cover image Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes

Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes

David Horowitz. Spence Publishing Company, $24.95 (300pp) ISBN 978-1-890626-21-1

Once a prominent U.S. leftist, Horowitz garnered an even larger reputation upon the publication of Radical Son, his memoir documenting his transformation from a radical to a conservative. Now, as the editor of the intentionally provocative conservative journal Heterodoxy and a frequent columnist for Salon, Horowitz employs heat-seeking rhetoric that aims to be as inflammatory as possible. Taking on U.S. race relations and claiming that ""anti-white racism"" has become intrinsic to the black civil rights movement and ""common currency of the `progressive' intelligentsia,"" he launches an all-out attack that is almost comical in its single-mindedness. He documents Louis Farrakhan's controversial and contested statements attacking white European and American culture and politics; goes after Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, ""whose boundless suspicions of white Americans amount to a demonization as intense as Elijah Muhammad's""; and characterizes Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell as a ""black racist"" and a ""product of the Communist left."" He also explores how American universities have been destroyed by leftist ""McCarthyism"" and the ""political persecution of Newt Gingrich by liberal democrats."" But such provocation, presented in essays that seem hurriedly written and which lack footnotes (or any documentation of their more questionable facts), quickly devolves into a boring rant. (Nov.)