July 1995

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 6, No. 7 July 1995

 

CONTENTS

The Morality of Survival, Part I
Violating the IQ Taboo
Book Review: Immigration — The Debate Becomes Interesting 
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Morality of Survival, Part I

Our current morality dooms the West to destruction. We must adopt a new morality of survival.

by Michael W. Masters

“[The West] has not yet understood that whites, in a world become too small for its inhabitants, are now a minority and that the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, irretrievably to extinction in the century to come, if we hold fast to our present moral principles.”

Jean Raspail, The Camp Of The Saints

The loss of racial identity in the Western world is symptomatic of a deeper crisis within the European peoples, whose culture and technology have provided the world with much of what we know today as modern civilization. At its core, the crisis is the inevitable consequence of a profound, and perhaps fatal, misunderstanding of the nature of morality. We have lost sight of ancient and eternal laws of Nature on which our civilization must be based if we are to survive. We no longer have the luxury of indulging in universalist altruistic principles that, no matter how noble they may appear, have driven us to the brink of ruin.

The Fight: St. George Kills the Dragon by Edward Burne-Jones

The Fight: St. George Kills the Dragon by Edward Burne-Jones

Demographic projections based on American and European immigration policies, as well as the evidence of one’s own senses as one walks the streets of any large Western city, point to a bleak future. Within a century or two, perhaps less, the peoples of the West, those whose ancestry derives from the Nordic and Alpine subraces of Europe, will have ceased to exist as a cohesive entity. How quickly the end will come depends on immigration rates, differential birthrates among ethnic groups, and mixed-race childbearing rates. But the final outcome is fixed so long as we adhere to our present course.

And yet, frank discussion of the outcome, the submergence of the race that produced the world’s first, and perhaps only technological civilization, is usually silenced with words like “racist,” “bigot,” and “xenophobe.” Neither the flawed moral system that enforces this silence nor the people who support it will outlive the demise of the West. But when the West is gone, it will be of little consolation that those responsible will have expired as well. If we are to reverse course, it is vital that we take steps now, before it is too late.

If, today, the West’s moral system is flawed, how can it be corrected? The first question we must ask is whether it is moral for ethnic groups as well as individuals to seek survival. And if so, what are the moral actions we may undertake to secure survival? What must be the moral basis of our civilization if it is not to be lost? In his book, Destiny of Angels, Richard McCulloch calls these questions a matter of “ultimate ethics.”

The Moral Dilemma of the West

The dilemma of our people is the product of a deep misconception about nature and morality. It arises from the mistaken, sentimental belief that altruism can be extended beyond its evolutionary origin — kinship and within-group altruism — to the whole of humanity. It results from failure to accept the role of genetic factors in defining human temperament and potential.

The standards that govern public debate are reminiscent of the Dark Ages in that they have no basis in science or in human experience. Instead, they consist of moralistic assertions derived from a world view rooted in radical egalitarianism. The long term consequence of adherence to these principles is rarely examined, let alone subjected to scientific scrutiny.

Most Western people would agree that an innate sense of right and wrong plays a key role in the Western moral system, a system that values individual worth and reciprocal fairness. The tragedy of this moral view is that it has been extended to the world at large — seemingly the most noble behavior humanity has ever exhibited — and has become the threat to the survival of the West.

As biologist Garrett Hardin demonstrated in his 1982 essay, “Discriminating Altruisms,” universalism — a chimerical One World without borders or distinctions — is impossible. Groups that practice unlimited altruism, unfettered by thoughts of self-preservation, will be disadvantaged in life’s competition and thus eliminated over time in favor of those that limit their altruistic behavior to a smaller subset of humanity, usually their own genetic kin, from whom they receive reciprocal benefits.

Professor Hardin writes:

Universalism is altruism practiced without discrimination of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space . . . To people who accept the idea of biological evolution from amoeba to man, the vision of social evolution from egoism to universalism may seem plausible. In fact, however, the last step is impossible . . . Let us see why.

In imagination, picture a world in which social evolution has gone no further than egoism or individualism. When familialism appears on the scene, what accounts for its persistence? It must be that the costs of the sacrifices individuals make for their relatives are more than paid for by the gains realized through family solidarity . . .

The argument that accounts for the step to familialism serves equally well for each succeeding step — except for the last. Why the difference? Because the One World created by universalism has — by definition — no competitive base to support it . . . [Universalism] cannot survive in competition with discrimination.

Professor Hardin adds:

[W]e must not forget that for three billion years, biological evolution has been powered by discrimination. Even mere survival in the absence of evolutionary change depends on discrimination. If universalists now have their way, discrimination will be abandoned. Even the most modest impulse toward conservatism should cause us to question the wisdom of abandoning a principle that has worked so well for billions of years. It is a tragic irony that discrimination has produced a species (homo sapiens) that now proposes to abandon the principle responsible for its rise to greatness. It is to the advantage of non-Europeans, virtually all of whom retain their cohesion as distinctive, discriminating groups, to exploit the economic wealth and social order of the West, benefits many demonstrably cannot create for themselves. When this cohesive drive is placed in competition with self-sacrificing Western altruism, there can be only one outcome. In the near term, Europeans will be displaced by groups acting in their own self-interest. In the long run, biological destruction awaits us. Since those who displace us do not, by definition, maintain our morals standards — for if they did, they would not be replacing us — our flawed moral system will vanish with us.

The fact that universal, self-sacrificing altruism destroys its practitioners is its most obvious flaw. Any survivable moral order must recognize this.

Garrett Hardin

Garrett Hardin

The Cosmic Race

The dream of a Utopia in which racial harmony prevails, has never come true. Today, racial encroachment is a threat to the very existence of Western peoples. Lawrence Auster, author of The Path to National Suicide, An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, has elsewhere summarized the situation thus:

Modern liberalism told us that racial differences don’t matter, and on the basis of that belief, liberals then set about turning America into a multiracial, integrated, race-blind society. But now that very effort has created so much race consciousness, race conflict and race inequality, that the same liberals have concluded that the only way to overcome those problems is to merge all the races into one. The same people who have always denounced as an extremist lunatic anyone who warned about ‘the racial dilution of white America,’ are now proposing, not just the dilution of white America, but its complete elimination. Race-blind ideology has led directly to the most race-conscious — and indeed genocidal — proposal in the history of the world.

