It began as a fringe proposition favored by the politically extreme. But the idea that taxpayers should pay reparations to black Americans for the damages of slavery and segregation is no longer a fixation of the political margin. It is fast becoming the next big “civil rights” thing.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has already introduced legislation to set up a commission that would examine the impact of slavery as a foreordained prelude to some kind of legislated payback. (Conyers will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Democrats win back the House.) A coalition of African-Americans is claiming a debt of $4.1 trillion. A coalition of African nations is claiming a debt of $777 trillion against an assortment of governments including the United States.
Distinguished black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates have given the idea their imprimatur, while Randall Robinson, who led the successful boycott movement against South Africa a decade ago, has written a strident, anti-white, anti-American manifesto called “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” which has become a bible of the reparations cause.
Nor is it just in the realm of ideas that the payback demand is gaining ground. Last week, the Chicago City Council voted 46-1 in favor of a reparations resolution. The lopsided nature of the vote persuaded Mayor Richard Daley to apologize for slavery (in Chicago?), thus joining what has become a familiar and unseemly ritual of contrition for the Clinton-era left. The primary sponsor of the resolution, Alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, has announced she is going to organize a “national convention” to push the issue of reparations in the coming year.
So what is wrong with the idea? In truth, just about everything. Examined closely, the claim for reparations is factually tendentious, morally incoherent and racially incendiary. Logically, it has about as much substance as the suggestion that O.J. Simpson should have been acquitted because of past racism by the criminal courts. Its impact on race relations and on the self-isolation of the African-American community is likely to be even worse.
If the reparations idea continues to gain traction, its most obvious effect will be to intensify ethnic antagonisms and generate new levels of racial resentment. It will further alienate African-Americans from their American roots and further isolate them from all of America’s other communities (including whites), who are themselves blameless in the grievance of slavery, who cannot be held culpable for racial segregation and who, in fact, have made significant contributions to ending discrimination and redressing any lingering injustice.
1. Assuming there is actually a debt, it is not at all clear who owes it. Tillman articulated the argument for the existence of the debt this way: “America owes blacks a debt because when we built this country on free labor … wealth was handed down to the white community.” Robinson reaches back in time even further: “Well before the birth of our country, Europe and the eventual United States perpetrated a heinous wrong against the peoples of Africa and benefited from the wrong through the continuing exploitation of Africa’s human and material resources.”
To sustain this claim, Robinson’s book devotes entire sections to the alleged depredations of whites against blacks hundreds and even thousands of years before the “eventual United States” — i.e., the government that is expected to pay the reparations — was even created. It is necessary to insert the qualifier “alleged” because, like so many who wave the bloody shirt, Robinson makes little effort to establish causal responsibilities, but invokes any suffering of blacks where whites were proximate as evidence that whites were to blame.
Slavery itself is the most obvious example. It was not whites but black Africans who first enslaved their brothers and sisters. They were abetted by dark-skinned Arabs (since Robinson and his allies force us into this unpleasant mode of racial discourse) who organized the slave trade. Are reparations going to be assessed against the descendants of Africans and Arabs for their role in slavery? There were also 3,000 black slave owners in the antebellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?
2. The idea that only whites benefited from slavery is factually wrong and attitudinally racist. By accusing the U.S. government of crimes against black people in advance of its existence, Robinson reveals the ugly anti-white racism beneath the surface of many arguments for reparations, especially his. According to this line of reasoning, only white Americans are implicated in slavery, just as only whites are the presumed targets of the reparations payback. Both presumptions, however, are wrong.
If slave labor created wealth for all Americans, then obviously it created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. Free blacks in the antebellum United States surely benefited from the free labor of slaves, along with whites. Are they to be exempted from payment of the debt just because they are black?
But if the “free labor” argument of the reparations claimants is correct, even the descendants of slaves have benefited from slavery. The GNP of black America (as black separatists constantly remind their followers) is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous “nation” in the world. To translate this into individual realities, American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of 20 to 50 times those of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.
What about this benefit of slavery? Are the reparations proponents going to make black descendants of slaves pay themselves for benefiting from the fruits of their ancestors’ servitude?
3. In terms of lineal responsibility for slavery, only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the antebellum South, where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should the descendants of non-slaveholding whites owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible morality would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?
4. Most Americans living today (white and otherwise) are the descendants of post-Civil War immigrants, who have no lineal connection to slavery at all. The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and after 1960. Is there an argument worth considering that would, for example, make Jews (who were cowering in the ghettos of Europe at the time) or Mexicans and Cubans (who were suffering under the heel of Spain) responsible for this crime? What reason could there be that Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, Armenian victims of the Turks or Greek, Polish, Hungarian and Korean victims of communism should pay reparations to American blacks? There is no reason, and no proponent of reparations has even bothered to come up with one.
5. The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim — that Jews and Japanese-Americans received reparations from Germany and the United States, respectively — are spurious. The circumstances involved bear no resemblance to the situation of American blacks, and are not really precedents at all. The Jews and Japanese who received reparations were individuals who actually suffered the hurt.
Jews do not receive reparations from Germany simply because they are Jews. Those who do were corralled into concentration camps and lost immediate family members or personal property. Nor have all Japanese-Americans received payments, but only those whom the government interned in camps and who had their property confiscated. The reparations claims being advanced by black leaders seem to imply that the only qualification required for reparations is the color of one’s skin. Robinson’s book is pointedly subtitled “What America Owes to Blacks.” If this is not racism, what is?
6. Behind the reparations arguments lies the unfounded claim that all blacks in America suffer economically from the consequences of slavery and discrimination. It would seem a hard case to prove over a 150-year (or even 50-year) gap, and the only evidence really offered by the claimants is the existence of contemporary “income disparities” and “inequalities” between the races. No actual connection (as far as they’re concerned) need be made. On the other hand, African-American success stories that contradict the conclusion are abruptly dismissed.
Thus, to take the most obvious case, Oprah Winfrey may have been a sharecropper’s daughter in the most segregated of all Southern states, but — victim of slavery and segregation or no — she was still able to become one of the 400 richest individuals in America on the strength of her appeal to white consumers. This extraordinary achievement, which refutes the reparations argument, is echoed in millions of other, more modest success stories, including those of all the prominent promoters of the reparations claim, even the unhappy Robinson. No wonder the only argument against these obvious counterfacts is that all successes must be exceptions to the (politically correct) rule.
