>Why can a penniless Mexican, who is here illegally and unable even
>to speak English, find work in America's inner cities while blacks
>cannot?
Hispanic poverty rates have closed in on blacks.
And then he reveals his standards of refutation:
>The existence of millions of very successful, middle-class African Americans
>refutes the idea that the deprivations of the black underclass are,
>in fact, caused by any historical forces like slavery and
>segregation.
Apparently forgetting that the so called black middle class has a fraction of the wealth of whites, and is probably, among other things, much more likely to make a step down the ladder than whites of a similar income.
But wasn't a lot of the problem caused by Horowitz's claim that black freedom was a gift from Abe, the union soliders and the American union in general?
>And this raises another question that black leaders might do well to
>reflect on: What about the debt blacks owe to America-to white
>Americans-for liberating them from slavery... Where is the gratitude
>of black America and its leaders for those gifts?
It must have been maddening at say an existential level to see in big print in a school newspaper the claim that one's freedom and humanity are a gift from others.
A gift after all not only creates solidarity as the giver shares something with the receiver but also engenders a relationship of superiority because the one who receives the gift, and accepts it places himself in the debt of the one who has given it, thereby becoming indebted to the giver and to a certain extent becoming his 'dependant' at least for as long as the receiver has not 'given back' what was given.
So by using the language of the gift (in gross distortion of the actual historical events), Horowitz was putting some of his student supporters in a position to infer that the historical *gift* of their ancestors had never been properly reciprocated and that (if anything) blacks thus remained their dependants (morally speaking).
Horowitz interpreted this way (and I don't think it's an unreasonable interpretation of what Horowitz wrote even if he only meant to pull toes, though his agenda is clearly to blame yet again--what else--the single-mother-state welfare support apparatus for all that ails black America), the student protestors unsurprisingly trashed the newspaper.
It was of course the wrong thing to do, but how far is Horowitz's provocation from screaming fire in the proverbial crowded theater or libel or some other form of unprotected speech? Whose sensitivities to the meanings of a seemingly simple word as gift should count--the minority or the majority students?
Poor Lewis Gordon (a philosopher at Brown) who seems to have suffered quite a bit for suggesting that this ill advised protest action raises issues a bit more complicated than free speech vs. left fascism.
It's been really painful to follow.
Rakesh