David Horowitz critiques AR

David Horowitz.

The cover story of the August 2002 issue of AR was the first comprehensive account of the Wichita Massacre to appear in any publication. We thought the story was so important we released it in electronic form on the day AR went into the mail. Several web sites posted it, including David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com, which ran a version that edited out some of the more explicitly racialist commentary. Mr. Horowitz himself wrote a friendly and generous disclaimer justifying his decision to post an article from a publication many would call “racist.” It is reproduced below.

Read Jared Taylor’s reply.

David Horowitz on AR

July 15, 2002

In the editorial I wrote to accompany today’s lead story on the Wichita Massacre, I said “In the present atmosphere of racial hypocrisy, the mere expression of concern over attacks on white people would in itself make an individual a target for racial witch-hunters.” I could also have said that publishing a story from the American Renaissance newsletter would do the same.

The American Renaissance group is a creation of Jared Taylor, author of a pioneer book of political incorrectness on race called Paved With Good Intentions. Taylor is a very smart and gutsy individualist, but he is also a man who has surrendered to the multicultural miasma that has overtaken this nation and is busily building a movement devoted to white identity and community. We do not share these agendas. What I mean by “surrendering” is that Taylor has accepted the idea that the multiculturalists have won. We are all prisoners of identity politics now. If there is going to be Black History Month and Chicano Studies then there should be White History Month and White Studies. If blacks and Mexicans are going to regard each other as brothers and the rest of us as “Anglos,” then whites should regard each other as brothers and others as — well, ... others. Within the multicultural framework set by the dominant liberalism in our civic culture, Taylor’s claim to a white place at the diversity table certainly makes sense. But there is another option and that is getting rid of the table altogether and going back to the good old American ideal of E Pluribus Unum — “out of many one.” Not just blacks and whites and Chicanos, but Americans. Jared Taylor is a very intelligent and principled man. But I believe he is mistaken on this matter, and even if he is right I would rather fight against the multicultural behemoth and be on the losing side than embrace a false faith and win.

There are many who would call Jared Taylor and his American Renaissance movement “racist.” If the term is modified to “racialist,” there is truth in the charge. But Taylor and his Renaissance movement are no more racist in this sense than Jesse Jackson and the NAACP. In my experience of Taylor’s views, which is mainly literary (we have had occasion to exchange opinions in person only once), they do not represent a mean-spirited position. They are an attempt to be realistic about a fate that seems to have befallen us (which Taylor would maintain was inevitable given the natural order of things). But Jared Taylor is no more “racist” in this sense than any university Afro-centrist or virtually any black pundit of the left. He is not even racist in the sense that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are racist. He is — as noted — a racialist, which FrontPageMag.com is not.

I make no apologies, therefore, for posting this piece of journalism. It is an accurate and profoundly important report about an event with which every American should be familiar, and whose implications every American should ponder.