But the reality is that this black middle class — composed exclusively of descendants of slaves — is also a very prosperous middle class that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass, which is really the only segment of the black population that can be made to fit the case. Is this black middle-class majority — numbering millions of individuals — really just a collective exception of unusual people? Or does its existence not suggest that the failures of the black underclass are failures of individual character, hardly (if at all) impacted by the lingering aftereffects of racial discrimination, let alone a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?
West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves, but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites (and nearly 25 percent higher than the average incomes of American-born blacks of all classes). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? And how can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective — yet so critical — to the case? The fact is that nobody has demonstrated any clearly defined causal connection between slavery or discrimination and the “disparities” that are alleged to require restitution.
And how, by the way, are blue-collar whites and ethnics expected to understand their reparations payments to these African-American doctors, lawyers, executives and military officers who make up the black middle class?
7. The renewed sense of grievance — which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create — is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities. Virtually every group that has sought refuge in America has grievances to remember. For millions of recent immigrants the suffering is only years behind them, and can be as serious as ethnic cleansing or genocide.
How are these people going to receive the payment claims from African-Americans whose comparable suffering lies in the distant past? Won’t they see this demand as just another claim for special treatment, for a rather extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others, many of whom are even less privileged than they are? Why can a penniless Mexican, who is here illegally and unable even to speak English, find work in America’s inner cities while blacks cannot? Can 19th century slavery or even the segregation of 50 years ago really explain this?
To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans did to their ancestors 50 or 150 years ago is to burden this community with a crippling sense of victimhood. It is also to create a new source of conflict with other communities.
A young black intellectual wrote the following comments about reparations: “I think the reparations issue will be healthy. It will show all Americans (white, Hispanic, Asian) how much blacks contributed to helping build this country.” Actually, as Robinson’s book makes clear, what it will accomplish is just the opposite. It will provide black leaders with a platform from which to complain about all the negative aspects of black life — to emphasize inner-city pathologies and failures, and to blame whites, Hispanics and Asians for causing them.
How is this going to impress other communities? It’s really just a prescription for sowing more racial resentment and creating even greater antagonism.
8. This raises a point that has previously remained off the radar screen, but will surely be part of the debate to come: What about the “reparations” to blacks that have already been paid? Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans, in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) — all under the rationale of redressing historical racial grievances.
In fact, reparations advocates already have an answer to this argument, and it is a revealing one. Here is how Robinson refers to this massive gesture of generosity and contrition on the part of the white political majority in America during the past 35 years: “It was only in 1965 … that the United States enacted the Voting Rights Act. Virtually simultaneously, however, it began to walk away from the social wreckage that centuries of white hegemony had wrought.” Take that, white, Hispanic and Asian America! If a trillion-dollar restitution and a wholesale rewriting of American law and fundamental American principle in order to accommodate racial preferences and redress injustice are nothing, then what will fill the claimants’ bill?
9. And this raises another question that black leaders might do well to reflect on: What about the debt blacks owe to America — to white Americans — for liberating them from slavery? This may not seem like a serious question to some, but that only reveals their ignorance of the history of slavery and its fate.
Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, in virtually all societies. But in the 1,000 years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Englishmen and Americans created one. If not for the anti-slavery attitudes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have ended. If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would have remained slaves indefinitely.
If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights. Where is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?
10. The final and summary reason for rejecting any reparations claim is recognition of the enormous privileges black Americans enjoy as Americans, and therefore of their own stake in America’s history, slavery and all.
Blacks were here before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves? For the African-American community to isolate itself even further from America would be to embark on a course whose consequences are troublesome even to contemplate. Yet the black community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists and nationalists in its ranks, who must be called what they are: racists who want African-Americans to have no part of America’s multiethnic social contract. This separatist strain in black America’s consciousness has now been joined with the anti-Americanism of the political left to form the animating force behind the reparations movement.
In this regard, Robinson — himself a political leftist — is a movement archetype. Anti-white sentiments and anti-American feelings stand out on every page of “The Debt,” including a chapter he devotes to praising Fidel Castro, one of the world’s longest-surviving and most sadistic dictators. A rhapsody for Fidel Castro’s Marxist police state would seem a bizarre irrelevance to a book on reparations for American blacks, except that for Robinson, Castro is a quintessential victim of American “oppression.” Robinson despises America that much. “Many blacks — most perhaps,” he asserts in his discussion of Castro, “don’t like America.” Is Robinson saying they prefer Castro’s gulag?
This unthinking, virulent anti-Americanism is the crux of the problem the reparations movement poses for black Americans, and for all Americans. The reparations idea is about not liking America. It is about an irrational hatred of America. It is about holding America responsible for every negative facet of black existence, as though America were God and God had failed. Above all, it is about denying the gift America has given to all of its citizens through the inspired genius of its founding.
To Robinson, Thomas Jefferson, author of the proclamation that “all men are created equal,” was merely “a slave owner, a racist and — if one accepts that consent cannot be given if it cannot be denied — a rapist.” The fact that Americans still honor the author of the Declaration of Independence makes his personal sins into archetypes that define America. Robinson: “Does not the continued un-remarked American deification of Jefferson tell us all how profoundly contemptuous of black sensibilities American society persists in being? How deeply, stubbornly, poisonously racist our society to this day remains?”
This hatred for America and, specifically, for white America blinds Robinson — and those who think like him — to a truth far more important than Jefferson’s dalliance with Sally Hemings, which may or may not have been unwilling. (Contrary to Robinson, consent obviously can be given, even if it cannot be denied.) For it is the words Jefferson wrote, and that white Americans died for, that accomplished what no black African did: They set Robinson’s ancestors free.
For all their country’s faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in America and above all in the heritage that men like Jefferson helped to shape. This heritage — enshrined in America’s founding and the institutions and ideas to which it gave rise — is what is really under attack in the reparations movement. This assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left, is an attack not only on white Americans but on all Americans — African-Americans especially.
America’s black citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive — a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under attack. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea.
Dredging up a new reason to assault this idea is not in the interest of African-Americans. What would serve the African-American community better would be to reject the political left as represented by people like Robinson, Jesse Jackson and every black leader who endorses this claim. What African-Americans need is to embrace America as their home and to defend its good: the principles and institutions that have set them — and all of us — free.
