December 1993

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 4, No.12 December 1993

 

CONTENTS

Dissenting Voices
A Reply
Dissenting Voices II
Sacrificing the Best
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Dissenting Voices

Agree / Disagree

A long-time friend of the editor explains why he no longer reads AR.

by Malcolm Meldahl

Dear Jared,

Since we are friends from way back, and with an old school tie as well, I think you’re due an explanation for why I’m dropping American Renaissance when my subscription expires.

My reasons for taking your pamphlet have always had more to do with curiosity about you than with racialism’s interest for me. I have always had some discomfort with the subject but I welcomed the challenge of your ideas to my complacent liberalism. I also admired your courage in taking on this touchiest of subjects. God knows it needs honest discussion in this age of politically correct hysteria. But having been a subscriber since its inception, I am tired of American Renaissance. You have heard most of my objections one way or another before, but I am in the mood to recapitulate them:

  • AR is hopelessly utopian. It dreams of a state or society that will never be. Historical processes have already overrun the racialist’s hour.
  • Therefore AR is inutile. It articulates a point of view that, however “realistic” in terms of historical human nature, is nevertheless of no help when it comes to reinventing life on earth in the next epoch. The big mix is here already, ethnically and economically. The pertinent problems are in the mix, not in lamenting it.

What’s the use of trying to push back the tide, reossify old prejudices, encourage the tribalization of a human community that is headed for further amalgamation? Like it or not, we will have to face it. Publicizing unfairness and the tyrannies of liberalism is fine, but AR goes further than that.

As you know, I have never been able to come to terms with a certain animus motivating AR, sometimes naked, mostly veiled, which I am afraid really does lend to hurting people or at least saying “Well, it’s better this way.” And this leads me to an objection that takes objection into another dimension:

  • I do not see the religious possibilities in the AR point of view. It is a tract self-limited to the biological, the social, the political. I think that at the “end of all our exploring,” whether we get there or not, is some kind of religious understanding. Something deep says that the AR perspective is inimical to this. Whether or not it is possible for one to hold to a racialist viewpoint or social philosophy with a clean and faithful heart, I know that I could not. I doubt it would be possible today, even if it were possible in the past, for Lincoln, say. I would be troubled by the worry that my race philosophy had been or could be misused as a vehicle for the expression of hatred and malice — or had, at best, been a means to look the other way. This leads me to my last point, the most troubling of all.
  • I do not detect the will nor perceive the means to resist excesses possible to commit in the name of AR’s ideology. Indeed the validation that could be given to ethnic cleansing by the kind of cogent, calm arguments put forth in AR chill the soul. There is no set of crampons sufficiently sharp and strong to keep you guys from sliding to the bottom of the philosophical slippery slope into a bloodbath. I do not detect the strength of will to resist the barbarism that could be committed in the name of your ideas. I fear that should your racialist ideas prevail politically, you would become a Goebbels at worst, at best an editor of Pravda. I’d like to see the fervor with which you militate against liberalism and its obvious excesses matched by the fervor to preserve what’s good and admirable in its sympathies and republican spirit. Your “hard truths” are all arranged on one vector, and a wrongheaded one at that.

You offer a rationalist rediscovery of human differences and suggest, by implication, concomitant social policies. But a visceral sense of human differences precedes and goes way deeper than any rationalistic appraisal. What any racialism does is immediately take those visceral reactions, make sense of them, codify them, make a veritable rosary, an unthinking incantation of them. I know what it is like to give way to a sense of repugnance. Some deep-seated appetite in one’s nature answers to it. It cries out for an answer.

Racialism organizes much of this feeling (mostly fear and guilt), makes of it a construct energized by the viscera but justified by the mind. This is your Mephistophelian business with AR. It is persuasive. I feel myself lured by it but that doesn’t make it right. It is the easy way out. It is the reptile leading the better angels of our nature.

I wholly approve of the war on cant and duplicity. We all have to fight it for our selves and for our souls. But I guess it has seeped into me that I shouldn’t give money to promote ideas that have at best no future, at worst could help recapitulate the greatest horrors of the past. Ultimately I worry that AR attacks that which can give a human life its highest form of understanding. Times have changed. What Jefferson said then and what he might say now are unlikely to be mutually recognizable. You are talking last year’s language and peddling a dangerous nostalgia.

Which is why I will not renew my subscription when it expires.

Malcolm Meldahl attended high school with the editor of AR and the two have been friends ever since. Mr. Meldahl lives on Cape Cod with his wife and two sons.

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ARTICLE

A Reply

by Jared Taylor

Naturally, it is disappointing that an old friend should read AR for three full years and remain unconvinced by it. Even so, you gave it the benefit of the doubt for a long time, longer than any friend or editor could have asked.

