>
On Thu, 2 Sep 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:
> John Strausbaugh has a column, called "Don't Call Me N-word, Whitey,"
> in this week's New York Press defending Horowitz
> <http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=254&author_id=2>.
I'm sure you're right that this is a defense, but it's a peculiarly maladroit one. The two passages Strausbaugh quotes from the horse's mouth are the most self-damning things I've seen in the affair so far. Horowitz comes off sounding like nothing so much as my racist aunt:
On the phone last Friday, Horowitz complained to me that "blacks can
say racist or anti-Semitic things about anybody, and nobody holds them
to account... We've had this kind of surreal conversation about race
for many years now in this country. It's because of the intimidation
of anybody who's not black-or even anybody who's black but not
[politically] left-against saying anything sensible on the issue of
race without fear of being attacked as a bigot or a racist."
He went on, "Then you have these idiotic statements by black leaders
like Jesse Jackson or Kweisi Mfume that there's too many black people
in jail and it's because of white racism. There are too many black
people in jail because of the criminality of too many black people,
but nobody can say that."
Maybe it's just my worldview that makes this statements sound so patently absurd that I thought Strausbaugh was hanging him up to dry. Black leaders get a free ride when they say something anti-semitic? Is it possible to say that with a straight face? And for those of us that believe all people were created equal, the fact that there is a massive disproportion of blacks in prison implies pretty directly that the system must be askew somewhere. To suggest that only an idiot could entertain such an idea . . .well, it makes Horowitz look like an idiot, in the Greek sense of the word, entirely contained in his own world.
In addition, Strausbaugh elicits from him what seemed to me a pretty funny take on his "even my best in-laws are black" argument. Howowitz had said "What will I tell my daughter in law?" Strausbaugh asked him about how in fact she took it. Horowitz said, "Oh she's, got pretty liberal politics. We're always going at each other." Which suggested to me that she thought always thought he was a racist old coot. Lord knows most of us put up with this much in our in-laws.
Also Strausbaugh's last paragraph so perfectly expressed how I felt after reading his column that perhaps I mistook it for what he thought:
No doubt there are plenty of people who'd think that Horowitz must
occupy a separate reality from theirs, and agree with White that he
should just shut up about it. The question for a venue like Time is
how you go about suggesting that he do that.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com