assault on America and its social contract. For obvious reasons, progressives largely concentrate on one race—American blacks, or “African-Americans” as they have come to be known through at least five permutations of linguistic political correctness since World War II: “coloreds,” “Negroes,” “blacks,” “persons of color” and—only then—“African-Americans.” The injustices of slavery and segregation and the historic sufferings of this community form an arguable basis for the progressive indictment, but only by systematically ignoring the historic gains—unprecedented and unparalleled—of this same community, which are the direct result of America’s tolerant and individual-centered social contract.
Progressive attacks on a chimerical “white supremacy” have been destructive for all citizens. The principal target of this racism, as already noted, is the idea of equal treatment for all individuals under the law, an idea that progressives seek to replace with group identities and group privileges based on race and gender. The idea of an equality of individuals without regard to race, ethnicity or gender, on the other hand, is the very idea that informs the American identity, and unites its diverse communities into a single nation.
There will always be racists and bigots. Only utopians will fail to understand this and seek to deploy the coercive powers of the state to make everyone believe as they do. By contrast, people connected to the realities of this world recognize that America is the most tolerant of societies. Americans’ cultural acceptance of racial, ethnic and gender minorities is virtually without parallel in human history. Interracial marriage, once the strongest racist taboo is now hardly noticed, whether among ordinary Americans or cultural celebrities; large American cities—Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta—are run by African American administrations and an African American has been twice elected to the White House. In their battles with “white supremacy,” progressives cling to a past that is already remote. They have become the true reactionaries of our time, and it is hardly surprising that they are its new racists as well.
2 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/26/3474838/why-civil-rights-groups-are-calling-for-the-ferguson-prosecutor-to-step-down/; http://www.cbsnews.com/news/background-of-prosecutor-in-ferguson-case-has-some-suspicious-of-bias/.
3 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf; http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf; http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43.
4 In 2013 there were 5,537 whites who were victims of homicide, compared to 6,261 blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_1_murder_victims_by_race_and_sex_2013.xls.
5 In 2013, 90% of black homicide victims were killed by other blacks. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls.
6 http://nypost.com/2014/09/08/nypd-is-as-diverse-as-new-york-city-itself/.
8 Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, 2008.
9 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/27/opinion/la-oe-goldberg-trayvonmartin-race-20120327. It is my own opinion that Zimmerman was indeed culpable, but that doesn’t make the actions of the lynch mob any less deplorable. See Part IV, chapter 12 in this volume, “Second Thoughts About Trayvon.”
This is the sixth volume of my writings called The Black Book of the American Left. It is also one of the most important, as its subject—race—goes to the heart of the most problematic aspect of America’s history and heritage, and is thus the focus of the progressive assault on America and the American social contract.
The first essay in this volume, “The Reds and the Blacks,” explains how this assault is shaped by the left’s melodrama of “oppression” and “social justice,” and is merely an extension of Marx’s discredited formulas of “class oppression.” Parts I & II of the text that follows address the falling-away of the civil rights movement from the mission and values championed by Martin Luther King. An introduction, “Memories in Memphis,” is the account of my visit to the “National Civil Rights Museum” housed in the motel where King was murdered. This visit provided a summary moment in my efforts to understand these historic events. “Memories in Memphis” first appeared as the opening chapter in Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. The original title of that book published in 1999 was “Hating White People Is a Politically Correct Idea.” This was an accurate description of the culture promoted by the new leaders of the civil rights movement, and—equally important—was the undeniable thrust of what was being taught in university curricula devoted to the malevolent race, gender and class “hierarchies,” which tenured leftists falsely claimed as structures of American society. The book was rejected by my publisher, Basic Books, whose editor told me, “We will never publish a book with that title.” His response indicated how completely the literary culture had succumbed to the new dispensation. I had to find an obscure publisher in Texas to get the book in print, and thus the upshot of trying to right an injustice was a dramatic diminishment of my career as an author.
Both essays, “The Red and the Black” and “Memories in Memphis,” were written in 1999, and the opening chapter of Part II, “The Race Card,” two years earlier. All the other chapters in this volume are organized in chronological order to form a running journal of the conflicts that accompanied the transformation of the civil rights cause. Until this transformation it had been a movement to integrate African-Americans into America’s multiethnic democracy. In less than a decade it had become a movement led by demagogues to refashion racial grievances into a general assault on white people and on the country they were said to “dominate.” In its core agendas, the new civil rights movement was an assault on the basic American social contract, and in particular the 14th Amendment’s commitment to equal rights under the law and thus to race-neutral standards and race-neutral governmental practices. Post-King civil rights became a movement to institutionalize racial preferences—the same kind of discriminatory practices that characterized segregation—and