Of the many objections you raise, there is only one that really matters. It is the view that for whites to think in racial terms is inherently evil and can only be the result of animus, or “hatred” as the press invariably calls it. Racial consciousness among whites has been forced underground because so many people have been taught to think this way. I must say that it is painful that you should think this of me. It is irritating to be thought evil by strangers; it is dispiriting to be thought evil by one’s friends.

By your own admission, though, much of what AR says is persuasive. Am I wrong to suspect that if you no longer thought it immoral, your other objections would drop away? You are rejecting a view that, as you concede, promotes your own interests and that may even express your own instincts. Nevertheless, you are willing to forego an advantage because you think it wrong — an admirable position to take.

The scruples you express are, I believe, one of the hallmarks of our people. I think that to an unusual degree, whites must believe that what they do as a group is not just expedient but moral. That is one of our great strengths, and the last thing I would ask is that you set aside your scruples. My task is to convince you, and others who share your instincts for fairness and generosity, that it is not merely natural but right for whites to assert their own interests. Only then will they use their distinctive qualities to defend their race and culture rather than, as they do now, permit their own dispossession in the name of those qualities.

Lesser Objections

Before considering this all-important question I will reply to the objections I think less important. The first two are parts of the same argument: It does no good to promote the AR view of the world because that world will never be.

“Historical processes,” you say, “have already overrun the racialist’s hour.” A moment’s reflection should convince you that this is not so. Racialism now marches from strength to strength — but for everyone but whites. In the United States, blacks, Hispanics, and even Asians are banding together along racially exclusive lines as never before to extract privileges from whites. For millions of non-whites, race is central to their identities and informs everything they think and do. Indeed, every corner of every continent is exploding with assertions of peoplehood — sometimes violent — that reflect not just race but human differences of all kinds.

The current racial regimen is one of unilateral disarmament. Whites can be bullied and intimidated by non-whites because non-whites have clear understandings of their racial interests and whites do not. For blacks, especially, race comes before anything else. No matter how much they may differ among themselves, they almost invariably close ranks against whites.

This is why the rap singer Sister Souljah’s advice to blacks — that they leave off killing each other for a week and kill whites instead — was not repudiated by other blacks. It is why the thugs who nearly killed Reginald Denny at the start of the Los Angeles riots were lionized as “The L.A. Four.” It is why a man so corrupt and incompetent as Marion Barry has been re-elected as mayor of Washington, DC.

What you meant to say is not that there is no hope for the white racialist. To that I would say only that ten years ago no one expected the Soviet Union to disappear, Germany to be reunited, or Yugoslavia to be torn apart. History is far from over. French royalty was at the height of its glory when it was struck down by revolution. Who can say that the current “tyrannies of liberalism,” as even you call them, are not at flood tide and may soon recede? In Europe, the racialist right influences national policy. Is such a development unthinkable in the United States?

In any case, if you are a man willing to forego advantage in the name of what is right, surely you can understand persistence in a cause simply because it is right. There may never be world peace or a cure for cancer or an America as it should be, but people devote their lives to these things because it is right to do so and because much good can be accomplished short of total success.

Religious Possibilities

Unless I have misunderstood it, your objection that racialism has no “religious possibilities” is the weakest of your arguments. I do not claim that the defense of race and culture is a religious task, but I see it as far more spiritually uplifting than its opposite. The reality of multi-racialism crushes the spirit. What are the special religious possibilities that are to be found in Detroit, Camden, Miami, or South-Central Los Angeles? Godhead may or may not be found in devotion to one’s people, but there is the very devil to be found in every American city that has been transformed from white to non-white.

Our country has made a kind of secular religion out of the belief that pouring the nation’s wealth into cities wrecked by non-whites will somehow bring back clean streets and polite neighbors. The real work that goes into this task is grim and spirit-killing; I do not believe that it is, for anyone, “the end of all our exploring” that you seek.

To turn your religious argument on its head, there are many things you care about passionately — poetry, integrity, beauty, work well done — that you do not, as far as I know, think of as having religious possibilities. Why must racialism have such possibilities in order to gain your support?

Questions of Biology

I am surprised that you write as if an interest in the scientific study of racial differences is only a cover for vulgar feelings of repugnance. Any number of people — and I count myself among them — have approached the questions of race and IQ from a desire to know the truth. And the truth, by the way, includes the likelihood that North Asians are more intelligent, on average, than whites. Let the chips fall where they may.

You remind me of the Victorian lady who said, when first hearing of Darwin’s theory of evolution: “I pray that it is not true, but if it is true, I pray that it will not become widely known.” The link between race and IQ is almost certainly true, and it is becoming widely known. AR has taken up this question at some length, so I will not cover old ground. I will say only that one of the greatest challenges our nation faces — and one utterly unacknowledged — is the desperate need to devise a humane system that recognizes the differences in abilities of the races.

