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In his introduction to Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, former Marxist turned conservative muckraker David Horowitz insists that his views on race "have remained entirely consistent with my previous commitments and beliefs.... I believed that only government neutrality towards racial groups was compatible with the survival of a multi-ethnic society that is also democratic. I still believe that today." Horowitz has, in fact, remained remarkably consistent in attacking elite social institutions and their subtle attempts to promote what Nicholas Lemann refers to in The Big Test as a "meritocracy." While former colleagues from the '60s have come to defend the rise of progressives within the bunkers of power, Horowitz still assaults the ramparts with venomous glee; his appearances on cable TV news shows, NPR, and the Salon Web site have earned him a legion of fans.
In Hating Whitey, Horowitz pummels administrators, hapless scholars, rival pundits, and embattled defenders of affirmative action and race-based quotas. But while Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom and Shelby Steele have made the case against racial preference with rigorous methodological approaches or rhetorical eloquence, Horowitz doesn't throw much new light on the issue. Even the revealing personal essays dealing with the author's ill-fated tenure with the Black Panthers in the early '70s recycle material previously covered in his autobiography Radical Son. This time around, Horowitz mostly names names and issues ideological fatwas against those with whom he disagrees, invoking the 1950s anti-Communist newsletter Red Channels at its prime. Hating Whitey may satiate the blood lust of the converted, but it's only marginally useful in the larger discussions of race relations in America. --John M. Anderson
From Publishers Weekly
Once a prominent U.S. leftist, Horowitz garnered an even larger reputation upon the publication of Radical Son, his memoir documenting his transformation from a radical to a conservative. Now, as the editor of the intentionally provocative conservative journal Heterodoxy and a frequent columnist for Salon, Horowitz employs heat-seeking rhetoric that aims to be as inflammatory as possible. Taking on U.S. race relations and claiming that "anti-white racism" has become intrinsic to the black civil rights movement and "common currency of the 'progressive' intelligentsia," he launches an all-out attack that is almost comical in its single-mindedness. He documents Louis Farrakhan's controversial and contested statements attacking white European and American culture and politics; goes after Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, "whose boundless suspicions of white Americans amount to a demonization as intense as Elijah Muhammad's"; and characterizes Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell as a "black racist" and a "product of the Communist left." He also explores how American universities have been destroyed by leftist "McCarthyism" and the "political persecution of Newt Gingrich by liberal democrats." But such provocation, presented in essays that seem hurriedly written and which lack footnotes (or any documentation of their more questionable facts), quickly devolves into a boring rant. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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