In the Huffington Post, Tom Hayden rationally counters arguments that the race-is-everything viewpoint of the film Crash is flawed:

The Times’ news coverage highlighted critical comments about Crash by Joe Hicks, a local African-American who has become something of a David Horowitz in blackface, a former black communist who has degenerated into a virtual neo-conservative propagandist.

Oops — did we say “rationally?” We forgot that in a LAT piece about Crash, Hicks went against orthodoxy and didn’t say what he was supposed to:

… Joe Hicks, the longtime African American community activist, believes the movie so distorts the state of race relations that it could hurt Los Angeles’ reputation.

… Activist Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc. and former head of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said “Crash” presents a Los Angeles where most people are filled with prejudice and vitriol, such as the wealthy Brentwood housewife who assumes her Latino locksmith is a gang member.

“What it says about L.A. is something that is completely untrue about the kind of human relations we experience in this city,” Hicks said. “It is looking at things, viewing them from some distortion, presenting things as they want them to be to feed into some political agenda.”

According to Hayden, this is “denial.” To a more sensible person, it sounds like the grey-area reality we see every day.

But the content of Hicks’ remarks isn’t Hayden’s concern. Conveniently for Hayden, under the rules of the far left, when a black person publicly strays from orthodoxy their arguments don’t need to be discussed. Instead, one is free to go straight to the ad hominem attacks (”David Horowitz in blackface”)!

Despite Hayden’s contention that Hicks’ comments were “highlighted” in the LAT piece, others were critical of the film, including the assistant director of the Asian American Studies program at UCLA, a class at USC film school, and Mayor Villaraigosa’s attorney. But they weren’t identifiably black and thus avoided Hayden’s invective. Hayden singled out Hicks and mentioned his ethnicity three times in a single sentence.

Hayden’s criticism of Hicks is nothing more than “he’s black and he didn’t toe the liberal line on this one.” Hmmm … expecting all members of an ethnic group to behave the same way — certainly a Huffington Post contributor wouldn’t be guilty of, you know, the “r” word?

Too bad the LAT didn’t interview Hayden for the Crash story. They would have found out that the movie’s obsession with race resonates with … people who are obsessed with race. Especially Huffington Post bloggers obsessed to the point of practicing what they would decry in others.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:02 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Loons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.