November 1997

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 8, No.11 November 1997

 

CONTENTS

Today’s Defeat Will Be Tomorrow’s Victory
The Galton Report
Book Review: Sex, Lies, Race, and AIDS
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Today’s Defeat Will Be Tomorrow’s Victory

Outspent and outmanned, we ran an uncompromising, feisty campaign on Eurocentric principles.

by Frank Borzellieri

Early on in 1997, in an attempt to give Eurocentrists a voice in the belly of the multicultural beast, I decided to run for a seat on the New York City Council. I risked an uphill battle against a powerful Republican incumbent because he had arranged a sweetheart deal with the Democrats to run unopposed in the general election. If I could win in the primary there would be no Democrat to fight in November.

Frank Borzellieri

Frank Borzellieri with some of the books he advocated be used in schools.

In what turned out to be more than a symbolic gesture, my campaign authorized and paid for a solicitation from Jared Taylor to supporters of American Renaissance, asking for donations to our campaign. When the smoke finally cleared on Election Day, we had been outspent by a margin of seven to one in an election we lost by a vote of two to one. But the reverberations of our campaign will be felt for a long time to come.

We lost, all right, but not for the reasons most people would suspect. There are lessons to be drawn from every campaign, and I would like to offer my perspective on what happened and why.

The overwhelming majority of people have very little conception of how a political campaign works. Electoral politics — the specific endeavor of trying to get more votes than an opponent — is very hard-headed, brutal, exhausting business. Issues matter, but they matter only if all other things are equal. And more often than not — especially in local elections — things are not equal. What makes them unequal, of course, is financing. As the saying goes, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”

Many people believe that political campaigns are exciting, glamorous, Hollywood-type affairs, with teams of advisors huddled in back rooms devising strategy while the candidate is out shaking hands. This can be the case but it usually is not. In my case, as with most insurgents, the black cloud that hung over the campaign from day one was the constant need for money. Without it, you cannot run a serious campaign. I was, therefore, spending more time than I should have on the telephone asking for money or asking supporters to raise money.

Money is far more important in a local race than it is in one for President, governor, or mayor of a big city. While money is important in big races, it is not likely to be the crucial factor. First of all, in order even to reach the point of running for major office, a candidate must already have a lot of money. Also, major races get so much free media coverage that advertising is far less important.

For example, why did Bob Dole close the gap by about 12 points on President Clinton immediately following the Republican National Convention? Very simple. For four days the American people heard nothing but speeches about how great Bob Dole is. Within a few weeks, the Clinton campaign had its convention and the numbers changed again. But in a local election, where public opinion is not swayed by nightly reports on the television news, it is mainly a candidate’s ability to pay to get his message out that counts. “Issues” certainly matter, but they matter only if the voters hear about them.

Issues matter most when there is saturation coverage. That is why no one would ever claim New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and President Bill Clinton were re-elected because they outspent their opponents. They were simply perceived, rightly or wrongly, as having done a good job and as better alternatives to their opponents.

Contrary to what our detractors would love to claim, I did not lose because of the issues AR readers care about. I lost because we didn’t have the money to publicize them. In fact, my opponent saw so much merit in my views that he began sounding just like me.

Challenging an incumbent is a daunting task. The advantages of incumbency are enormous — usually insurmountable — and this is especially true in New York State. Just as with financing, incumbency is much more important on the local level than in a major, high-profile race. Campaigns for Senator or mayor of a big city are generally judged by the voters on the merits and incumbents often lose.

On the local level, incumbency is tantamount to lifetime tenure. The re-election rate for local office holders in New York State is 98 percent, a rate higher than the 90 percent rate for United States Congress. (Even in 1994, the year of the “Republican revolution,” in which a massive turnover supposedly took place, the most important advantage was not being a Republican, but an incumbent; incumbents were still re-elected at an 88 percent clip.)

There are many reasons why incumbency is so important on the local level, but the most important, again, is money. The ability to raise money, the power of the political machine that all incumbents enjoy, the reluctance of people to donate to a challenger for fear of repercussion, the free “name-recognition” that an incumbent receives — not only from the press but from “constituent” mailings paid for with tax money — all contribute to this built-in advantage.

If incumbency is an enormous advantage throughout America, in New York it is practically a coronation. It is the incumbents, of course, who write the laws, and they write them to favor themselves. Even becoming a candidate (getting your name placed on the ballot) is extremely difficult without the power of a political machine. Qualifications vary from state to state, but in New York we have what is called the “petition process,” in which supporters circulate petitions on behalf of a candidate and get the required number of signatures. The number of signatures is ridiculously high — so high that a federal judge had to step in in 1996 and order Pat Buchanan put on the ballot for the Republican Presidential Primary, stating that the qualification process violated New Yorkers’ rights to a democratic election.

For my City Council race, we needed a total of 800 signatures. Since signatures are subsequently open to “challenge” and disqualification, the rule of thumb is to try to get double the number needed, in order to withstand a challenge. In our case, we got over 1,700 signatures. Eight hundred or even 1,700 signatures may not seem like a lot, but these names usually have to be gotten house to house, and only registered Republicans can sign. It takes an inhuman amount of time and effort.

An incumbent can easily get signatures because of the power of his political machine, that is to say, the large number of people who are employees of the incumbent or are part of the official local political committee. They are always ready to work for or help an incumbent. An insurgent candidacy must devote all its time and energy to qualifying.

When our petitions were filed, they were immediately “challenged,” meaning the authenticity of the signatures was legally questioned. If a sufficient number of signatures can be shown to be invalid and “knocked off,” thereby reducing the number below the minimum, the candidate is disqualified. Signatures are invalid if they can be shown to be forgeries, duplicates, or of people not qualified to vote in the election.

New York incumbents routinely “challenge” opponents’ signatures, both at the Board of Elections and in the courts. This can be done on any pretext, merely to force the candidate to spend money on lawyers’ fees and paralyze his campaign. The law in New York does not punish frivolous legal challenges to petitions — there are no sanctions and the loser does not pay court costs — so any well-funded candidate has nothing to lose by taking his opponent’s petitions to court. But first they have to be challenged before the New York City Board of Elections, which is supposed to make an objective determination about the probable invalidity of the petitions before the case goes before a judge.

If you want to see a Kangaroo court in action, forget the old Soviet Union; just visit a hearing of the board. The Deputy Director of the board was my opponent’s wife (!) who sat on stage overseeing the group of trained seals that shamelessly violated its own rules by allowing the process to move forward to court without any justification. One independent panelist — ironically, a liberal Democrat from Manhattan — stood up in protest over this outrage, blasted the other nine members, and gave my opponent’s wife an icy stare. A more open-minded, fair decision could have been expected from the O.J. Simpson criminal trial jury.