The current pretense of equality only creates injustice, bitterness and a relentless destruction of standards. It guarantees that every attempt to solve racial problems will only make them worse. If all one did with one’s life were to publicize the truth about race and intelligence, it would be a great service to justice and progress.

Thus it is not the racialist who strings his views into “a veritable rosary, an unthinking incantation” as you so gracefully put it. It is the egalitarian who lets his predispositions blind him to the facts. There are no racialist or even conservative mantras to numb the brain like “All men are created equal,” “We are a nation of immigrants,” or “Diversity is our strength.” Liberals will chant these slogans right up to the edge of the precipice. These are your rosary, to which you might add another bead, “White racial consciousness is evil.”

We come, therefore, to the heart of the issue. Is it moral for whites to defend their race and culture?

This reply will conclude in the next issue.

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ARTICLE

Dissenting Voices II

Can a black person be a “white racialist”?

by Marian Evans

Today, when there is so much resentment expressed by blacks for whites, it can be a revelation to meet a black who speaks of whites with genuine affection.

I recently had a frank, four-hour conversation with a middle-aged black woman, whom I will call Miss Channing. She has medium-brown skin and pleasant features, and was reared in a middle-class household. She claims some French and American Indian ancestry from her mother, and an unknown black-white mixture from her father.

When we met I was immediately struck by her consistent use of the word “Negro.” “‘Black,’” she explained, “was forced on us by dark-skinned Negroes who were jealous of light-skinned Negroes.” She herself finds nothing attractive, much less beautiful, about blackness. She said that no one, not even the most strident Afro-centrist, thinks that “those big Negroid features” are appealing. She pointed out that all the models in advertisements in Ebony and Essence have light skins and sharp features. As she put it, “none of them look like they just stepped out of the jungle.”

She noted that even frankly anti-white movie producers work the same preference into their casting decisions. Female leads are the light-skinned mixed-bloods who are the only blacks whom even other blacks find genuinely attractive.

Miss Channing is single. She says that most black men are worthless and that ever since she could remember, she has been attracted to white men. She believes that the great tragedy of her life was to have been an adolescent when inter-racial dating was not considered acceptable. She says she knows many black women younger than herself who have lost all patience with black men and she confidently predicts a marked rise in the number of black women who date and marry white men.

Miss Channing is adamantly opposed to non-white immigrants, whom she calls “pre-moderns.” She fears that current policies will flood whites in a sea of third-wonders who will “turn the country into a banana republic.” At one point she put her hand on my arm and said, “You people [whites] have to do something about this. You can’t let it happen.”

She has no compunction about saying that it is not only the country that must be kept from going non-white. She quoted a black friend as asking, “Why is it that whenever we finally get into any place that we have been kept out of all these years, the first thing we do is pervert it?” She believes that whites (and the better class of blacks) have every reason to resist integration because once the percentage of blacks reaches a certain level, standards cannot be maintained.

Miss Channing became aware of the research on race and intelligence only recently. It does not make her happy to think that Africans probably are, on average, less intelligent than people of other races, but she is prepared to accept the verdict of the data — as long as whites are willing to judge her as an individual rather than simply as a “Negro.”

She observed that an understanding of racial differences and the genetic basis for intelligence has solved a riddle that had long puzzled her: Why have light-skinned blacks always been the most successful? She has recently been persuaded that although greater social acceptance may play a role in their advancement, the decisive advantage for light-skinned blacks is white genes.

Like her intellectual idols — Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams — Miss Channing believes that liberal interference by means of affirmative action and welfare has been a disaster for blacks. She thinks black underclass men are the nation’s worst scourge and even wonders if black men may not be genetically inferior to black women.

She cannot understand why whites have permitted the liberal/socialist destruction of American institutions. She scarcely recognizes in today’s whites the same race that founded the United States and made it great. “What happened to you,” she says, “is that the non-whites and the pre-moderns ganged up on you.”

Miss Channing says that she knows many blacks who feel as she does and that their number is growing. She says that since whites are so afraid to talk about race and other taboo subjects, conservative blacks will have to do it for them. “Negroes have been a huge problem in this country,” she says; “Maybe by speaking out we can become part of the solution.” Her personal vision of salvation would be marriage to a white man and children who also married whites. She would be perfectly happy to have grandchildren who looked white.

What does one make of Miss Channing? It is not unusual for people to prefer one part of their family tree over another. Whites who are “part Irish” or “part Italian” often take pride in what they think of as their ethnic heritage. A woman with no more Confederate than Union ancestors may well think of herself as a staunch Confederate.

Race is somehow different. Virtually all whites are glad that they are white, and if they had to choose some degree of black-white mixture for themselves they would go long on the white and short on the black. And yet, perhaps because an honest admission of it is so rare, there is something heart-breaking about a black woman’s admission of something that whites take for granted.

