Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza, sometimes called Distort D'Newsa, is a right-wing academic.

• CNN, analyst
• Dartmouth Review, founder and editor-in-chief
• American Enterprise Institute, John M. Olin Scholar
• Hoover Institution
• Editorial staff, Policy Review

Attacking blacks

• Dartmouth Review

As noted in a September 22, 1995, article in The Washington Post, "[T]he off-campus newspaper [The Dartmouth Review] published an interview with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, using a mock photograph of a black man hanging from a campus tree".

• The End of Racism

D'Souza's key work is the 700-page The End of Racism which argued that the attack on racism was a more serious problem than racism itself, concluding that laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed. D'Souza also suggests that blacks are pathological and that racism was simply a rational response to black pathology. D'Souza's own website says the book "argues that the American obsession with race is fueled by a civil rights establishment that has a vested interest in perpetuating black dependency." [1]

After the book was published along with The Bell Curve Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson, two Aftican-American colleagues of D'Souza's at the American Enterprise, resigned in protest.

• Quotes from "The End of Racism":

[The Civil Rights Movement] sought to undermine white racism through a protest strategy that emphasized the recognition of basic rights for blacks, without considering that racism might be fortified if blacks were unable to exercise their rights effectively and responsibly.

Most African American scholars simply refuse to acknowledge the pathology of violence in the black underclass, apparently convinced that black criminals as well as their targets are both victims: the real culprit is societal racism. Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector. Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department.

Increasingly it appears that it is liberal antiracism that is based on ignorance and fear: ignorance of the true nature of racism, and fear that the racist point of view better explains the world than its liberal counterpart.

The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.

The popular conception seems to be that American slavery as an institution involved white slaveowners and black slaves. Consequently, it is easy to view slavery as a racist institution. But this image is complicated when we discover that most whites did not own slaves, even in the South; that not all blacks were slaves; that several thousand free blacks and American Indians owned black slaves. An examination of these frequently obscured aspects of American slavery calls into question the facile equation of racism and slavery.

If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?

How did [Martin Luther] King succeed, almost single-handedly, in winning support for his agenda? Why was his Southern opposition virtually silent in making counterarguments?

• Comments on Reagan

In a live chat with washingtonpost.com on Ronald Reagan, D'Souza wrote that blacks rejected Reagan because Reagan felt that what you could do was important, not your race, and blacks disagreed.

Dryden, N.Y.: A difficult question. Watching the SIMI viewing I have been struck by the overwhelming whiteness of the crowd. This to me is one dark facet of the Reagan legacy, a man who chose to start his campaign in Philadelphia, Mich. [where three civil rights workers were murdered]. Why do you think he was so tone deaf on the vital American issue of race?

Dinesh D'Souza: Reagan had an unfailingly inclusive vision of America. His view was that it didn't matter where you came from or who you were. What mattered was what you could do. Immigrants found this appealing. Blacks in general didn't. Blacks are at a peculiar point in their history where many of them believe that "race does matter" and "race should matter." A different vision from what Martin Luther King held in his "I Have a Dream" speech. So Reagan didn't reject blacks, blacks rejected Reagan. It's unfortunate, but I don't think it tells against Reagan. Maybe there will be some reconsideration of Reagan now by African Americans.

Outing gays at Dartmouth

As editor of the Dartmouth Review, D'Souza stole correspondence from the school's Gay Student Alliance and published it, outing several gay students to friends and family and driving one to consider suicide. When The Nation published an article stating this, D'Souza wrote asking for a retraction, calling the piece "lies from the loony left", and sending articles which he said would clear his name. But bizarrely, the articles he included showed that the claim was true -- they included a piece written under his byline that featured excerpts from gay students correspondence.

References

Michael Bérubé, "Dinesh and Me", June 10, 2004.
Kevin Nix, ""Distort D'Newsa" now a CNN analyst", Media Matters for America, June 8, 2004.