HOW

PROGRESSIVES
USE RACE AS A
WEAPON
AGAINST OUR
COUNTRY
By David Horowitz
 Copyright 2018
David Horowitz Freedom Center
PO BOX 55089
Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964
Elizabeth@horowitzfreedomcenter.org

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How Progressives Use Race as a Weapon
Against Our Country
By David Horowitz

Civilizations die when they cease to believe in

themselves, when they lose the will to defend themselves,
and thus the will to survive. The empowering inspiration that
created American civilization is inscribed in the certificate of
its birth. The Declaration of Independence is a proclamation of
the equality of individuals, whatever their race, creed or origin,
and it asserts their inalienable right to liberty. This statement of
national principles is unprecedented in the five thousand years
of previous human history.

Most important is the American Founding’s view of its

citizens as individuals, rather than defined by memberships in
racial, ethnic, and gender groups. For this reason, the words
“white,” “black” “male” “female” “slave” do not appear in the
Constitution. The guarantee of individual rights to equality and
liberty is the inspiration that created the culture and country
that led the world in abolishing slavery, made Americans the
decisive force for freedom in three global wars, and established
a society that today is rivalled by no other in its inclusiveness,
tolerance and freedom. It is America’s founding principles
and their practice that has caused this nation to be hailed as
a “beacon of freedom” for the entire world, and that led its
greatest president to call it, “the last best hope of mankind.”

One might expect the election of America’s first black

1
president to mark a culminating point in this remarkable,
unique legacy - particularly since white Americans made up
56% of his winning coalition.1 In evaluating this statistic, bear
in mind that there are no elected white presidents of majority
black countries, or Asian countries. But the presidency of
Barack Obama did not lead to a celebration of America’s
achievement in creating a successful multi-ethnic and multi-
racial society. It led to greater racial and ethnic tensions. That
is because Obama was a lifelong political leftist who openly
rejected this view of American exceptionalism, equating it with
“British exceptionalism” and “Greek exceptionalism,” in other
words not exceptional all.2 Obama’s presidency did not lead to
a celebration of America’s achievement in creating a successful
multi-ethnic and multi-racial society because Obama is the
leader of a political movement that is at war with America and
its achievement.

On the eve of his election Obama predicted that, “we

are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United
States of America,” as though America was so deeply flawed
as to require a “fundamental” transformation. In a subsequent
statement, near the end of his second term, Obama explained
why. In his view not only was America not a beacon of equality and
freedom, but was instead a racist society in practice and also by
nature. “The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost
every institution of our lives … casts a long shadow, and that’s
still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.”3

This is the ideological conviction of progressives and the

1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2012/11/08/president-obama-
and-the-white-vote-no-problem/?utm_term=.d481f73c767d
2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o_YW4Oaehg
3
https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/obama-racism-is-in-american-dna/
2
political left. With the election of Donald Trump it has reached
unprecedented levels of self-condemnation. America it is said,
is a “white supremacist society” – a claim that would have
been dismissed out of hand as an absurdity during the previous
administration when the chief law enforcement officers of the
land, the head of the president’s National Security Council
and the president himself were black. Today, however, the
Democratic Party is home to constituencies and organizations
promoting this defamation, however ludicrous and disregardful
of the reality. In their official party platform, Democrats speak
of “systemic” and “institutional racism,” even though systemic
and institutional racism were explicitly outlawed over half a
century ago in the Civil Rights Acts.4 In other words, to believe
the Democratic Party platform one has to believe that the
historic Civil Rights movement, which led to the Civil Rights
Acts was an abject failure and achieved nothing.

Such extreme condemnations originate, and are

intended, as attacks on America itself – on the American idea
and its achievements. This is the meaning of the nationwide
protests of the national anthem, and the attempt by the California
NAACP to delegitimize and replace it as “racist,” and by the
numerous attempts to destroy monuments to Thomas Jefferson
and other American Founders, as though their legacy was not
one of freedom but oppression.

