Ad's rhetoric skewed

This letter is a response to the "advertisement," "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea-- and Racist Too," by David Horowitz, published by the IDS April 13. My response should be titled "Horowitz's Advertisement Against Reparations Is a Bad Idea-- and Racist Too."\nAlthough Horowitz's "advertisement" against reparations begins by stating that it does not "in any way endorse the brutality that African slaves suffered or the subsequent treatment of blacks leading up to the Civil Rights Era," its rhetoric is skewed in that direction. And it is exactly the brutality of the slavery of Africans in America and the racial discrimination and injustices against African Americans up through today in the 21st century that has led to the current reparations debate.\nThirteen million Africans survived the horrendous "middle passage" into slavery led by European exploiters and their compliances, and thousands of African children, women and men died during the journeys across the ocean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was African labor that sustained the plantation-based agrarian economy upon which colonial America was built.\nAfrican resistance to slavery is well documented, from slave ship to plantation insurrections, even before Christian, white abolitionists together with free blacks and those who were recently escaped from the bonds of slavery united against the peculiar institution. Free blacks fought with the Union Army in battles that led to the end of slavery.\nBut, the Reconstruction of America after the Civil War failed because wealthy white elites and white supremacy groups instituted a labor-exploitative "sharecropping" system, and a reign of terror against African Americans. In 1911, when W.E.B. Dubois and other progressive Americans founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United States was entrenched in an unjust, segregated society of political and social inequality. It was in 1903 that Dubois declared, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."\nSixty years later, in 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, the United States was not much closer to creating a color-blind and just society. Thirty-eight years later, in 2001, the struggle to uphold fairness and justice for all in the United States of America continues.\nThe publication of the Horowitz "advertisement" by the IDS does not make the work toward racial understanding, fairness and justice in Bloomington conducted by such citizens as those involved in the Bloomington United organization, the IU Commission on Multi-Cultural Understanding or the IU Office of Student Development and Diversity any easier.\nHorowitz's "advertisement" against reparations for slavery does nothing to educate any one about race relations in the United States of America, nor does it enlighten any one about current Congressional debates over reparations for slavery. The Horowitz "advertisement" does demonstrate the power of those who control the press or have the means to use it to manipulate public discourse.