July 2002

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 13, No. 7 July 2002

CONTENTS

Race and Psychopathic Personality
Science in the Service of Ideology
The California Racial Privacy Initiative
French Nationalists Stumble in Election
Why National Preferences Would be Legal
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Race and Psychopathic Personality

Racial differences in “average personality.”

For as long as official statistics have been kept, blacks in white societies have been overrepresented in all indices of social pathology: crime, illegitimacy, poverty, school failure, and long-term unemployment. The conventional liberal explanation for this is white “racism,” past and present, which has forced blacks into self-destructive choices. More clear-headed observers, however, have sought a partial explanation in the low average IQ of blacks.

Black Criminal

Credit Image: Lou Jones/ZUMAPRESS.com

Low IQ can lead to crime because less intelligent children do poorly at school and fail to learn the skills needed to get well-paid jobs, or even any job. Unemployment is therefore two to three times higher among blacks than whites. People without jobs need money, and have relatively little to lose by robbery or burglary, and may therefore commit property crimes. The association between low intelligence and crime holds for whites as well, among whom the average IQ of criminals is about 84.

Nevertheless, as Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein showed in their book The Bell Curve, low IQ cannot entirely explain a black crime rate that is six-and-a-half times the white rate. When blacks and whites are matched for IQ, blacks still commit crimes at two-and-a-half times the white rate. This shows that blacks must have some other characteristic, besides low intelligence, that explains their high levels of criminality.

Prof. Herrnstein and Dr. Murray found the same race and IQ relationship for social problems other than crime: unemployment, illegitimacy, poverty, and living on welfare. All of these are more frequent among blacks and are related to low IQ, and low IQ goes some way towards explaining them, but these social problems remain greater among blacks than among whites with the same IQs. Low intelligence is therefore not the whole explanation. Prof. Herrnstein and Dr. Murray did not offer any suggestions as to what the additional factors responsible for the greater prevalence of these social problems among blacks might be. They concluded only that “some ethnic differences are not washed away by controlling for either intelligence or for any other variables that we examined. We leave those remaining differences unexplained and look forward to learning from our colleagues where the explanations lie” (p. 340).

Psychopathic Personality

I propose that the variable that explains these differences is that blacks are more psychopathic than whites. Just as racial groups differ in average IQ, they can also differ in average levels of other psychological traits, and racial differences in the tendency towards psychopathic personality would explain virtually all the differences in black and white behavior left unexplained by differences in IQ.

Psychopathic personality is a personality disorder of which the central feature is lack of a moral sense. The condition was first identified in the early nineteenth century by the British physician John Pritchard, who proposed the term “moral imbecility” for those deficient in moral sense but of normal intelligence. The term psychopathic personality was first used in 1915 by the German psychiatrist Emile Kraepelin and has been employed as a diagnostic label throughout the twentieth century. In 1941 the condition was described by Hervey Cleckley in what has become a classic book, The Mask of Sanity. He described the condition as general poverty of emotional feelings, lack of remorse or shame, superficial charm, pathological lying, egocentricity, a lack of insight, absence of nervousness, an inability to love, impulsive antisocial acts, failure to learn from experience, reckless behavior under the influence of alcohol, and a lack of long-term goals.

In 1984 the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term psychopathic personality and replaced it with “anti-social personality disorder.” This is an expression of the increasing sentimentality of the second half of the twentieth century, in which terms that had acquired negative associations were replaced by euphemisms. There are other examples. Mentally retarded children are now called “slow learners” or even “exceptional children;” aggressive children now have “externalizing behaviors;” prostitutes are “sex workers;” tramps are now “the homeless,” as if their houses were destroyed by earthquake; and people on welfare are “clients” of social workers. However, the term psychopathic personality remains useful.

While psychopathic personality is a psychiatric disorder, it has long been regarded as the extreme expression of a personality trait that is continuously distributed throughout the population. In this respect it is like other psychiatric disorders. For instance, severe depression is a psychiatric disorder, but everyone feels depressed sometimes, and some normal people are depressed more often and more severely than others. It is the same with psychopathic personality. There are degrees of moral sense throughout the population, and psychopaths are the extreme group.

There is a difference between blacks and whites — analogous to the difference in intelligence — in psychopathic personality considered as a personality trait. Both psychopathic personality and intelligence are bell curves with different means and distributions among blacks and whites. For intelligence, the mean and distribution are both lower among blacks. For psychopathic personality, the mean and distribution are higher among blacks. The effect of this is that there are more black psychopaths and more psychopathic behavior among blacks.