The curricula of American schools originally designed

to educate the citizens of a democracy are increasingly devoted
to the doctrine that whites are racists, that America oppresses
“people of color,” and that “whiteness” is a socio-political
“construct” which must be abolished.5 As one Texas State
4
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/papers_pdf/117717.pdf
5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies
3
college student, echoing Obama, wrote in his school paper,
“White DNA is an abomination.”6 Nor is this a view confined to
students and their teachers, but rather one with broad currency
among the nation’s intellectual elites. According to the winner
of the 2016 National Book Award, Ta-Nehisi Coates, “white
America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans
who believe they are white, was built on looting and violence.”7
In a 2017 book on Obama’s presidency, Coates declared: “white
supremacy [is] so foundational to this country that it [will] not
be defeated in my lifetime, my child’s lifetime, or perhaps
ever.”8

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the nation’s most celebrated and

awarded black author. According to George Packer, another
National Book Award winner, “Coates has become the most
influential writer in America today; [his] latest  Atlantic essay
is already being taught in college courses.” When Coates was
appointed an editor of the Atlantic Monthly one of America’s
oldest liberal journals, he reacted this this way: “I knew by
then that I was not writing and reporting from some corner
of America society, but from the very heart of it, from the
plunder that was essential to it, and the culture that animated it.
[emphasis added]”9 In other words, America is not only a racist
enterprise; it is a criminal one.

Coates’ centrality as a public intellectual, along with

the universal respect he has garnered from the political left,
are reasons why his anti-white racism and virulent hatred

6
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/11/29/texas-state-university-student-newspa-
per-on-white-people-your-dna-is-an-abomination/
7
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, 2016 p.5
8
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years In Power, p. 159 Kindle edition
9
We Were Eight Years In Power, p. 113
4
for America are noteworthy, or why anyone should pay any
attention to him at all. The subject of the Coates essay Packer
refers to as already a college assignment is Donald Trump -
Obama’s successor - whom Coates employs as a foil to attack
America and everything it stands for: “It is insufficient to state
the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would
not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate
exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office
through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom
which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a
tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder
cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others
from it.”10

Coates’ repellent dismissal of a progress that includes

what is arguably the greatest transformation of race relations
ever, is also the theme of a contemporary campaign called
the “Equal Justice Initiative.” This campaign intends to raise
awareness of lynchings, a practice that was put an end to at
least sixty years ago. It is more particularly a campaign to
raise awareness of the lynchings of African Americans, and
only African Americans, although about a third of lynching
victims were white. The “Equal Justice Initiative” is funded
and promoted by one of America’s – and indeed the world’s -
largest corporations, Google. Its outrageous campaign theme is,
“Slavery did not end; it evolved.”

America is under attack by forces both within and

without, religious and secular, which seek to delegitimize and
destroy it. A spear point of the attacks are these very claims
- that America is racist, “white supremacist,” and, in some
perverse sense, actually a slave society. MSNBC anchor and
10
Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, p. 341 Kindle edition

5
former Nation editor Chris Hayes has actually written a recent
book, A Colony in A Nation (the “colony” is black, the “nation”
is white) advancing this preposterous thesis. By undermining
America’s self-image and esteem, these enemies of America
hope to sap its will to defend itself.

Just before the attacks of 9/11 the left launched

a movement for reparations for slavery, even though the
institution was abolished well over a century ago. “The Case
for Reparations” is the title of a 2014 Atlantic article which
brought Ta-Nehisi Coates into national prominence. In fact,
reparations is an idea that was in the 1960s rejected by all three
major civil rights organizations, who viewed it as divisive and
misguided, since the slavery power had been defeated by the
very government the activists were holding responsible. The
manifesto of the reparations movement was called The Debt:
What America Owes to Blacks, and was written by Randall
Robinson, who on completion of the book, repudiated his
American citizenship and left the country for Jamaica.

The Debt begins with the following declaration: “This

book is about the great still-unfolding massive crime of official
and unofficial America against Africa, African slaves, and their
descendants in America.”11 It goes on to claim, “The enslavement
of blacks in America lasted 246 years. It was followed by a
century of legal racial segregation and discrimination. The two
periods, taken together, constitute the longest running crime
against humanity in the world over the last 500 years. . . .”19 No
wonder, according to prominent professor, television personality
and leftwing ideologue, Michael Eric Dyson, “[Americans]

11
Robinson, The Debt, op. cit. p. 8. Emphasis added.

6
can’t talk about slavery because it indicts the American soul.”12

If true, Robinson’s statements would make American

slavery a more heinous crime than the Nazi atrocities, the
genocides of the Indians, or the thousand years of black slavery
in Africa, which took place before a white man ever set foot on
that continent. But they are false. Slavery existed in all societies
for 3,000 years before anyone declared the institution immoral.
That was a contribution of white Christian males in England led
by Wilberforce, and even more importantly by Thomas Jefferson
and the American founders. The actual enslavement of black
Africans was carried out by black Africans, who sold them to
Muslim Arabs, and only later to white Europeans in the Atlantic
slave trade – a trade that began in 1526 and lasted for 300 years.
In other words, Americans generally did not “enslave” black
Africans but bought African slaves from their black African
masters. They then transported them in the Middle Passage to
the continental United States.

