Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (12 page)

Is America a country ruled by racist powers, as leftists claim? Are African-Americans oppressed? If so, what would explain the desire of so many black Haitians to come to American shores? Why were so many Haitians ready, a few years ago before their immigration was blocked, to risk life and limb to make the illegal passage across shark-infested waters? Was it their desire to be oppressed? Were they longing to be dominated by a master race? In fact, it is obvious why the Haitians wanted to come. It is because those who do come have more rights, more opportunity, more cultural privilege, and more social power in America than they had in their native Haiti, which has been independent and run by black governments for more than two hundred years. Indeed, as a result of America's pluralistic democracy, Haitian-Americans are freer and more privileged in America than they would be in any black-run country in the world. The simple truth that the rhetoric of bad faith is designed to obscure is that blacks are not oppressed in America; nor is anyone else. Yet kitsch marxism prompts powerful voices in our culture to talk as though they were.

The very presumption of the civil rights left that racial preferences are necessary because America is ruled by a racist majority is both logically contradictory and empirically false. In its hour of victory in the 1960s, the civil rights movement was supported by the vast majority of the American people, including federal law enforcement and the American military, and by ninety-percent pluralities in both congressional parties. Since those victories, public opinion surveys have shown a dramatic increase in the goodwill of whites generally towards the African-American minority and an equally precipitous decline in attitudes that could reasonably be called bigoted. Large increases in the number of black officials elected by majority white constituencies, and huge income transfers authorized by a predominantly white electorate to black innercity communities establish beyond all reasonable doubt the solid empirical ground of these reports. Indeed, there would be no affirmative action preferences at all if not for the support of white officials elected by white constituencies.

The presumption that justifies racial preferences thus involves the left in an intellectual cul-de-sac. The white majority that allegedly cannot be fair in society at large is also a white majority in government itself. If whites must be compelled to be fair by government programs, how can they have designed and instituted those same programs? If the white majority is racist how can a government it dominates be counted on to redress racial grievances? The question is absurd because the premise is absurd. In fact it is America's white racial majority that ended slavery, outlawed discrimination, funded massive welfare programs for inner-city blacks, and created the very affirmative action policies that are allegedly necessary to force them to be fair.

Ironically, the move to subvert the state's neutrality — and with it the principle of "color-blindness" that lies at the heart of the rule of law — in the long run works against minorities and particularly African-Americans who have been seduced into promoting it. Groups that are numerically larger are bound to benefit more from political redistribution than numerically smaller ones. Over time, as the displacement of blacks by Latinos in urban centers like Los Angeles already makes clear, the racial spoils system will transform itself into a system that truly locks blacks out.

Civil rights is just one battlefield in the real war of the left, which is the war against America itself. The big guns of this war are directed from the centers of intellect on the high ground of the university culture, where tenured radicals have created an anti-American ideology and forced it on the nation's youth through the curriculum. The thrust of this curriculum was summarized in a text by a constitutional law professor at one of America's elite universities a few years ago. In
Progressive Constitutionalism
, Robin West argues that "the political history of the United States . . . is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life." This is the credo of the progressive left.

Of course, the political history of the United States is exactly the reverse. It is in large measure the history of a nation that led the world in eliminating slavery, in accommodating peoples it had previously defeated, in elevating nonwhites to a position of dignity and respect, in promoting opportunities and rights to women, and in fostering a healthy skepticism towards unworthy leaders and towards the dangers inherent in government itself.

This is a vision that is now called "conservative," but only because leftists currently shape the political language of liberalism and have been able to define the terms of the political debate. There is nothing "liberal" about people who deny the American narrative as a narrative of freedom, or who promote class, race, and gender war in the name of social progress. But they have created a situation in which "conservative" describes those who cherish the constitutional and philosophical framework of American pluralism, and guard it against the advocates of a political bad faith.

A
BOOK ARRIVED THIS MONTH that chilled my marrow. The author's face on the dust jacket was different than I remembered. Its hair was cropped in a severe feminist do, its skin pulled tight from an apparent lift, its eyes artificially lit to give off a benign sparkle. But underneath I could still see the menace I knew so well — an image from the darkest period in my life.

I first met her in June 1974, in a dorm room at Mills College, an elite private school for women in Oakland. The meeting had been arranged by Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party and icon of the New Left. For almost a year before that I had been working with Newton, developing a school complex in the East Oakland ghetto. I had named it the Oakland Community Learning Center and was the head of its "Planning Committee."

The unusual venue of my first meeting with Elaine Brown was the result of the Panthers' odd disciplinary notions. They were actually Huey's notions because (as I came to understand later) the Party was absolutist and the leader's word was law. Huey had "sentenced" Elaine to Mills as a kind of exile and house arrest. "I sent her to Mills," he explained to me, "because she hates it there."

Elaine was a strikingly attractive woman, light-skinned like Huey, but with a more fluid verbal style that developed an edge when she was angry. I had been warned by my friends in the Party that she was also dangerous. A festering inner rage erupted constantly and without warning wherever she went. At such times, the edge in her voice would grow steel-hard and could slice through her target like a machete.

I will never forget standing next to Elaine, as I did months later in growing horror, as she threatened KQED-TV host Bill Schechner over the telephone. "I will
kill
you motherf——r," she promised him, if he went through with plans to interview the former Panther Chairman, Bobby Seale. Seale had gone into hiding after Huey expelled him from the Party that August. As I learned long afterwards, Seale had been whipped — literally — and then personally sodomized by Huey with such violence that he had to have his anus surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of the Panthers. A Party member told me later, "You have to understand, it had nothing to do with sex. It was about power." But in the Panther world, as I also came to learn, nothing was about anything except power.