Miss Channing almost seems to think of herself as a white woman trapped in a black woman’s body. To the extent that rising racial consciousness finally prompts whites to rally to their nation and their culture she applauds it. At the same time, it can only cause whites to think of her as different from themselves, and to the extent that white racial consciousness may exclude her she fears it. Among most blacks, of course, her views are anathema. Here may be the ingredients of tragedy.

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BOOK REVIEW

Sacrificing the Best

An essay on the dysgenic savagery of war.

War and the Breed, David Starr Jordan, Beacon Press, 1915, (abridged reprint by Cliveden Press), 127 pp., $12.50.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Today, the welfare state is the most powerful force working to lower the genetic level of the population. Any system that forces the responsible and hard working to support unlimited procreation by the incompetent can only drag down the average. In this little book, David Starr Jordan reminds us that war is even more ruthlessly dysgenic. The very best of a nation’s men are cut down in battle, often before they have had even a single child.

War and the Breed by David Starr Jordan

Jordan wrote this book in 1915, one year into the great, fratricidal struggle that desolated so much of Europe and set the stage for an even more terrible struggle. He saw the Great War as only the latest and most horrible of the butcheries that have retarded the evolution of the race. This contemporary and abridged reprint is illustrated with 28 full-page photographs and brief biographies of some of the young Britons who were needlessly sacrificed in that war. Their strong, honest faces are a silent reproach to governments that were willing to snuff them out without issue.

Jordan offers several reasons why war sends a nation’s best to their deaths. First, armies do not accept the feeble-minded, sickly, or deformed. Second, among those who serve in combat, it is the bravest, most intelligent men who make the best soldiers and who are therefore relied upon by commanders when combat is most desperate. Finally, until recently, all European nations had military traditions that drew their best and most patriotic sons to the colors.

Jordan makes the point that this has always been the case. Though he may press the point a little too far, he argues that it was war that brought down Greece and Rome by slaughtering their best men. The Greeks were not unmindful of the terrible genetic risks of war, and at one time took precautions against them. Every one of the Spartans who died in the defense against the Persians at Thermopylae was a volunteer, but no man who had not already had at least one son was left behind to guard the pass. Later, during the Peloponnesian Wars, hard-pressed Greeks could no longer hold their childless men in reserve.

Jordan notes that the burden of empire so decimated the Romans that whole tribes of aliens and even slaves were made into legionnaires. Horace, writing near the beginning of the Christian era, recorded the consequences:

Our grandfathers sired feeble children; their’s
Were weaker still — ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.

The British, too, have suffered both from the losses of war and from the great outpouring of adventurous men who sought their fortunes in the colonies. The exertions of empire and the costs of two world wars have changed the character of the British. Jordan quotes Havelock Ellis: “The reckless Englishmen, who boldly sailed out from their little island to fight the Spanish Armada, were long since exterminated; and an admirably prudent and cautious race has been left alive.”

Under Napoleon, France too reaped a gruesome harvest of Europe’s best men. In the emperor’s time, soldiers were chosen for their height, because tall men made a more fearsome impression on the battlefield. Jordan writes that the wars of the Republic and the First Empire notably diminished the stature of Frenchmen. The declining average height of a population can be measured; the other qualities that were lost — bravery, dash, and intelligence — cannot.

The losses that Napoleon inflicted on Europe come into perspective when compared with casualties during America’s own fratricidal war. At Gettysburg, our bloodiest battle, 163,00 men were engaged and 37,000 killed or wounded. At Napoleon’s defeat in 1813 at the Battle of Leipzig, 440,000 were engaged and 92,000 killed or wounded. However, the greatest loss France suffered under Napoleon was during the Grand Army’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. Of the 400,000 men who had set out to discipline Russia, only 20,000 returned. It is testimony to the martial vanity of man that Napoleon, who once said that “a boy will stop a bullet as well as a man,” should still be a hero to the French.

Of course, tanks and machine guns soon made modern war even more murderous. The Battle of the Somme, which dragged on for four months in 1916, claimed over 600,000 British and French casualties, and an unknown but roughly equal number of German casualties.

It is fortunate that war does not kill off the best of the women along with the men — at least it did not before the era of civilian bombing. However, as Jordan explains, war often so thins the ranks of the better men that the women they would have married may be unable to find husbands.

In today’s climate of enforced silence on genetic matters, it is instructive to note how unselfconsciously Jordan wrote about the dysgenic effects of war. At the time, he was chancellor of what became known as Stanford University, and his concerns about the genetic quality of the race were widely shared. He quotes many others — journalists, professors, and even poets — who issued the same warnings about the effects of war.

Neither Europe nor America has fought a major war since 1945, so an entire generation has been spared. Moreover, the technical means to wage mass war and the disappearance of the gentleman-soldier tradition mean that future conflicts may be more akin to indiscriminate massacres than to selective, dysgenic killing.

Today, welfare is a greater threat to the gene pool than warfare.