Yes, he rewrote history, particularly the history of Muslim and Arab rapacity and bigotry, and he pandered a lot. But the pandering was in large part diplomacy and far less than conservatives were predicting, and far less than the pandering that characterized his previous attempts to mollify the Muslim world. He most pointedly did not apologize for American actions after 9/11, or seek to find excuses for the terrorist attacks in our policies and behavior before 9/11. On the contrary, he deliberately opened the wound of 9/11 to justify America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We did not go by choice, we went because of necessity. I am aware that some question or justify the events of 9/11. But let us be clear: al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on that day. The victims were innocent men, women and children from America and many other nations who had done nothing to harm anybody. And yet al-Qaida chose to ruthlessly murder these people, claimed credit for the attack, and even now states their determination to kill on a massive scale. They have affiliates in many countries and are trying to expand their reach. These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts … “
And Iraq! This is the war he had opposed as unnecessary and wrong, until now. In Cairo he did not apologize for “Bush’s war” or America’s “occupation.” He said that the Iraqis were better off without Saddam Hussein, which obviously could not have happened without the war — a truism, which for seven years Democrats failed to concede. Where Kennedy and Gore and Obama himself condemned America’s war as “unnecessary,” “illegal,” “based on lies,” an aggression against a “fragile and unstable” country that could not defend itself, Obama, speaking in a Muslim capital, defended our presence in Iraq as driven by a desire to give Iraqis their freedom and their country. Bush could not have said it better.
As for the Middle East conflict, Obama began — began — by telling the Muslim world that the bond between Israel and the United States is unbreakable, and by opening the wound of the Jews that made a homeland for them a moral imperative: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”
And then he characterized Holocaust deniers like Ahmadinejad as despicable, and identified them as a cause of war in the Middle East, and announced that he was going to Buchenwald the next day (clearly to underscore that fact): “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction — or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews — is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”
And while Obama made false parallels between Jews and Arabs as contributors to the intractability of the Middle East conflict and rewrote some history, he also said in no uncertain terms that it was Palestinians who had to renounce violence (and here he drew no parallels and no moral equivalence) and had to recognize the Jewish state — something even the “moderate” terrorist Abbas refuses to do.
And to underscore this point he drew a parallel between the struggles of American blacks for civil rights and Palestinians. But unlike Condoleezza Rice, who not too long ago drew the same parallel to aggrandize the PLO terrorists as civil rights activists, Obama drew a sharp and revealing line of distinction between them: “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”
And that was really the core of Obama’s speech. It was a defense of America’s founding and America’s mission. We are a tolerant nation and a peaceful nation, Obama told 1.5 billion Muslims, and we will accept and embrace you if you reject the violent and hateful among you and walk a peaceful and tolerant path. And this tolerance must extend not only to the Jews of Israel, and other infidels, but to Muslims among you who are oppressed, specifically Muslim women: “The sixth issue that I want to address is women’s rights. I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. That is why the United States will partner with any Muslim-majority country to support expanded literacy for girls, and to help young women pursue employment through micro-financing that helps people live their dreams.”
That is not pandering. It is saying that America’s democratic, tolerant, inclusive way needs to be the path to the future for the Muslim world.
Conservatives will make a great mistake if they fail to see this speech for what it was, and treat it as another round in the partisan food fight. It was not an appeasement of our enemies. It was a forthright statement by an American leader in a Muslim capital explaining why America is in fact the global leader in those battles that matter most to people everywhere: freedom, equality, and peace. As conservatives we have many quarrels with the Obama administration — and we should have. But this speech is not one of them.
I have been watching an interesting phenomenon on the right, which is beginning to cause me concern. I am referring to the over-the-top hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president, which distinctly reminds me of the “Bush is Hitler” crowd on the left.
Speaking of this crowd, have you seen any “I am so sorry” postings from that quarter as Obama continues and even escalates the former president’s war policy in Afghanistan and attempts to consolidate his military occupation of Iraq?
Conservatives, please. Let’s not duplicate the manias of the left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the antichrist, although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.
I have recently received commentaries that claim that “Obama’s speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history” and “never has a politician in this land had such a quasi-religious impact on so many people” and “Obama is a narcissist,” which leads the author to then compare Obama to David Koresh, Charles Manson, Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Excuse me while I blow my nose.
This fellow has failed to notice that all politicians are narcissists – and that a recent American president was a world-class exponent of the imperial me. So what? Political egos are one of the reasons the Founders put checks and balances on executive power. As for serial lying, is there a politician that cannot be accused of that? And once, the same recent president set a pretty high bar in this category, and we survived it. As for Obama’s speeches, they are hardly in the Huey Long, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro vein. They are in fact eloquently and cleverly centrist and sober.
So what’s the panic? It is true that Obama has shown surprising ineptitude in his first months in office, but he’s not a zero with no accomplishments as many conservatives seem to think — unless you regard beating the Clinton machine and winning the presidency as nothing. But in doing this you fall into the “Bush-is-an-idiot” bag of liberal miasmas.
It is also true Obama has ceded his domestic economic agenda to the House Democrats and spent a lot of money in the process. But what’s the surprise in this? After all, Bush and McCain both proposed (and in Bush’s case pushed through) massive government giveaways (which amount to government takeovers as well). This is bad, but it doesn’t make Obama a closet Mussolini, however deplorable the conservatives among us may regard it. Moreover, he’s already run into political resistance even within his own party. Charlie Rangel has made it clear that the itemized deduction tax hike is not going through his committee — and that should tell you that the American system, the one the Founders created, is still in place.
Even as astute a conservative thinker as Mark Steyn has been swept up in the tide that thinks Obama is a “transformative” radical. But look again at his approach to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, as noted, he is carrying out the Bush policies — the same that he once joined his fellow Democrats in condemning. And that should be reassuring to anyone concerned about where he is heading as commander in chief.
In other words, while it’s reasonable to be unhappy with a Democratic administration and even concerned because the Democrats are now a socialist party in the European sense, we are not witnessing the coming of the antichrist. A good strategy for political conflicts is to understand your opponent first — not to underestimate him, but not to overestimate him either.
Once conservatives do that, they will find some silver linings in the first moves of the Obama administration. Through a combination of ineptitude and zeal, Obama has in two short months locked down the conservative and Republican base. On fetal stem-cell research, on borders (e-verification), on spending, on unions, on shutting down talk radio, Obama has flexed the leftist muscle so nakedly and unmistakably that there isn’t a conservative left who will vote Democratic in the next election (and there were many who did so in the last).
As we move forward, Obama faces increasingly tough choices in the wars against Islamic fascism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran. Hopefully, he will make the right choices, and should he do so conservatives will need to be there to support him. If he makes the wrong choices, conservatives will need to be there to oppose him. But neither our support nor our opposition should be based on hysterical responses to policies that we just don’t like. Let’s leave that kind of behavior to the liberals who invented it.
