Readers of The Progressive know that I do not support attempts to generate a movement around the demand for reparations for injustices perpetrated against and its legacy. In fact, among the reasons that I don't is that couching demands for justice in those terms opens space for exactly the kind of demagogy and sophistry that David Horowitz displays in the obnoxious ad that he has placed in several college newspapers. So, predictably, we now find ourselves engaged in a debate not over the realities of racialized inequality and injustice but over whether his right to free speech has been violated, a debate that resurfaces all the Reagan vintage canards of "political correctness".
At the same time I disagree with those, including many on the left like our own Matt Rothschild, who see objection to those newspapers publishing Horowitz's screed as inappropriate calls for censorship. Moreover, I support those papers that refused to carry Horowitz's ad, and I do not oppose the demonstrations and other protests that publication of the ad has generated, including calls for boycotts and the efforts by students at Brown University and elsewhere to confiscate the issues of papers that contained it. I know that this position may seem counterproductive, irresponsible or intolerant to many people of good will and sound political judgment. I will defend it, but first I should explain why I reject the view that refusal to publish the ad - or objection to its having been published - expresses a dangerous form of censorship.
At issue is not simply whether Horowitz has the right to express his opposition to the demand for reparations. Of course he does. No one is preventing him from doing so, and no one ever has. His complaint that he is being silenced is also a familiar Reagan vintage canard - the well-known right-wing propagandist denouncing, ubiquitously and incessantly in the most visible outlets of the mass media, a supposed liberal tyranny that keeps him from being heard. He has never had any difficulty gaining access to those venues, and he's all over the place now. And surely no one would argue that a newspaper must print anything and everything that is submitted as an ad.
The more important question is what criteria determine editorial decisions to publish or reject. On a recent CNN segment on the subject, the editor of the Brown Daily Herald said that his paper's policy is not to accept ads that it judged "illegal, libelous or obscene or something like that". A few days earlier, on C-SPAN’s "Washington Journal", the editor of the University of Wisconsin Badger Herald that also had published Horowitz's ad indicated that his paper's criteria for rejection included determining whether an ad contains claims that are "clearly false". The host then asked whether the paper had had to decide on accepting ads from groups or individuals who deny the existence of the Nazi Holocaust. It turned out that the paper had been confronted with that decision and had chosen not to publish the Holocaust deniers' ad because it failed on the criterion of clear falsity. This difference exposes the deeper problem in the Horowitz controversy.
While standards of illegality and libelousness are, at least in principle, objectively determinable in relation to codes of civil and criminal law, obscenity - especially if understood as extending beyond standards laid out by law - is much less so. And clear falsity is a particularly ambiguous category. What makes a view seem clearly false is a social consensus that it is false or unreasonable. And social consensus is to great extent a function of social position and power. This applies even to the domain of facts of natural science. Awareness of the social foundation of uncontroversial truth and falsity is what drives creationists' insistence on equal place for their antievolutionist views, corporate polluters' campaigns to discredit apparent evidence of global warming, and tobacco manufacturers' struggles to refute evidence of the health hazards caused by their products. They all are attempting to alter or preempt specific consensual social understandings of scientific fact and the limits of reasonable argument.
Contention over consensual social understandings is the essence of politics and political debate, and, yes, it is necessary to maintain an open field for all manner of views, no matter how unpopular or repugnant. However, it is normal and not unreasonable to impose minimal standards of honesty and credibility of argument on submissions - whether news reportage, other types of articles, opinion pieces or ads -- as a condition of publication. As a practical matter, the more controversial the submissions' claims are to editors and their perceptions of consensual understandings, the more scrutiny will be given to the coherence and plausibility of the arguments supporting them. Newspapers, journals and magazines typically subject submissions to fact-checking, but the aggressiveness with which they do so varies with editors' predispositions to accept claims as reasonable and their presumptions about the credibility of those making the claims.
As what may seem to be an extreme illustration, I awoke one morning in 1974 - on the same day, no less, as coverage of the fiery Los Angeles shootout that ended the bizarre group's existence -- to find myself smeared, along with a handful of equally innocent others (all of us labeled as suspected "hardcore terrorists on the run"), on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution as a shadowy, possible link to the Symbionese Liberation Army that had kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. Although I was a full-time graduate student, registered voter and property owner in the city, and listed in the phone book, no reporter ever attempted to contact me or anyone who might have known me; the story was written entirely from unchecked statements by local police, who also never contacted me, and fancifully inaccurate COINTELPRO era FBI files. As my graduate department chair noted, this was consistent with the Atlanta media's long-standing convention of covering the black community from the police blotter.
This takes us back to the comparison of Horowitz and Holocaust deniers. Someone I was talking with recently disputed equation of the two on the basis of the clear falsity criterion. He objected that Horowitz made no such definitively refutable claim as the allegation that Nazis did not kill millions of people. However, only the crudest deniers make such a gross, and easily disproven, claim. More clever proponents acknowledge the fact of mass deaths at the Nazis’ hands but deny that the death tolls resulted from systematic extermination; they argue against the existence of death camps, contending that the deaths resulted from poor conditions in work camps. This argument is sophistry, of course. Its objective is to shift the debate about the Holocaust's existence to the murkier terrain of motives and intentions - yet another Reagan vintage stratagem, as in the U. S. Supreme Court's requirement of proof of intent to discriminate in civil rights cases.
