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When a young man named Matthew Shepard was tortured and left to die on the
high plains of Wyoming simply because he was gay, the nation was outraged.
Earlier that year, an even more brutal attack was made on the person of
James Byrd Jr., a black man in Texas. Like Shepard's murder, Byrd's was
followed by outpourings of anger and grief from editorial pages and
political pulpits across the country.

Well and good enough. These responses are signs of health in the body
politic, the presence of a will to summon the better angels of our nature,
and to keep the savagery that lurks beneath the surface of any civilized
society safely at bay.

But by contrast, most of the nation never knew about another crime that took
place more than a year before the attack on James Byrd. Three white Michigan
youngsters hitched a train-ride as a teenage lark. When they got off the
train, they found themselves in the wrong urban neighborhood, surrounded by
a gang of armed black youths. One of the white teenagers, Michael Carter,
aged fourteen, was killed. Dustin Kaiser, aged fifteen, who was brutally
beaten and shot in the head, eventually recovered. The fourteen-year-old
girl (whose name has been withheld) was pistol-whipped and shot in the face
after being forced to perform oral sex on her attackers.

Though the six African-Americans responsible for the deed were arrested and
convicted, their attack was not prosecuted as a hate crime. More to the
point, most of the nation never knew that the crime had taken place. It was
not reported on page one of the national press, and there was no public
outrage expressed in the nation's editorials or in the halls of Congress.
Indeed, the few papers that reported the incident nationally did so on their
inside pages. Beyond the Great Lakes region, the stories often failed to
mention the races of the participants at all.

The crime took place on July 21, 1997, but among readers of this book, there
will not be one in a hundred who has even heard of it, because, as a hate
crime, it was in a perverse sense politically incorrect. To notice that
black people, as well as whites, can be responsible for vicious crimes of
hate, is improper. Hate crimes can only be committed by an oppressor caste;
therefore, what happened in Michigan was not a hate crime at all.

The fact is that it is not tolerable in America to hate blacks, but it is
okay in our politically correct culture to hate white people. Hollywood
understands this rule of progressive etiquette. A recent film, American
History X, features (for the umpteenth time) white neo-Nazis as the villains
of a homily about racial bigotry. The idea is that race hatred is synonymous
with "skin-heads" who are white. But a few years ago a sensational mass
murder trial in Miami spotlighted a black cult leader named Yahweh Ben
Yahweh, who required his cult members to kill whites and bring back their
ears as proof of the deed. One of his recruits was a star football player.
Seven people were murdered. But there was no Hollywood scramble for the
rights to the Yahweh cult story, as there would have been if the colors were
reversed or everyone had been white. As a result, few Americans are even
aware that these murders ever took place.

According to Department of Justice figures, 85 percent of the crimes of
interracial violence nationwide are committed by blacks against whites. How
many of these crimes are actually the result of black racism, and therefore
hate crimes? There is no real way to tell. There is, however, plenty of
anecdotal evidence that suggests the problem is not negligible. A recent
spate of brutal and random murders in a single Los Angeles district, for
example, was explained by one black inhabitant to a Los Angeles Times
reporter as retaliation for the "fact" that "whites had taken all the black
jobs."

Of course, the leftist academy has a ready answer for every question about
black racism: Only whites can be racist. The alleged reasoning behind this
assertion is that in our society only whites have power. This is the kind of
absurdity only an intellectual could think up. Forget the thousands of
public officials great and small, police chiefs, judges, administrators, and
members of congress, petty bureaucrats, corporate executives, and military
officers now drawn from the ranks of minorities, who wield social power in
various forms. At the most elemental level, a black with a gun - and there
are many - has the power of life and death over an unarmed law-abiding
citizen of any race or color.

The doctrine that only whites can be racist is, in fact, itself an
instigation to hate crimes. It is a doctrine that has already spread to the
secondary schools. The week after the Shepard killing, a Seattle father
called a national talk radio show on which I was a guest and told the
audience that his son's class in junior high school had been discussing the
hate crime concept because of the killing. During the discussion, the
teacher informed the class that only heterosexual whites could be racists.
The caller's son was unconvinced and brought up the savage beating of
Reginald Denny by a group of black gang members during the Los Angeles
riots. Surely, he suggested, this was a hate crime. But his teacher
corrected him. Even though Denny was pulled from his truck solely because he
was white, and then beaten within an inch of his life, he could not be the
victim of racial attitudes. The attempted murder of Reginald Denny was
actually an act of rebellion by people who were themselves the victims of a
white racist system, and the act they committed, therefore, could not be
considered a hate crime. This is the perspective of academics who teach
Whiteness Studies, of law professors who teach "critical race studies," and
no doubt of education professors busily transmitting the progressive
worldview to the next generation of junior high school instructors.

This is one reason why conservatives and libertarians have not joined the
left in promoting politically correct hate crime legislation that would
create a few more specially protected categories among us, as a kind of
human Endangered Species Act. Sorting Americans into distinctive racial,
ethnic, and gender groups, while designating whites and heterosexuals to be
their "oppressors," makes the latter into legitimate targets of hate
themselves. It thus becomes a way of exacerbating, rather than correcting,
social disorder.

It is time to go back to the wisdom of the Founders, who wrote a
constitution without reference to ethnic or gender groups. They did so in
order to render us equal before the nation's system of law. It was an
imperfectly realized ideal then, but that should be no excuse for abandoning
the ideal now. We need to end the vicious libels of political correctness
that have percolated their message of anti-white racism into our mainstream
culture. The vast majority of white people do not hate or oppress black
people. We need to single out those individuals who do for condemnation and
social ostracism. And we need to do the same to individuals who belong to
minorities and are haters themselves. Most of all, we need to go back to the
task of treating all Americans as individuals first, and as members of
groups only secondarily, if at all.


Excerpted from "Hating Whitey" by David Horowitz

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/dh/2000/david07-13-00.htm