War and the Breed is available for $14.00, postage included, directly from Cliveden Press, 6861 Elm St, Ste. 4H, McLean, VA 22101.

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Richness of Diversity

A federal judge, Sonia Sotomayor, has accepted for trial an unusual job discrimination case, in which the plaintiff claims she was harassed because she does not speak Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. Juanita McNeil, a black woman, worked on the pediatric nursing ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City for six years until, she claims, she was forced from her job. She says that her Filipina supervisor withheld promotions, gave her undesirable assignments and “us[ed] the Tagalog language as a discriminatory weapon” by giving instructions to the largely Filipina staff in a language that Miss McNeil could not understand. [Deborah Pines, Job Bias Suit Over Language Declared Valid, New York Law Journal, 9/22/93, p. 1.]

Canadians See the Light

Canada accepts more immigrants, as a percentage of its current population, than does the United States, and whites are finally beginning to object. According to a recent poll conducted by the Immigration Department (yes, Canada has one), more than half of all citizens are “really worried that they may become a minority if immigration is unchecked.” The poll also found that it is people who live in cities — and who get their impressions of non-white immigrants first hand rather than from the press — who most object to Canada’s changing population. The government has been preaching the idea that to know immigrants is to love them, but has regretfully concluded that “familiarity breeds contempt.” [Kirk Lapointe, Government polls find Canadians less tolerant of immigrants, Montreal Gazette, 9/14/92.]

GM Sees the Light

General Motors has parted company with Ford and Chrysler and has told minority suppliers that they will have to start meeting the same price and quality standards as all other suppliers. There will be a grace period during which concessionary standards will be dismantled, and even after that period, GM will maintain a “mentor” program to guide non-whites through the corporate bureaucracy. Other than that, they are on their own.

We hope that GM stands firm despite the howling this change will provoke. At a time when non-white preferences are expanding everywhere, it is encouraging that a major company should be moving the other way. Ford and Chrysler are expanding their minority hand-holding efforts, and Ford is setting up a financial company to help non-whites start auto-parts companies. [Angelo Henderson, Life and Death, Detroit News, March 10, 1993, p. E1.]

Chicago Sees the Light

A study conducted by Loyola University’s Center for Ethics has found that racial and ethnic divisions are the most pressing problems on the minds of Chicago-area professionals. In an open-ended questionnaire, lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, and businessmen were asked “What are the most pressing ethical issues facing the Chicago community?” Racial division was the most frequently volunteered reply, followed by low education standards. [Ronald Yates, Racial, ethnic divisions top concerns of leaders, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 1992.]

Peer Pressure

The trial is finally over for the thugs who started the Los Angeles riots by nearly killing Reginald Denny. The jury was so lenient that even the mainstream press has begun to wonder about the future of the American justice system. The tradition of jury trials did not evolve in a multi-racial society, and “diversity” may yet ring its death knell. No Anglo-Saxon chieftain ever dreamed that “twelve good men and true” could mean four blacks, four Hispanics, two Asians, and two whites.

However, for people already aware of the terrific strains that race puts on jury trials, this latest fiasco was hardly a surprise. Its only really original contribution to the national decline was the notion that mob fever can now be used as an excuse for crimes. As one of the witnesses [race not specified] explained to the New York Times, “They [the defendants] seemed just like anyone, just like you and I. I see them just as two human beings. They just got caught up in the riot. I guess maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” [Quoted in Mike Royko, Mob Fever: Catch it, and you may go free, Chicago Tribune, 10/28/93, Section 1.]

This means that if a black man catches sight of other black men hauling white people out of their cars and thrashing them, it would be too much to ask him to refrain from doing the same. He is in the wrong place at the wrong time and cannot help himself.

Reginald Denny, who had his skull smashed into more than 100 pieces, [Samuel Francis, “Black Civil rights, white civil rights,” Wash Times, 10/22/93.] thinks it was entirely proper to let his attackers off with a slap on the wrist. He went on to demonstrate his zeal for forgiveness by hugging the mothers of the two men who nearly killed him.

Onward and Upward

The Board of Education of Prince George’s County, Maryland, has voted unanimously to change the name of a county middle school from Roger Taney to Thurgood Marshall. Justice Taney, who succeeded John Marshall as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision denying that blacks were U.S. citizens. In its resolution, the board decried Taney as “representative of the United States at its ugliest historical moment” and praised Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice, as “the greatest legal mind ever produced by the state of Maryland.” The newly renamed school is 80 percent black.

At the same meeting, the board established a policy for punishing students who bring telephone pagers to school. Pagers are frequently used in drug deals. [Laura Litvan, “School board votes to strip Taney’s name from school, Washington Times, 3/5/93, B3]

Rising from the Ashes

The Detroit school district has established what is called the Phoenix Preparatory Center, a school for students who have been expelled from other Detroit schools for carrying guns. During the 1991-92 school year 194 Detroit students were caught with guns, up from just 54 the previous year.