In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association issued a revised Diagnostic Manual listing 11 features of anti-social personality disorder: (1) inability to sustain consistent work behavior; (2) failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior [this is a euphemism for being a criminal]; (3) irritability and aggressivity, as indicated by frequent physical fights and assaults; (4) repeated failure to honor financial obligations; (5) failure to plan ahead or impulsivity; (6) no regard for truth, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or “conning” others; (7) recklessness regarding one’s own or others’ personal safety, as indicated by driving while intoxicated or recurrent speeding; (8) inability to function as a responsible parent; (9) failure to sustain a monogamous relationship for more than one year; (10) lacking remorse; (11) the presence of conduct disorder in childhood.

This is a useful list. Curiously, however, it fails to include the deficiency of moral sense that is the core of the condition, although this is implicit in virtually every feature of the disorder. All of these behaviors are more prevalent among blacks than among whites, and suggest that blacks have a higher average tendency towards psychopathic personality.

Questionnaires can be used to measure psychopathic personality in normal populations. The first to be constructed was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which was devised in the 1930s. This instrument consists of a series of scales for the measurement of a variety of psychiatric conditions regarded as continuously distributed in the population, such as hysteria, mania and depression, and includes the Psychopathic Deviate Scale for the measurement of psychopathic personality.

During the 65 or so years following its publication, the MMPI has been administered to a great many groups. Mean scores have been published by different investigators for a number of samples of blacks, whites, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians. All of these studies show a consistent pattern: Blacks and Indians have the highest psychopathic scores. Hispanics come next followed by whites. Ethnic Japanese and Chinese have the lowest scores. The same rank order of racial groups is found for all the expressions of psychopathic personality listed by the American Psychiatric Association, and these differences are found in both children and adults.

Conduct Disorder

The terms psychopathic personality and anti-social personality disorder, however, are not used for children or young adolescents up to the age of 15 years. They are instead said to have conduct disorders. The principal criteria set out by the American Psychiatric Association (1994) for a diagnosis of conduct disorder are persistent stealing, lying, truancy, running away from home, fighting, arson, burglary, vandalism, sexual precocity and cruelty. Childhood conduct disorder is therefore an analogue of psychopathic personality in older adolescents and adults. A number of studies have shown that conduct disorder in children is a frequent precursor of psychopathic behavior.

Studies have found that the prevalence of conduct disorders is about twice as high among blacks as among whites. This is the case not only in the United States but also in Britain and the Netherlands. Other racial groups also differ in the prevalence of conduct disorders among children. As with all the other expressions of psychopathic personality, conduct disorders are frequent among American Indians.

Children with conduct disorders are sometimes suspended or expelled from school because of constant misbehavior, particularly aggression. In both the United States and Britain, black children are disciplined in this way three or four times as frequently as white children, while East Asians have low discipline rates. In misbehavior in schools, as in so much else, East Asians are the “model minority.” In the United States, Indians have a high discipline rate.

Lack of honesty is one of the core features of the psychopathic personality, and one measure of this characteristic is the default rates on student loans. About half of American college students take out loans but not all graduates repay them. The 1987 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study consisting of 6,338 cases reports default rates as follows: whites — 5 percent, Hispanics — 20 percent, American Indians — 45 percent, blacks — 55 percent.

Bad credit ratings also reflect a failure to honor financial obligations. A report by Freddie Mac of 12,000 households in 1999 found the highest percentage of poor credit ratings was among blacks (48 percent). The next highest was among Hispanics (34 percent), while whites had the lowest at 27 percent.

A prominent feature of psychopathic personality is a high level of aggression, which is expressed in a number of ways including homicide, robbery, assault, and rape. All of these are crimes, so racial and ethnic differences appear in crime rates. High black crime rates have been documented by Jared Taylor and the late Glayde Whitney in The Color of Crime. For homicide, rates for black males are about six times the white rate, and for black females they are about four times higher. The homicide rate for East Asians is about half that of whites. The high homicide rate of blacks is also found in South Africa, and homicide is generally higher in black countries than in white and East Asian countries.

As regards other crimes, the robbery rate for blacks is about twelve times the white rate, while the assault rate is about five times higher. The high black rates for these crimes are followed in descending order by Hispanics, American Indians, whites and East Asians. The rate for rape is about five-and-a-half times greater for blacks than whites, and two to three times greater among Hispanics and Indians as compared to whites, while East Asians commit rape at about half the white rate.