This piece first appeared in FrontPage Magazine.
When conservative talk-show hosts criticize the Democrats’ foot-dragging on the war, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle complains they are promoting hate and endangering his life. When conservatives like myself deplore the sympathies shown by many “antiwar” activists to America’s enemies — a sympathy documented by Michelle Goldberg in Salon’s own pages — Joe Conason accuses me of attempting to incite patriotic mobs against all critics of the war. This is the way postmodern defenders of political dialogue attempt to shut down discussion.
Here is what Conason wrote: “In many quarters on the right, doubt about war equals hatred of America or worse. This sort of hysteria now pervades the propaganda operations of David Horowitz [whose] Front Page magazine features ‘The Fifth Column,’ where political adversaries are smeared with treason. Like many right-wingers, he insists that anyone who doesn’t enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq must despise America and love Saddam. Anyone, that is, except for the antiwar skeptics on the right — who somehow escape being branded as traitors.”
These are all — how shall I put it delicately? — lies. I have never equated doubt about the war with hatred of America. I recently reposted a Boston Globe article by Todd Gitlin, a man with doubts about the war, and changed the title to “A Patriotic View From the Left.” The point I was making to my conservative readership was that Gitlin’s view was patriotic because it was critical of the “hate America” crowd, even though Gitlin remains a leftist critic of Bush. My documenting America’s fifth column is not a plot to suppress leftist critics, let alone all those who do not line up behind Bush. I do not equate political dissent with treason. Would I have spent years writing for Salon, and political capital defending its editors, if I considered them traitors? These charges are both insulting and absurd, and Conason knows it, and that is what makes his performance even more distasteful than it normally would have been.
Underneath my conservative white robe, Conason suggests I’m a communist! “While Horowitz and company focus on easy targets like Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, their deeper aim is to depict anyone who doesn’t line up behind Bush as soft on terror. Aside from scamming a few quick bucks — ‘Help David Expose the Leftist Plot to Control America’s Young Minds!’ — that is in fact their only purpose. (Despite its capitalist form, this enterprise strongly resembles communist methods of enforcing the correct line. You can take Horowitz out of the CP, but you can’t take the CP out of Horowitz.)”
The insinuation — the vulgar Marxist insinuation — that my conservative politics is a plot to make money is typical of Conason (indeed, as was the subject of his first attack on me, inspired by my first Salon column). Does anyone wonder why conservatives regard socialism as envy gussied up as a political cause? Although my parents were communists, after adolescence I never was, in either practice or theory. I was always a new-leftist critic of communism. My first book, “Student” — published in 1962 — was dedicated to Supreme Court justice and civil libertarian Hugo Black and explicitly criticized American communists for their rigid party line and anti-democratic philosophy (and was attacked by the Communist Party’s People’s World for that very reason).
Far from suggesting anything close to the idea that “doubt about war equals hatred of America or worse,” I have posted antiwar articles on FrontPage by my own columnist, John Zmirak. If Conason wants to maintain I have “smeared [my] adversaries with treason,” he should produce the quotes. Who is he talking about — Jane Fonda? John Walker Lindh? Or Noam Chomsky, who like Fonda traveled to hostile terrain (in this case Pakistan in the middle of the Taliban war) to accuse the United States of crimes against humanity.
Visitors to my site and readers of my Salon articles know that I have defended specific individuals who are Dissent socialists, Nation leftists and Salon editors. At HorowitzWatch, a site created by my critics, I have explicitly dissociated myself from the view that those who criticize the war are ipso facto fifth columnists or traitors. “Criticizing American policy is fine,” I wrote in my most recent post, “and almost no particular criticism can be labeled Fifth Column. It’s a matter of the profile of the critic, and the context of his/her criticism. I agree that it’s problematic and one needs to be careful in these matters when applying charged labels. But we are also in a war and it is clear that there is a large constituency in this country that believes America can do no good and that its enemies have ‘social justice’ on their side.” Are these sentiments controversial?
As it happens, Conason is also 100 percent wrong about my having no enemies to the right. I personally commissioned Myles Kantor to write an article titled “Introduction to the Anti-American Right” and have run articles slamming the antiwar positions of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative. I have also crossed swords with the right-wing editor of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo (whose search engine turns up 240 attacks on me, personally).
Conason’s column is an attempt to create an atmosphere in which the left cannot discuss what is now its most serious problem, namely, the presence of terrorist sympathizers in its own ranks. To do so would be McCarthyism, right-wing chauvinism, witch-hunting. Yet the problem created by the solidarity of many leftists with America’s enemies is not a new one for progressives. During the Cold War and before the emergence of the new left, progressives lent their support almost across the board (the Dissent camp and the Trotskyists were exceptions) to the Soviet adversary and later to Cuban and Chinese communists and other divisions of the gulag state.
Alienation from one’s own country and fifth-column support for its enemies is a much bigger problem for the contemporary left than it was for the left during the Cold War. Already the national peace demonstrations are in the hands of pro-Saddam, pro-Milosevic, even pro-ayatollah fanatics (as not only Michelle Goldberg, but the Nation’s David Corn have scrupulously pointed out). This has already so discredited the left generally that it has probably undone most of the gains the left made as a result of the Soviet collapse and the successful, albeit fanciful, alibi it employed to escape the connection — “Well, that wasn’t real socialism.”
The left’s problem in the war on terror is that America has been attacked, that American citizens have been slaughtered in their places of work and — if the D.C. snipers were (as I believe) a domestic al-Qaida — in their neighborhoods. Moreover, the left’s fifth-column wing has embraced not only anti-Americanism, but anti-Semitic, anti-female, religious fanaticism — thus forfeiting every last shred of the left’s “progressive” aura.
Sympathy for an enemy 10,000 miles away in Vietnam was one thing. Sympathy for the architects of 9/11 is another. The perils that the patriotic left faces from being connected to an anti-American, terrorist-sympathizing fifth column are vastly increased by the prospect of more 9/11-grade atrocities waiting in the wings. If you think sympathies for the communist devil created problems for radicals during the Cold War, wait until the casualty toll inside America begins to mount. That is why the left needs to feel free to have this discussion, which attitudes like Conason’s seek to embargo.