This change of strategy was signaled by the cover story of a Fall 1993 special edition of Time. The story featured a computer synthesized image of a woman representing the intermixture of all of the ethnic population elements of the United States in their present proportions. The subliminal message conveyed by this computerized android, obviously still of predominantly European ancestry, was: “Don’t worry, this is harmless.” Or, in the current idiom of multiculturalism, “let us celebrate our diversity.” Of course, this image represents the utter destruction of diversity, not its conservation.

This computer-generated android is a lie. The American population base is in a state of rapid change. Whites are now having fewer children, and there are thus fewer whites of child bearing age than Time assumes. This is happening worldwide. The question is, what would be the result of this plan being carried forward on a larger scale, carried to its logical conclusion in a world sans borders? Time’s android is but a way station on the road to what some lovingly call the Cosmic Race.

People of European ancestry constitute something over ten percent of the world’s population, but since 1980, white births amount to only a little more than five percent of the world’s new children. The birth rate in the West has fallen to dangerously low levels, now about 1.8 children per woman. A level of 2.1 is required to balance deaths. Birth rates in the third world remain very high, thanks in large measure to the infusion of Western food, medicine, and “peacekeeping.”

Because people are not computer morphs but have discrete ancestors, let us assume that the fraction of people with European ancestry is now one-sixteenth of the child-bearing population. When the Time experiment is complete on a world-wide scale, the resulting human will have only one white great-great-grandparent. He will be visibly Asian since about 60 percent of the world’s population is Asian. In round numbers, this amounts to ten of the sixteen great-great grandparents, including four from China alone. Three would come from India and three more from Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Africa would supply three and non-white Latin America and the Caribbean basin the remaining two.

In this scenario, which is already unfolding on the North American continent and in Europe and Australia, the single European ancestor would leave no discernible residue in homo cosmicus. Europeans would be extinct, fulfilling the nightmare vision that Jean Raspail described in The Camp Of The Saints. This is not a condemnation of any real human being with such an ancestry. Nevertheless, this process would eradicate the biological diversity that multiculturalists claim to cherish. In its place would be only uniformity, the irreversible submergence of all races.

The passing of any race is an event of great significance. The destruction of an entire population is, in fact, genocide by the definitions of the UN Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “. . . the destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial or national group. The acts so defined include . . . the destruction of the conditions of life necessary for the physical existence of the group . . .”

The debate about race must be framed in these terms in order to convey its true importance. The battle cannot be won by allowing the other side to limit the terms of debate by declaring certain subjects beyond discussion. The consequences are too important.

The Dual Code of Morality

Why, though, does race matter? The answer lies in the biology of genes and in the impact of genetic kinship on altruism. For many decades, altruism was a paradox for theories of evolution. Darwin himself realized that altruism was difficult to explain in terms of individual “survival of the fittest.” In his book, Race, Evolution and Behavior, Philippe Rushton writes, “If the most altruistic members of a group sacrifice themselves for others, they run the risk of leaving fewer offspring to pass on the very genes that govern the altruistic behavior. Hence, altruism would be selected against, and selfishness would be selected for.”

Prof. Rushton suggests that this paradox is resolved by genetic similarity theory, a field pioneered by biologist W.D. Hamilton and others. Prof Rushton writes:

By a process known as kin selection, individuals can maximize their inclusive fitness rather than only their individual fitness by increasing the production of successful offspring by both themselves and their genetic relatives . . . Genes are what survive and are passed on, and some of the same genes will be found not only in direct offspring but in siblings, cousins, nephews/nieces, and grandchildren . . . thus, from an evolutionary perspective, altruism is a means of helping genes to propagate.

Over time, kin selection has resulted in a dual code of morality, an altruistic code for one’s genetic kin and a non-altruistic code for everyone else. Anthropologists have suggested that humans evolved through a process of migration and tribal warfare between groups composed of genetically related individuals. In A New Theory of Human Evolution, Sir Arthur Keith wrote, “The process which secures the evolution of an isolated group of humanity is a combination of two principles . . . namely, cooperation with competition . . . I hold that from the very beginning of human evolution the conduct of every local group was regulated by two codes of morality, distinguished by Herbert Spencer as the ‘code of amity’ and the ‘code of enmity’.”

Garrett Hardin writes, “The essential characteristic of a tribe is that it should follow a double standard of morality — one kind of behavior for in-group relations, another for out-group.” In-group relations are characterized by cooperation while out-group relations are characterized by conflict. Liberals have tried to discredit the role of tribal conflict, claiming that such distinctions have been lost as groups reached nation size. But in so doing, they miss the vital message of genetic similarity theory. National ethnic groups represent the growth and consolidation of genetically related tribes over time.

Professor Hardin argues that, because of the nature of altruism and competition, the dual code of morality is inescapable and cannot be eliminated from human society:

In the absence of competition between tribes the survival value of altruism in a crowded world approaches zero because what ego gives up necessarily . . . goes into the commons. What is in the commons cannot favor the survival of the sharing impulses that put it there — unless there are limits placed on sharing. To place limits on sharing is to create a tribe — which means a rejection of One World. . . A state of One World, if achieved, would soon redissolve into an assemblage of tribes.”

The in-group out-group distinction still operates today; it is only the battleground that has shifted. Tribal warfare has been replaced by territorial irredentism and competing birthrates.

The liberal campaign to eliminate feelings of national, cultural, or racial solidarity among Western peoples was undertaken largely in the hope that the abolition of “tribalism” would inaugurate an era of world peace. As Professor Hardin has shown, tribalism cannot be eliminated. Worse still, any idealistic group that unilaterally dismantles its own tribal sense will be swept away by groups that have retained theirs. Unless the current direction is changed, the West will be destroyed in this new form of biological warfare.

The dual code of morality is therefore the cornerstone on which any enduring moral order must be based. It is also an answer to the question of ultimate ethics posed earlier: “Is it moral for ethnic groups to seek to survive?” Since it is impossible to eliminate “tribes” from the human race, the answer to this question must be yes. That which is built inextricably into the laws of the universe cannot be immoral.

Universalists might try to caricature the dual code of morality as an invidious double standard, but it is something we practice every day without even thinking about it. Without it, no group, be it a family, club, corporation, political party, nation, or race would exist. It is how groups distinguish between members and non-members. Employees of the same company treat each other differently from the way they treat competitors. Members of the same political party cooperate with each other and run against opponents. Families draw sharp distinctions between members and strangers. It is easy to overlook the dual code of morality precisely because it is so fundamental a part of human nature.

