David Horowitz, Racism, and Reparations Part 2

Six
The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination
No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and 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% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective - and yet so critical - to the case?

This was already addressed in my last post about some of Horowitz's previous ignorant racism. The rise of the black middle class that is now larger than the black underclass is indeed remarkable given the fundamentally white supremacist-driven system of the US.  However, as mentioned previously, the black middle class is more likely to experience downward social mobility and live in mostly black neighborhoods facing some of the same issues plaguing lower-income black communities. Because of racial discrimination, redlining, and the post-industrial urban collapse, black urban communities have suffered disproportionately while job creation has shifted to suburbs or in fields that require education or job training inaccessible to most low-income blacks. Northwestern Sociology professor, Mary Pattillo, has done extensive research on the unique experiences of the African American middle class that shows the persistence of racism as an impediment to black wealth and achievement. Check that post, here. Horowitz also makes a racist argument that blames the victims of poverty that seeks to place the burden on impoverished Americans largely forced into poverty by blaming their individual character. As mentioned previously, white privilege and black disadvantage and ghettoization has made it extremely difficult for blacks, and other poor people of color, from entering the middle class, too. 

He also attempts to give another example of slave-descended blacks, Caribbean immigrants and their higher average incomes, as proof of the non-existence of slavery's lingering effects on blacks after emancipation. West Indian immigration cannot be generalized so broadly, as done here, and must be placed in context. What time period of Caribbean immigration is Horowitz alluding to? Early 20th century or post-WWII? Furthermore, many West Indian immigrants came with more education, so their opportunities for entry into the "coveted" middle class was easier in some senses. Moreover, these West Indian immigrants are hardly a homogenous group. Many West Indian and African American communities in New York, for instance, are contiguous and facing the same problems with police brutality, housing discrimination, and various other disadvantages of being black in America. Thus, descendants of slaves from the Caribbean who have higher wages on average than African Americans require detailed analysis and contextualization lacking Horowitz's brief piece. In order to justify his claim, one would have to do additional research into the origins of the Caribbean diaspora in the US and also include them within the broader class dynamics of the black middle class. Despite receiving higher wages, like the African American middle class, many West Indians still face negative consequences of racism that serves as an impediment.

Seven
The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.
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 and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others -- many less privileged than themselves?

First of all, racist Horowitz's claims about victimhood and grievance reek of the racist attempts by Arizona to end Chicano Studies for public high schools with predominantly Latino student bodies. Properly demanding redistributive social policies or reparations to correct the ongoing imbalance in US allocation of resources and power is rational and would be useful for creating conditions more amenable to a social democracy. This could and should be part of a broader plan for shifting the political discourse of the US to the left and to more inclusive, humanistic policies for education, financial resources, and opportunities for the poor, who are disproportionately black and brown. If properly framed as a social justice issue for addressing historic and current issues of racism in American society, it would be to everyone's benefit to address these issues. For instance, funding schools, job training, allocation of additional resources, and more participatory, democratic governance would lead to increased public safety since incentives for crime or at least robberies would decline. Fewer folks of all racial backgrounds would need to commit crime. The role of US imperialism and white supremacy on a global scale in fueling the conflicts that motivates many refugees and others to come to the US should also support reparations logically because it forces the US government to acknowledge its own domestic terrorism and its role in catastrophes internationally could be connected to US imperialism easily.

Eight
Reparations To African Americans 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 historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a "healing," what will?

Horowitz's racist ignorance once again implies African Americans were not taxpayers whose money contributed to the Great Society and welfare benefits that also included more whites than blacks. Welfare was initially intended for white women, white widows and women abandoned by their men, not blacks. Indeed, many southern states went out of their way to exclude black women from receiving welfare, yet black women are now vilified as "welfare queens" who want to cheat the system and be government dependents. Most recipients of welfare are white, and though a disproportionate number of African-Americans use welfare services, that's because a disproportionate number of African Americans live in poverty. Horowitz further reveals his racism again and again by overlooking the obvious fact that white women were the original beneficiaries of welfare and most welfare benefits go to white women, not blacks. And again, blacks are taxpayers as well, so their money has contributed to welfare benefits for whites and others. Unfortunately, welfare rights have consistently faced cuts and challenges since black women began demanding their welfare rights, which are not an issue of reparations, but a social safety net to ensure people do not starve to death in this supposedly progressive nation. If reparations will take on the form of welfare, then it must be wholesale restitution that includes extensive job training, universal healthcare, living wages, and strengthening affirmative action to ensure black representation and other people of color. 

The current weakened form of welfare, mended but not ended, removed countless impoverished individuals from receiving benefits and has adopted a discriminatory form that precludes many from public housing or other benefits based on situations often beyond the control of that individual. Thus, should a woman be denied access to public housing because someone in her family or household is suspected of drug dealing on the premises or nearby? Punitive, draconian measures taken against drug offenders and poor communities more broadly can often lead to denial of welfare or housing. If this is reparations, placing further restrictions on blacks or additional punishment lumped with police brutality, crime, and poverty, then I don't want it. Blacks in America deserve living wages, stronger affirmative action, right to food and shelter, job training, better schools, and financial restitution needed to fund the aforementioned. Horowitz also overlooks the well-known fact that white women have benefited more from affirmative action than blacks, yet remains silent on this fact when framing affirmative action as "racial preferences" that, presumably in his worldview, discriminate against whites. 