On to court we went, where we were forced to spend thousands of dollars on attorneys’ fees. Of course, our petitions were perfect. The judge scolded my opponent’s lawyer, essentially accusing him of bringing a frivolous suit, declared my petitions valid, and ordered my name put on the ballot. But my opponent’s strategy worked. A lot of money that we had painstakingly raised could not go toward fliers, mailings, advertising or anything else for the campaign.

Not Entirely Alone

Nevertheless, the campaign began well enough. Although I was battling my opponent, his machine, the Board of Elections, the media and the entire political establishment, I was not entirely alone. Former New York State Republican candidate for governor Herbert London endorsed me, as did a former local assemblywoman. National Review said some kind words about me in an editorial, and Sam Francis wrote favorably about me in his syndicated column. But outside of that, the world was out to stop us at any cost.

In announcing my candidacy, I accused my opponent of selling out on all issues conservatives care about — official English, racial quotas, funding illegal immigrants, term limits, the right to bear arms — and declared myself the true Republican. The next night we debated on New York 1, a local cable station. The moderator, a black reporter, asked me, “Do you believe that someone who would refer to Dr. Martin Luther King as a “leftist hoodlum’ should sit on the City Council?” “Yes,” I replied, “that’s me.”

For most of the debate I slammed my opponent for ignoring crucial issues, while he bent over backwards trying to convince the audience he was a real conservative. By all accounts — even those of the adversary press — I pummeled him. After the debate, he appeared shaken. Needless to say, he did not agree to any more debates for the rest of the campaign.

Instead, he pulled out the awesome machinery that only incumbents enjoy. For the next four weeks, he continuously mailed out expensive, glossy, sophisticated mailings emphasizing official English, immigration reform and all the other issues he was stealing from me. And he could do this at taxpayers’ expense.

Under the guise of “reports to constituents,” he spent roughly $75,000 of tax money promoting his campaign. Incumbents are allowed by law to make tax-payer-financed mailings of this kind (which must not mention the challenger’s name) up until ten days before the election! And why not? It is the incumbents who write the laws. Rather than run a fair election — man vs. man on the issues, on our records, and on the merits — my opponent realized in a hurry that his only road to victory would be to outspend us by a huge margin, and bury us under an avalanche of mailings and advertisements, as all incumbents do and only incumbents can.

There was such a difference in campaign volume that my opponent could actually give the impression that he was the only candidate. Since voters were getting swamped with his mail, many probably didn’t know they could vote for me unless they read about it in the newspaper. Much as I would love to blame my defeat on the liberal media, which demonized me, I cannot honestly do so. After all, sensible people see through absurd charges of racism. The problem was money.

A perfect example of the wonderful things money can accomplish in a campaign is “voter ID and pull.” The concept is simple, effective — and very expensive. It was actually first articulated by Lincoln, who said, “Identify who your voters are and get them to the polls on election day.” Simple though this is, it cannot be done on the cheap.

“Voter ID” entails sending out “preliminary” mailings touching on the candidate and his pet issues. A phone bank is then run to contact the entire eligible enrollment to “ID” the voters most likely to vote for your candidate. You now have a prime list of “favorables” whom you can target for “get-out-the-vote” mailings at the end, as well as the crucial “pull” telephone operation in the final days. You can ignore voters identified as favorable to your opponent or you can target them with negative mailings to diminish his support. In a primary, where turnout is always low, “voter ID and pull” — the ability to identify your supporters and get them to the polls — is crucial. Needless to say, my opponent had the money to do this and we did not.

I wanted to make race, immigration and multiculturalism the issues in this campaign, not only because these were the issues on which I was well known and had used so successfully in winning elections in the past, but because the voters are hungering for someone in high office to address these issues in a realistic manner. All politicians run for the tall grass on these issues but, much to the chagrin of the establishment, I had proven that, when articulated in a no-nonsense manner, these issues are winners. With our finances badly bled by the court challenge, we were unable to get the message out. We did manage to make several mailings near the end, but a very effective piece on immigration, for example, which got a good response, we could afford to send to only one section of the district.

My campaign consisted mainly of my going house to house for months — I lost 17 pounds in the process — and my volunteers working the phones, stuffing envelopes, and attaching labels. Our campaign was run by devoted, hard-working people (including an AR subscriber who flew in from Chicago and manned the phones for a day) but it lacked the resources to compete on a fair playing field.

Surprisingly, the press treated me decently for a time. They played up my complaints about my opponent spending tax dollars on his campaign and stealing my issues. They also mentioned the scandalous court challenge to my petitions, which bankrupted the campaign. However, things returned to form when a columnist for the New York Daily News wrote about me so unfairly that even other reporters were amazed.

An affirmative-action writer named Albor Ruiz entitled his column “Just Conservative — or a Plain Bigot?” “Frank Borzellieri,” he wrote, “who wants to be a City Council member, believes that slavery was a good thing.” Of course, my point was that blacks enjoy a higher standard of living in the United States than they do anywhere else in the world, so it is a fact that the act of bringing slaves to North America benefited today’s blacks. But my opponent played the Ruiz slander to the hilt, calling me “a dangerous man, looking to hurt people.” For the remainder of the campaign, he was constantly quoted as calling me as “a skinhead with curls.”

AR Becomes an Issue

After I had had lunch with him one day, a New York Times reporter called me late that night at home to ask about something he had found on the Internet: an appeal for assistance “from someone named Jared Taylor.” AR had become an issue in the campaign. Neither Mr. Taylor nor I had any idea that his appeal had been posted on the Internet, but when I was questioned about it, I impressed upon the reporter that I was proud to have AR’s support and that the appeal was, indeed, bringing in money. The press and my opponent went crazy.

My opponent, who had never heard of Jared Taylor, started referring to him as a “neo-Nazi,” and the appeal letter was quoted at length in the local press. Mr. Taylor and I both spoke to reporters about AR, emphasizing that conferences draw mainstream figures including professors, columnists, and clergymen.

Still the rumor about “neo-Nazis” went all the way to the top. New York Governor George Pataki, who ordered the Georgia state flag removed from the capital building in Albany because it represented “racism,” reportedly said at one of my opponent’s fundraisers, “I normally do not get involved in Republican primaries, but in this case I must take a stand because one candidate is getting money from hate-mongers.” My opponent circulated a letter to a local civic group, the Ridgewood Property Owners, an organization whose members had contributed to my campaign and that consists mostly of old Germans. The letter, written by a former member of their board of directors and a supporter of my opponent, stated, “Mr. Borzellieri fancies himself an advocate for white people and has adopted the point of view of American Renaissance, a neo-Nazi organization . . . God forbid Mr. Borzellieri were to be elected, he would cast a pall of bigotry on our community, and our community would become the battleground for racial violence from fringe extremist groups . . .”

At the public meeting of the Ridgewood Property Owners, at which both candidates spoke, this juvenile letter went over like a lead balloon. Ridgewood is my home neighborhood and the members know me well. Neither my opponent nor I mentioned the letter in our remarks. The important point is, once again, that if the election were actually decided on these things, with finances being relatively equal, I would have been the clear winner. I half-jokingly asked my opponent in a private moment to please send the letter throughout the district, as it would win the election for me.