In a more honest time, an African American writer and

American patriot, Zora Neale Hurston, saw the historical reality
with great clarity: “The white people held my people in slavery
here in America. They bought us, it is true, and exploited us.
But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was [that] my
people had sold me. . . . My own people had exterminated whole
nations and torn families apart for profit before the strangers got
their chance at a cut. It was a sobering thought. It impressed
upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.”13
12
Kevin Grant, “Socialist Professor Addresses Student Audience on Reparations
and Race Relations,” Arizona State Press, April 24, 2001. Dyson, a leading African
American intellectual, is a professor at DePaul University and was flown in at Uni-
versity expense to provide a rebuttal to a case against reparations I had been invited
by students to present.
13
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks On A Road, 1997
7
 America – the United States of America – did not sustain
400 years of slavery as was long claimed by her attackers, or
246 years of slavery, as Robinson claimed. It was only 78 years
from the founding of America in 1787 with the signing of the
Constitution, to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union
victory abolished the hateful institution. Thus, historically
speaking – accurately speaking – black Africa enslaved blacks,
and majority white America liberated blacks.

Every African American alive today owes his or her

freedom to Thomas Jefferson and the American founders and
the 350,000 mainly white but also black Union soldiers who
gave their lives to end this evil. That is a heritage that black
Americans share with white Americans, along with the entire
multi-racial mosaic that makes up America today. Professor
Dyson’s malice towards white Americans notwithstanding, of
course they can talk about slavery, and with pride in their role
in ending it.

In their attack on America, leftists don’t rest with their

misrepresentation of the history of slavery. They seek to indict
the very Founding that liberated black slaves by denigrating it
as a “white supremacist” collusion with slave owners through
the so-called “three-fifths compromise.” According to the left,
the Founders were racists who regarded a black person as only
three-fifths of a human being. This is just a display of historical
ignorance. The issue before the Constitutional Convention was
whether to count slaves – not blacks - as equivalent to free
individuals for the purpose of congressional representation, in
other words political power. It was the anti-slavery forces at
the insisted that since slaves were not free and could not vote,
they should only be equivalent to three-fifths of a free person

8
for this purpose.14 They did so to diminish the power of the
slave-holding south. The Constitution, as already noted, doesn’t
use the words “black,” “white,” “slave,” “male” or “female”
precisely because its creators were dedicated to creating a
society – the society we enjoy today – where the law of the land
holds that everyone regardless of race, gender or origin is to be
treated equally.

Why three-fifths then? Why not zero? Why compromise

with the slave south at all? The answer should be obvious.
America’s enemy at the time was the greatest empire in the
world at the time. In War of 1812, the British managed to burn
the White House. If the anti-slavery northerners had declared
war on the slaveholding south (which is what not compromising
would have meant) the empire would have formed an alliance
with the south and crushed them, preserving the slave system.
Even decades later, when America was much stronger, the
outcome of the war between the states was far from certain.

The anti-Americans project this destructive revision

of the historical record into the present by distorting its reality
through an ideological prism that is collectivist and racist – the
very antithesis of this nation’s founding vision. Progressive
ideology is generally referred to as “identity politics,” but is
more accurately described as “cultural Marxism.” Cultural
Marxists have taken the Marxist model of warring classes and
transformed it into a model of oppression by race, gender, and
sexual orientation. The reduction of individuals into group
objects, creates a new indictment: “people of color,” women,
and non-heterosexual groups are said to be “marginalized”
and (therefore?) “oppressed” by white supremacist males –
America’s ruling caste.
14
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/three-fifths-clause-united-states-constitution-1787
9
 The facts offered by the left as evidence of “racism”
and “oppression” are not actually evidences of racism and
oppression. Instead they are statistical disparities between group
categories, as the left defines them. Consider these statements
in the 2016 Democratic Party Platform: “It is unacceptable
that the median wealth for African Americans and Latino
Americans is roughly one-tenth that of white Americans. These
disparities are also stark for American Indians and certain Asian
American subgroups, and may become even more significant
when considering other characteristics such as age, disability
status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

This is not just a regret that there are such disparities

accompanied by a wish that something could be done about them.
It is part of an indictment of America as a society characterized
by “systemic racism” and “institutional racism” – and of course
“sexism” and other isms that populate leftist indictments. The
Democratic platform vows “a societal transformation” that
will “end institutional and systemic racism in our society.”
To establish some connection to the real world, the platform
claims that, “The racial wealth and income gaps are the result of
policies that discriminate against people of color and constrain
their ability to earn income and build assets to the same extent
as other Americans.”