Contrary to Conason’s claims, it is my view that tactical disagreements over taking on Saddam Hussein at this moment in time don’t even qualify in the categories we are discussing. It is perfectly legitimate for skeptics to worry about the risks and/or distractions of the war against Iraq, even though it is also my belief that the sooner we do go to war with Saddam the better. In this hawkish perspective, I happen to be in complete agreement with Al Gore’s running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Conason’s article does an immense disservice to the left. By distorting the arguments of critics like myself he stigmatizes in advance anyone who seeks to raise the problem. By equating critics of the anti-American left with McCarthyites, Conason obscures the problem itself. I may disagree fervently with a David Corn or a Todd Gitlin, or with Salon’s editor David Talbot, on a host of issues, but I am truly gladdened and encouraged that critics from the left are forthrightly condemning the ugly progressives who side with the enemy.
On July 16, Frontpage Magazine ran a story about the “Wichita Massacre,” the brutal execution of four white youth by two criminal brothers who happened to be black. It was our second look at this tragic incident, which took place at Christmastime two years ago. We ran it as a special feature — this time on the occasion of the trial of the perpetrators — because it crystallized for us a national hypocrisy on race. This hypocrisy regards the murder of blacks by whites as an indication of the existence of a characteristically American racism and therefore banner news, while the far more prevalent murder of whites by blacks is routinely considered to be without racial overtones and — as in the Wichita case — not to be newsworthy at all.
The more recent article about the Wichita events originally appeared on the Web site of American Renaissance, a white racialist group founded by Jared Taylor. Even though the article stayed with the facts in the case and did not include any interpretative remarks that might be construed as racist, reposting it from this site seemed to require some commentary about the source, so I reprinted the piece with my own commentary. But Salon readers probably require additional explanation as to why I would post even a factual article from a tainted source.
The short answer is this: Why not? We live in an age of multicultural excess, in which the current issue of Harvard Magazine (September-October)features — without apology — an article by Noel Ignatiev titled, “Abolish the White Race.” Ignatiev’s piece proudly mentions his infamous magazine Race Traitor, with its inflammatory motto: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” Ignatiev is currently a fellow at Henry Louis Gates’ W.E.B. DuBois Institute, the nation’s most prestigious African American Studies department. Neither Harvard Magazine nor Henry Louis Gates seems to feel an obligation to explain why they are sponsoring a race-hater like Ignatiev. Since I was not sponsoring Taylor but merely reposting a factual report from his magazine, to go out of my way to justify my deicision would seem to me like a capitulation to the racial double standards I was protesting in the first place.
Nonetheless, I was aware that others committed to those double standards would attack me for merely posting Taylor’s article. So I did provide a brief commentary outlining the difference between Taylor’s views and mine. In the commentary I wrote to accompany our feature, I described Taylor as “a man who has surrendered to the multicultural miasma that has overtaken this nation and is busily building a movement devoted to white identity and community,” agendas we “did not share.” I further explained:
“What I mean by ‘surrendering’ is that Taylor has accepted the idea that the multiculturalists have won. We are all prisoners of identity politics now. If there is going to be Black History Month and Chicano Studies then there should be White History Month and White Studies. If blacks and Mexicans are going to regard each other as brothers and the rest of us as ‘Anglos,’ then whites should regard each other as brothers and others as — well, … others. Within the multicultural framework set by the dominant liberalism in our civic culture, Taylor’s claim to a white place at the diversity table certainly makes sense. But there is another option and that is getting rid of the table altogether and going back to the good old American ideal of E Pluribus Unum — ‘out of many, one.’ Not just blacks and whites and Chicanos, but Americans.”
In the current issue of American Renaissance Jared Taylor replies to these comments and raises the fundamental question of whether America is or should be a multiethnic, multiracial society, or whether it was conceived and should be preserved “as a self-consciously European, majority-white Nation.” Among literate conservatives, Jared Taylor is the most blunt in expressing this vision, but it is a theme of others who might be called “Euro-racialists.” (This is a bastardized and somewhat incoherent coinage, but one that adequately describes a bastardized and somewhat incoherent perspective).
Prominent among the articulators of Euro-racialism are writers for the Web site Vdare, and Pat Buchanan, whose bestselling book “The Death of the West” articulates its most familiar version. If Buchanan’s last electoral run is any indication, Euro-racialism is a still a fringe prejudice among conservatives. But if it were to emerge as the view of conservatives themselves, it would in my view mean the death of the conservative movement. Since I consider the conservative movement the last bulwark in the defense of America and the West, it would ironically also fulfill the prophecy in the title of Buchanan’s book.
Taylor describes me as a “neo-conservative,” but I have no idea what reference this has to my positions or my work. The two most prominent theoreticians of neo-conservatism announced its death some time ago, because it had always defined the defection of a group of New York liberals from liberalism over its failure to stay the course in fighting the anticommunist battle during the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, neo-conservatism – at least in the view of its founders — has become indistinguishable from conservatism itself.
I have never identified myself as a “neo-conservative” because belonging to a younger political generation I did not share some of the social attitudes of the neo-conservative founders. Since attitude is fundamental to some conservative perspectives, I have preferred to define my own. To be a conservative in America, from my perspective, then, is to defend where possible and restore where necessary, the framework of values and philosophical understandings enshrined in the American founding. This should not be taken to mean a strict constructionist attitude toward every clause of the documents that constitute the founding. If the framers of the Constitution had presumed to see the future, or had wanted to rigidly preserve the past, they would not have included an amendment process in their document.
My brand of conservatism is based on a belief in the fundamental truth in the idea of individualism; in the idea of rights that are derived from “Nature’s God” and therefore inalienable; in the conservative view of human nature and the philosophy of limited government that flows therefrom; and in the recognition that property rights are the proven foundation of all human liberties.
Thus, for me, Taylor’s challenge goes to the heart of what it means not only to be an American but also to be an American conservative.
Because America is a nation “conceived” — and not just a nation evolved (although it is that, too) — the meaning of the American founding is and will always be a contested issue for Americans, and the answer to these questions about the meaning of the American idea and therefore of the American nation, will always affect its direction and its future. It is not coincidental, therefore, that the issue of the founding is the very first to which Taylor turns.
Taylor contends that the national motto “E Pluribus Unum” refers not to many races or ethnicities when it comes to forming an American people but simply to the 13 colonies. But this is a rhetorical argument rather than a comment on reality, since it ignores the actual populations of the 13 colonies, which even at that time were multiethnic and multiracial. In 1776, American citizens included not only ethnic Englishmen, but Dutchmen, Germans, French, Scotch-Irish, Jews, free blacks and others.