This person also rejected the view that Horowitz's ad fails on the clear falsity criterion because it maintains in effect that slavery was good for the black slaves and their descendants. Here's what Horowitz alleges: "If slave labor has created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP [gross national product] of black Americans makes the African-American community the tenth most prosperous 'nation' in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped". Under the heading "What About The Debt Blacks Owe to America?" he asserts that blacks in America "enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world and the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere." He asks, "Where is the acknowledgment of black America and its leaders for those gifts?" For anyone familiar with the history of racist argument in the United States, these claims fit all too neatly within a nearly two centuries-old line that slavery rescued black people from a hopeless African savagery and was therefore a benefit for the enslaved. Horowitz is clever enough not to make the claim explicitly, relying on logical structure and familiar trope to make his point. In the context of that history, though, his claim exactly parallels the moves of the cleverer Holocaust deniers.
He claims that the existence of a black middle class "suggests that present economic adversity is the result of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination" or slavery. This contention is faulty on its face in logical terms; the possibilities he poses are by no means the only ones available. Furthermore, no reputable scholars of American inequality and social stratification - including those who do not seek to explain black disadvantage primarily in terms of racial discrimination --would accept his simple-minded polarity, and there is an abundant historical and social scientific literature refuting it. His contention that blacks should show gratitude to "white Englishmen and Americans" for ending the slavery they created expresses similarly perverse logic. It is tantamount, to paraphrase Malcolm X, to arguing that an assailant should be commended for ceasing an assault. He rests his preposterous view on an observation that slavery had existed for a millennium all over the world and that "white Englishmen and Americans" initiated the first movement for its abolition. This formulation denies the distinctive character of the slave labor and social system that developed principally in the New World during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it seriously misreads the history of abolition - both again in ways that no respectable scholars would accept. Like Holocaust deniers, Horowitz resorts to a willful distortion of and a highly deceptive selection from the body of responsible scholarship (like that of David Brion Davis) on the history of slave abolition. The effort by legitimate scholars to determine the complex array of factors that led to the rise of abolition is warped by Horowitz into the simplistic and erroneous claim that whites were responsible for abolition.
In his ad Horowitz not only misrepresents the admittedly misguided case for reparations; he doesn't represent it at all. He doesn't even set up a straw opponent. He only lashes out in a way calculated solely to inflame resentment among nonblacks. It is unfortunate that the controversy surrounding Horowitz's ad has focused so much on the question of "sensitivity". This, I believe, plays into his and other rightists’ hands by trivializing what is objectionable about it. The ad is propelled by sophistries and clear falsehoods, and it depends upon a willingness to include obvious and unalloyed racial demagogy within the range of views permissible in the arena of acceptable public debate. The language of sensitivity deflects attention from what is most troubling about Horowitz's screed and its reception by those papers that published it. The problem is not that editors were insensitive to feelings or beliefs common among blacks. It is that these editors apparently found his outrageous allegations plausible enough not to scrutinize closely their basis in fact and logic.
This is what lies beneath public nattering about "political correctness" or Horowitz's concoction, "racial McCarthyism". Racists and other rightists have been waging a more than thirty-year effort to shift the consensual social understanding of reasonable or plausible claims about racial and other forms of inequality. Complaints about a tyrannical "political correctness" boil down to objections that explicitly racist - or sexist or homophobic or nativist - claims justifying inequality are now likely to fall outside the consensual social understanding of reasonableness or accuracy. (And where were all the cries of politically correct censorship when the New York Times refused to run anti-NAFTA ads during the weeks before the crucial congressional vote or when it routinely rejects pro-Palestinian ads?)
Rightist shills like Charles Murray and the born-again David Horowitz have made careers on attempting to shift the boundaries of that consensus. They pursue this goal partly by exploiting the principled civil libertarian commitments of some, the political squeamishness or naïvete of others and the racial bad faith of still others to shout and bully their way into public respectability. This is how Murray and his ilk helped to shift the terms of debate around social welfare policy during the 1980s so thoroughly that in 1996 they achieved their goal of eliminating federal aid entitlements for poor people. Murray subsequently attempted the same kind of mission on behalf of more directly racial justifications for inequality in his 1995 tract of racist pseudoscience, The Bell Curve.
That's why I cannot oppose the actions, even the more militant ones, taken by those students who have protested publication of the ad, though confiscating the papers is a debatable tactic.. Yes, Horowitz is a base hustler for whom this ad is partly a commercial opportunity. Just as David Duke and Louis Farrakhan have used controversies stimulated by their ugly demagogy to generate income, Horowitz uses this ad to feed his revenue machine. (His website is only a "newspaper" whose major focus is covering the controversies that Horowitz himself generates and a "bookstore" that is a series of links to amazon.com to sell his books; his bogus "Center for the Study of Popular Culture" is apparently nothing more than a phone number and mail drop.) He is also a reactionary militant who intends this ad as a provocation. And we should keep in mind the context that black students on all these campuses are small minorities who are living through a national assault on programs intended to promote racial justice, an assault that has ramifications at their own institutions.
As I've argued, the reparations frame is wrong-headed in part because it so easily falls into the trap of this sort of provocation. Once the provocation is made, though, it must be met head-on, but not on its own terms. Treating his trash as worthy of reasoned debate gives it precisely the legitimacy he seeks in the right's Camel's-nose-under-the-tent strategy. It is appropriate and correct to demand that the tent be sealed to keep its nose out. Like Horowitz, I'm a product of the movements of the 1960s. I know all too well that none of the programmatic or attitudinal victories won by those movements would have been possible without drawing lines in the dirt and demanding the nonnegotiable, undebatable rejection of evil.
Adolph Reed, Jr.