Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Online Free PDF Page B

the savage beating of Reginald Denny by a group of black gang members during the Los Angeles riots. Surely, he suggested, this was a hate crime. But his teacher corrected him. Even though Denny was pulled from his truck solely because he was white, and then beaten within an inch of his life, he could not be the victim of racial attitudes. The attempted murder of Reginald Denny was actually an act of rebellion by people who were themselves the victims of a white racist system, and the act they committed, therefore, could not be considered a hate crime. This is the perspective of academics who teach Whiteness Studies, oflaw professors who teach "critical race studies," and no doubt of education professors busily transmitting the progressive worldview to the next generation of junior high school instructors.
    This is one reason why conservatives and libertarians did not join Barney Frank and the left in promoting politically correct hatecrime legislation that would create a few more specially protected categories among us, as a kind of human Endangered Species Act. Sorting Americans into distinctive racial, ethnic, and gender groups, while designating whites and heterosexuals to be their "oppressors," makes the latter into legitimate targets of hate themselves. It thus becomes a way of exacerbating, rather than correcting, social disorder.
    It is time to go back to the wisdom of the Founders, who wrote a constitution without reference to ethnic or gender groups. They did so in order to render us equal before the nation's system of law.
    It was an imperfectly realized ideal then, but that should be no excuse for abandoning the ideal now. We need to end the vicious libels of political correctness that have percolated their message of anti-white racism into our mainstream culture. The vast majority of white people do not hate or oppress black people, just as the vast majority of heterosexuals do not hate or oppress gays. We need to single out those individuals who do — whatever their race or gender — for condemnation and social ostracism. And we need to do the same to individuals who belong to minorities and are haters themselves. Most of all, we need to go back to the task of treating all Americans as individuals first, and as members of groups only secondarily, if at all.

 
3

A Rage to Kill
     
    I am writing this essay
sitting beside an anonymous
white male that I long to murder.

bell hooks, A Killing Rage
    W HEN I READ THIS SENTENCE, I found myself looking around the room nervously. For these are not the open ing words of a new novel by Brett Easton Ellis, but a nonfiction essay by bell hooks, * an intellectual icon of the tenured left. Though only in her forties, hooks is a Distinguished Professor of English at the City College of New York, a former faculty member at Yale, and a phenomenon of the politicized academy. An awkward writer of ideological formulas and agitprop prose she has a wide-ranging influence in the politically correct university culture. The collection for which "A Killing Rage" is the title essay is one of a shelf of similar tracts that hooks has published, earning her a sobriquet from the New York Review of Books as "the most prominent exponent of black feminism" in America.
    The occasion for professor hooks's homicidal urge turns out to be nothing more than a lost seat on a commercial airline flight. As hooks relates the episode, she had seated herself in the first class cabin alongside a female friend, who is also black and identified only as "K" — perhaps an allusion to Kafka, so cultivated is hooks's sense ofvictimization. No sooner are the two women settled in their firstclass seats, however, then a voice on the plane's speaker system calls K to the front of the cabin where her ticket is inspected. The stewardess informs K that she does not have a claim to the seat because her upgrade has not been properly completed. It is too late, moreover, to correct the fault.
    The stewardess also