In an attempt to anchor his rhetorical case in the attitudes of the founders themselves, Taylor quotes John Jay to the effect that Americans were a united and connected people because they had common ancestors. But Jay is obviously mistaken because this was certainly not true in any ethnic or racial sense. Even insofar as Americans were European in origin, “European” is not an ethnicity, and the history of Europe is the history of wars between its ethnicities and its racial groups.
An acquaintance of mine, of Scotch-Irish descent, maintains that his forebears came to the New World expressly for the opportunity to fight the English. Whether the memory is accurate or not, it illuminates the error made by both John Jay and Jared Taylor. America was created out of a British Empire that was virtually global in scope, and its various peoples, European and otherwise, far from being a cohesive group with a common ancestry, were the bearers of histories of hostility and war.
The fundamental mistake of the Euro-racialists is to confuse ethnicity and culture. How is race or ethnicity integral to the American idea or the American culture? Are not Francis Fukuyama, Dinesh D’Souza and Thomas Sowell quintessential Americans despite their Japanese, Indian and African lineage? The Jews have remained a people united by culture and — until recently — a language for 2,000 years; but as a people they embrace a world of ethnicities and races.
It is a culture that is crucial in shaping the American identity, not an ethnicity or race. John Jay’s observation that speaking a common English language is a critical element in uniting the American people transmitting this culture is probably correct. Here, there is ground for agreement. An American identity cannot exist outside an American culture. Even though that American culture can and inevitably must evolve and incorporate new elements, it cannot leave behind its European roots without losing, in some fundamental sense, its self. It is this American culture, not a racial or ethnic heritage, that we need to preserve.
Ironically, Taylor and the Euro-racialists have fallen into a trap set by the “multicultural” left. The left’s multicultural offensive is an attack on America’s national culture, not on its racial or ethnic composition. “Inclusion” and “diversity” are not the real agendas of the left — America has always honored both principles, however imperfect their implementation may have been. The idea of the melting pot is an American idea. The left, however, has never been interested in a “melting pot” that would assimilate diverse ethnicities into an American culture.
The left is hostile to the idea of assimilation. Its agenda is the deconstruction of America’s national identity and culture, of the American narrative of inclusion and freedom. Multiculturalism is not about the assimilation of minorities into the crucible of American freedom, it’s about their supposed liberation from American oppression. By accepting the left’s view of itself as a movement for diversity and inclusion, and responding with a call for Euro-centricity and exclusion, the Euro-racialists simply play into the hands of the multiculturalists.
Under the cloak of ethnic inclusion, the left has injected an anti-American curriculum into the American educational system, in an attempt to alienate America’s youth from its heritage. Under the smokescreen of “diversity,” it has rewritten America’s laws and subverted its Constitution. It has launched a campaign to institutionalize group rights and racial privileges in place of individual rights and laws that are race-neutral.
This is a perfectly diabolical scheme: In the name of diversity and inclusion the left is systematically destroying the framework of individualism and the rule of neutrality that make diversity and inclusion possible. But instead of fighting this sinister attack on the very foundations of the American system, Jared Taylor and the Euro-racialists are eager to validate it. They have even embraced the destructive narrative devised by the left whose purpose is to kill the American dream. Taylor’s construction of American history in his reply to my commentary directly parallels the maliciously distorted version of the nation’s history in works of such anti-American fanatics as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.
In Taylor’s telling, America has become the racist nightmare of leftist fantasy. Taylor begins his historical reconstruction with Thomas Jefferson who “thought it had been a terrible mistake to bring blacks to America, and wrote that they should be freed from slavery and then ‘removed from beyond the reach of mixture.’” Taylor then describes a pantheon of notable Americans who were officers of the American Colonization Society designed to promote the same “solution,” including Andrew Jackson, Francis Scott Key and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. He observes that the capital of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after the chief architect of the Constitution, James Monroe, “in gratitude for his help in sending blacks to Africa.” Naturally Taylor includes the chief icon of the left’s deconstruction project, Abraham Lincoln, who “also favored colonization” and invited the first delegation of blacks to visit the White House in order to “ask them to persuade their people to leave.”
The purpose of Taylor’s pantheon of political leaders is transparent. It is to establish that white America is racist since politicians “are cautious people who re-circulate the bromides of their times.” Racism, in other words, is just the American creed.
This picture of the American mind is no less a caricature coming from Jared Taylor than when it comes from Louis Farrakhan or Howard Zinn. There are obviously many motives that could have prompted 19th century American statesmen to consider “colonization” a reasonable alternative to the problem of assimilating people who had been brought to America against their will and who had suffered grievous injustice at the hands of American citizens. But even granting, for example, Jefferson’s racial prejudice, the presumption that this fully expresses the complexity of his attitudes, and let alone his historic role in shaping the racial question, is both vulgar and absurd. This is the man who proclaimed that God had endowed men with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In short it was Jefferson who sowed the ideological seed not only of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution granting emancipation to slaves but also the 14th Amendment guaranteeing all Americans, black as well as white, equal citizenship rights under the law.
If Jefferson planted the seeds of this liberation, it is the American people who implemented it, through the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives in a civil war. The denigrators of Lincoln hate the fact that he resolved the schizophrenia of the American birth in favor of Jefferson’s idea that America was a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all man are created equal. Reactionaries like Taylor may want to take this country back to the pre-American social order that existed before 1776, but there are few Americans alive today who will follow them. Moreover, it is a gross historical misrepresentation to call this project “American,” as Taylor and his followers do.
Taylor’s recounting of the legislative past is equally selective and ahistorical. The fact that the first American naturalization bill made citizenship available only to “free white persons” or that it took more than 100 years to expand citizenship rights to all races and ethnicities, would have the significance he wants to assign it, only if the weight of American history were not behind the expansion of these rights, and only if the premise of that expansion were not the very principles embedded in the founding itself. The text of the Constitution does not contain the terms “black” and “white,” because it does not recognize racial distinctions in respect to citizens and their rights.
The delayed granting of citizenship rights to blacks is the fulfillment of the American promise. It is not to be confused with the seemingly limitless expansion of rights promoted by the left under the doctrine of a “living Constitution.” The “rights” the left seeks to create are not rights recognized in the classical liberal doctrines the Founders embraced, but are antithetical to them. They are the redistributionist rights of the radical tradition the Framers despised and that Madison himself described as “wicked.” Racial preferences, which have become the “civil rights” cause of left and which have been made constitutional by “liberal” courts are in fact an offense to the Constitution and the values it enshrines. Equality of citizenship for all races and ethnic ancestries, on the other hand, is clearly an expression the principles inscribed in the constitutional foundations, which are the foundations of a free republic.