Teachers at the Phoenix Center will all be social workers, counselors, or psychologists. The school will have coat racks rather than lockers, so students will not be able to hide things. Erlene Flowers, director of the school district’s Interagency Program for Youth, and chief proponent of the Phoenix Center points out that these are not children who have actually shot anyone; they have simply brought weapons to school. “They are normal kids with tremendous potential,” she explains. [Ron Russell, New School targets teen gun-toters, Detroit News, 12/15/92, p. 1A.]

Wise Beyond Their Years

Gary Colley was on holiday in Florida from Britain when he was shot dead at a highway rest stop. In October, police arrested four blacks who are likely to have taken part in the killing. Three have particularly interesting resumes. One is only 13 years old but has already been arrested 15 times — on more than 50 charges. A 16-year-old boasted 30 arrests and a 14-year-old had twenty-six. The fourth suspect, another 16-year-old, had only one arrest. Many, many crimes are committed for every arrest, so between them these youngsters have accounted for hundreds of crimes.

Why were they still at large when Mr. Colley flew in from Britain? Under Florida law, a juvenile cannot be put in jail for more than six months, even if he is convicted of murder. [Juvenile Justice in Janet Reno’s State, NY Post,10/19/93.] Only under the most unusual circumstances can a juvenile be tried as an adult and be put away for years at a time. Thirty arrests is apparently not reason enough to do so, which perhaps helps explain why Florida — former home of Attorney General Janet Reno — has the highest crime rate of any state in the Union.

Tennessee Waltz

As everyone knows — but refuses to say — when cities go black they cease to be governable. Memphis, Tennessee is teetering on the edge. During the 1980s, it lost six percent of its population, as whites escaped to the suburbs, and is now 55 percent black. The surrounding county — not counting Memphis — is only 12 percent black, and the two areas are vastly different in education, income, and ambiance.

Memphis’ black mayor, W.W. Herenton, has proposed to annex the rest of the county so as to prevent the city from sliding permanently into chaos. “I have an obligation to look down the road and see that we don’t end up like other cities have,” he explains, with an eye to such failures as Detroit, Newark, and Cleveland.

White suburbanites do not want to be swallowed up by Memphis. They did not escape the city only to see it metastasize to the suburbs. Most Memphis blacks are unhappy about the idea, too, because the new, expanded city would be only 44 percent black, and would probably elect a white mayor.

Who in Memphis, besides the realistic Mr. Herenton, is in favor of the plan? White business owners who do not want to see their taxes rise, and middle-class whites who think that the suburbs should get a taste of diversity, too. [Ronald Smothers, City Seeks to Grow by Disappearing, NYT, 10/18/93.]

Rangers Stand Firm

The Texas Rangers baseball team is building a $165 million stadium in Arlington, Texas. Practically no contracts have been awarded to black builders, so the NAACP is demanding set-asides. The team refuses to budge, despite threats of a boycott. “To the low bidder goes the contract,” explains one of the owners. [Steven Reed, Is it fair or foul?, Houston Chronicle, Aug. 1, 1993, p. 1D.]

Feeding the Monster

The New Jersey Department of Higher Education pays for the publication of a semi-annual magazine called Transformations, which relentlessly promotes all the causes that are wrecking American education. Here is a complete list of the contents of a recent issue:

  • Principals’ Gender and the Work Orientation of Male and Female Teachers
  • The Feminization of Jewish Education
  • Writing Word Problems that Reflect Cultural Diversity [how to bring subjects like race and lesbianism into statistics exam problems]
  • Recent African-American Women’s Fiction: Teaching and Finding Voices
  • Politics and Pedagogy: The Creation of a Gender Studies Minor at a Jesuit College
  • From Experience to Analysis: Using Student Discomfort in the Feminist Classroom
  • Towards a Model for Facilitating Curriculum Transformation
  • Long-Lived and Invisible: Old Women and Gender Integration in the Curriculum
  • The Inclusive Curriculum: Setting Our Own Agenda

At least in New Jersey, the wrecking crew is officially in charge of the construction site.

Calling the Future

Sprint, the long-distance telephone company, has started selling telephones with Spanish rather than English lettering. “Automatic redial,” for example, has been replaced with discado automatico. For now, the telephones are available only in South Florida, but if they are a success, they will go on sale in other heavily-Hispanic areas.

In September, Sprint became the first long-distance company to offer billing in Spanish. AT&T and MCI are considering doing the same.