The “code of amity, code of enmity” explains racial loyalties. It is an extension of the biologically necessary fact that parents love their children more than the children of strangers. Such feelings are normal and natural. Yet “racism” has become the curse-word that stops discussion. Those who use the word as a weapon say that racial loyalty is racism when exhibited by whites but is justifiable pride when exhibited by non-whites. The word is simply a means of gaining power over people who have exaggerated moral scruples.

The Biology of Diversity

Feelings of racial loyalty are grounded in biological differences. These are discussed authoritatively in J. Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior, but they do not imply that one race has a right to rule over another. Frank discussion of real differences must not be considered morally repugnant. Scientific truth cannot be racism, at least not in the pejorative sense that the word is now used.

Race Evolution and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton

Most forms of behavior (by whites) that are characterized as racism do not involve unprovoked assault on people of other races, but are simply the natural loyalty of humans for their own group. They are necessary for survival. Unprovoked violence is a moral evil, but by all statistical measures, whites are overwhelmingly the victims of crimes of racial violence, not the perpetrators.

Blacks are twelve percent of the population but commit almost two-thirds of the violent crime in America, are over twelve times more likely to murder whites than the reverse, are more than a thousand times more likely to rape white women than the reverse, and choose whites as crime victims fifty percent of the time compared to whites choosing blacks as victims only two percent of the time.

Interracial crime is just one manifestation of a fundamental biological principle called Gause’s Law of Exclusion. In his book, The Mammals of North America, University of Kansas biology professor Raymond Hall states the law as follows: “Two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” [emphasis in original] One will inevitably eliminate or displace the other. Prof. Hall specifically includes humans in this rule: “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.”

Oblivion need not come in the form of physical destruction. It may simply involve the loss of habitat. Harlem, Watts, East St. Louis, and many other black neighborhoods were once occupied by whites. The arrival of blacks (or other non-whites) in sufficient numbers makes it impossible for whites to survive, whereas the process does not work in reverse. Even without the carnage of inter-racial crime, whites could be eliminated through sheer loss of territory. Viewed in biological terms, ethnic diversity is prelude to destruction.

Michael Masters lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His article will conclude in the following issue.

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ARTICLE

Violating the IQ Taboo

A Report from the Field

by Jared Taylor

Over the past year or so I have spoken to half a dozen student groups about the relationship between race and intelligence. My lectures are not very different from AR articles. The audiences are initially hostile, sometimes to the point of rudeness, but I have never thought I might be attacked. In fact, I have begun to notice an interesting pattern in the way students respond during the question-and-answer sessions that follow the lectures. Blacks behave quite differently from whites, but not always in the ways one would expect.

There are always at least a few blacks in the audience, and when the lecture ends they are always the first to raise their hands. Occasionally, they do not even wait to be called on; they just start talking. The first “questions” are likely to be jumbled harangues about slavery, lynching, and racism. They are usually so full of cliches that not even the other blacks really want to listen, and before long there are cries of “Ask your question.” As likely as not, the harangue is turned into a “question” with a breathlessly uttered “So what do you think about that?”

The audience may titter at such a limp ending, but these are useful “questions.” The student has probably mentioned “the brutal colonization of Africa” or “the proven racial bias in IQ tests,” or even “systematic genocide,” and I can choose any of these subjects for my reply. The question session may start with several outbursts like this, but never very many. When they see that shouting “racism” just makes them look silly, most blacks are sensible enough to stop.

Black and White IQ Distribution

It is then that the mood begins to change. After all, everyone is fascinated by taboos. Blacks and whites alike begin to realize that I know a lot about race and intelligence, that I do not have cloven hooves, and that I answer questions honestly and factually. Despite years of liberal training, people simply can’t help being interested in twin studies, adoption studies, cross-cultural IQ testing, and physical differences between the races. They start asking real questions and want real answers. Many students have probably never heard anything but the usual sociological mush about “racism” and “test bias” and, to their credit, they seem open to the clarity and consistency of biological explanations.

The longer the question and answer session goes on, the more candid and even friendly it becomes. After the formal session comes to a close, many students — black and white — cluster around to ask yet more questions. They can’t seem to get enough of this forbidden topic. Once, at Northwestern University, I spoke for nearly an hour, conducted a Q&A for a further hour and a half, and then answered questions informally for another twenty minutes.

Once their more militant fellows have left the room, some blacks become downright cordial. “You’ve opened my mind to a new way of looking at things,” one will say with a smile. If I have spoken about the IQ differences between dark-skinned and light-skinned blacks, a light-skinned woman may approach me and say, “I always wondered about those dark, dark brothers.” Some blacks are genuinely pleased to meet a white man who is not afraid of straight talk about race.

For the most part, the white students are disappointing. They are never the first to raise their hands, and even after the questions start to flow, they phrase theirs in careful, non-committal terms: “What does the literature you cited have to say about Chinese-American IQ scores?” On my way out the door, one or two whites may approach me and say furtively, “I’m so glad you came and spoke to us. Someone has got to start saying these things.” I remind them that they can start saying them, too.

So far, my most disappointing experience has been at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The college invited me to take part in a series of lectures on the future of welfare, and asked me to speak about welfare and race relations. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, was to speak before I did, and I assumed that the subject of race and IQ would arise. To my surprise, Dr. Murray spoke only about the need to abolish welfare; no one in the audience asked him about The Bell Curve. Later that evening, though, he and I and about a dozen Hillsdale faculty had a lengthy, free-wheeling discussion about race and IQ. I assumed the subject was considered fit for public consumption.

The next day, in my talk, I spoke about the relationship between IQ scores and racial differences in poverty rates, welfare rates, illegitimacy rates, and crime rates. The question and answer session, which lasted only about 20 minutes, was mildly hostile but polite. The students — including one black — who surrounded me for another 20 minutes until the auditorium shut down were the usual curious and friendly group.

Afterwards, the woman in charge of the lecture series was not friendly. She said that I failed to speak about the subject assigned to me and that I had embarrassed the college. One black had told her I was an obvious racist, and that he was insulted by my presence on campus. She told me she could not abide by a previous agreement to publish my lecture, along with all the others, in a volume called Champions of Freedom. I couldn’t help but remind her that she had taken an active part in the discussion the previous evening, that she had taken racial differences in intelligence for granted along with everyone else. For her, that didn’t matter; I had failed to keep my end of the bargain and had embarrassed the school.

