Ben Horowitz: The Multi-Billionaire Venture Capitalist, Who Uses The N-Word Liberally In His Book
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Spike Lee was on to something when he made Bamboozled, all those years ago.
Bamboozled is one of those joints which has aged incredibly well. The late film critic —Stanley Crouch — who was known for his perennial evisceration of Lee, was somewhat generous in his assessment of this particular work.
And anyone who has seen the film will remember Michael Rappaport’s character — Thomas Dunwitty.
We meet Thomas Dunwitty in the movie upbraiding Pierre Delacroix played by Damon Wayans for not being Black enough. To get his point across, Dunwitty displays his knowledge of African-American culture and also lets us into the fact that he is married to a Black woman.
And not to mention his use of the N-word.
So what’s Thomas Dunwitty got to do with one of the biggest venture capitalists in the world, I hear you ask?
Quite a bit.
Ben Horowitz is a real-life Thomas Dunwitty.
In his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, we get to learn a bit about the man behind Netscape and countless other start-ups.
We learnt that his father grew up in Queens, New York and distributed Marxist literature as a teenager.
We also did learn that he was meant to call the guy who would become his best friend the N-word, when an older kid dared him to do so.
Our protagonist did let us in to the fact that he is married to an African-American woman by the name of Felicia, with whom he has three children.
Over the course of his book, chapters begin with some quote from Jay-Z, with the N-word being deployed without any guilt from deploying the epithet.
Reading the crappy book, you are left with the impression that the author thinks that he has earned the right to use the racial epithet quite liberally, since he is married to a Black woman and he has three children who are mixed-race.
Tim Wise, in his capacity as the explainer-in-chief to white folk, has written countless books on the…