That day at Mills, however, Elaine used her verbal facility as an instrument of seduction, softening me with stories of her rough youth in the North Philly ghetto and her double life at the Philadelphia conservatory of music. Her narrative dramatized the wounding personal dilemmas imposed by racial and class injustice, inevitably winning my sympathy and support.

Elaine had the two characteristics necessary for Panther leadership. She could move easily in the elegant outer world of the Party's wealthy liberal supporters, but she could also function in the violent world of the street gang, which was the Party's internal milieu. Elaine was being punished in her Mills exile because even by Huey's standards her temper was explosive and therefore a liability. Within three months of our meeting, however, his own out-of-control behavior had forced him to make her supreme.

The summer of 1974 was disastrous for Newton. Reports had appeared in the press placing him at the scene of a drive-by shooting at an "after hours" club. He was indicted for pistol-whipping a middle-aged black tailor named Preston Callins with a -357 magnum, for brawling with two police officers in an Oakland bar, and for murdering a seventeen-year-old prostitute named Kathleen Smith. When the day arrived for his arraignment in this last matter, Huey failed to appear. Assisted by the Panthers' Hollywood supporters, he had fled to Cuba.

With Huey gone, Elaine took the reins of the Party. I was already shaken by Huey's flight and by the dark ambiguities that preceded it. As a "politically conscious" radical, however, I understood the racist character of the media and the repressive forces that wanted to see the Panthers destroyed. I did not believe, therefore, all the charges against Huey. Although disturbed by them, I was unable to draw the obvious conclusion and leave.

My involvement with the Black Panther Party had begun in early 1973. I had gone to Los Angeles with Peter Collier to raise money for
Ramparts
, the flagship magazine of the New Left, which he and I co-edited. One of our marks was Bert Schneider, the producer of
Easy Rider
, the breakthrough film of the Sixties which had brought the counter-cultural rebellion into the American mainstream. Schneider gave
Ramparts
five thousand dollars, and then turned around and asked us to meet his friend Huey Newton.

At the time, Newton was engaged in a life-and-death feud with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver had fled to Algiers after a shoot-out with Bay Area police. (Eldridge later admitted that he ambushed them.) Schneider wanted us to take Eldridge's name off the
Ramparts
masthead, where he was still listed as "International Editor."

Huey's attraction to the Left had always been his persona as "Minister of Defense" of the Black Panther Party, his challenge to revolutionary wannabees to live up to their rhetoric and "pick up the gun." Huey had done just that in his own celebrated confrontation with the law that had left Officer John Frey dead with a bullet wound in his back. Everybody in the Left seemed to believe that Huey had killed Frey, but we also wanted to believe that Huey — as a victim of racism — was also innocent. Peter's and my engagement with the Panthers was more social than political, since
Ramparts
had helped the Party become a national franchise. Their military style left me cold, but now, a change in the times prompted the two of us, and especially me, to be interested in the meeting.

By the early 1970s, it was clear that the "Movement" had flamed out. As soon as Nixon signaled the end of the military draft, the "anti-war" demonstrations stopped and the protestors disappeared, marooning hardcore activists like myself. I felt a need to do something to fill the void. Huey Newton was really alone among Movement figures in recognizing the change in the
Zeitgeist
and making the most of it. In a dramatic announcement, he declared the time had come to "put away the gun" and, instead, to "serve the people," which seemed sensible enough to me.

Our meeting took place in Huey's penthouse eyrie, twenty-five floors above Lake Oakland. The Eldridge faction, which had condemned Huey for "selling out the armed struggle," had made much of Huey's lavish lifestyle in its intra-party polemics. But the apartment itself was sparely furnished, and I was ready to accept Schneider's explanation that it was necessary for "security." (A television screen allowed Huey to view entrants to the building.) Not only J. Edgar Hoover's infamous agents but also the disgruntled Cleaver elements might very well want to see Huey dead. There had been several killings already. One of Huey's East Coast loyalists, Sam Napier, had been shot, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.

Somehow, because of Huey's sober pronouncements and his apparent victory in the intra-party struggle, I regarded this reality as part of the past, and no longer threatening. Unlike Elaine, Huey was able to keep his street passions in check in the presence of the white intellectuals he intended to use. In all the time I worked with him, I never saw him abuse another individual, verbally or otherwise. I never saw him angry or heard him utter a threat. I never saw a gun drawn. When I opposed him on important political issues, as I did at our very first meeting, I found him respectful, a seduction I could not resist. (My partner, Peter, was more cautious and politically aloof and, as events were to prove, wiser than I.)

After the meeting, I offered to help Huey with the Party's community projects and to raise money for the Panther school. Huey wanted to buy a Baptist church facility in the East Oakland ghetto with an auditorium, cafeteria and thirty-five classrooms. In the next months, I raised more than one hundred thousand dollars to purchase the buildings on 61st Avenue and East 14th Street. The sixty-three-thousand-dollar down payment was the largest check I had ever seen, let alone signed. The new Oakland Community Learning Center was administered by the Planning Committee, which was composed of Panthers whom Huey had specially selected to work with me. Neither Bobby Seale, nor Elaine Brown, nor any other Panther leaders were among them.

The Learning Center began with more than one hundred Panther children. Its instruction was enriched by educationalists like Herbert Kohl whom I brought in to help. I took Kohl to see Huey in the penthouse, but the meeting went badly. Within days, Huey's spies had reported that Kohl (who was street smart in ways I was not) was telling people that Huey was using cocaine. When I confronted Herb, he said: "He's sniffing. He was sniffing when we were up there."