In a double issue for September-October 1993, AR reviewed a self-published book by an American living in South Africa. The author, Gedaliah Braun, argues that African blacks take it for granted that the average white is smarter than the average black, and even many American blacks accept the notion of racial differences in intelligence — after some resistance. Dr. Braun writes that most blacks are not bothered by these ideas, and that the whole race/IQ taboo has been manufactured by whites out of pointless concern for black sensitivities. He thinks that many politicized blacks react furiously to any suggestion of racial differences, mainly because they know that this is such an effective way to intimidate whites; the facts themselves are of no great concern to them.

In 1993, I was very skeptical of Dr. Braun’s thesis. As I speak to more and more audiences, I find myself much less skeptical today.

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BOOK REVIEW

Immigration: The Debate Becomes Interesting

A mainstream author and publisher finally raise the subject of race.

Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, Peter Brimelow, Random House, 1995, 327 pp., $24.00

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Near the end of this across-the-board critique of American immigration policy, Peter Brimelow makes one of the many statements that so amply justify the book’s subtitle. “It is simply common sense,” he writes, “that Americans have a legitimate interest in their country’s racial balance. It is common sense that they have a right to insist that their government stop shifting it. Indeed, it seems to me that they have a right to insist that it be shifted back.” [emphasis added]

Alien Nation

Editors at Random House must have agonized over this clear expression of white racial consciousness but, to their credit, they let it stand. In fact, this is only the most explicit statement of the racial undercurrent that gives this book its energy and focus. Mr. Brimelow, a senior editor at both Forbes and National Review, points out that nationality cannot be acquired as casually as a driver’s license. Citizens must have something in common; race and culture are essential ingredients to nationhood.

With the appearance of this book, the public debate about immigration has finally approached the full dimensions that taboos have denied it. After years of letting themselves be silenced by anyone willing to equate immigration control with “racism,” a prominent advocate of border controls has at last called the other side’s bluff. Of course race is an issue, explains Mr. Brimelow, and whites have every right to oppose dispossession by nonwhites.

Just as publication of The Bell Curve has not immediately silenced the blather about racial equality, Alien Nation will not immediately still the chants of “We are a nation of immigrants.” Nevertheless, now that one mainstream commentator has appealed to race — not to attack Western civilization but to defend it — others will do the same. The terms of debate have shifted, let us hope decisively.

Grim Recitation

As he must, Mr. Brimelow starts his book with a recitation of the grim facts of the demographic transformation wrought by recent immigration, and a brief account of what caused it. He notes that many Americans seem to think that the crowds of Hispanics and Asians now to be found in nearly every part of the country are the result of some mute force of nature rather than the consequence of national law. It was, of course, the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 that, in an atmosphere of thoughtlessness and stupidity, greatly increased the number of immigrants and almost completely changed their countries of origin. A perfectly ordinary, revocable act of Congress launched the repopulation of the United States by nonwhites.

Whereas from 1820 to 1967, nearly 90 percent of all immigrants were from Europe or Canada, of the nearly 17 million legal immigrants that poured into the country between 1970 and 1993, only 17 percent were from majority-white countries. An unknown but large number of the latter were nonwhite, second-time immigrants.

The 1965 law has resulted in absurdities such as this: In 1992 there were more legal immigrants from Nigeria (2,794) than from Italy (2,336). It is instructive to then add to these figures the numbers of illegal immigrants from each country that were amnestied that same year. The Nigerian total leaps to 7,912 while the Italian figure moves up to only 2,619 — a clear indication of who was breaking the law and who was not. In 1991, there were nearly three times as many legal immigrants from Jamaica (18,025) as from Germany (6,272). Amnesties in the same year boosted the Jamaican figure to 23,828 while it increased the German figure to only 6,509.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants now live in the United States, but the best estimates put the figure at something like four or five million, almost all of them nonwhite. Every year, perhaps as many as two or three million enter the country illegally, but many also leave, resulting in a net annual increase of some 300,000 to 500,000. If current rates of immigration were to continue — legal and illegal — by the year 2050 more than a third of the country’s population would be post-1970 immigrants and their children.

Since white Americans are not even having enough babies to replace themselves, this huge nonwhite influx is rapidly changing the nation’s racial balance. Whites, who were nearly 90 percent of the population in 1960, are now only 75 percent. Current trends would reduce whites to a minority in less than 50 years — a blink of the eye in historical terms.

Surprisingly, American immigration policy actually does recognize that race is an essential part of cultural cohesion — but only for nonwhites. The United States has granted control over immigration to five of its overseas territories: American Samoa, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, and Palau. All explicitly protect their ethnic majorities from dispossession through immigration. In Samoa and the Marianas, for example, U.S. citizens cannot even own land unless they are of islander ancestry.

One of Alien Nation’s great strengths is that it repeatedly points out the fundamental facts about the racial transformation of the rest of the United States: Americans have never had a chance to vote on it, it has been consistently opposed by huge majorities of citizens, it could easily be slowed or reversed, and in the long run it will threaten the very existence of the nation. As Mr. Brimelow argues, it is clearly up to the proponents of this unprecedented upheaval to justify their position, yet the nation and the media have never forced them to do so. As in all things, the possibility of ending up on the unfashionable side of a racial argument has smothered discussion of what may well be the most spectacularly mistaken policy of our times.

Every Possible Argument

Because the immigration debate, such as it is, has been carried on in an artificial environment in which everyone pretended that race and culture did not matter, the proponents of open borders have managed to compile a few arguments that appear to support their view. Much of Mr. Brimelow’s book is devoted to smashing them.

For example, a common neoconservative argument in favor of continued immigration is that firmer controls would mean that “my grandfather couldn’t have come.” Many in the chattering classes seem not to realize that there were plenty of people already here when their grandfathers arrived, and that Old Americans were under no obligation to admit new ones. However, as Mr. Brimelow notes, it is worth pointing out that the grandfathers came from Europe, and would therefore be denied entry under current law.

The most widely promoted pro-immigration view, of course, is that newcomers are a necessary tonic for the economy. No one seems to notice the implied insult: that native-born Americans are a stagnant lot who need regular doses of Mexicans and Cambodians to ginger them up. Mr. Brimelow shows convincingly that if there really are any economic benefits from immigration, they are tiny and probably outweighed by the obvious burdens that immigrants impose.

Many of today’s immigrants, for example, go on welfare. During the earlier “great wave” of immigration around the turn of the century, newcomers got no handouts. Left to sink or swim, as many as a third sank and went home. No longer. Third-world illiterates now waste no time learning how to let Uncle Sam pay rent and buy their groceries.