Domestic violence shows the same race differences. Severe violence by husbands against wives is about four times more common among blacks as whites. Black wives assault their husbands at about twice the white rate. American Indians assault their spouses even more often than blacks do. High crime rates among blacks have been found not only in the United States but also in Britain, France, Canada and Sweden.

A prominent feature of psychopathic personality is an inability to form stable, long-term loving relationships. David Lykken, a leading expert on psychopathic personalities, writes of the psychopath’s “undeveloped ability to love or affiliate with others,” and Robert Hare, another leading expert, writes that “psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification” and “equate love with sexual arousal.”

Marriage is the most explicit expression of long-term love, and a number of studies have shown that blacks attach less value to marriage than whites. Questionnaire surveys have found that blacks are less likely than whites to agree that “marriage is for life.” Two American sociologists, R. Staples and L. B. Johnson, write that “Blacks do not rank marriage as highly as whites” and that “Black Americans’ acceptance of this form of relationship is inconsistent with their African heritage.”

In a study of an American sample of 2,059 married people, C. L. Broman found that “blacks are significantly less likely to feel that their marriages are harmonious and are significantly less likely to be satisfied with their marriages.” Other studies of racial and ethnic differences in attitudes have found that whites think about marriage more often than blacks, and have a stronger desire than blacks to find the right marriage partner. There are also racial differences in rates of cohabitation, which also reflects a commitment to a long-term relationship. A survey of 24-to 29-year-olds in Britain found that 68 percent of whites had cohabited but only 38 percent of blacks.

Blacks in the United States, Britain, France and the Caribbean are less likely than whites to marry or enter into stable relationships. In an American survey of 18-to 64-year-olds carried out from 1990 to 1996, 61 percent of whites were married but only 35 percent of blacks. The most likely to be married were East Asians (66 percent). Fifty-five percent of Hispanics and 48 percent of American Indians were married. The same race differences are found in Britain. In a survey carried out in 1991, among 30-to 34-year-olds 68 percent of whites were married but only 34 percent of blacks. Studies of marriage rates for France in the 1990s have also found that blacks are less likely to be married than whites. These differences are also found for cohabitation, with fewer blacks living in unmarried cohabitation relationships than whites.

Differences in marriage rates are reflected in differences in illegitimacy rates. In the United States, black illegitimacy rates are down slightly from their high in 1994, when 70.4 percent of black women who gave birth were unmarried. The 2000 figure of 68.7 is still the highest for any racial group, and is followed by American Indians at 58.4 percent, Hispanics 42.7 percent, whites 22.1 percent, and Asians 14.8 percent. The Asian figure includes populations with greatly differing illegitimacy rates, with native Hawaiians, for example, at 50 percent, Japanese at 9.5 percent, and Chinese at 7.6 percent.

Low rates of stable relationships are found among blacks in the Caribbean islands. In a review of the literature the sociologists B. Ram and G. E. Ebanks write that “In the Caribbean in general . . . there is a substantial amount of movement from one sex partner to another and also a very high percentage of reproduction outside marriage.”

When they do marry, blacks are less tolerant than whites of monogamous constraints. An extreme form of intolerance is murder of one’s spouse. In Detroit in 1982-3, 63 percent of the population was black but 90.5 percent of those who killed their spouses were black. Less extreme forms of aversion to monogamy are adultery and divorce. The Kinsey data on college graduates, collected in the 1940s and 1950s, found that 51 percent of blacks were unfaithful to their spouses during the first two years of marriage compared with 23 percent of whites. Several other studies have confirmed that the incidence of marital infidelity is greater among blacks than among whites. Blacks cite infidelity more frequently than whites as a cause of divorce.

Blacks also have more sexual partners than whites. The Kinsey survey found that about twice as many black college graduates had had six or more partners before marriage than whites. Many later studies have confirmed this. A survey of 2,026 15-to-18-year-olds in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s found that 38 percent of blacks had had five or more sexual partners, 26 percent of whites, 21 percent of Hispanics and eight percent of East Asians.

The same differences are found in Britain. In a study of a nationally representative sample of approximately 20,000 16-to 59-year-olds carried out in 1990, 36 percent of blacks had had two or more sexual partners during the previous five years, compared with 29 percent of whites and 18 percent of Asians.

