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The Daily Tar Heel

The David Horowitz Controversy

Calls for Slave Reparations Characterize an `Assault on America'

Slavery was a crime against humanity, but it was ended by this same government over 136 years ago. There are no slaves or children of slaves alive today to receive such reparations.

On the other hand, blacks now living in America are the freest and most prosperous black people on earth.

The average descendant of African slaves in America earns between 20 and 50 times as much as the average black person in Africa, whose ancestors were not kidnapped and enslaved.

Why should a Vietnamese or Iraqi refugee, a Mexican migrant worker or Polish escapee from Communism pay reparations for an injustice committed more than a century ago? Why do African-American leaders want to separate African Americans from other Americans? Blacks came before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves?

For African Americans to pursue "reparations" claims against European, Asian and Hispanic Americans is a divisive and self-defeating idea.

A leader of the reparations movement, Randall Robinson, has written a manifesto, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," which is a model of what is wrong with the reparations cause. Anti-white sentiments and anti-American feelings leap out from every page of Robinson's book, including a chapter devoted to praising Fidel Castro, one of the world's longest surviving and most sadistic dictators. A rhapsody for Fidel Castro's Marxist police state would seem a bizarre irrelevance to a book on reparations for American blacks, except that for Robinson, Castro is a quintessential victim of American "oppression" and therefore a hero regardless of his crimes.

In Robinson's telling, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the proclamation that "all men are created equal," was merely "a slave owner, racist and, if one accepts that consent cannot be given if it cannot be denied, a rapist." (Robinson is referring to Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings.)

In Robinson's view, the fact that Americans still honor the author of the Declaration of Independence makes his personal sins into archetypes that define America itself: "Does not the continued unremarked American deification of Jefferson tell us all how profoundly contemptuous of black sensibilities American society persists in being? How deeply, stubbornly, poisonously racist our society to this day remains?"

Behind the reparations idea, finally, is an irrational fear and hatred of America. It is about holding America responsible for every negative facet of black existence, as though America were God, and God had failed.

Above all, it is about denying the gift America has given to all of its citizens, black as well as white, through the inspired genius of its founding.

This hatred for America blinds Robinson and those who think like him to a truth far more important than Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings, which may or may not have been unwilling (consent obviously can be given even if it cannot be denied).

For it is the words Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" (words that white Americans died for) that accomplished what no black African did: They set Randall Robinson's ancestors free.

For all America's faults, African Americans have an enormous stake in America and in the heritage individuals like Thomas Jefferson helped to create. To denigrate Jefferson is to denigrate themselves.

The heritage enshrined in the American founding and the institutions and ideas to which it gave rise is what is really under attack in the reparations movement. This assault on America, led by racial separatists and the political left, is not only an attack on white Americans, but on all Americans -- and on African Americans especially.

America's black citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive -- a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault.

The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African Americans also need the support of the American idea.

David Horowitz is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and editor of FrontPage Magazine.com.

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