As the campaign drew to a close, the newspapers weighed in with official endorsements. The Queens Tribune, in a hysterical editorial, wrote that my opponent is “a man of compassion who believes in simple things like equality for all. His opponent is a racist, reactionary embarrassment who does not. Frank Borzellieri, who calls himself “Euro-centric’ is a white supremacist cloaked in intellectual disguise. He is the most unacceptable candidate to run in this borough in our paper’s 27-year history of covering politics. He brings to the debate the most vile and ugly of human feelings. Voters must turn out to reject the racism he espouses.” Whew!

The Queens Gazette, always more sympathetic to me, also did a major article on the AR angle, stating I had some good ideas on education but needed “more maturity” (translation: become more liberal.) The major New York papers naturally, endorsed my opponent. It was in the same, final week of the campaign that the favorable National Review editorial appeared, noting my position that illegal immigrants should be “rounded up and deported.”

During this period I spoke by phone to Mr. Taylor nearly every night. Exhausted though I was, I assured him that we must hold firm and emphasize that the majority of citizens agree with the AR point of view. A candidate must publicly stand with American Renaissance, whatever the consequences, and I was proud to do this.

Temporary Setback

Despite this temporary setback, there are several points that I must emphasize. First, I have won every election that I have run (primaries and school board) in which my opponents did not enjoy an overwhelming financial advantage. In other words, when the campaigns were decided on issues (and I have always emphasized the kinds of issues discussed in AR) I was the winner. All these elections took place in the same general geographic boundaries. In 1994, I won two primaries against an even more powerful incumbent member of the New York state legislature, when the number of votes needed was small enough that I could afford the campaign. (I lost in the general election when I was outspent 12 to one.)

In 1996, I made history by obtaining more votes, relative to my opponents, than any school board candidate in New York City history. The point I stress is that we will win when we are not outspent seven to one, as we were in this election. We won on the issues, as even my opponent’s literature proves. Thanks to our campaign, he (at least temporarily) got religion.

I also want to emphasize that if I made one mistake, it was in not making an all-out, nationwide financial appeal to our ideological kindred. Excepting AR, I appealed for funds only in the conventional method — from politicians, community people, etc. AR readers are serious and dedicated — and I am deeply grateful for their generous support. Most people are not serious or dedicated. I generally found that local people, even those who wanted me to win, are basically cowards and bootlickers. Most were afraid of contributing for fear of retaliation. Had I made a more serious appeal to Eurocentrists and middle Americans, we would have been at even strength and we would have won.

I am a strong believer in the need for our people to enter the legislative and electoral process. It is not enough to complain about our problems; we must do something about them. And we must not compromise. There are now term limits on the New York City Council, so the next election will have no incumbent. We know that we are correct in our views, no matter how politically incorrect. I know the terrain well now. Success in New York City will always have national ramifications. If we can learn the lessons of this campaign — and I know we can — the next election will be a victory.

Mr. Borzellieri is an elected member and currently vice president of the District 24 School Board in Queens, New York.

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SPECIAL REPORT

The Galton Report

A sampling of recent science literature.

Food for Thought

Part of the assault on Western Civilization has been to argue that virtually everything that is morally repugnant is the fault of whites, who have ruined noble savage cultures all around the world. Included in this assault has been the denial of cannibalism, now said to be a “myth” created by narrow-minded white explorers and missionaries. Cannibalism is an awkward matter for multiculturalists who claim that all peoples are the moral equal of White Western Christians, so it must be explained away.

It has become fashionable, for example, to suggest that clear marks of stone knives and meat scrapers on human bones were made by “morticians who were cleaning the bones for secondary burial.” And even if the infamous Emperor Bokassa I, dictator of the Central African Republic (1966-1979), did have a freezer full of processed humanity, it was only because white civilization provided the freezer.

Anthropological findings are beginning to reestablish cannibalism. For instance at Mancos, an Anasazi pueblo dating from 1150 A.D., the scattered and broken remains of at least 29 humans were found mixed with other kitchen trash. Like the remains of other prey animals, the bones show cut marks, disarticulations, breakage, burning, and “‘pot polish’ — shiny abrasions on bone tips that come from being stirred in pots.” At Mancos, bones “were the leavings of a feast in which 17 adults and 12 children had their heads cut off, roasted, and broken open on rock anvils. Their long bones were broken [to eat the marrow] . . . Finally, their bones were dumped, like animal bones.” A soon to-be-published book describes similar finds involving “300 individuals from 40 different bone assemblages [piles of bones] in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, dating from A.D. 900 to A.D. 1700.” As one scholar notes, There’s no known mortuary practice in the Southwest where the body is dismembered, the head is roasted and dumped into a pit unceremoniously, and other pieces get left all over the floor.”

In Fiji there are both burial sites and nearby trash middens, with human bones in both. The human remains in the burials are treated quite differently from those in the trash, which were processed just like pig bones. As one observer notes, “This site really challenges the claim that these assemblages of bones are the result of mortuary ritual.”

Paleoanthropologist Tim White of Berkeley scoffs at the “mortuary ritual” argument: “Some (although not all) of the Anasazi and Neanderthals processed their colleagues. They skinned them, roasted them, cut their muscles off, severed their joints, broke their long bones on anvils with hammerstones, crushed their spongy bones, and put the pieces into pots.” He adds: “To say they didn’t eat them is the archaeological equivalent of saying Clinton lit up and didn’t inhale.” [Gibbons, A. (1997). Archaeologists rediscover cannibals. Science, vol. 277 (1 August 1997), pp. 635-637.]

IQ Around the World

Richard Lynn has produced an expanded and updated review of the entire world’s literature on intelligence of races. Prof. Lynn’s excellent interpretations and discussion save this important paper from being nothing more than a catalog of more-of-the-same. Because the issue of black/white differences in intelligence first became a scientific and social question in the unique context of the U.S., it is important to have data from around the world for comparison.

Substantial national samples, some very recent, reaffirm the findings from Prof. Lynn’s previous reviews: Sub-Saharan black Africans, if unhybridized with other races, have an amazingly low average IQ of about 70. A sample of 250 Jewish immigrants into Israel, black Ethiopians, had IQs of 69, a score that is considered “educable mentally retarded” by typical U.S. standards. The sub-Saharan racial hybrids (Coloreds) average around 80, not much different from the average of 85 found in the racially mixed African-American population.

Environmental apologists still invoke poverty as the cause for the relatively poor showing of American blacks. However, the poverty argument won’t wash on a worldwide basis. After the ravages to their economy of years of communism (or perhaps for other cultural reasons), mainland Chinese are considerably worse off than American blacks according to essentially all indices of poverty. Even so, the Chinese slightly exceed American whites on measures of intelligence, averaging about 105 when scaled against a white average of 100.

