Brothers under the skin

Like his nemesis Al Sharpton, David Horowitz seems more interested in inflaming racial tensions than resolving them.

By Alicia Montgomery

Mar 15, 2001 | Poor David Horowitz! He's been thrown against the barricades once again for standing up to the "racial arsonists" who advocate reparations for slavery. Or that's what he wants everyone to believe. Perhaps he even believes it himself.

But he shouldn't be able to shrug off the "racial provocateur" label so easily. He's spent years earning it. He's done more than his share to lower the level of discourse on racial issues in Salon's pages, and his recent self-defense was no exception. Rhetorically, Horowitz has much more in common with rabble-rouser Al Sharpton than he cares to admit.

Both are unreasonably preoccupied with race. Both represent themselves as guardians of equality, and call anyone who attacks their arguments an undercover tool of the thought police. Both have a taste for political public relations stunts -- like Horowitz's anti-reparations ad push. Both would rather cherry-pick the most shrill remarks of their most unreasonable critics and use them to claim ideological martyrdom than defend their own words and actions.

For both men, somewhere, beneath the heaping load of self-serving hyperbole, there's a morsel of truth in what they say -- but good luck finding it.

Horowitz insists that there's only one moral to the story of race in America: that the effects of racism in the black community are minimal, and have been blown way out of proportion by a cadre of power-hungry black leaders, who are meanwhile ignoring the moral and social failings that are the real reason blacks lag behind whites in almost every measure of well-being, from family income to educational attainment to life expectancy. His own words in the 1999 column "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do" provide a window on his mind-set:

The myth of racial oppression, invoked to explain every social deficit of blacks, is an exercise in psychological denial. Crying racism deflects attention from the actual causes of the problems that afflict African-American communities. Its net result is to deprive people and communities who could help themselves of the power to change their fate.

In Horowitz's world, this is the subtext of every topic that touches on race. White racism doesn't exist except among the KKK set (an assumption that betrays a bit of bicoastal, cultural elite bias) while black racism is overlooked and accommodated everywhere, particularly in the halls of power. And every liberal black leader he attacks, of course, is a money-grubbing cheat:

The reparations claim itself is the work of racial provocateurs -- people who want to put race at the center of every political conflict and reveal it as the source of every problem afflicting African-Americans in order to shake out the loot on the back end.

Typically, Horowitz doesn't name which racial provocateur specifically made this claim; he often fails to distinguish between the actions or motivations of different black leaders. Reparations advocate Randall Robinson, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume, Jesse Jackson and Sharpton -- for Horowitz's purposes, they could all be the same guy. And, for that matter, slave reparations, crusades against police brutality, support of affirmative action and concern about the Confederate flag could all be the same issue.

Next Page: He alienates those who need to hear his message

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