But are they? If such policies existed they would be

illegal under the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, not to
mention the 14th Amendment to the Bill of Rights. If they
existed one can imagine the armada of suits that would fill
the courts over which a goodly number of Obama appointees
preside. But this is not happening and that is because the
disparities are realistically explained by individual details,
for example the presence (or lack) of two-parent families, the

10
degree of education or lack of education, or whether (in the case
of so-called Latino Americans), they are English speakers, and
here legally, so able to get well-paying jobs. More generally,
wealth and income are determined in large part by what cultural
attitudes guide the choices that families and individuals make.
Otherwise Japanese Americans, who are “people of color,”
would not be among America’s richest economic groups.

The very categories are suspect – and racist. Is there a

category, “Latino Americans” that is useful for these purposes?
Cuban Americans are not really comparable to Puerto Rican
Americans for example in education, economic status and
cultural attitudes. There is a very large African American middle
class in America – encompassing between 40% and 50% of
the African American population. In 2014, 21% of African
Americans earned more than $75,000 per year.15 If American
society could really be categorized as systemically racist, how
did these African Americans succeed while others didn’t? It
is only by factoring out the decisions that individuals make,
since erasing individuals is the normal practice of collectivists,
that leftists can make the ludicrous claims that make up their
indictment of a society, which has done more than any other in
the world with such large minority populations to provide them
the opportunity to succeed.

The ideological category that underpins the message of

the anti-American collectivists is “people of color,” a term they
use to define the marginalized and oppressed, which is not even
grammatical English. The whole world is people of color – the
oppressed – except for white people, the designated oppressors.
According to leftists, only white people can be racists, because

15
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/much-is-required_
us_5908a07ee4b0bb2d0871ff81#_ftn1
11
only white people have power. This is an absurdity, but that
doesn’t prevent it from being a staple of the anti-America/anti-
white cause.

But does “people of color” even define a coherent

group with a common social identity that can serve as a marker
separating oppressor from oppressed? Tell that to the Rwandans,
who are all people of color but are divided as Rwandan Hutus
who carried out a genocide against the Rawandan Tutsis, or the
Pakistanis and Indians who share a skin color but are at war
against each other, or the ISIS slaughterers of Egyptian Coptics
and Islamic Sufis, Arabs all. To the left these are all “people
of color,” therefore oppressed. This bastardized term’s sole
purpose is to divide the world into oppressors and oppressed:
white people and non-whites, so that white people can be
demeaned and attacked.

This racist view is behind every assault by the left against

America today. Take the central claim of the most powerful racial
movement on the left, Black Lives Matter. This organization
was founded by three self-styled Maoists, and has adopted as
its icon a Marxist revolutionary and convicted cop killer, Assata
Shakur, who is a protected ward of the Communist dictatorship
in Cuba.16 Not surprisingly, Black Lives Matter condemns
America as a “corrupt democracy” and “white supremacist
system,... built on Indigenous genocide and chattel slavery,”
and claims that it “continues to thrive on the brutal exploitation
of people of color”; that blacks are routinely  “dehumanized”
and rendered “powerless at the hands of the state, … deprived
of [their] basic human rights and dignity,” and targeted for

16
http://www.aim.org/special-report/reds-exploiting-blacks-the-roots-of-black-
lives-matter/
12
“extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.”17

Black Lives Matter has been the chief organizer of riots

in Ferguson, Baltimore, Dallas and other cities, inciting violence
against police with the claim that there is a “war on blacks”
and that the law enforcement agencies - headed in each of the
cities named by African American chiefs of police - murder
unarmed blacks as a matter of course. This lie has led directly to
dramatic increases in the number of homicides – mainly black
on black homicides in 56 American cities, including Ferguson
and Baltimore, where the murder rates increased by 47% and
60% respectively in the immediate wake of riots organized by
Black Lives Matter.18