The poverty-stricken Chinese resemble other East Asian populations of Mongoloid race, such as Japanese, Koreans and Taiwanese, in being particularly high on spatial rather than verbal ability. Prof. Lynn emphases that “the poverty in China has not depressed the intelligence of the population.”

Another nail in the coffin of the poverty hypothesis comes from Bulgaria. At a time when Bulgarian per capita income was only about one third that of American blacks, the white Bulgarian “intelligence levels were substantially higher [that those of blacks] and close to those of American whites.”

It has become rather popular to suggest that “the black/white IQ difference in the United States has been narrowing since the 1960s in parallel with the improvement in the socioeconomic position of blacks.” Prof. Lynn points out that even The Bell Curve suggests a narrowing of the difference. However, research still finds the approximately 15-point difference that has been present since the very first studies of 1917-1918. Prof. Lynn writes that “the evidence suggests that the higher average IQ of American whites, relative to that of blacks, remains unaffected by the improvement of the social and economic position of blacks since the 1960s.”

“The view that genetic differences are involved has been strengthened by three new sources of evidence,” writes Prof. Lynn. “These are the consistency of the race differences across the world, the effects of the adoption of black babies by whites [no effect on black IQ], and the race differences in brain size.” [Lynn, R. (1997). “Geographical variation in intelligence”, Chapter 13 in H. Nyborg (Editor), The Scientific Study of Human Nature, Oxford U.K., Pergamon, pp 259-281.]

No Differences Permitted

The journal Nature Genetics has reported the discovery of the first known genetic mutation that causes familial colorectal cancer (“familial” diseases tend to run in families). News of the mutation, which can be identified by a blood test, was widely reported. Johns Hopkins University will offer the test and the Lerner Foundation of Cleveland will pick up the cost for those who cannot afford to pay — but the test is offered only to people of “Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.” The mutation was found in over six percent of a sample of 766 Ashkenazim, and was present in nearly one-third of Ashkenazim with a family history of colorectal cancer.

“There are over 11.2 million Ashkenazi Jews worldwide,” writes a Johns Hopkins press release “and the researchers estimate that more than 680,000 carry this new mutation.” [Laken, S.J. (and 15 co-authors), (1997). “Familial colorectal cancer in Ashkenazim due to a hypermutable tract in APC.” Nature Genetics, Vol. 17, # 1 (1 September 1997).]

The Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) community was apparently unwilling to let this straightforward scientific statement circulate without adornment. There was probably some worry that people might get the idea that AJs are genetically different from other groups. Heaven forbid anyone might mention that the widely publicized BRCA1 (Breast Cancer) gene is also predominantly an AJ phenomenon, as are a number of other genetic diseases.

In fact, AJs are not a mystery; any racially astute small population that for 2,000 years practiced tight endogamy (inbreeding, often including marriage among family relatives), was xenophobic, and expelled members who bred outside the group, would inevitably sequester a plethora of genetic diseases.

Trust the New York Times to try to set things right in a major article that covered most of the bases: “‘The Jewish community has been understandably concerned about the possibility of discrimination against Ashkenazi Jews on the basis of such findings,’ said Lois Waldman, an officer of the American Jewish Congress . . . This is a serious issue, that the research doesn’t inadvertently stigmatize a particular group . . .”

“The mere act of defining human populations as genetically different holds potential for mischief . . . [T]he level of genetic differentiation among human populations is relatively trivial . . .

[A]ll human populations will prove to be boringly alike . . . [G]enetic ideas have led to horrifying consequences.”

The one ray of light in this article full of smoke and mirrors was a quotation from that intrepid free thinker, James Watson: “Anyone who proclaims we are now perfect as humans has to be a silly crank . . . If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline?” [Wade, N. (1997) “Testing genes to save a life without costing you a job.”New York Times, September 14, 1997.]

Glayde Whitney is professor in psychology, psychobiology and neuroscience at Florida State University.

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BOOK REVIEW

Sex, Lies, Race, and AIDS

Sex At Risk: Lifetime Number of Partners, Frequency of Intercourse, and the Low AIDS Risk of Vaginal Intercourse, Stuart Brody, Transaction Publishers, $32.95, 222 pp.

Although the subtitle of this curious little volume suggests a coherent theme, Sex At Risk is basically three unrelated essays in a single cover. None is specifically about race, but the essay on AIDS transmission includes racial data that are particularly interesting in light of the review of Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters in the previous issue of AR.

Sex At Risk- Lifetime Number of Partners, Frequency of Intercourse, and the Low AIDS Risk of Vaginal Intercourse, Stuart Brody

In this essay, Mr. Brody argues that the risk of a generally healthy person contracting AIDS through vaginal intercourse is virtually nil. He writes that one reason many people think vaginal intercourse is risky is because homosexuals and drug injectors sometimes lie, claiming to have gotten the disease through sex with women. Every undetected lie becomes another recorded but bogus case of vaginally transmitted AIDS.

Mr. Brody points out that many AIDS surveys of heterosexuals do not distinguish between vaginal and anal intercourse. This distinction is crucial. The protective lining of the rectum is much thinner than that of the vagina and is easily ruptured during intercourse, thus permitting passage of the AIDS virus. By failing to distinguish between anal and vaginal intercourse, surveys often leave the mistaken impression that a woman who actually got AIDS through anal intercourse contracted it vaginally. Even when studies distinguish between these two activities, heterosexuals sometimes lie about what they do.

Mr. Brody writes that homosexual activists have encouraged belief in vaginal transmission so as to make AIDS appear to be a general threat rather than “a disease of undesirables.” However, they could not promote this view without the help of people who are willing to lie, and Mr. Brody’s comparative data in this area are striking.

On the general subject of the willingness of people to lie about drug use, Mr. Brody notes a longitudinal study of young adults who were asked in 1980 and again in 1984 if they had ever used marijuana. Of the people who said “yes” in 1980, eight percent of the men and 12 percent of the women said “no” four years later. Women were therefore 50 percent more likely than men to give inconsistent replies, but blacks and Hispanics were 200 percent, or twice as likely as whites, to change their stories.

Mr. Brody also reports studies of what people say to others after they have been officially informed that they are HIV positive: 20 to 40 percent either claim they are negative or that they have never been tested, with blacks and Hispanics considerably more likely than to lie than whites. In a study of alcoholics and drug users, 25 percent of whites and 65 percent of blacks lied about the results. Among bisexual men, blacks are less likely than whites to tell their female partners about their potentially lethal homosexual activities.

Mr. Brody notes that non-whites consistently give more “socially desirable” answers to survey questions than whites do, and that women lie more often than men. He suspects that differences in the willingness to lie explain much of the variation in the reported percentages of the various groups who claim to have gotten the virus through heterosexual intercourse: white men — 0.7 percent, black men — 3.1 percent, white women — 12.1 percent, black women — 15 percent. Of course, to the extent that women are infected by bisexual men who claim to be heterosexual, their high rates of claimed heterosexual infection may reflect their partners’ dishonesty rather than their own.

