First Amendment Used to Shield Racist Spiel

by Harry Amana
SeeingBlack.com Media Critic

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Disgruntled, old-school liberal-turned-rightist David Horowitz is making a mark for himself these days on the issues of free speech and censorship. And almost all of this is because of his stance against African Americans' quest for reparations from the U.S. government.

Take a look at Horowitz's "Frontpage" zine Web site at: http://frontpagemag.com/index.htm. This is where he keeps a chronology of sorts about his media-oriented quest for fame and honoraria. It's a list of headlines and teaser paragraphs of news stories from various sources about his exploits as a speaker, pundit, and general ahistorical racist.

There's also an update link to stories specifically about his anti-reparations ad, which either has appeared in university student papers, or has been refused by them. And, of course, there's a link to the ad itself: "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks — and Racist Too."

His general frame on reparations focuses on whites not being responsible for slavery, blacks' alleged complicity in the atrocity and blacks' alleged benefits from U.S. successes. No need here to go through a point-by-point refutation of his silly arguments, assumptions and misrepresentations. This has competently been done by a number of folks, including Earl Ofari Hutchinson through the Black Radical Conference listserv [see its archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/brc-news@lists.tao.ca/ ]

Suffice it to say that most talk about reparations — framed most recently by Randall Robinson's book The Debt: What American Owes To Blacks [http://www.thedebt.net ] — focuses on the responsibilities and obligations of the U.S. government to slave descendants.

It is also noted that with the exception of the 12-year period of Reconstruction (1865 - 1877) and a 13-year period between the 1965 Civil Rights Act and the 1978 Bakke decision on so-called "reverse discrimination" the U.S. government has never committed itself to balance the racial scales politically, socially and economically. And, of course, even during this combined 25-year period the commitment was never a total one. So reparations are still in order.

What's interesting with the recent Horowitz furor, however, is the way his confrontation with campus activists has been framed by Horowitz and, subsequently, by mainstream media. Seldom has the debate focused intensely on the issue of reparations, but rather on censorship and the First Amendment.

Mainstream media, after all, is not that much interested in reparations. If they were, then surely much more would have been made over the attempts by Congressman John Conyers since 1989 to get a bill to the house floor to form a committee simply to study the merits of reparations.

Internationally, folks in England, the Caribbean, and in Africa at the 1993 meeting of the Organization of African Unity have also expressed concerns about reparations [see: The Black Scholar, Summer 1998], with little or no publicity.

Then came David Horowitz. And suddenly the media are everywhere, but not always on point. It's time, now, for supporters of this issue to get media smart and make sure that the media talking points on First Amendment and censorship gets constantly re-framed to reparations.

Media, too, were historically complicit in the "peculiar institution," and they owe us.

-- April 9, 2001

Harry Amana is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Web site with more than 300 links to media and minorities is: http://www.unc.edu/~haman.

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