About eight percent of immigrants are on welfare, more than two and a half times the rate for native-born whites. This helps explain why about one third of the welfare payments made in the state of California go to families headed by immigrants. For some nationalities welfare is a way of life; nearly half of all Cambodians and Laotians suckle at the public teat, as do a quarter of all Vietnamese. Of white immigrants, those from the USSR have the highest welfare rates — 16.3 percent. The immigrant group with the lowest welfare rate (1.6 percent) — well below even the native-born white rate of three percent — is the small number of white South Africans who have come to the United States.

Theoretically, an immigrant can be deported if he becomes a public charge within five years of arrival. Between 1961 and 1982, exactly 41 people were deported for that reason, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service stopped counting. Theoretically, also, sponsors of immigrants can be made to pay the charges for indigent immigrants, but the INS makes no effort to force them to.

Mr. Brimelow points out other obvious ways in which immigrants harm the country but that are rarely reported. For example, the millions of immigrant children that the country now feels obliged to teach in their own languages cost schools districts as much as 60 percent more per pupil than children who speak English. Even less well known is the fact that a stubborn core of uninsured Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, is at the heart of America’s fabled “health care crisis.”

The press has reluctantly noticed that Hispanics and South East Asians have helped reestablish tuberculosis in this country, but Mr. Brimelow reminds us that 90 percent of the 6,000 lepers in the United States are immigrants, and that newcomers have also brought cholera, malaria, and dengue fever.

Foreigners also strain the legal system; 15 percent of state prison inmates in California are illegal aliens. A quarter of the prisoners in federal jails are foreigners. Mr. Brimelow tells us law enforcement personnel estimate that an astonishing 75 percent of the 100,000 Nigerians in the country are involved in crime and fraud of some kind.

Like so many government policies, immigration law is shot through with absurdities and special-pleading. The asylee/refugee program is political favoritism for groups that have powerful backers in the United States. Cubans and Soviet Jews are the obvious beneficiaries of sentiment that should presumably be bringing us boatloads of Rwandans, Liberians, and Bosnian Muslims. The program is particularly wasteful because its beneficiaries automatically receive government handouts. Many develop a taste for taxpayer money and never work.

The Irish are another group that benefits from “policy” that is a shameful joke. They get the lion’s share of the 40 to 50 thousand visas that are distributed by lottery. Nothing more surely represents the value Congress places on the prospects for citizenship than to distribute them like winnings in a craps game.

What to do?

Mr. Brimelow would not be opposed to halting immigration completely, but he has many sensible proposals that stop short of that. One obvious measure is actually to control our border with Mexico. Another would be systematically to deport all illegals.

If there is to be immigration we should admit people whom the country actually needs rather than the extended families of the people who came most recently. To those who tout “family reunification,” Mr. Brimelow points out that aliens can always go home; reunification works just as well in Mexico as in El Paso. And what sort of people assimilate best? Mirabile dictu, it is educated, English-speaking white people.

Mr. Brimelow would put an end to the entire “refugee” hoax and stop granting citizenship to the children of people born in America (which now includes children of illegal immigrants). One clever proposal would establish strictly reciprocal immigration rights; since practically no country permits much immigration from the United States, that would quickly solve the problem.

Mr. Brimleow frequently cites past immigration law. In 1800, for example, the residency requirement for naturalization was 14 years as opposed to the current five years. He also notes that the very first naturalization law, passed in 1790, permitted only “free white persons” to become U.S. citizens.

Ultimately, of course, American attitudes must change. Mr. Brimelow writes of being asked by a student at University of Cincinnati Law School: “Isn’t immigration a civil right?” Alien Nation will help change attitudes.

It would be a pleasure to say that this is the perfect volume for our times, but it is defective in surprising and unnecessary ways. The style is so breezy it will blow your hat off. The first chapters skip about in a disorganized way, and the whole book is laced with unilluminating anecdotes about the author and his associates. All this could have been easily fixed. Even so, because Mr. Brimelow marshals so many vital facts from such a clear-eyed perspective, his book could well help nudge the nation back toward sanity.

Unfortunately, it will not be an over-night recovery. He writes of the great upheavals that could wrack the country if it does not change course: “Deep into the 21st century . . . American patriots will be fighting to salvage as much as possible from the shipwreck of their great republic.” Some of those patriots will remember Peter Brimelow.

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Gifted but Short-changed

The May 23rd issue of the Wall Street Journal published a cover story about the recent trend towards eliminating courses for gifted students. The latest theory is that separating children by ability is elitist, if not racist, and that, anyway, smart children are improved by studying with dullards. To their credit, many white parents will not sit still for this nonsense, and have raised a sizable stink. They have forced a number of schools that had tried “mixed classes” to switch back to “tracking.” However, as the Journal explains, the return to grouping by ability usually works only in all-white schools. Integrated schools invariably have too many whites and Asians in the advanced classes and too many blacks and Hispanics in the slow classes, and such demonstrations of racial differences are unacceptable. [Sarah Lubman, Parents flunk schools that put gifted pupils with lower achievers, WSJ, 5/23/95, p. 1.]

In the meantime, a recent study of a group of 1,500 children identified as gifted in 1922 shows that brains are a bonus even in old age. These people are healthier than average, and more likely than other old people still to be at work in their professions. Those who have retired are involved to an unusual degree in hobbies and volunteer work. During their careers, this group was far more successful than average, and many became nationally known. Ninety-five percent of the men chose professional careers or were business executives, but only 40 percent of the women did so.

Another recent study has shown that 93 percent of the Ph.D candidates at the nation’s five highest-ranking math and science graduate schools had test scores in the seventh grade that put them in the top one half percent of all students. [Betsy White, Gifted kids live up to potential, study says, Atlanta Journal/Constitution, 4/23/95, p. A4.]

Hot Momma

Madeline Vasquez is the president of the parents’ association of her child’s school in East Harlem, New York — or at least she was this spring, when she collected $800 from children for class photographs. The money proved to be too great a temptation, and she spent it, but this meant she had to account for it. She decided to engineer an emergency that would require evacuation of the school building and then claim that the money, which she would say she had left in the principal’s office, had been stolen while the building was empty.

Her first try, phoning in a bomb threat, failed because the school was not evacuated. She then hit upon the idea of setting fire to the school, which she did at 9:15 a.m. on April 4th. The blaze sent some 650 children screaming into the streets, and two teachers had to be treated for smoke inhalation. In May, her story began to unravel, and she confessed to setting the fire. [Dan Janison, Jeff Simmons & Eric Stirgus, Parents’ prez sets school afire to hide theft: cops, NY Post, 5/9/95, p. 14.]