Nine
What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians - 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 been brought to an end. 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 still be slaves. 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 anywhere. Where is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?

I don't even know where to begin with this...If black slaves were not actively resisting their enslavement and working alongside as well as pressuring whites to become involved or question their privileges from racial slavery, white abolitionism would not have done a thing. The Christian humanitarianism from Britain and elsewhere, such as the Quaker tradition, was abolitionist, but so was the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and many slave revolts, such as Nat Turner's in 1831. Horowitz ignores the historical agency of black abolitionism and slave resistance to frame it as an example of white, Western European and Americans swooping in and saving 'savage' Africans from themselves and the horrors of the slave trade. Owning another human being is objectively immoral, and even if many forms of African slavery were less physically destructive, it remained immoral. But so did European imperialism, scientific racism, and continued attempts to control the labor of emancipated blacks in the US or the Caribbean. Slavery may have been formally abolished, but ex-slaves continued to resist to ensure their rights rather than wait as passive recipients of the saving grace of Western civilization. "Western" civilization is inherently a product of enslaved African material, cultural, and intellectual traditions and political ideology, thereby making abolitionism and slave resistance two-sides of the same coin countering the capitalistic impulse for exploitation. 

Horowitz, however, would like us to believe that if it were not for a white president signing the Emancipation Proclamation, or white soldiers of the Union army, then blacks would still be helpless slaves. Indeed, for Horowitz's racist view of history, blacks are ahistorical and incapable of freeing themselves from history. Indeed, Africa and the African diaspora become a literal Heart of Darkness where nothing resembling humanity or the capability for development or change can happen beyond the timelessness of its savagery. On the other hand, whites could have and would have abolished slavery without slave resistance on the ground, whites would have miraculously ensured full democratic rights to the entirety of American society, and consequently, black Americans must be grateful for the superior values of whites (although these whites were loathe to actually practice what they preached or really move beyond their racist thoughts). The truth is all peoples interact in complex networks and exchanges and, as a result, no region of the world is isolated from developments of humankind elsewhere. Blacks and whites, as well as indigenous and others, are responsible for the creation of the US, and Horowitz does nothing to prove his racist belief that blacks were freed entirely by whites in America and should be grateful rather than the self-liberation ethos and long history of slave resistance that all historians have noted. 

Ten
The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom
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 is to embark on a course whose implications are troubling. Yet the African-American community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists, nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans to be no part of America's social contract. African Americans should reject this temptation.
For all America's faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in their country and its heritage. It is this heritage that is really under attack by the reparations movement. The reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left. It is an attack not only on white Americans, but on all Americans -- especially African-Americans.
America's African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive -- a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea. For it is this idea that led to the principles and institutions that have set African-Americans - and all of us -- free.

Once again, Horowitz titles ten with a racist, paternalistic attribution of America freeing blacks. Of course, to Horowitz, America is defined as a normative white society with white European Western values, despite him referring to it as "multi-ethnic" previously or correctly noting that blacks were present in the present-day US before the Mayflower. He characterizes the demand for reparations as "separatist" without offering any evidence for how or why blacks demanding reparations means they want to separate themselves from American society or nationality. How or why is this separatist? Perhaps there are certain separatist black groups that also want reparations, but does that mean the entire movement for reparations is "separatist." Also, given the long history of white racism and violence toward blacks, black nationalism and separatism were/are understandable responses to the seemingly dismal state of race relations. Horowitz also makes an offensive assumption about the political left as wanting to further separate blacks from "America's social contract," which Horowitz declines to correctly identify as white supremacist. Charles Mills, a Trinidadian political scientist, has written an excellent analysis of the western social contract as a racial contract embedded with notions of white supremacy that Horowitz would never admit, lest he illuminate the covert racism of the American right. 

In his conclusion, Horowitz tries to portray reparations as harmful for African Americans and the "American idea," but without defining what constitutes the latter. If, by "American idea," he is referring to the social contract and racialized political ideology rooted in liberalism premised on notions of whites as citizens and free and blacks as unfree and servile, which I suspect he is, then Horowitz is lying to his teeth about prescriptions for what would best serve the interests of African Americans. Indeed, his conclusion sounds like those post-racial, colorblind conservatives who misquote Martin Luther King to elucidate their opposition to affirmative action. For misquoting and misrepresenting the views of black civil rights activists to further a racist agenda is a despicable, heinous act common among the right, which must be refuted. The "American idea" that liberates African Americans is rooted in the left, African American radical egalitarianism, Christian humanism and the prophetic tradition, and a sense of a collective destiny, not the purely individualistic, capitalist-driven mania of right-wing America.