NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 8, 2001

Leftist-turned-conservative author David Horowitz submitted the ad to newspapers at 21 colleges nationwide, according to Fox News. Only four agreed to run it, two of which immediately apologized. Nine papers refused to run it, and eight have not responded.

At the notoriously leftist University of Wisconsin, more than 150 students rallied against the Badger Herald on Tuesday for running the ad. Protesters stormed the paper's offices and denounced it as a "racist propaganda machine." Police had to tell the newspaper's staff to lock their doors to protect themselves from the wrath of the activists.

The ad, titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too," argues that blacks already have benefited from the labors of American slaves and that no one group is responsible for the practice, so no one group should have to pay for it.

The Wisconsin protesters demanded that the editor publish an ad blasting the Badger Herald for carrying the ad and a cartoon that lampooned the Ku Klux Klan.

"The Ku Klux Klan comic and the anti-reparations for slavery advertisement are prime examples of this newspaper's longstanding tradition of attacking the character of people of color and their history in this country," the protesters’ ad charged.

Not so, said Badger Herald editor Julie Bosman, who said the decision not to run the students' denouncement was based on a policy to refuse ads that are false and destructive to the organization. The paper's rival campus publication, the Daily Cardinal, ran the response.

The paper, Bosman said, has bent over backward to fight racism of any kind. "In the past month alone, we have run a series on diversity, featured a story on Black History Month and published an in-depth look at hate crimes in Madison," Bosman said. "We hope to continue to improve diversity relations on campus by offering a public forum for discourse."

But the protesters, who included in their number such groups as Palestine Right to a Return Committee and the Madison Student Coalition, demanded that Bosman resign, which she said she would not do.

"I am outraged. This isn’t free speech, this is hate speech," student activist Becky Wasserman said. "The Herald is abusing its power and creating a hostile environment on this campus."

Chris Barghout, representing Palestine Right to a Return Committee, expressed his discontent over what he feels is unfair Arab representation and encouraged those present at the rally to boycott the Herald advertisers.

A similar ad was published in the Daily Californian at the leftist-dominated University of California at Berkeley. Editor Daniel Hernandez said that running the ad allowed his paper to "become an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry" and apologized in a Page One editorial, according to Fox News.

In a letter to Hernandez, Horowitz said he was appalled at the paper’s "retreat from First Amendment principles, which should be the primary responsibility of a newspaper editor."

"You may disagree with these views but you have no right to censor them," Horowitz said. "Indeed, you have a positive responsibility not to censor them."

At Wisconsin, an editorial said: "At the Badger Herald, we only regret that the editors of the Daily Californian allowed themselves to give in to pressure in a manner that unfortunately violated their professional integrity and journalistic duty to protect speech with which they disagree.

"The knee-jerk response by The Californian is frighteningly indicative of the growing tendency of college newspapers to allow the opinions they publish to be stomped out for fear of being called names," the editorial said.

"We will not apologize for the publication of the advertisement, last month's controversial cartoon that belittled Ku Klux Klan members or any other controversial subject matter that would require us to compromise someone's First Amendment rights," it added.

"This newspaper continually strives to represent and respect all students’ viewpoints across a racial and ideological continuum. We understand and lament the fact that because of our commitment to free speech, we run the risk of occasionally offending readers. It is not our goal. But while we do not want to offend for the sake of offense, we refuse to censor unpopular ideas simply because someone may be offended," the editorial said.

At least one faculty member came to the paper’s support. Political science professor Donald Downs applauded the actions and decisions of the Herald.

"Students have a right to be upset, and they have the right to protest," he said. "But on the other side, the Herald has the right to publish a provocative article. I think the Herald has acquitted itself well."

Downs said he was impressed with the way the Herald has handled the conflict.

"I came away impressed with how seriously they took the issue," he said. "In the end, they decided to stand by their First Amendment convictions; that needs to be respected."

Text of the Horowitz ad:

Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?

The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th 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.

Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?

The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks?

The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African-American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slave-owners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled "What America Owes To Blacks." If this is not racism, what is?

No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites (and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective - and yet so critical - to the case?

The renewed sense of grievance – which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create – is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others – many less privileged than themselves?

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) – all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a "healing," what will?

Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one. If not for the anti-slavery attitudes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end. If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves. If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?

Blacks were here before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves? For the African-American community to isolate itself even further from America is to embark on a course whose implications are troubling. Yet the African-American community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists, nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans to be no part of America's social contract. African Americans should reject this temptation. For all America's faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in their country and its heritage. It is this heritage that is really under attack by the reparations movement. The reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left. It is an attack not only on white Americans, but on all Americans – especially African-Americans.

America's African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive – a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea. For it is this idea that led to the principles and institutions that have set African-Americans – and all of us – free.

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