Horowitz manipulates, distorts in ad

Acutely aware of the artist's responsibility to edify society, black poet/scholar Audre Lorde has used the following insight as both inspiration and to guide: "To survive in the mouth of the dragon we call America, we have had to learn that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings." Her observation, contrary to what men such as David Horowitz are prone to believe, was not a product of rabid, wild-eyed black separatism or her own demagogic ambitions. \nInstead, Lorde's perspective emerged out of a sober and responsible study of America's historical record. Lorde understands that the European and American architects of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade operated on a shortsighted blueprint. \nThey had not calculated what they would do with their African slaves beyond the point of profit. The plan was to bring this free labor ashore, keep the workers healthy enough to be functional, feed the dusky beings every now and then. With luck, the slavers thought, their unpaid laborers would survive lifetime tenure on the plantation, and of course, never once ask for a wage, for a healthy meal, or God forbid, for the luxury to behave according to their own will. \nBecause there was no expectation that Africans would act out their own humanity, the Euro-American brain trust experienced crisis when reports of such unwanted petitions began to flood their offices. White-wigged white men haunted the hallowed halls of American government with the blind stares of the besieged. \n"What do we do now?" was the frequent utterance. The insecurity that plagued the South when enslaved Africans contested their exploitation pales in comparison to the mortal horror involved in owners and overseers having to approach their former property as human beings. Foresight had not accounted for this possibility.\nWe were never meant to survive.\nIn light of the all-too-human inability of one person to unhand his hardened understandings of another person -- that is, for an owner to look upon his tool as human -- Horowitz's arguments about widespread white benevolence toward blacks throughout the nation's history is nothing short of mythical. For example, when speaking about the Civil War and "the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves" in his advertisement, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too," Horowitz poorly characterizes the intent of the Union dead. \nMost white soldiers fought to preserve the Union, not the citizenship of former slaves. In fact, six months after the Emancipation Proclamation, on July 1, 1863, white Northern male draftees violently attacked black neighborhoods on the mere suspicion that they would be fighting for black liberty. The assault was logical. Why fight for people who will compete for your spot at the factory or the stockyard? Black enslavement was good for white job security.\nBeyond a white military, Horowitz's ad also celebrates antebellum anti-slavery movements as the successful brainchild of white Northerners. He notes that, "there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one." Yet Horowitz ignores Quock Walker's efforts in 1791, when the ex-slave brought his owner before a Massachusetts court in a suit for his own freedom; or David Walker's 1829 writings that called for slaves to take up arms against their owners; or the thousands of bondspeople who attempted to flee the South with or without the assistance of the Underground Railroad. All these gestures preceded William Garrison's 1831 founding of the American Antislavery Society (peopled by only a minority of whites), which people such as Horowitz wrongly cite as the primary champion of slave emancipation. \nHorowitz's most shrill trumpeting of mass white largesse occurs when he suggests that affirmative action policies have offered due reparations to blacks for their centuries of unpaid labor. He notes that the State has transferred "trillions of dollars" in the form of "racial preferences" to African Americans. \nHorowitz omits that the majority of white Americans did not skip and whistle to the polls when facing the prospect of Civil Rights legislation. Whites were so resistant to the 1954 Brown decision that there was little evidence of its existence on the social landscape a decade later. A begrudged former President Richard Nixon issued executive orders to enact affirmative action in the early 1970s, and this reluctant attitude toward ameliorating past discrimination was manifest in continued challenge until the 1978 Bakke decision began to declaw such laws. So-called "Reagan Revolutionaries" and "Gingrich Contractarians" have effected the imminent death-knell of affirmative action policies, with very little protest from its primary beneficiaries: white females, whose genitalia no longer determine the social ceiling to their professional ambitions.\nIn short, though several white Americans have fought tooth and nail for racial equality -- indeed, some to their death -- the notion of mass white magnanimity toward blacks is a fantasy that never occurred. Moreover, one could certainly read the delay of an equitable society and the failure of begrudgingly implemented social programs as evidence that no generation of white Americans has ever had the fortitude or decency to experience the inconvenience of redistributing resources and power to effect racial equality. \nThe majority of whites, apparently, could never assimilate the prospect of having to deal with American Africans -- their former property or servants -- as social equals. No ideological apparatus available could allow such a thought.\nWe were never meant to survive.\nHorowitz knows this.