A Washer Woman Shall Lead Them
As someone who helped to create the radical New Left in the ’60s and became a conservative in the ’80s, I am often asked to explain how it is possible to make such a 180-degree turn. I have tried to answer this in a 450-page autobiography.11 But there is a short answer as well. I abandoned the agendas of the left because they do not work. Socialism, big government and economic redistribution have proven disastrous to the very people whom the left proposes to “liberate.”
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Free Press, 1997.
I still believe in the “liberation” of blacks, minorities and the poor, as I did in the 1960s. Only now I believe in their liberation from the chains of “liberalism” and the welfare state—from permanent dependence on government handouts, from perverse incentives to bear children out of wedlock, from inverted ethics that imply it is better to receive than to give, and worse, to receive without reciprocity or responsibility and above all without work. The doctrines of the left teach those who have fallen behind in the economic scramble to blame others for their failure. This attitude stimulates resentment and deprives its holders of the power to change their condition. The left insists on race preferences, thus delivering the message to minorities that they cannot compete unless the system is rigged in their favor. This reinforces the sense of group inferiority, which is the essence of racism.
Leftist doctrine proposes double standards of intellectual, moral and professional competence, teaching minorities that they can get away with less. It is a crippling philosophy for those it claims to help, and a not-so-subtle expression of racial arrogance on the part of those are behind it. Under “liberalism” no one is responsible. Instead, something called “society” is the root of all evil. If a criminal strikes a prey, “society” is the root cause of his wickedness; if a person is poor, “society” has made him so. If conservatives seek to hold people responsible for their condition, it is out of a mean-spirited impulse to blame the victims. How could there possibly be all this opportunity conservatives talk about when America is saturated with racism and oppression?
I used to believe all this nonsense, but then I arrived at a worldview based on what I have recently come to call the Oseola McCarty principle. Oseola McCarty is a 75-year-old African-American cleaning woman from Mississippi. From her working life she was able to accumulate enough savings to donate $150,000 to a student scholarship program at the University of Southern Mississippi. In short, a black woman living in the most racist and poorest state in the union (almost half her life under segregation) could earn enough money washing other people’s clothes to save $150,000 and give it away. If Oseola McCarty can do that, what American black or white cannot?
Oseola McCarty’s example tells us that the poverty problem in America is not about lack of opportunity or jobs, or about racism. Poverty is about individual failure. It is about family dysfunction, character disorder and self-destructive behavior. That is what Oseola McCarty’s achievement means. It is no surprise that, while most self-appointed spokesmen get tongue-tied when asked if African-Americans have gained anything from the civil rights revolution of the last 30 years, Oseola McCarty has no hesitation. She says the world is a “much, much better place” than when she was a child. So it can be for anyone liberated from the philosophy of the left. The new mantra would be this: Spare us from the kindness of those who would cripple us with excuses for attitudes and behaviors that can only hold us back and eventually destroy us. Keep us from the charity of those who would chain us to their benevolence with lifetime handouts. Spare us the compassion of saviors who secretly despise us, who think that we cannot compete on our merits or live up to the moral standards they expect of themselves.
This is the creed of true equality. It has just taken me a long time to understand that.
March 31, 1997, http://www.salon.com/1997/03/31/horowitz970331/ http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/01/21/an-old-black-washer-woman-shall-lead-them/print/.
1 David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Free Press, 1997.
Alternative to Affirmative Action
President Clinton’s much-awaited statement on race has come and gone and, as usual with this president, no one on either side of the argument is convinced that anything was said at all. Perhaps this reveals something about the general state of the nation—our inability to speak clearly, unambiguously and directly about the issue of race.
The president chose a University of California campus in San Diego as the site for his pronouncement in order to focus attention on California’s ban on racial preferences and what he described as the drop in enrollment rates resulting from that ban. According to university officials, African-American admissions to UC’s Boalt Hall law school, one of the most prestigious in the nation, dropped by 85 percent as a result of the new policy. But African-American enrollment throughout the whole University of California system actually increased. What the president chose not to discuss was the way in which the results at an elite institution like Boalt completely undermine the defenders of the affirmative action/racial preference policies that are now—thanks to Proposition 209—illegal in California. During the arguments over the California Civil Rights Initiative, opponents had claimed that race was only one of many factors and an insignificant one at best in awarding affirmative action slots at the university. Now it is clear that affirmative action is a system of racial preferences and racial discrimination and nothing more.
The president calls for a conversation about race, but what he really wants is a conversation about racism, and about white racism exclusively. His response to California’s rejection of racial preferences is that we must not “re-segregate” higher education. As though re-segregation was not already an accomplished agenda of the left; as though black separatists and their liberal allies were not the leaders of the movement; as though there were not separate black dorms and black graduations sanctioned by progressive university administrators; as though there were not special orientations for incoming black freshmen and expensive invitations to black racists like Khalid Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture, Professor Griff, Sister Souljah, Leonard Jeffries, Tony Martin, Frances Welsing, etc., etc., to speak before black student unions and Pan African student associations and incite racial hatred against whites.
Lacking any interest in addressing the real problems of racial division in America, what the president did was to offer a challenge to those of us who remain faithful to the vision of the civil rights movement and reject government discrimination. To those who oppose affirmative action, the president said, “I’ll ask you to come up with an alternative. I would embrace it if I could find a better way.”
There is such an alternative. It’s called study. Study hard. If you want to get into an elite law school, that’s what you need to do. The alternative to rigging the standards, Mr. President, is to teach one’s children the value of an education in the first place. It is to stick around after conception to help children enter a difficult and demanding world. It is to give up the blame game and look at your own responsibility for where you are. It is to tell your children that getting educated is not “thinking white.” It’s thinking.
How is it helpful to African-Americans to tell them that it is not their failure when they do not meet standards that others do, but the fault of white racists who want to keep them down? This is a lie and everybody knows it. African-Americans are failing because they