It’s Official

Racism and Sexism, An Integrated Study, by Paula Rothenberg, is one of the standard texts used in “multi-cultural” and “sensitivity” training. On page six, Miss Rothenberg lays her cards on the table with the following definition of racism:

Racism involves the subordination of people of color by white people [emphasis in the original. While an individual person of color may discriminate against white people or even hate them, his or her behavior or attitude cannot be called “racist.’ He or she may be considered prejudiced against whites and we may all agree that the person acts unfairly and unjustly, but racism requires something more than anger, hatred, or prejudice; at the very least, it requires prejudice plus power. The history of the world provides us with a long record of white people holding power and using it to maintain that power and privilege over people of color, not the reverse.

Miss Rothenberg goes on to define “sexism” as a crime that only men can commit.

New Yorkers Oppose Immigration

An October poll shows that more than 63 percent of people living in New York City think that there has been too much immigration to the city in the past few years. Sixty percent say that all this immigration has made New York a worse place to live, as opposed to 30 percent who think immigrants are good for the city. Among the newcomers themselves, 51 percent think immigration has hurt New York, while only 37 percent think it has helped. New Yorkers who were born in America think, by a margin of 66 to 25 percent, that immigration hurts the city. Sixty-eight percent of immigrants and 82 percent of native-born New Yorkers think the February World Trade Center bombing would not have happened if there were tighter immigration controls. Twenty-eight percent of the population of New York City is foreign-born.

A similar poll was conducted in Houston, both of “community leaders” and of ordinary people. Seventy and a half percent of white “leaders” thought immigration was a good thing; only 44 percent of ordinary whites did. As usual, it is the people who are not immediately affected by immigration who can claim to approve of it.

The Wages of Truth

Gen. Carl Mundy, commandant of the Marine Corps, was recently explaining to an interviewer for 60 Minutes why so few non-whites make it to the top levels in the corps: “Minority officers do not shoot as well as the non-minorities. They don’t swim as well. And when you give them a compass and send them across the terrain at night in a land navigation exercise, they don’t do as well at that sort of thing.”

Needless to say, Gen. Mundy was attacked, most notably by then — mayor Dinkins of New York, and by Ben Chavis of the NAACP. So far, there are no plans to discipline him, but Navy Secretary John Dalton has ordered “a complete review on the recruitment, retention and promotion of minorities.”

New York Gets a New Mayor

Calvin Butts, a prominent black preacher in New York City, used to tell his congregations that New York must not be like other American cities, which once had black mayors but are now governed by whites. “We lost Los Angeles. We lost Philadelphia. We lost Chicago . . . We’re not going to lose New York,” he liked to say.

In November’s ballot, blacks did their best not to “lose” New York; 96 percent voted for their co-racialist. Mr. Dinkins also won about 25 percent of the white vote, but that was not enough. New York now has a Republican mayor for the first time in decades, but it would be a mistake to expect much from former Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani. The squalor, crime, and barbarity of New York City are neither caused nor cured by city government. As long as the city continues to hemorrhage whites (their numbers have dipped below the 50 percent mark), life will get worse.

The Cost of not Paying for Abortions

Abortion opponents in various states have succeeded in preventing Medicaid from paying for abortions for indigent women. Naturally, this means that some of these women have children and go on welfare rather than pay for an abortion. In Ohio, it is estimated that since Medicaid funding for abortions was stopped in 1978, 23 percent of eligible women have had babies rather than abortions. In Texas, the figure is said to be about 35 percent. What are the increased long-term costs of bringing these children into the world? The October 1993 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology has published a study of what has happened in Michigan.

The people of the state voted in 1988, by a margin of 57 to 43, to stop government financing of abortions for poor women. The authors of the study have a low estimate of 2,100 and a high estimate of 5,800 for the number of indigent children who are born every year who would otherwise have been aborted. The public cost of the abortions would have been $6 to $8 million dollars. The direct cost of keeping these children on welfare for five years — and many are likely to be on much longer — is $50 million for the lower estimate and $137 million for the higher estimate.

The study considers welfare costs only. It makes no attempt to estimate what these children will cost the state in terms of school disruption, special education, or costs to the legal system.

Closing Ranks

Gary Bledsoe is an assistant Texas district attorney — and is also the president of the Texas NAACP. It was recently found that at least 14 percent of the long-distance telephone calls he made on his office telephones, during office hours, were for the NAACP. The state put Mr. Bledsoe on paid leave while it investigated whether he had violated laws prohibiting personal or political work on state time.

The NAACP, of course, erupted with the predictable frenzy. The national organization immediately detected racism in the investigation, and a spokesman says Mr. Bledsoe was targeted “because he is a black person standing up for the rights of the poor, the dispossessed.”

NAACP Executive Director Ben Chavis says Mr. Bledsoe is the victim of racial “character assassination,” and says that “the vicious attacks on Gary Bledsoe are clearly illegal and immoral.” Mr. Bledsoe is reportedly “overwhelmed” by the support he has received from blacks.

This sort of wildness makes even the most mulish liberals begin to wonder. The Houston Chronicle says the NAACP is “crying wolf.”

