David Horowitz's Archives: The Civil Rights Movement is Dead, RIP
Large metropolitan law enforcement agencies are now multi-ethnic and multi-gendered rather than white and male (the much-despised Los Angeles Police Department, for one prime example, is a 53 percent minority force). But in the rhetoric of ideologues like Sharpton and Jackson, “white supremacy” is always the demon that oppresses. Both men have even gone so far as to invent racist crimes by whites in order to sustain their lucrative hatreds. The Tawana Brawley incident, which would have terminally discredited any public figure other than Sharpton, is well known.
More recently, however, Jesse Jackson launched his own campaign of racial accusation, in an effort to transform the tragic suicide of 17-year-old Raynard Jackson in Mississippi into a white “hate crime.” Following the news of Raynard’s death in June, Jackson hopped on a plane to Mississippi, where he led 1,000 marchers chanting “stop the lynching now; stop killing our children,” and announced that “some man or men did this evil.” But when the investigation was concluded, it was clear that there had been no lynching. Instead, investigators discovered that Raynard’s white girlfriend had recently broken up with him, a plausible catalyst of his depression. But Jackson’s trip was a partial success — which coverage do you think the public remembers? The investigation or the Jackson’s allegations of a lynching?
Just two months before Jackson descended on Mississippi to accuse unnamed and unknown whites of lynching Raynard, 8-year-Kevin Shifflett was attacked by a black racist in Alexandria, Va., a suburb of the nation’s capital. The racist attacker was a 29-year-old parole violator, who had been previously incarcerated for a hammer attack on an unarmed white male, whom he did not know, and whom he referred to only as “whitey.” This time the attacker used a knife to slash Kevin’s throat. According to an eyewitness, the attacker shouted a racial epithet at the third-grader as he went in for the kill. Later, police found a note in the suspect’s hotel room: “Kill them raceess [sic] white kidd’s [sic] …”
For three months, the Virginia authorities concealed the racial identity of the suspect, as well as the fact that it might have been a racial attack. Eventually, the Washington Post did run several stories describing how police had withheld the facts and how they had found the note in the suspect’s apartment. But the rest of the media ignored the case.
If Kevin had been black and his attacker white, consider the national media coverage that would have attended this case. Moral edicts and blanket charges would have been hurled from the Capitol rotunda at an anguished national audience; a presidential press conference would have devoted itself to extravagant mea culpas denouncing the outrage. Instead, the media engaged in the same kind of racial profiling Jackson, Sharpton, the NAACP, the ACLU and other members of their vanguard have imposed on our moral discourse.
Any person not in the grips of a racial ideology can plainly see that racist profiling does not, in fact, characterize the institutions of the American polity. But it does define the agenda of the political left. After all, what is the “civil rights” movement, as articulated by the left, but race profiling? It is the left that demands racial boxes in the U.S. Census. It is the left that defends racial preferences in admissions policies and government job contracts. It is the left that requires political positions and judicial appointments to conform to a quota system based on skin color. It is the left that agitates for a race-conscious (as opposed to a color-blind) system of government and laws — a reversal of the entire meaning of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, which were fought specifically to outlaw such systems in the segregated South. And, ironically, it is the conservative opponents of race profiling, led by University of California regent Ward Connerly who have spearheaded the campaign to end legal discrimination by government bodies and restore a single standard based on an individual merit and achievement not ethnicity and skin color.
Racial profiling in the name of racial justice and equality has its own catalog of victims — both black and white. Every inner-city youngster killed by a black criminal who has been released from jail because of the “disproportionate minority confinement” requirement is a victim of Jackson and the progressive race profilers. Every law enforcement officer (black and white) unjustly targeted for suspicion is a victim of left-wing racism. And every false seed of doubt sown in minority communities about the fairness of law enforcement bears bitter fruit in increased power for the predators who terrorize those communities and fill the lives of their inhabitants with fear.
Before Americans give further credence to racial arsonists, they may want to ponder these facts and the awful implications of the silence that still engulfs the murder of an 8-year-old Virginian, who happened to be white, and who was brutally slaughtered because of the color of his skin.