Entirely apart from the issue of truthfulness, the behavior and perhaps even the biology of non-whites may contribute to their relatively high rates of AIDS. For example, if they are in jail, men who are ordinarily heterosexual may have anal intercourse (voluntarily or involuntarily). Since blacks are six to ten times more likely than whites to be in jail, and since unprotected anal intercourse is one of the most common ways to get AIDS, this contributes to high rates among blacks. It has also been found that black bisexuals have, on average, twice as many female partners as white bisexuals, and are 50 percent more likely to engage in anal intercourse with them.

Arguing by analogy from other sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Brody suggests the possibility that blacks are biologically more susceptible than whites to AIDS. Syphilis rates among blacks are as much as 50 times higher than among whites. Standard transmission models for venereal disease cannot explain such high rates, even considering that blacks have more sex partners. One interesting study of sailors on shore leave who frequented infected prostitutes found that blacks had a one-in-two chance per exposure of getting gonorrhea whereas whites had a one-in-five chance. There may be unknown biological characteristics that explain this difference.

Behavior and biology may both help explain high rates of “heterosexual” AIDS in Africa. Anal intercourse is a common form of contraception among Africans. Female genital mutilation may also encourage anal intercourse if the vagina is painful or never heals completely. An improperly healed vagina is also a less effective barrier against infection during vaginal intercourse. At the same time, African medical personnel often reuse hypodermic needles without sterilizing them, and widespread chronic disease makes Africans generally more susceptible to HIV.

In sex and disease, as in so many other things, the facts bear out Prof. Levin’s contention that race does, indeed, matter — 0.7 percent, black men — 3.1 percent, white women — 12.1 percent, black women — 15 percent. Of course, to the extent that women are infected by bisexual men who claim to be heterosexual, their high rates of claimed heterosexual infection may reflect their partners’ dishonesty rather than their own.

Entirely apart from the issue of truthfulness, the behavior and perhaps even the biology of non-whites may contribute to their relatively high rates of AIDS. For example, if they are in jail, men who are ordinarily heterosexual may have anal intercourse (voluntarily or involuntarily). Since blacks are six to ten times more likely than whites to be in jail, and since unprotected anal intercourse is one of the most common ways to get AIDS, this contributes to high rates among blacks. It has also been found that black bisexuals have, on average, twice as many female partners as white bisexuals, and are 50 percent more likely to engage in anal intercourse with them.

Arguing by analogy from other sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Brody suggests the possibility that blacks are biologically more susceptible than whites to AIDS. Syphilis rates among blacks are as much as 50 times higher than among whites. Standard transmission models for venereal disease cannot explain such high rates, even considering that blacks have more sex partners. One interesting study of sailors on shore leave who frequented infected prostitutes found that blacks had a one-in-two chance per exposure of getting gonorrhea whereas whites had a one-in-five chance. There may be unknown biological characteristics that explain this difference.

Behavior and biology may both help explain high rates of “heterosexual” AIDS in Africa. Anal intercourse is a common form of contraception among Africans. Female genital mutilation may also encourage anal intercourse if the vagina is painful or never heals completely. An improperly healed vagina is also a less effective barrier against infection during vaginal intercourse. At the same time, African medical personnel often reuse hypodermic needles without sterilizing them, and widespread chronic disease makes Africans generally more susceptible to HIV.

In sex and disease, as in so many other things, the facts bear out Prof. Levin’s contention that race does, indeed, matter.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Undeclared War

A white, Roman Catholic teacher in her mid-40s used to commute every day from her pleasant white suburb to one of the most violent slums of Chicago to teach writing in the public schools. On Feb. 8, a nearly six-foot-tall, 170-pound eighth-grader attacked her in her class with a claw hammer and with no more warning than the words “white bitch.” With one blow he destroyed an eye socket and with another he shattered her cheek bone. He was angry because she had threatened him with suspension for misbehavior.

The teacher now has five metal plates in her head, and her one good eye is held in place with surgical mesh beneath the skin. However, her greatest pain lies in the fact that her assailant had told many other students the night before about his plans, and had repeated his threats the morning of the attack. Some of her own students knew he had brought the hammer to school, but told her nothing. “That’s what hurts,” she says. “A lot of them knew.” After the attack, which left her gushing blood, children from her class scampered out of the room to tell the attacker’s younger brother that the deed had, indeed, been done. Reached by a reporter, the brother said: “She was tricking on him. She deserved it for threatening suspensions.” (John Kass, Violent Kid Ends Teachers Dream — But He Had Help, Chicago Tribune, July 22, 1997. John Kass, Kids, System Beat Teacher Long Before Her Work Was Done, Chicago Tribune, July 24, 1997.)

No Longer Undeclared

Khalid Abdul Muhammad of the Nation of Islam recently addressed an enthusiastic crowd of 400 at San Francisco State University, urging blacks to “use violence when necessary.” One of his more memorable lines was, “I want to see a movie that shows us killing white folks so hard the blood is flowing into the popcorn.” Then he paused and added, “After all it’s only a movie.” The crowd whooped, leapt to its feet, and punched the air. Admission to the event was $7.00 for students, $10.00 general admission, and $15.00 for “racists.” (Lori Eppstein, Antisemitic Speaker Urges Violence, Washington Jewish Week, June 5, 1997, p. 18.)

Kiwis on the March

An anti-immigration party has been established in New Zealand. Inspired by the success of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in Australia, John Lehmann has decided to turn his Government Accountability League into a full-fledged political party and fight the 1999 elections.

Mr. Lehmann has already been accused of “racism.” An Auckland college refused to let him use one of its buildings for a meeting when he advertised it as open to “bona fide New Zealanders only.” Last October, the New Zealand Race Relations Conciliator, a man named Rajen Prasad, stopped the league’s “Dob-a-wog” (turn in a non-white) campaign, which encouraged New Zealanders to report overstaying visitors to the authorities. Mr. Prasad found public use of the word “wog” illegal under the New Zealand Human Rights Act. (David Barber and Stephanie Peatling, Hanson Inspires Like-minded NZ Party, Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, Aug. 14, 1997.)

Meanwhile, a recent poll finds that up to half the Asian immigrants to New Zealand are thinking of leaving. They complain of bad job prospects and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. Even the government, which had previously courted Asians, has instituted an English-language test that has cut Taiwanese immigration from 12,325 in 1996 to 659 in the first half of 1997. Where do the dissatisfied Asians say they would like to go? Australia or the United States. (David Barber, Migrants Feel Cold Shoulder, Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 16, 1997.)

Nothing Seems to Work

A company called Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. has just announced the almost complete failure of an attempt to improve the lot of Detroit welfare mothers. Over a period of 18 months between 1989 and 1991, it spent approximately $9,000 on each of 2,300 mothers to teach them family planning, child care, job training, etc. After a 3-1/2-year follow-up period, the women are virtually indistinguishable from controls who did not get the training. Seventy-five percent of both groups are still on welfare. The only difference is that program participants were slightly more likely than controls to get a GED.

