The timing for the recent release of “Progressive Racism,” Book VI in David Horowitz’s series, The Black Book of the American Left, could not be more propitious.
This volume, which explores the politicized betrayal of MLK’s vision in detail, is arguably the most important of the series because, as Horowitz writes in his preface, the subject “goes to the heart of the most problematic assault on the American social contract.” The book is a compilation of Horowitz’s columns on race published (mostly, with a few recent exceptions) in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Horowitz writes that he structured the chronologically arranged articles 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 multi-ethnic 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 government practices. Post-King civil rights became a movement to institutionalize racial preferences – the same kind of discriminatory practices that characterized segregation – and to recreate a race-conscious political culture in which blacks and a handful of designated minorities were singled out as the groups to be racially privileged. On the other side of the coin, whites were made targets of exclusion, suspicion and disapprobation.”
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