David Horowitz makes a simple error found in so many discussions of race in America.

The mistake is to consider "white" and "black" as interchangeable categories. Horowitz brings up the case of the murder of a white child by a black man screaming racial epithets. I do not ever mean to say that this act is anything but unfathomably deplorable, but I must argue against Horowitz's (mis)use of it. He claims this is as much a "hate crime" as the dragging death of James Byrd. On the surface, this makes sense -- white and black are both races, why can't a hate crime go either way?

The answer is simple: Being black -- the concept or the existential reality -- is fundamentally loaded in American culture with the oppression the race has faced, with the disempowerment of the race in contemporary society, with all the inequities that go along with being a minority. Being white has none of this baggage, it has not such a visceral history.

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