To conclude his argument Taylor turns personal, which may be appropriate for a discussion that attempts to address both the universal and the particular:
“Mr. Horowitz deplores the idea that ‘we are all prisoners of identity politics,’ implying that race and ethnicity are trivial matters we must work to overcome. But if that is so, why does the home page of FrontPagemag carry a perpetual appeal for contributions to ‘David’s Defense of Israel Campaign’? Why Israel rather than, say, Kurdistan or Tibet or Euskadi or Chechnya? Because Mr. Horowitz is Jewish. His commitment to Israel is an expression of precisely the kind of particularist identity he would deny to me and to other racially conscious whites. He passionately supports a self-consciously Jewish state but calls it ‘surrendering to the multicultural miasma’ when I work to return to a self-consciously white America. He supports an explicitly ethnic identity for Israel but says Americans must not be allowed to have one … If he supports a Jewish Israel, he should support a white America.”
There is a lot that is wrong with this picture. To be a “prisoner” of identity politics is not the same as regarding race and ethnicity as “trivial matters,” and I don’t. To portray me as a political Jew, who identifies primarily with Jewish causes, or who would not rally to the defense of Israel if he were of some other ethnicity, is very wide of the mark. My political causes are public record and go back more than 50 years, and in my autobiography, “Radical Son,” I have even recorded my interior thoughts about why I took on these causes. None of them were ethnically motivated, which I believe is true for most people involved in similar ones. If there has been an ethnic group to which I have devoted the major portion of my political energies over the course of a lifetime, it has been black Americans, not Jews.
As a Marxist, of course, I was a deracinated Jew — never bar mitzvahed and a stranger in synagogues. As an editor of the left-wing magazine Ramparts, I did write a cover story called “The Passion of the Jews,” and did defend the existence of Israel as a “raft state” for survivors of the Holocaust, rejected everywhere else. But the article itself was a case against Jewish particularism, while recognizing its validity in a world in which Jews had become the objects of a program for their extermination. At the time, however, I still believed in a socialist revolution that would dissolve these prejudices and forge an international community free from such atavisms.
This utopian delusion was killed in me shortly after I wrote the piece, in circumstances I have described elsewhere. But to recognize the fact of ethnic particularity is not equivalent to becoming a racialist or a nationalist in the narrow, tribal sense to which Jared Taylor aspires.
Even after I rejected the progressive illusion, I did not become the prisoner of an ethnic calculus in selecting my (now conservative) causes. The American creed is universal, and a conservative will defend it wherever it becomes an inspiration for others. Call this American ethno-centrism if you will; it is a lot more inclusive than the white European nation for which Jared Taylor longs.
I do not fool myself for a moment into thinking that it would not matter to me as a Jew if the Arabs succeeded in their determination to destroy the state of Israel. But I also do not expect any American of any national origin to be unaffected by the infliction of great harm to his or her ancestral community. Despite this concession, I do not think ethnicity defines the way I, or most Americans, measure right and wrong, or decide to commit our political passions.
Israel is under attack by the same enemy that has attacked the United States. Israel is point of origin for the culture of the West and it is under attack for the same reasons that America is regarded by radical Islam as the “Great Satan.” In defending Israel, as I have defended other countries — Afghanistan for example, when it was attacked by the Soviets — I have no ambivalence about my national identity, which is American. It is not Israeli, and most certainly not “white.”
If I support an ethnic Jewish state in principle, it is because if Arabs were to become a majority in Israel they would persecute, kill and expel the Jews as they have for a thousand years. No sober person could believe otherwise. But I also support an ethnic Jewish state because this is merely the granting of equality to Jews among the family of nations. Would a Frenchman feel sanguine about a German majority in France?
America is different. It is a nation that from the beginning has encompassed many ethnicities and more than one race. It was created as a “new nation” and its creators defined its identity not in categories of blood and soil, but in a document articulating principles that are universal: we hold these truths to be self-evident. Most of the nations of the world are different from America in their essential construction.
One could argue, of course, that this very fact of America’s uniqueness proves the reactionaries’ case — that human beings are incapable of transcending their ethnic and racial particularities to form a common national bond. But that would require arguing that the two-and-a-quarter centuries of the American experiment have failed. I am not ready to believe this, even if Jared Taylor and the Euro-racialists are. I could very well be mistaken. But I would rather be wrong as an American, than the President of Jared Taylor’s Euro-white alternative. Moreover, I remain certain of at least one thing. America is such a multiethnic and multiracial experiment, and Jared Taylor and the Euro-racialists are wrong in contending that it is not.
University of California regent Ward Connerly’s new “Racial Privacy Initiative,” which last month qualified for the March 2004 ballot, would bar the California government from asking citizens what their race is. These days, even the government admits it’s hard to tell anyone’s race. One of the nation’s hottest movie stars, “XXX” hunk Vin Diesel, militantly refuses to reveal his racial background, except to say he’s “multicultural.” But if Diesel wanted to attend most universities or apply for any kind of government assistance, he’d be forced to break his silence and check a box, or boxes.
Defenders of racial checklists note that the current census has been liberalized to let citizens to choose from among 63 racial and ethnic categories — although there is no obvious reason for stopping at 63, and there is no constitutional basis for asking the race question at all. The constitutional rationale for the census is to count heads for the purpose of determining congressional districts. Since congressional districts are not determined on the basis of race or ethnicity there is no justification for such questions.
Connerly’s campaign is another stage in his crusade to free Americans from the racial albatross, an agenda he has described as an effort to “eliminate racial profiling.” This agenda has provoked a frenzy of opposition from the usual racial reactionaries — the NAACP, the ACLU and the entire “civil rights” coalition, who simply can’t imagine life without racial categories. The same coalition opposed Connerly’s Prop 209 campaign and was eventually proven wrong in every hysterical particular of the arguments they used to oppose it. Women were not stripped of their rights, as the anti-Connerly coalition had warned. Minority enrollment dipped, then climbed again. African-American enrollment is still down from where it was when it was artificially bolstered by affirmative action, but maybe the continued struggles of black students to meet high educational standards will force some attention to the corrupt educational bureaucracy in most inner city school districts.
