Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Free Page A

in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so well. In the battle over California's Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) to outlaw racial preferences, for example, the left's opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy, whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, though he himself is black, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. (The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, even paying his expenses for the trip.)
    During the campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated the Initiative with its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which Mrican-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights should the dreaded legislation pass. To make their case, the anti-CCRI groups sponsored television spots that actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses. A fearful voice-over by actress Candace Bergen explicitly linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that, if CCRI's proponents succeeded, women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts.
    In the years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative, not a single one of the left's dire predictions has been realized. Women have not lost their rights and segregation has not returned. Even the enrollment of blacks in California's system of higher education has not significantly dropped, ** although demagogues of the left — including the president of the United Stateshave used a shortfall in admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to lead the public to believe that an overall decline has taken place. One year after the Initiative passed, enrollment had significantly fallen only at six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consists of more than seventy-four programs. Yet there has been no apology (or acknowledgment of these facts) from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other leftist groups responsible for the anti-Civil Rights Initiative campaign and for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.
    When an earlier version of a chapter in this book, "Why Democrats Need Blacks," was published in Salon magazine, the editors printed several long responses from black readers, including the award-winning Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed. Reed suggested that I did not really care what happens to blacks and that I am insensitive to injustice when it is inflicted on blacks-a not-so-subtle imputation of racism. In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in the article itself. The critics' response was to dismiss these conservatives as "inauthentically black," "Sambos," "Neo-Cons," and "black comedians." From the point of view of leftists, the only good black is one who parrots their party line.
    There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, in closing this introduction, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed in the pages of Salon :
I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for everyone in this country, including my extended black family. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals