David Horowitz - Progressive Racism

2016 by David Horowitz

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First American edition published in 2016 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation. Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Book design and production by Catherine Campaigne; copy-edited by David Landau; research provided by Mike Bauer.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Horowitz, David, 1939 author. Title: Progressive racism: / by David Horowitz.

Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015038178 | ISBN 9781594038600 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: RacismUnited States. | United StatesRace relations. | African AmericansCivil rights. | Civil rights movementsUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC E185.615 .H674 2016 | DDC 305.800973dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038178

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

1. 13 Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream
   (co-authored with John Perazzo)

Contents

I n August 2014 the shooting of a black criminal in Ferguson Missouri by a white police officer led to a series of riots lasting several months, and eventually inspired national protests making it the civil rights cause of the Obama era. The protesters indictment was summarized in a chant Hands Up, Dont Shoot, which symbolized their claim that the nations police had declared open season on unarmed black citizens and were killing them for the crime of being black. During the public disturbances surrounding the Ferguson events the president and his chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, exhibited active sympathy and support for the movements complaints.

When the facts were finally established by forensic evidence and grand jury testimony, and eventually by a separate Department of Justice investigation conducted by Holder himself, they refuted the movements central claim. Forensics, video records and the testimony of five black eyewitnesses established that the alleged victim Michael Brown, was targeted for arrest not because he was black but because he had just committed a strong-armed robbery. He did not have his hands in the air and was not shot while surrendering but while attacking the arresting officer whose gun he attempted to wrestle from its holster.

In short, the actions of the crowds that burned the city of Ferguson and looted its community businesses even before the facts were in, and which continued their rampages even after the facts were established, were not those of a civil rights protest but of a lynch mob, unconcerned with the evidence, impatient with due process, and intent on ensuring that a severely injured officer who had been the victim of a criminal attack be indicted, tried, convicted and punished. Or else. How did the mob know that the officer was guilty? Because he was white. Mob leaders even demanded that the prosecutora white liberal Democratbe removed from the case because his own father was the victim of a black criminal 50 years previously, and therefore he could not discharge his duties fairly.

This racist thuggery would have been readily recognized as such if the lynch mob had been white. But it was composed mainly of African Americans and civil rights progressives, who were supported in their aggression by a media eager to embrace the baseless idea that unarmed black teens were regularly shot in the streets by white police officers who were protected by a white supremacist power structure. This, too, was contradicted by the facts. Shootings of black criminals by police have steadily been declining, while the number of whites shot by police officers nearly doubles that of blacks even though black malessix percent of the populationaccount for nearly forty percent of all violent crimes.

A second contested incident occurred soon after in New York when a black street criminal named Eric Garner died while resisting arrest after police were forced to apply a choke hold because of his large size. Garners wordsI cant breathejoined Hands Up, Dont Shoot as a slogan of those pushing the narrative that Americaand especially its policewere irredeemably racist. I cant breathe was meant to highlight the progressive mobs view that the choke hold employed to cuff the 300 pound Garner had actually strangled him. So pervasive was the assumption of police guilt in the case that the slogan was featured on the warm-up jerseys of star athletes and became a national cause celebre. According to the activists, another unarmed black suspect had been murdered because he was black.

This time the charge of racism was particularly ludicrous since it was leveled against a police force half of whose officers were minorities. The sergeant on the scene in charge of the fatal arrest was an African American woman, a fact studiously ignored by the media intent on pushing the narrative of police racism. Eventually the autopsy report showed that unknown to the police who arrested him Garner was suffering from multiple maladies including heart problems, asthma and morbid obesity. It was these conditions that caused the normal trauma of a resisted arrest to result in the collapse of Garners pulmonary capacity and his subsequent death in the ambulance later.

In other words, both accusationsof racism and strangulationwere false. But because of the pervasive influence of progressive prejudice in the culture at large, the lynch mobs were ultimately successful. To forestall the threat of future violence stemming from future protests, the careers of the white officers involved in the fatal arrests were terminated. Ferguson officer Darren Wilson was forced to go into hiding to keep from being killed himself.

The furor of these events spurred much commentary as racial arsonists like Al Sharpton tried to make local tragedies into a national crisis. A fact lost in this shuffle was that progressive lynch mobs had been doing this work for decades. Three other recent cases show the desperate effort of progressive vigilantes to keep alive the notion of America as a racist nation. One is the destruction of the career and fortune of TV cooking personality Paula Deen, a supporter of President Obama who had given more than a million dollars in charity to help inner city African Americans. In addition to being white, Deens offenses were a groundless discrimination lawsuit against her brother that was later dismissed, and her use of the forbidden word nigger in a remark made to her husband in private after being mugged by a black criminal during a bank robbery twenty-five years earlier. (She volunteered the remark in a deposition connected to the lawsuit.)