Now that same old coalition is arguing that Connerly’s new initiative will cripple anti-discrimination laws. This is just a new twist to the old hysteria. Anti-discrimination laws that protect individuals will not be affected at all. Pseudo-anti-discrimination laws that provide racial preferences and privilege for politically anointed groups will.
But Connerly’s latest campaign has also thrown some cooler heads into an ideological tizzy. For example, Peter Beinart, the usually astute editor of the New Republic, had this to say about Connerly in a TRB column:
“[Connerly's anti-racial profiling slogan] should strike you as odd. In fact, it suggests just how schizophrenic conservative rhetoric on race has become. On the one hand, conservatives blithely endorse Connerly’s initiative as the natural extension of their longstanding battle against racial preferences. On the other, since Sept. 11, conservatives have unceremoniously junked the very principle on which all that anti-affirmative action crusading rests: color blindness. When it comes to Arabs and the war on terrorism, conservatives don’t want to “eliminate racial profiling” at all. They want the ACLU and all the other politically correct guilt-mongers to get out of the way and let the government start practicing it. In its writing on affirmative action and its writing on homeland security, the American right is engaged in a dialogue of the deaf — with itself. ”
Actually, Peter, the shoe is clearly on the other foot. It’s the left whose cynical abandonment of its own color-blind standard created racial preferences, which are an obvious form of racial profiling. Having marched in the ’60s to establish the principle of color-blindness, the left switched sides in the ’70s to support the principle it had just successfully opposed. Its rationale for embracing the profiling principle in the guise of “affirmative action” was that it was necessary to use racism to combat racism (although it is politically incorrect to express it so bluntly). This was the point of the infamous Blackmun opinion in the Bakke decision, which held that it might be necessary to take race into account to get beyond it.
This is the most widely embraced Orwellian principle in our culture today. It allows the cynical manipulators of race on the left to smear conservative civil rights activists who oppose race consciousness and race privilege as “racists.” It allows the left to call itself a “civil rights” movement even while it embraces the very principle that made segregation possible, and even though it is the conservative opposition that has remained faithful to the civil rights standard set by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the hundreds of thousands who marched on Washington in 1963.
Such ideological sleight-of-hand is not unusual in these matters. In fact, it is normal for liberals to blame conservatives for the sins their own policies and practices caused. Liberals blamed conservatives for launching the politics of personal destruction during the Clinton impeachment battles, but it was obvious that the attacks on Clinton were a belated retaliation for the personal assaults liberals themselves had earlier launched against Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. The lynch mobs of the left set out to defame these Supreme Court nominees by rifling their personal garbage (literally) in a campaign that was unprecedented. Then, when it came to Clinton’s sexual misbehavior, conservatives mistakenly believed that because liberals had set the standards for “sexual harassment,” they would be outraged if one of their own violated them.
Conservatives never seem to fully appreciate the fact that the issues are never the issue where liberals are concerned. For liberals, the issue is power. Whatever serves their need for power is right; whatever frustrates it is wrong. When racial profiling is to their advantage it is good. It’s only when it isn’t that it’s bad. The left’s hypocrisy is limitless. After decades of demanding racial profiling in job placements, school admissions, scholarships, corporate boards and government agencies, the left began decrying so-called “racial profiling” in law enforcement procedures without a single missed beat.
The quotes around racial profiling are necessary, because the profiling that upsets liberals and is endorsed by conservatives is not “racial profiling” at all. It is a time-honored race-neutral practice, often enforced by minority officers themselves, and completely consistent with a color-blind society properly understood. Obviously a color-blind society does not mean either a society where racial characteristics are invisible or where racists don’t exist. Conservatives are not the utopians in this fight. A “color-blind society” means a society with a single standard for all races and ethnicities.
Security profiles should be designed to protect law-abiding citizens from likely criminal predators. Profiles that include the ethnicity or race of potential suspects – but are not limited to those characteristics — do not constitute “racial profiling” in any meaningful sense of the term. The inclusion of race in a security profile is in itself as harmless as the inclusion of gender or height or any other identifying characteristic. It does not imply racism on the part of the profilers. On the other hand, rigging admissions or contract standards for selected racial groups does. It is the sole purpose of affirmative-action racial preferences to achieve a race-specific result. They are designed to target racial groups for racial privileges. This is what segregation and apartheid were all about. The means and the end were identical.
This is not what the security profiling demanded by conservatives is about, at all. Conservatives do not want Muslims to be arrested as terrorists if they are innocent. The profile is not constructed out of a desire to stigmatize Muslims as terrorists. It is based on already established incidences of terror and is intended to heighten awareness of where the danger may be coming from. To raise suspicions about groups whose members have in fact targeted innocents for harm bears no relation to ethnic or racial prejudice, as long as the suspicions are not raised solely by ethnicity or race. An unintended side effect may to raise suspicions toward members of the group who are innocent. But this is not the same as convicting them. Causing inconvenience to innocents is regrettable, but it is a price people regardless of ethnicity or race are willing to pay for safety. It is a characteristic of all preventive programs that innocents will be screened along with the guilty. But the ultimate target is the guilty and not the innocent, and the guilty may turn out to be of any ethnicity or race. In affirmative action measures, by contrast, the target itself is racial.
The war in which we are now engaged is a war with radical Islam. All of the terrorists who have targeted us are Muslim and/or Arab. Not to have heightened suspicions of Muslims and Arabs in these circumstances is mindless, not to say suicidal. To draw conclusions solely on the basis of the fact that people are Muslims or Arabs would be unwarranted and prejudiced. But conservatives are not calling for the convictions of Muslims or Arabs on the basis of their ethnicity.
The same observations about racial profiling hold for the scrutiny of criminal suspects in the practice of crime prevention, the original pretext for these concerns. Black males commit crime way out of proportion to their relatively small numbers in the U.S. population. So it stands to reason that black males as a group would merit heightened scrutiny by law enforcement officials. The abuse of fears about “racial profiling” to lobby against law enforcement practices that stop a higher percentage of black males is form of racism itself, because it exposes innocent black Americans who constitute the vast majority of the victims of black crime to greater risk because they are black.
Ward Connerly’s mission is really a mission to save America from the hypocrisies that leftists have imposed on it. The price of this political correctness has already been great in the form of increased crime, exacerbated racial tensions and lost opportunities. A color-blind society means a society in which government treats all Americans under a single standard and does not single out particular races for privilege or prejudice. It does not mean a society that is blind to the dangers that confront it.
U.S. President Barack Obama delivers a speech in the Grand Hall of Cairo University June 4, 2009. 