Whites See Red

The White Officers Association has brought suit against the Houston Police Department because it is the only employee group forbidden to recruit members at the Houston police academy. Four other racial and ethnic groups do this routinely. So far, this would be an ordinary if mildly encouraging story — except that the white officers are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Perhaps the organization may some day take its name seriously again. [White police group sees red, — — Law Journal, 5/15/95, White officer’s association of the Houston Police Department v. Houston Police Department, 95-1274 (S.D. Texas).]

Unbearable

In May, the carcass of a 150 pound female bear was found dumped in a public park. Several of its internal organs had been cut out and replaced with a crucifix, which suggests that this was the work of Santeria devotees. The bear was found, of all places, in Forest Park, in the New York borough of Queens. “This is the first time this has happened in a New York City park,” says the Parks Commissioner, who has offered a $2,500 reward for information on the killer. [Philip Messing, $2,500 reward for bear killer, NY Post, 5/24/95.]

Blacks Circling Wagons

They must know they are in trouble. A group of black businessmen have established a new Political Action Committee that will give money only to candidates who support racial preferences for blacks. One of the founders and a spokesman for the PAC is Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. [Stephanie Mehta, New PAC of top black entrepreneurs could aid affirmative-action defenses, WSJ, 5/10/95.]

Fault Lines Widen

There were two sadly similar stories in the May 9 issue of the New York Post. In April, 1993, five Brooklyn “youths” found a white woman jogging alone on the Coney Island boardwalk. They dragged her under the boardwalk, where they took turns raping, sodomizing, punching, and kicking her. The crime, committed against a recent immigrant to the United States, caused a stir at the time. This May, the “youths” were given plea-bargained sentences that ranged from four-to-ten years to seven-to-21 years. They showed utterly no remorse, and laughed and joked as their lawyers spoke with the judge.

One convict’s mother then claimed her son got a harsh sentence because he was black. “When did you ever hear of anyone getting 20 years for rape?” she wanted to know. A father ranted about blacks being persecuted by a white criminal justice system. [Andrea Peyser, Why Coney Island Thugs will laugh all the way to prison, NY Post, 5/9/95, p. 8.]

On the same day, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, another black was sentenced to life in prison plus 100 years. In 1992, 25-year-old Scott Johnson abducted a 35-year-old white woman and her three-year-old daughter at a shopping mall. He left the child in a rural area, where she wandered along for eight hours. He raped the woman and then killed her, stabbing her 40 times.

The victim’s husband was disappointed that the killer was not sentenced to death. “Justice is not being served until that animal is dead,” he told the court. Mr. Johnson shot back with “You better stop calling me an animal, motherf*****.” The husband beckoned to Johnson and shouted “Come on,” but bailiffs prevented a fight. At one point, the victim’s sister screamed “Why, why did you have to kill her?” Mr. Johnson smirked. As he was led from the courtroom, members of the victim’s family shouted “Animal, animal, animal.” [Jennifer Havilah, Mockery of Justice, NY Post, May 9, 1995, p. 9.]

Whites who have experiences like this — and there will be more of them — are not likely to be receptive to today’s propaganda about equality and integration.

America Without Americans

Carrillo Castro, former Mexican consul to Chicago and current Minister of Foreign Affairs, is urging his country to loosen restrictions on Mexican dual nationality. He wants American “citizens” to be able to vote in the United States without feeling they have abandoned their ties to Mexico. As he explains, this would give Mexicans more influence in the United States and would help prevent passage of restrictive immigration laws. If the Mexican government makes dual nationality legal, we can expect a huge wave of naturalizations — strictly in the interests of Mexico. [Teresa Puente, Mexicans back dual nationality, Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1995, Sec. 2, p. 3.]

Meanwhile, an Africa-America “roots summit” ended in Dakar, Senegal, with a call for American blacks to “take a stake in their ancestral home” by applying for dual citizenship in African countries. Leon Sullivan, a long-time black activist, led the call, claiming that he is already a citizen of Gabon, Gambia, and Ivory Coast. The “summit” also called for reduction and forgiveness of African debt, which is estimated at about $300 billion. [Reuters, Africa-America summit urges dual citizenship for U.S. blacks, News and Observer (Charlotte), 5/6/95.]

Looking Into the Abyss

How sad it must be to be honest, clear-sighted, and black. Keith Richburg, a black American who spent several years as a reporter in Africa for the Washington Post, recently summed up his experiences in the paper’s April 10-16 issue of its weekly edition.

“I’ve seen monumental greed and corruption, brutality, tyranny, and evil,” he writes, in order to explain a feeling that has been building up within him. “I’m no longer even going to pretend to block that feeling from my mind. I empathize with Africa’s pain . . . But most of all I feel secretly glad that my ancestor made it out — because now, I am not one of them.” “There, but for the grace of God go I,” he adds, with rare candor. Mr. Richburg knows very well that his ancestor was shipped to America in chains, but he writes, “I thank God my ancestor made that voyage.”

In a long article that covers many countries and many horrors, Mr. Richburg writes about the hypocrisy of the second Africa-America “summit,” held in Gabon in May, 1993: “[It was] a nauseating outpouring of praise from black Americans for a coterie of Africa’s most ruthless strongmen and dictators. There were such famous champions of civil rights as Jesse Jackson heaping accolades on the likes of Nigeria’s number one military thug at the time, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida . . .”

Near the end of his Africa assignment he wrote from Somalia: “I write this surrounded by my own high fence, protected by two large dogs, a security guard, a silent alarm system and a large metal door that I bolt shut at night to keep ‘Africa’ from coming across the yard and bashing in my brains with a panga knife for the $200 in my desk drawer. I am tired and . . . ready to go.”

What part of Africa will he miss? “Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, and one can feel perfectly at peace on the veranda of the Bay Hotel. But all I remember thinking was: Imagine all the horror that lies between here and Cairo, in that vast stretch of earth we call black Africa.”

Mr. Richburg has taken a new assignment in Southeast Asia. [Keith Richburg, A Black American in Africa, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, April 10-16, 1995, pp. 6ff.]

African-America

We belatedly report a story from the recent aldermanic elections in Chicago. Candidate Hal Baskin decided to make a campaign issue of the fact that his opponent, the four-year incumbent, Shirley Coleman, was once married to a man now scheduled for execution for rape and murder. “She may not have been giving the man what he needed at home,” Mr. Baskin explained to reporters, “and that is maybe the reason he went out there on one of those rape sprees.”

