Racial Discrimination, United States - Ethnic & Race Relations, African Americans - General & Miscellaneous

The Race Card

Name: The Race Card
Author: Peter Collier and David Horowitz
ISBN: 9780761509424

by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

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Overview

The Race Card captures the twisted hypocrisy of many of today's civil rights champions who, by word and by deed, seem more intent on tearing open new wounds than on healing old ones. In stunning detail we're shown how the notorious cases of O.J. Simpson and Huey Newton have turned our judicial system upside down. We learn of Louis Farrakhan's curious affinity for the Ku Klux Klan and thumb through radical Afrocentric literature whose bizarre theories, in the name of multiculturalism, are entering the reading lists of schools across the country. We're left to wonder whether our nation has become so race obsessed that it has lost its ability to distinguish right from wrong. Included are unflinching reports on Angela Davis, the Lenin Prize winner and pseudo-scholar who's honored with an endowed chair by the University of California; Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia's media-genic cop killer and cause celebre for Hollywood actors; and the alarming ease with which revisionist pop culture canonizes a Black Panther Party whose bloody, violent past continues to haunt its victims.

About the Author, Peter Collier and David Horowitz

Peter Collier and David Horowitz are nationally known writers, editors, and political commentators whose intellectual development arcs from early, influential support for the Black Panther movement to the forefront of neoconservatism. They operate the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture and publish the magazine Heterodoxy, in which these essays first appeared. They are the authors of Destructive Generation, and the bestselling political biographies The Kennedys, The Rockefellers, and The Fords. David Horowitz's memoirs, Radical Son, has recently been published by The Free Press.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Essays on racesome cursory, some substantialfrom the magazine Heterodoxy, published by prominent neo-conservatives Collier and Horowitz (The Rockefellers), make up this book. The authors' unapologetic perspective is clear: in Los Angeles and other big cities, "the issue is not lawless white cops but remorseless black criminals." While Collier and Horowitz dwell in their eponymous essay on the troubling fact that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime, they ignore routine police harassment of blacks and care not to explore sociological explanations for crime. Similarly, an essay by Paul Mulshine that effectively dissects the case made by supporters of convicted killer Mumia Abu-Jamal ignores questions about the fairness of his trial. A one-time supporter of the Black Panthers, Horowitz apparently aims to atone: the book includes Kate Coleman's important reconstruction of the unsolved murder of Panther bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, and Hugh Pearson's account of the heckling he received from blacks unwilling to accept his research regarding the Panthers. In a section provocatively titled "Afro-Fascism," contributors warn about some disturbing Afrocentric books used in high school curricula. Other essays take on academic bell hooks and columnist Clarence Page. While this book contains some useful and provocative criticism, the authors don't seem to recognize that the "race card" is still played regularly by whites, most notably in cases of false accusation (Susan Smith, Charles Stuart, etc.) (June)