“I think I was surprised by the number of challenges these women have in their lives and how difficult it is for them to stay in jobs in the labor market,” observes Robert Granger, director of the program. (Tim Whitmire, Associated Press, July 2, 1997.)

Try Anything

LaTonya Green of Detroit is a black lady bank robber. Her May, 1996, conviction was upheld despite a complaint that there were not enough blacks on the jury. Now, it has come to light that the Detroit jury pool in federal cases has been juggled for years to keep it majority black. So many blacks are in jail, fail to appear, or are unqualified as jurors that the courts were discarding the names of many whites to ensure “appropriate” black representation. What did Miss Green’s lawyers decide to do when this practice became known? Ask for a retrial because whites had been improperly kept off the jury. The appeal failed. (David Josar, Whites’ Exclusion From Juries Questioned, The Detroit News, Aug. 3, 1997, p. 5B.)

Blind Deer Hunters

Michigan has become the sixth state to allow the blind to go deer hunting. They may hunt with otherwise illegal laser sights, which throw a dot of light on the target. Blind hunters will be accompanied by someone who can see, who will quietly whisper instructions like, “Up a little, a bit to the right. Now fire.” (Eric Sharp, Blind Deer Hunters to Take Aim This Fall, Detroit Free Press, May 9, 1997, p. A1.)

Christian Universalism

Pope John Paul II has denounced Western nations for cutting back on immigration, saying they have a moral duty to care for the needy — including the duty to let them in. “Who is my neighbor?” he asked. “The neighbor is every human being, without exception. It is not necessary to ask his nationality, or to which social or religious group he belongs. If he is in need, he must be helped.” (Frances D’Emilio, Associated Press, Aug. 22, 1997.)

No Hard Men

The 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) has the largest number of operations and the highest rate of reenlistment of all of the five active-duty Special Forces Groups. Its informal group motto, “Hard times don’t last, but hard men do,” is emblazoned on coffee mugs, T-shirts, etc.

A lady sergeant in a support company took offense at the motto, saying it implied that women can’t be hard, and created a “hostile and intimidating work environment.” She took her complaint to the equal opportunity commissars with predictable results: the motto’s use has been officially curtailed. (“A Cow Mooed,” The Resister, Spring & Summer, 1997, p. 23.)

No-Longer-British Airways

The tail colors of the British Airways planes have traditionally been a stylized Union Jack with a coat of arms that reads, “To Fly, To Serve.” This is now thought to be too ethnocentric and narrow. New designs will include such things as Kalahari bushman paintings, American Indian wood carvings, Japanese paintings, Chinese calligraphy, and South African Ndebele murals. Like many Britons, Richard Branson of Virgin Airways is outraged. He plans to adopt the flag in some fashion for his fleet colors. (Right NOW!, July/Sept 1997, p. 24.)

Steppin’ Out

The latest fashion for style-conscious black men is “gators,” or alligator-skin shoes in blinding, sometimes two-tone pinks, blues, and greens. “Gators” cost from $300 to as much as $3,000 a pair. Says one suave black who owns 20 pairs, “A woman sees a man with gators and knows he’s got something going on.” Alligator shoes are especially popular in Detroit, where at least one preacher sports them in the pulpit. Bishop Wayne T. Jackson stomps and taps his way through a sermon, emphasizing points with his flashy two-tones. He says they help him hold the attention of younger Christians.

Detroit’s main outlet for gators is City Slicker Shoes, one of the few retail outlets that is prospering in Detroit’s mostly moribund city center. It is owned by two middle-aged white men. (Corey Takahashi, Crocodile Dandy, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 11, 1997, p. 1.)

Belated Candor

Winnie Mandela’s barbarities are slowly coming to light. After having ducked murder charges once, the Mother of the Nation is facing indictment for eight killings, including that of 13-year-old Stompie Moeketsie, and a doctor who examined his corpse. American Journalist Peter Godwin has recently confessed that Mrs. Mandela’s adoring, see-no-evil Western press coverage helped make it impossible for the South African authorities to punish her.

He writes that merely reporting the suspicious circumstances of the death of young Moeketsie was “excruciatingly difficult,” and that he was criticized by other reporters for “having provided ammunition to the forces of evil.” He now admits that although he and others covered apartheid-era South Africa as if the villains and heroes could be distinguished with “moral certainty,” “there lurked another South Africa, one complex and shaded gray, one best ignored, since it took too long to explain.” (Peter Godwin, Lessons From South Africa, Newsweek, Sept. 29, 1997, p. 44.)

There is, of course, no such biased reporting about the United States.

More ‘Moral Certainty’

British television has produced a documentary on the falsehoods in Alexander Haley’s famous “non-fiction” work, Roots, but American television networks will not air it for fear of offending blacks. Roots was a huge success when it appeared in 1976, earning the author millions of dollars, the admiration of President Jimmy Carter, and more than 200 literary awards. The book is now known to be fiction. Philip Nobile, a writer who has spent years cross-checking its sources, has found Haley to be a shameless hoaxer: “Virtually every fact in the closing critical pages of Roots is false,” he says.

A teacher at Tennessee University, where the records of Haley’s 10-year search for his ancestors are stored, explains why it is best not to air the documentary: “We have accepted we must honor the spirit rather than the letter of Roots, but to have it systematically demolished would only play into the hands of white supremacists.” (John Harlow, American TV Boycotts Expose of Haley’s Roots, Sunday Times (London), Sept. 6, 1997.)

Great White Hope

Paul Weyrich is a political strategist who publishes The Weyrich Insider. In a recent rundown of potential Republican Presidential candidates, he notes that Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House, is lusting for the top job. Mr. Weyrich reports that the speaker has hinted his running mate would be one of his closest house colleagues, black congressman J.C. Watts. (Weyrich Insider, Aug.25, 1997, p. 3.)

Congressman Julius Ceasar Watts

Congressman Julius Ceasar Watts

No Pets/No Foreigners

The Japanese make no secret of whom they like and whom they don’t. They are also free of government intrusion into private transactions. Thus do many foreigners find that Japanese real estate agents refuse to do business with them because they know many proprietors will have no truck with barbarians. In the real estate business, it is reportedly not uncommon to see the sign: “No Pets/No Foreigners.” (Tony Khan, No Pets/No Foreigners, Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo), Sept. 13, 1997, p. 6.)

Africa Comes to the Heartland

Minneapolis, of all places, has a thriving community of Somalis, who account for fully 400 of Roosevelt High School’s 1,500 students. The girls dress in full Islamic robes, head to toe. Boys and girls sit on opposite sides of the classroom. During lunch breaks Somalis get on their knees, press their heads to the floor, and pray to Mecca. Some students have had no formal education before, and do not even realize that the earth circles the sun. English as a Second Language is the largest department in the school, some of whose administrators concede that teaching Somali children can be a “challenge.” (Debra O’Connor, Unveiling New Opportunities, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, May 26, 1997, p. 1.)

