The following is the text from the full-page advertisement opposing monetary reparations for slavery that David Horowitz sent to numerous student newspapers in February 2001, discussed in Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 7. Publication of the advertisement by such papers as the Daily Californian (University of California, Berkeley), the Brown Daily Herald (Brown University), and the Badger Herald (University of Wisconsin, Madison) sparked an emotional reaction that typified the crisis of free speech at institutions of higher learning in the United States.

Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too

One

There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible for the Crime of Slavery

Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?

Two

There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively from Its Fruits

The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous “nation” in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.