8. Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid.

Horowitz gets desperate. He claims that welfare benefits have been paid to lacks "under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances." Of course welfare payments, which he incorrectly dates to the time of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, have been paid to people of all races for most of the 20th century, in one form or another. If Horowitz means the now defunct AFDC, home of the loathed "welfare mother," (a program Horowitz is against), then it is worth pointing out that AFDC was also open to people of all races, including relatively recent immigrants to the US. In no way was it designed to redress historical racial grievances. Horowitz suggests that welfare was a transfer payment (from whom?) to blacks on the level of trillions of dollars. This figure is both vague and would not be accurate even if every dollar from every Johnson-era federal welfare program -- excluding old age benefits from Social Security -- went only to blacks.

Horowitz also claims that Affirmative Action programs are a form of reparation. Here too, he is wrong. AA/EEOC was designed to redress current racial preferences for whites, regardless of black qualifications, not as a "make good" for slavery. Horowitz also fumes over the wholesale rewriting of federal law for the benefit of blacks. One is led to wonder how he feels about the Constitutional amendments giving blacks citizenship and the laws allowing them to vote.

9. What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?

Boy howdy! Horowitz claims that slavery existed for thousands of years, and that there was never an anti-slavery movement until "white Christians – Englishmen and Americans – created one." We will forgive Horowitz, who as a Jew, is a descendent of slaves himself, for ignoring Moses, or for mistakenly thinking that Moses was a British Christian. I'm sure Horowitz burned his copy of the Torah back when he joined SDS. We will also ignore Spartacus and any number of slave revolts in the antebellum South. We will also forgive him for conflating slavery under antiquity, which did not have a racist component, with slavery under capitalism, which did.

We will also ignore the unfortunate fact that, for most of the last thousand years, slavery was an economic footnote, as serfdom was the most popular and efficient way of organizing labor for the feudal middle class. Slavery re-emerged under capitalism in a form very different than the way it existing in Egypt, Greece, Rome and Africa.

We will ignore all of these things, because it would distract us from pointing and laughing at Horowitz for the following: "If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves." All together now, my friends in fourth grade:
Abraham Lincoln did not give his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation!

Does Horowitz have some vision of Lincoln from the movies, where old Abe is dodging poison darts, hopping over deadfalls, rolling under ceiling-spike traps, swinging over cliffs with nothing but the help of a whip, and finally, outrunning a giant boulder, to sign the Emancipation Proclamation? Oh wait, that was Indiana Jones, not Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln signed the Proclamation years before he was assassinated. In no way could it be said that he gave his life to do something he had already done years before he died. Further, here is a complete list of slaves freed by the Proclamation:

That's right. None. Moving on.

Horowitz makes the hysterical claim that blacks in America would still be slaves if not for the Civil War. Most historians, even the most credulous members of the Great Man school of thought, would spill tea on their laps if they read such a claim in a historical journal. Slavery was clearly on the way out throughout the world, as labor could be more efficiently organized by freeing people from land (serfs) chattel status (slaves) and freeing them from the burdens of owning their own property (small scale artisans). Mass industrial production eliminated the economic power of slavery.

But even if Horowitz is right and everyone else is wrong about history, and Lincoln was essential, he would still be wrong. The Confederate states seceded from the United States. "America" wouldn't have slaves because the Confederacy was another country. If there was no Civil War and no Lincoln, and nothing else changed in history (Horowitz doesn't specify) the US would be a free country, and the Confederacy – a foreign power – would be a slave country. Horowitz goes beyond racism and beyond right-wing bombast to semiliterate stupidity with this "point."

10. The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom.

Horowitz claims that the black community is being suckered by black nationalists, black separatists and the political left. Apparently, Horowitz forgot his lessons from SDS: black nationalism is a right-wing movement, not a left-wing movement. Most black nationalists are against Affirmative Action and reparations, they want a black nation or see blacks and blacks alone (not the white government) as the agent of political and economic change.

Horowitz also asks, "Who is more American than the descendents of African slaves?" to which one can only answer, "Indians." The question is a rhetorical one; Horowitz sees the reparations claim as one that would alienate blacks from the US. The opposite is true, few people are alienated from institutions who give them money to make up for egregious treatment. Horowitz also claims, in the point itself, that the US gave blacks freedom. Sure, it did. After enslaving them in the first place. And the freedom the average black person in the US has is qualitatively different than the freedom everyone else in the US has, even other people of color and recent immigrants. Racism isn't just a historical artifact, it is an institution today, one informed by the institutions of the past.

Since Horowitz sees slavery as something that blacks benefited from (see point 2), and racism as the passe whine of the overprivileged minority that stops stuffing itself with government surplus cheese only long enough to have bastard children and cash their welfare checks, it isn't surprising that he would be equally confused on the facts of history, the actual claims of the reparation movement and his own arguments.