No Visas

Ever since 1994, the United States has granted the citizens of a few countries visa-free entry for up to 90 days of tourism or business. Countries are selected by the following criteria: a very low rate of visa refusal in the past, reciprocal treatment of Americans, machine-readable passports, and a determination by the U.S. Attorney General that visa-free entry of the country’s nationals will not be a burden to American law enforcement. This set of non-racial criteria yields the following list of countries: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. (USIS Bulletin, American Embassy, Stockholm.)

Quaint Habits

Hispanics — particularly the women — apparently like to use mercury to ward off evil spirits, improve their luck, and cure stomach pains. They mix it with bath water, burn it in candles, carry it in vials in their purses, put it in cups under their beds, and sometimes swallow it. When the Chicago Health Department learned of this it did a quick survey of 79 Hispanics and found that 15 use mercury. When they checked 16 botanicas, or Hispanic mumbo jumbo stores, they found that all of them sold the poison. Mexicans particularly prize it as a cure for gas pains in babies. (Jim Ritter, Hispanics’ Use of Toxic Mercury Studied, Chicago Sun-Times, July 18, 1997, p. 12.)

Banning Common Sense

Many campaigns use phone banks to encourage voters to come to the polls on election day. Companies that offer this kind of service have found that black callers get a better response from black voters and whites do better with whites. The Parker Group, an Alabama company, did this kind of segregated calling for white and black candidates alike: Governor Jim Folsom, Congressman Earl Hilliard, and Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington. Sometimes the pitch the callers made was different depending on the race of the voter. In Governor Folsom’s campaign, blacks were told that the Republicans were acting like the Ku Klux Klan, making fun of black leaders and distributing racist cartoons. Whites did not get quite so exciting a message. U.S. District Judge William Acker has found that dividing callers by race constitutes illegal segregation of employees. (Peggy Sanford, Court Upholds Bias Claim in Race-Matched-Calling Suit, Birmingham News, June 17, 1997, p. 1A.)

Meanwhile, the Alabama Department of Transportation has been ordered by a federal judge to stop segregating its work crews. The department started forming all-white and all-black crews in response to worker requests. Judge Myron Thompson has said that it makes no difference if the workers want it, segregation is unlawful and must be stopped. (AP, Alabama DOT Told To End Segregation, Oct. 1, 1997.)

King of Beasts

Illegal immigrants are streaming into South Africa, and some of them are crossing the border near Kruger National Park. This is good news for lions, who have discovered that humans are not as quick on their feet as zebras or wildebeest but taste just as good. Lions who make a habit of eating people are usually destroyed by the game wardens.

Douw Grobler, Kruger’s manager of game capture, explains how to tell if lions have been eating people: “Normally if you want to chase lions from a carcass, you just get out of the vehicle and they leave. I tested these lions three times — twice they stalked me, and the third time they came at me . . . This group had started specializing in humans.” (Chris Erasmus, Lions Make an Easy Meal of Desperate Refugees, Herald Sun (Australia), Aug. 17, 1997, p. 37.)

Race Comes First

A new cable channel called BET Movies/STARZ!3 shows black movies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nina Henderson, the vice president of BET Movies explains that blacks watch 75 hours of television a week — 50 percent more than whites — and that they like to watch other blacks. “We tend to watch where our images are, no matter how good or bad the programming,” she explains. (Kevin Williams, New Channel Shows Black Films Nonstop, Chicago Sun-Times, July 3, 1997, p. 39.)

For a Few Dollars More

As has by now been well reported, slave trading still goes on in parts of Africa. In Benin and Nigeria the market is mainly for children, but how is the merchandise acquired? Easily and without violence. Abdul Mohammed, who runs the Child Welfare League of Nigeria, explains that nattily dressed traders troll the bush, offering parents $20 to $40 for their children, promising that they will see to it that the children grow up rich and successful.

“These people who go to the villages are seen as affluent people, so they easily convince the villagers that the child will be better off if they go with them,” he explains. (Slave Trade in Africa Highlighted by Arrests, New York Times, Aug. 10, 1997.)

Loony Tunes

American Record Guide is an independent, opinionated guide to the classical music world and to recent recordings. Sometimes it strays beyond the merely musical. The July/August issue published this, under the heading “Black Musicians and Marketing:”

Is it an attempt to ‘win new audiences’ or what? I am looking at the newsletter of a major American orchestra. It announces and summarizes the current season. I’m looking at the pictures with the article. Five of the 11 musicians pictured are black; one is oriental. You would think classical music were a field dominated by blacks! There are a number of fine black artists, but some orchestras go out of their way to hire them. One wonders if Marketing is calling the shots. Very few blacks are interested in this kind of music, and that is why there are so few in our orchestras. Fortunately, whites aren’t prejudiced and will probably continue to go to concerts even if orchestra managements insist on having all five black artists every season. Blacks, meantime, will probably not show up in great numbers no matter how many blacks are pictured on the billboards and newsletters. And they will almost certainly stay away in droves from concerts with no black guest artist.

This mild statement of the obvious naturally ruffled feathers. One of American Record Guide’s advertisers, Reference Records, sent messages to all other advertisers encouraging a boycott, but ARG is not backing down. In a long article in the September/October issue, editor Donald Vroon wrote: “What pitiful conformists all those people [who cry “racist”] are, learning their little lessons like young communists reciting poems about Lenin . . . [I]t shocks me how few people seem to think for themselves . . .”

ARG is published bimonthly at a price of $32.00 a year. Its address is 4412 Braddock Street, Cincinnati, OH 45204. Telephone: (513) 941-1116.

Pendulum Swinging Back

The Illinois State Police have been found to have discriminated against white men from 1975 to 1990, by passing them over in favor of blacks with lower test scores. As many as 5,000 white applicants may have suffered discrimination during that period. Likewise, a Florida jury has awarded a white air traffic controller $500,000 because he was fired only to make room for a black. (Michael Gillis, Reverse Bias Hits State Police, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 2, 1997. Rush Larson, White Air Traffic Chief Wins Bias Suit, Washington Times, July 25, 1997, p. A13.)

Misery Loves Company

In South Africa’s KwaZulu Province, teenagers with AIDS are deliberately spreading the disease so they will not be the only ones to suffer and die. Some have started raping women so as to spread the disease more quickly. Women describe being raped by laughing teenagers who tell them to relax and not to cry because “everyone has AIDS now.” As one rapist explained to researchers, “You know you’ll be rejected, you know you’re going to die. All you can do is go off and spread [AIDS]. It’s your only hope, knowing you won’t die alone.”

