It Was a Trap – By Justin Peters (Slate) / May 4, 2024
A time-honored tactic by right-wing agitators brought on the “crisis” on American campuses. Everyone fell for it—again.
In 2001, a Vietnam-era student radical named David Horowitz decided to once again start causing trouble on campus. A few years earlier, several scholars and activists had begun to argue that the U.S. should pay reparations to descendants of slaves. Horowitz, whose politics had taken a sharp right turn since the 1960s, thought that this was a very bad idea. So he contacted several college newspapers, seeking to place a full-page ad, during Black History Month, titled, “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.”
The ad, which had been adapted from a Salon column he had published the previous year, seemed designed to stir passions on the campuses where it ran. In it, Horowitz deemed reparations “an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others”; argued that “the reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left”; and asked the question: “What about the debt blacks owe to America?”
Horowitz’s inflammatory arguments were not very well received. Many of the newspapers to which Horowitz submitted the ad rejected it entirely. At Brown University, angry students stole thousands of newspapers in which the ad had been printed. At the University of California, Berkeley, students marched on the offices of the student newspaper, prompting its editor in chief to publicly apologize for running the ad in the first place. The mainstream media soon picked up on the furor, and the ensuing press attention ended up making all of the students involved look like twits, while giving Horowitz exponentially more attention than the ads alone would have in the first place.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/university-protests-columbia-college-republicans.html