The actual facts about police and the black community

are quite different. “According to the Centers for Disease
Control,” writes black attorney and media commentator Larry
Elder, “police shootings against blacks have declined almost 75
percent since 1968. Of the 963 people shot and killed by police
in 2016, 233 were black, and 466 were white. Last year, a grand
total of 17 unarmed blacks were killed by the police, according
to The Washington Post. Contrast this with the approximately
6,000 to 7,000 blacks killed annually, almost all — as many as
90 percent — by other blacks.”19

Racist and violent, Black Lives Matter is an organization

officially embraced by the Democratic Party, and bankrolled
with tens of millions of dollars from Democratic Party donors
like George Soros. In the direct wake of the killing of five police

17
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7876
18
Ibid.
19
http://www.larryelder.com/column/no-colin-kaepernick-no-muhammad-ali/;
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-danger-of-the-black-lives-matter-movement/2/
13
officers by a black racist in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter
anti-police “protest,” President Obama invited its leaders to the
White House, and endorsed its mission: “I think the reason that
the organizers used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not
because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather,
what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem
that’s happening in the African-American community that’s not
happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue
that we’ve got to address.”

A resolution endorsing Black Lives Matter, adopted by

the Democratic National Committee, was more explicit citing the
alleged existence of “many…lost in the unacceptable epidemic
of extrajudicial killings of unarmed black men, women, and
children at the hands of police” (a reference evidently to the
17 cases actually recorded), attributing this “nightmare” to “the
vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow and White Supremacy.”

Therefore be it resolved that the DNC joins with

Americans across the country in affirming “Black lives
matter … efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow
… Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of
unarmed African American men, women and children
...

It is left to Ta-Nehisi Coates – also a guest of the White

House – to reveal the racist mentality behind this adoption
by the political left of a movement so hostile to the American
idea. A pivotal event in Coates’ National Book Award winner,
Between the World and Me, is the killing of his friend, Prince
Jones, by a policeman. According to the officer, Jones tried to
run him over with his car while the officer was arresting him for

14
drugs. A classic case of what Black Lives Matter is concerned
about? Not quite: “Here is what I knew at the outset,” writes
Coates. “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The
politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many
of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed
unconcerned. How could this be?”20

Coates answers his own question first by dismissing

black crime all together and attributing it to the evil whites – to
white supremacists who pull the strings behind the scenes and
manipulate apparently passive blacks into committing criminal
acts. According to Coates, “‘Black-on-black crime’ is jargon,
violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered
the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects,
who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this
should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled
into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history,
so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a
sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days,
we must invariably return…. The killing fields of Chicago, of
Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers
[i.e., white believers in the American Dream], but their weight,
their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them.”21

Having blamed whites for every suffering, every

deficiency in the black community, and even criminal act by
blacks, Coates is ready to answer the question of how it is
possible that a black cop killed his criminal friend: “The Dream
of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered
Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with

20
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, p. 83. Kindle Edition.
21
Coates, op. cit. pp. 110-111
15
frightening regularity.”22 Whites killed his friend. Whites are
responsible for every black on black crime. d It would be hard to
imagine a more racist view. It would be hard to imagine ravings
by an actual white supremacist more demented than this. Yet,
Coates is an intellectual icon of the progressive left, the toast of
the President and the cultural elite.

This is the nature of the assault on America. It is racist

and collectivist, eliminating individuals in favor of groups,
laying guilt on some because of their membership in groups
and removing guilt from others for the same reason. This is
the totalitarian ideology savaged by George Orwell in 1984,
which led to the murders of a hundred million souls in the last
century. Yet despite this historical catastrophe so close to hand,
the same destructive ideas are already deeply embedded in the
nation’s culture and politics. America does not deserve this.
Over two centuries it has shaped itself into the most tolerant and
inclusive society of its kind in the world. Orlando Patterson,
a renowned African American liberal and Harvard sociologist
whose award-winning works specialize in the study of slavery
and race, has said of America, that “is the least racist white-
majority society in the world; has a better record of legal
protections of minorities than any other society, white or black;
offers more opportunities to greater numbers of black persons
than any other society, including those of Africa.”23 To believe
the opposite is not only to deny a reality. If enough Americans
are seduced into believing these noxious ideas, it will set the
stage for a nation’s suicide.

22
Ibid.
23
https://www.prageru.com/courses/race-relations/america-racist
16