One doctor working in rural areas told researchers she no longer tells patients if they are HIV positive unless they ask — and they never do. “They just go out and spread it anyway,” she explains. “Even if they say they’re not, they’re lying. It’s how they cope. I don’t tell them anymore.” Many medical personnel do not even test for HIV for fear that positive results will be taken as a death sentence and a license to rape.

Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala, a lecturer at University of Durban-Westville who has been studying AIDS in the province, called the behavior “quite opposite to what AIDS educators would hope for.” (Sapa-AFP, Doomed South African Teenagers on Mission to Spread AIDS: Report, Aug. 24, 1997.)

Just Making Ends Meet

Antonio Ortiz used to live in Trenton, New Jersey. In June, his neighbors heard “a gunshot and a thump” in his apartment but found his door locked. When police arrived they found Mr. Ortiz, a drug dealer, still alive but with a mortal gunshot wound to the head. Since there were no weapons in the disordered apartment, police thought they had a murder on their hands. They changed the report to suicide and burglary when other witnesses explained that two black teenagers had jumped over Mr. Ortiz’s second-floor balcony immediately after he shot himself. They ransacked the apartment, stole Mr. Ortiz drugs and weapons, and escaped before the police arrived. (Chris Dolmetsch, Street Scavengers, The Trentoninan, June 22, 1997, p. 5.)

Multicultural Bliss

For years, California resident Judy Ann Petty has had her initials, JAP, on such things as her purse and check book. Since her husband’s name is Robin Arnett Petty, she has vanity license plates that say RAPNJAP. Now the California Department of Motor Vehicles says her plates have to go because of the letters JAP, which offend Japanese. Harvey Horikawa, the Japanese-American lawyer who prodded the department, says “I would think it would be sufficient to go with “JP and RP.’” Mr. and Mrs. Petty have vowed to fight the ruling. (Minerva Canto, “JAP’ Initials on License Plate Called a Racial Affront, Associated Press, Aug. 27, 1997.)

Disadvantaged Asians

Unlike most universities, the Small Business Administration still believes in affirmative action for Asians. Results are utterly predictable. In the ten years to 1996, the Asian share of subsidized “8a” contracts for the “disadvantaged” has gone from 10.5 percent to 23.7 percent, while the black percentage has dropped from 50.5 to 36.7. The Hispanic percentage has held steady at around 30. In New York City, the Asian share has jumped from 3.5 percent to 64.1 percent while blacks have fallen from 36 percent to 18.1 percent. Asians have been taking over in Alabama, of all places. In ten years, their share of 8a contracts gone from 2.5 percent to 46.3 percent while that of blacks dropped from 88 percent to 31.1 percent. Besides being smarter, Asians are much better than blacks at spreading the word about 8a to other Asians, and when their nine-year period of eligibility ends they often pass along the sweet-heart contracts to relatives.

Asians who start business are actually less likely to be “disadvantaged” than whites. Between 1978 and 1987 the average Asian business got off the ground with $53,600 in capital while the average white started a business with $32,000. Of the Asian entrepreneurs, 57.8 percent had college educations vs. 37.7 percent for whites. (Rochelle Sharpe, “Asian-Americans Gain Sharply in Big Program of Affirmative Action, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 9, 1997. p. 1.)

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Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — My warm congratulations to Victor Craig for his vigorous defense of Christian faith in the September issue. One point, however, that Mr. Craig failed to emphasize was that Christianity gives a firm and inflexible foundation to personal morality. It is no coincidence, I think, that the decline of white America in recent decades has gone hand-in-hand with a decline in moral standards. This is especially true in the waning of biblically-based views of marriage and family.

I think, however, that Mr. Craig conceded too much to the champions of disbelief in urging them to engage in a sham Christianity. There are, alas, already far too many bogus Christians in our churches today to ask that their number be augmented.

Robert Stacy McCain, Rome, Ga.

Sir — The doctrines of Christianity are propositions and as such they are either true or false.

If they are false, we must reject them, not allowing ourselves to be enticed by their beauty.

If they are true we dare not fear or reject them.

Ronald N. Neff

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Sir — The gentleman’s observation in the letters section of the October AR that Christianity “is a religion for losers” probably does not deserve comment. The ignorance of dismissing such men as Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Copernicus, Pasteur, Newman, Milton, Bach, and Chesterton — to name only a few — calls into question his familiarity with the giants of his own civilization.

For his part, Jim Owens blithely dismisses traditional Christianity as “a history of Church suppressions of freedoms” and as “a generalized subjugation of all.” An AR reader, who can presumably see through liberal propaganda on race, should not, himself, spout such P.C. nonsense.

If the non-Christian readers of AR thinks that Western civilization was just fine until the mid-to-late twentieth century, and that the seeds of our decline were not in fact sown in the liberalism, rationalism, and other isms of at least the past several centuries then it is they, not the Christians, who are naive.

Name Withheld, New York City

Sir — In the September issue I had more of Francis Welsing than I could enjoy. One paragraph would have enough on the Isis Papers. If you need to fill space there are always the Darwins, Galtons, and Burts, with whom some of your younger readers may not be familiar. A recent issue of the Economist gives Darwin about six pages and cover picture.

R. Travis Osborne, Athens, Ga.

Sir — In the June issue, Thomas Jackson writes that blacks are poorly represented as subjects in medical research because they are unwilling to volunteer. Another reason is that they are often ill suited to be subjects.

Many blacks are actually attracted by the prospect of the “easy money” earned by research subjects, but are refused admission to clinical trials because of rigorous drug testing — drug use can invalidate test results. Even the blacks who are accepted are sometimes unable to comply with dietary restrictions for the duration of a study. Alcohol may be prohibited, and people who drink in secret are found out and expelled. Furthermore, participants must be punctual to the exact minute when appearing for blood draws or making bathroom visits to provide researchers with urine and fecal samples. Some blacks are expelled because they cannot tell time or maintain a schedule.

A few years ago, as a graduate student, I was part of a clinical pharmacology trial. Many blacks applied for the preliminary screening tests, but few qualified for the actual eight-day trial. The lone black in the final control group was expelled one day into the study when he tested positive for marijuana.

Name Withheld, Chicago, Ill.

Sir — In connection with Prof. Whitney’s October observations about gene v. environment, the viewpoint of the “environmental school” is flawed because it fails to recognize that genes, expressed through the differing abilities of groups to alter their surroundings, influence the environment. This influence is so strong that one can never truly speak of “environment” as an independent factor.

For any human environment it must be recognized that people living it have played a crucial role in making it “good” or “bad.” The opposition may claim that one group can manipulate the environment to the detriment of another group. But if this is true, it is because they benefited from a superior environment? The argument inevitably returns to the biological explanation.

During human evolution when the environment played a direct role, via natural selection, in influencing genes the role of the environment was, in the Darwinian sense, dominant. Today, however, genes determine the nature of both people and their environment. For human intelligence and behavior genes are, without a doubt, now the dominant factor.

Michael Bordonaro, Bronx, N.Y.

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