Lights Out

Several cities across the country, including Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Shreveport, have been struggling to put down a gang-related rumor that is simply too plausible to dismiss. Young blacks who want to join gangs are said to go driving at night with their lights off. Another motorist will eventually blink his lights as a warning. The aspirant will then try to shoot the friendly motorist on the spot or pursue him to his destination and then kill him.

There have been no reported cases of gangs using this as an initiation exercise. However, the rumor has been spreading by telephone and facsimile, and at least one police department — Houston’s — has been gulled into promoting the rumor. Now police are worried that gangs may think it sounds like fun and will start driving with their lights off.

SIDEBAR

Now in Paperback

Paved With Good Intentions

by Jared Taylor

A devastating assault on contemporary racial thinking and racial policies that makes a perfect Christmas present for waverers. All copies inscribed by the author, and available at below retail price. Cloth edition, $20.00. Paper edition, $10.00. Postage is included.

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LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — One of the most disturbing things I have read in along time is the short item in the November issue about the Pulaski County, Ark. school district. You report that the district will not have to repay a $20 million loan to the state if it is able to reduce the black-white test score gap to the point where the black average is 90 percent of the white average.

It speaks volumes about the bureaucratic mind that the goal should not be scholastic improvement but a smaller racial gap. It is unconscionable that a school district be set a goal that can be met only if white test scores fall.

White parents care about the education of their children, and these Arkansas students will probably not he sacrificed — not even for $20 million. But this horrible financial agreement does tell us what the education establishment really wants.

Michael Cohen, Mobile, AL

Sir — In the context of your November article about American Islam you might have mentioned the recent “covenant” that marked the reconciliation between Louis Farrakhan and mainstream blacks. Press criticism of Rev. Farrakhan’s antisemitism used to be enough to force the likes of Jesse Jackson to keep his distance, but not anymore.

Last September, NAACP President Ben Chavis, Rep. Maxine Waters (Cal.), and Rep. Kweisi Mfume (Md.) joined the Revs. Jackson and Farrakhan for a love feast in Washington, D.C. The all-black audience roared with approval as Rev. Farrakhan rang the changes on the white man: He invented AIDS to kill blacks, he is a demon, he crushes other races beneath his heel.

This meeting got barely a ripple of notice in the press, and no one seemed prepared to draw conclusions from it. 1, for one, think it is pretty important when members of the black establishment meet publicly with a man who openly hates whites and openly advocates their destruction. Of course, most whites are blind to any sign of what non-whites have in store for them.

Nigel Carver, Trenton, NJ

Sir — I am as opposed as anyone to newcomers who are turning the United States into an outpost of the third world. However, I have some sympathy for Muslims who send their children to Islamic schools. There are eight Muslim day schools in the New York City area, and my neighbor sends his daughters (but not his son) to one.

He claims, and I believe him, that he does so mainly because the public schools have become such hog wallows. He thinks his son can fend for himself but he fears for the safety and chastity of his daughters. Whites have the same fears, which is why practically no white children attend the public schools.

My neighbor says that he would not mind sending his daughters to a nonIslamic school, but avoids Catholic schools for obvious reasons and claims that other schools are too expensive. I am hard-pressed to answer when he asks which schools are likely to encourage “modesty.”

Name Withheld, Brooklyn, N. Y.

Sir — “Who Still Believes in Integration” in the Sept.-Oct. issue is a masterpiece — factual, thoughtful, thorough.

It put into broader context for me an incident last year at North Hollywood High School, near where I Eve. Hundreds of black and Hispanic students got into such a fierce racial brawl that it took riot police to restore peace. I remember at the time thinking that the official reason given for the melee — a disagreement over what kind of music to play at the homecoming dance — sounded awfully thin. Of course the real reason is one that the school could never acknowledge: It is trying to force people together who would rather be apart.

School integration is not merely harsh treatment for students. It is also hypocritical because most adults live lives that are far removed from the kind of intimate, racial mixing that cannot be avoided in schools.

Grace Kearns, Hollywood, Cal.

Sir — I was fascinated by the review of Gedahlia Braun’s book in the September/October issue. He writes that African leaders do not understand the connection between what infrastructure development actually does and the eventual wealth of a nation. “Development” is simply a magical process that is supposed to bring forth showers of television sets and automobiles.

As a teaching assistant at a university with a hyperactive minority recruitment office, I see the same kind of thinking all the time. Many blacks see a college education as a magical process. It is the process itself, rather than anything one may learn at college, that is supposed to cause a highpaying, undemanding job to materialize. It is as if the mumbo jumbo of matriculation, moving into a dormitory, and joining the Black Student Union were incantations to the gods.

All too often, learning is irrelevant. Affirmative action grading means that all the blacks graduate, and affirmative action hiring means they all get jobs. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is magic.

Bruce Horner, Baltimore, Md.

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