Mr. Baskin was, himself, scarcely a model candidate. He acknowledged a long arrest record for everything from disorderly conduct to murder, but pointed out proudly that he was acquitted of the murder charge. Mr. Baskin was defeated. [Mary Johnson & Maudlyne Ihejirika, Foe blames alderman for ex-husband’s crimes, Chi Sun-Times, 3/18/95, p. 1.]

Every Governor Has It

Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, DC and former jail bird, would like to have the power to pardon criminals. He claims that the district is essentially a state, and since the governors of states can pardon criminals, he should have the same power. When asked if he had anyone in mind for a pardon, he replied “No. C’mon, it’s general.” [Beg Your Pardon, Washington Times (Metropolitan Times), April 19, 1995, p. C2.]

Berry Wise

Mary Frances Berry is a black woman who has had a full government career as a promoter of the black race. In 1984, during one of her stints at the public trough, she wrote that civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.

She is co-author of a book, also published in 1984, called Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. She says this about the Johnson years: “Although most historians have dismissed the claims of Afro-Americans that the United States had inaugurated a campaign of genocide against black people . . . as unfounded [and] hysterical, the threat of genocide was real.”

She also explains why so few blacks recognized the extraordinary promise of Soviet communism: “[They were] subjected to a massive barrage of propaganda from American news media . . . [so that] few of them knew about Russia’s constitutional safeguards for minorities, the extent of equal opportunity or the equal provision of social services to its citizens.” [Eric Briendel, Review panel with affirmative accents, 3/29/95, p. A23.] Mrs. Berry is currently chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

All in the Mind

A recent study finds that while 90 percent of white junior-high and high-school girls are unsatisfied with their body weights, 70 percent of black girls are perfectly happy with theirs. Even quite fat ones say they are content with their bodies. Although black girls agreed that “very overweight” women should diet, they define this as someone who “takes up two seats on a bus.” Black boys apparently see things the same way. “You got to be real fat for me to notice,” explains one Harlem 15-year-old. [Michele Ingrassia, The body of the beholder, Newsweek, 4/24/95, pp. 66ff.]

Brave to the End

We have reported twice (March and April, 1995) on the killing of Michael Westerman, the young Kentucky father of twins, who was shot by blacks because he was flying a Confederate battle flag from the back of his pickup truckConfederate Veteran, the official publication of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, has also decided to denounce the crime. They courageously report that Mr. Westerman was killed by “youths,” race unspecified.

In the meantime, the Clinton justice department is keeping its record spotless. So far, it has not prosecuted a single non-white for committing a hate crime against a white, and has declined to so classify the murder of Michael Westerman. [Michael Hedges, Killing blamed on rebel flag unfurls racial tension in Kentucky, Wash Times, 3/29/95, p. 1.]

Report from the Sun People

Leonard Jeffries is the chairman of the African-American studies department of the City College of New York. He is the well-known black supremacist who got into a scrape a few years ago for denouncing Jews, but he is now safely back at his academic post. He consented to be interviewed in the May 1995 issue of Rutherford magazine:

Q: Do you think America can ever move beyond its history of slavery?

A: No, never. Four hundred years of the devastation of 100 million black people can never be dealt with, not in a thousand years . . .

Q: What does America need to do, then?

A: Reparations. That’s what it’s all about.

Q: What kind of reparations are you talking about?

A: Everything you can think of . . .

Q: So this concept of black and white living peacefully together is just a fantasy?

A: We can’t live peacefully together, slave and master. How can a slave live peacefully with his master?

Q: But the black man is no longer a slave.

A: The slave should be waking up, thinking of ways to slit the slavemaster’s throat . . .

Q: What kind of world do you want to leave to your children?

A: A world in which there aren’t any white people . . .

Q: Would you just wipe them off the earth if you could?

A: It’s not necessary. They’re doing that job themselves. [T.L. Stanclu & Nisha Mohammed, Leonard Jeffries Jr., Rutherford, May 1995, p. 13.]

To Privilege Born

The career of black Congressman Mel Reynolds of Chicago is a sorry example of where affirmative action can lead. The former Rhodes scholar and Ivy Leaguer is now charged with statutory rape, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering.

Probably no white man has ever had the opportunity to drop out of Yale University, Yale Law School, and Harvard Law School, but Mr. Reynolds failed to get degrees at all three. He finally graduated from the University of Illinois. A Yale classmate remembers that Mr. Reynolds always sought special treatment: “He didn’t attend a lot of his finals. He always did them at home. He always had a ‘personal problem.’ He had a ‘family problem’ and he’d have to do it [the exam] by himself . . .”

A University of Illinois professor who recommended him for a Rhodes scholarship freely admits that he pushed him ahead of better qualified whites because “we were thinking that a black person, a person of stature and strength, could make a difference in the black community that a white man couldn’t.” At Oxford, the warden of Rhodes House says, “I either remember he failed all his exams or had to take them twice and showed the deepest reluctance to face his examiners . . . I think he expected special terms.”

He once showed up for an Oxford exam with his arm in a sling, claiming he had been hurt in a basketball game, though none of the other basketball players remembered the injury. When he learned that some people thought he was faking, he said “[White] people always talk about African-Americans because they are racist pigs.”

One fellow Rhodes scholar who is also in Congress rented Mr. Reynolds a house in Washington. After Mr. Reynolds racked up $6,000 in unpaid bills, his fellow congressman threw him out. In all, creditors are pursuing Mr. Reynolds and his wife, Marisol, for an estimated $145,000 in bad debts.

During his campaign for Congress, Mr. Reynolds was the media darling, and got sympathetic coverage when a bullet smashed the windshield of his campaign car. Reporters obediently assumed the shot was fired by a political opponent, but many now suspect Mr. Reynolds staged the event himself.

Last August, a campaign worker accused the congressman of having sex with her when she was sixteen. Although the woman is black, Mr. Reynolds blames the accusation on racism. He has since been charged with paying her to keep her quiet, falsifying evidence, and obstructing justice.

His early supporters express great disappointment in him, but they made Mel Reynolds what he is today. They helped him get away with so much, there was little reason for him to believe he would ever have to play by the rules. [Ellen Warren, Amid hopes, always doubts, Chi Tribune, 5/7/95, p. 1.]

No Pearls Found

Fred Reed is a newspaper columnist who often writes about law enforcement. In a recent column, he described the job of a patrolman:

A funny thing about police work is the sense of isolation a cop feels on some beats, an almost Lewis-and-Clark feeling of being on his own in Indian country . . . As white guys in a black-and-Latin region, we were ethno-culturally in the wrong solar system . . .

