Contrarian Controversy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 15, 1999 | by Robert Stacy McCain

Radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz takes on 'antiwhite racism' in a new book that skewers other 'progressive causes' as well.

David Horowitz is used to controversy, but the former Berkeley radical says he "wasn't prepared for this." By "this" Horowitz means the uproar caused by his new book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence Publishing, $24.95, 312 pp). The title reflects a major theme of the book, the "antiwhite racism" that Horowitz says has "become a common currency of the 'progressive' intelligentsia."

"Whites are the only group that there's a license to hate in America today," says Horowitz. "I wanted people to be confronted by their hypocrisy."

The battle concerning Hating Whitey began when the Free Press --which had published two successful books by Horowitz -- informed him that they "would not consider a book of that title," he says. Horowitz then turned to a conservative publisher who told him, "We have enough trouble without your title." Finally, Dallas-based Spence Publishing agreed to take the book.

Though his last two books sold about 70,000 copies in hardback, Horowitz says, major bookstore chains have balked at stocking the new title. Leftists who "dominate the literary culture ... have already declared war against this book. I've been warned it's going to get a lot worse."

In August, Horowitz found himself under attack after he wrote a column calling the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's lawsuit against gun manufacturers "an absurd act of political desperation." Jack E. White replied with a Time magazine column accusing Horowitz of "blatant bigotry."

"The comment that so incensed Jack White is when I wrote that no one is oppressed in America," Horowitz says. "If blacks were oppressed in America, Haitians wouldn't want to come here."

Horowitz believes that the left makes it dangerous to question the "complete mythology" that blames white racism for every problem affecting black people in America. "The worst thing about liberal ideology is its effect on minorities," he says. "By blaming others, it prevents them from solving their problems."

If leftists have declared war on Hating Whitey, it is ironic that many of the essays in the book first were published in the left-leaning Internet journal Salon (www.salon.corn). "I have nothing but admiration for David Talbot, David Weir and the editors at Salon, which I think is the most interesting magazine out there today," says Horowitz. "The culture of the Internet is liberating."

In fact, Horowitz says the culture of the Internet has helped circumvent the resistance of bookstores to Hating Whitey. After he made appearances Monday on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor and Bob Grant's New York talk-radio show, the book rose as high as No. 33 on the best-seller list of Amazon.com, the online bookseller.

Still, Horowitz says, he was rejected for an appearance on one cable-TV show after a producer called him "mean-spirited and racist" for claiming that antiwhite racism is a problem in America. "I think, culturally, the producer's reaction is a huge problem," Horowitz says. "It makes the point of the book."

The point of Hating Whitey is that "ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry," embracing not only the antiwhite rhetoric of black "racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan," Horowitz writes, but also white liberals such as Harvard lecturer Noel Ignatiev, who has proclaimed the need to "abolish the white race by any means necessary." White liberals help incite this hatred, Horowitz argues, pointing to the eagerness of politicians such as first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Bradley to "kiss the ring of [New York black activist] Al Sharpton, a foul-mouthed racist."

But Hating Whitey is not just a book about race. Horowitz explores topics ranging from the intellectual hoax that made Guatemalan peasant and author Rigoberta Menchu a campus hero to the feud between left-wing writer Christopher Hitchens and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. Horowitz also turns a critical eye on:

* Questionable foreign-policy positions by President Clinton and other Democrats, including the decision by the Democratic National Committee to hire Carlottia Scott -- whom Horowitz calls a former mistress of the Marxist dictator of Grenada, Maurice Bishop -- as its political-issues director.

* The left-wing atmosphere on campuses such as Maine's Bates College, which costs almost $30,000 a year but offers political-science classes in which the professor guides students through a 600-page Marxist textbook.

* Efforts to rewrite the history of the 1960s by former New Left leaders such as Todd Gitlin.

Horowitz also takes on notable liberals such as Richard Rorty, a socialist professor at the University of Virginia whose efforts to revive the left as "the party of hope" prompts Horowitz to remark: "In Washington, the Republican right is, in fact, the party of reform, just as surely as the Democratic left, hopelessly addicted to its socialist nostalgias, has become a camp of reactionaries, clinging to the bankrupt past of welfare entitlements and government handouts."