It felt like scuba diving. The fish on the reef were not necessarily hostile but, when you got down to it, they were still fish. The reef is their home, not yours. [Fred Reed, In rotting cities, a cop is largely on his own, Washington Times, 3/27/95, p. C2.]

White Man’s Burden

Arnold O’Donnell is a very unusual man. He is co-owner, with his brother John, of a small construction company that specializes in repairing streets and sidewalks. His customers are almost always local governments. He works in the District of Columbia — and he is white.

He points out that the work his company does is the very kind that is usually set aside for minorities. He says that over the years he has been prevented from bidding on “several hundred projects” because he is white. Last November, for example, all the road-building work for the expansion of Washington National Airport was restricted to “disadvantaged” businesses. Mr. O’Donnell points out that if anyone is disadvantaged in bidding for Washington, DC contracts, it is a white owner of a small construction company.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, which decides who is “disadvantaged,” has designated the following protected classes: blacks, Asians, Hispanics, American Indians, and people from Burma, Singapore, Laos, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Sri Lanka or Bhutan. [Karen Riley, Bearing the white man’s burden?, Wash Times, 4/5/95, p. A1.] We have never heard of racial discrimination against Bhutanese, but it is nice to know that the Department of Transportation is looking out for them.

Unemployer of Last Resort

Blacks are more than three times as likely as whites to be dismissed from federal employment. Hispanics and Asians are dismissed at essentially the same rate as whites. This news has been widely reported and has prompted the expected calls for investigation into government “racism.” It has been rarely pointed out that the divergence in firing rates is strictly in the “misconduct” category, which includes embezzlement, insubordination, and violence. When federal workers are fired merely for poor job performance — apparently this sometimes happens — blacks are no more likely to be dismissed than whites. [Karen de Witt, Blacks Prone to dismissal by the U.S., NYT, 4/20/95.]

All-American Boy

Tyson Beckford is 24 years old and shaves his head. He is also the first black model to sign an exclusive contract with Ralph Lauren to model the company’s clothing and accessories. “Tyson has an all-American look with a dramatic edge,” explains Mr. Lauren. [NYT, 3/18/95.]

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LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — In my earlier letter to AR I criticized Michael Levin’s article on racial differences in morality in admittedly harsh terms, so I can’t complain about his wanting to hit back strongly at me in his second article. However, Prof. Levin also has an obligation to be truthful. Referring to a previous article of mine, he misrepresents my statements in such a way as to suggest that my position on racial matters is essentially the same as his own. The end-result is to portray my criticisms as confused or even two-faced: “It is surprising how many Lawrence Austers there can be,” Prof. Levin concludes. This is a serious charge, and requires a careful response.

Prof. Levin says that in my article in the August 1994 issue of AR, I “expressed the view that different races have different ‘way[s] of being.’” Well, perhaps in many cases they do, but that is not what I said. What I said was: “[N]ot all groups are equally assimilable to each other, in the sense of the ability to come to share a common outlook, identity and way of being.” Prof. Levin has thus altered my statement, which concerned differing capacities for cultural assimilation among various racial or cultural groups, so as to make it resemble his own belief in racially (i.e. genetically) determined moral differences.

Nor did I say, as Prof. Levin claims, that “disengagement from nonwhites is, for whites, ‘the most reasonable and commonsensical thing in the world.”’ What I said was that for whites to “care about the survival of their race vis-a-vis other races” was the most reasonable and commonsensical thing in the world. I mentioned “disengagement” as one of the possible ways such survival might be pursued, and I further spoke of racial separation from blacks only as a last resort  — all of which has a very different “feel” from saying that racial separation per se is the most reasonable thing in the world.

However, these are trifles compared with Prof. Levin’s charge that in criticizing him I contradicted myself.

In my August 1994 article I said that blacks as a group lack the cumulative level of intellectual ability required to maintain an advanced society, and I added that if blacks continue to insist on their own racial agenda in opposition to the identity and mores of white America then there may be no alternative but separation. I also insisted that the collective or average character of the black race should not reflect on individual blacks, many of whom are capable both of functioning in Western society and of getting along, as individuals, “on a basis of equality and mutual recognition” with whites. By contrast, Prof. Levin, writing in what struck me as a chilling and ruthless tone, applied his thesis about a low, average black morality to each and every black, in order to prove that whites are justified in their “wish to avoid blacks.” The blanket phrase “to avoid blacks” plainly suggests that all whites as individuals are justified in shunning all blacks as individuals. Prof. Levin and I are thus saying entirely different things.

This raises a larger issue. If we are to have any chance of building a successful race-conscious politics, which in my view is the sine qua non of national survival, we must be able to show that such a politics is based on moral principle. Millions of white Americans have been paralyzed in the face of third-world immigration and other racial threats to our survival, because they have absorbed the liberal view that there is no moral distinction between a person who wants to preserve a white-majority America and one who regards nonwhites as inferior or subhuman. By seeking to equate our positions, and accusing me of being hypocritical for attacking his, Prof. Levin inadvertently makes a similar mistake — and contributes to the same paralysis.

In closing, I apologize to Prof. Levin, Mr. Taylor, and AR’s readers for the excessively harsh tone of my earlier letter. However (as can be seen by the foregoing) I stand by its substance.

Lawrence Auster, New York City

Sir — In September 1993, I helped found a student organization at Temple Law School called the Western Heritage Society. We promote free speech on public policy issues and have invited outspoken conservatives like Samuel Francis, Joseph Sobran, Larry Auster, Linda Gottfredson, and Jared Taylor to speak on campus.

From our very first lecture, Temple has opposed us. University authorities have ordered that our posters be torn down. Dean Robert Reinstein once tried to charge us $500 to use an empty lecture hall, and gave orders to campus security that prevented people from hearing Joseph Sobran. After I went to Harvard to receive the First Amendment Coalition’s student activism award, Dean Reinstein posted a letter denouncing me on Law School bathroom walls.

About two weeks later, someone tried to mug me on the steps of the Law School. I had already been mugged three times since I matriculated, so I sprayed my attacker with pepper gas. Dean Reinstein used this as a pretext to call me a “clear and present danger” to campus safety and suspended me for 2½ years. Incidentally, Temple has admitted as a student someone who served time in jail for murder.

I have been fighting a legal battle to be readmitted to Temple. If you can help or would just like more information about my case, please write:

Lincoln Herbert, 155 Windsor Ave., Lansdowne, Penn. 19050

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