Delay of Gratification

The impulsiveness component of psychopathic personality includes an inability or unwillingness to delay immediate gratification in the expectation of long-term advantage. The first study to demonstrate differences between blacks and whites in the delay of gratification was carried out by W. Mischel in Trinidad in the late 1950s. He offered black and white children the choice between a small candy bar now or a larger one in a week. He found black children were much more likely to ask for the small candy bar now, and this difference has been confirmed in three subsequent American studies. This racial difference has been noted but given different names by different writers. In The Unheavenly City Revisited, Edward Banfield writes of the “extreme present-orientation” of blacks, and Michael Levin writes of “high time preference,” an economist’s term for preferring cash now rather than a greater sum in the future.

The APA Diagnostic Manual refers to the psychopathic personality’s “inability to sustain consistent work behavior,” and a number of studies have shown that blacks are less motivated to work than whites and Asians, while Hispanics are intermediate. For example, black students do fewer hours of homework than whites and Asians. Among college students with the same Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, blacks get poorer grades than whites, probably because they don’t work as hard.

This helps explain black unemployment. Several American ethnographic studies of inner city blacks have concluded that many are unwilling to work. Thus, E. Anderson writes that “there are many unemployed black youth who are unmotivated and uninterested in working for a living, particularly in the dead-end jobs they are likely to get.” The sociologist S. M. Petterson writes that “it is commonly contended that young black men experience more joblessness than their white counterparts because they are less willing to seek out low paying jobs.” American Asians are the opposite of blacks in this respect. They have low rates of unemployment and it has been shown by James Flynn that they achieve higher educational qualifications and earnings than would be predicted from their intelligence, suggesting they have strong work motivation.

In the United States, unemployment rates are highest among Indians followed in descending order by blacks, Hispanics, whites and ethnic Chinese and Japanese. These differences are frequently attributed to white racism but it is difficult to reconcile this explanation with the lower rate of unemployment among East Asians as compared with whites, and also with the higher rate of unemployment among Indians as compared to blacks.

Blacks in Britain, Canada and France are frequently unemployed. In Britain, the 1991 census found that 26 percent of black men were unemployed, compared with 11 percent of whites and ethnic Chinese. In Canada in 1991, 13 percent of black men were unemployed compared with seven percent of whites. In France in 1994, 11 percent of black men were unemployed compared with eight percent of whites.

Recklessness

Psychopaths appear to enjoy taking risks because it stimulates them, and there are several ways in which blacks show greater recklessness and risk taking than whites or Asians. In the 1989-93 American Teenage Attitudes and Practices Survey, 9,135 youths aged 12 to 18 were asked to consider the question: “I get a kick out of doing things every now and then that are a little risky or dangerous.” Fifty-six point nine percent of blacks agreed, as compared with 38.6 percent of whites. Driving habits are an index of risk taking and recklessness. A number of studies have shown that blacks run red lights more often than whites, and have more frequent accidents. Five studies have shown that blacks do not use seat belts as often as whites. Hispanics and Native Americans likewise have more accidents caused by recklessness and risk-taking than whites and East Asians.

Sexual behavior can be reckless. Among those who do not wish to have children, blacks are less likely to use contraception than whites, and this has been found in both the United States and Britain. One result is that black women have more unplanned babies than whites. In the United States in the 1990s blacks had about twice the proportion of unplanned babies as whites and Asians. In Britain, a survey of teenage births carried out in 1994 found that these were three-and-a-half times more common among blacks than among whites and Asians.

The behavior of reckless men also causes unplanned pregnancies. Surveys have asked adolescent males if they would feel “very pleased” or whether they would care if they were responsible for an unplanned pregnancy. Twice as many blacks as whites say they would be very pleased or that they would not care. To be very pleased or not care about saddling a teenage girl with an unplanned pregnancy expresses a great degree of a reckless regarding the well-being of others. In the United States, the percentage of teenage blacks who have fathered an illegitimate child is approximately three times greater than that of whites, with Hispanics intermediate.

Another consequence of reckless avoidance of contraceptives is that blacks are more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases — including HIV and AIDS — all of which are more prevalent among blacks than among whites and Asians. At the present time, about 80 percent of the word’s HIV carriers are blacks in sub-Saharan Africa.

A common expression of conduct disorder in children and young adolescents is sexual precocity. Many studies have shown that blacks are more sexually precocious than whites and Asians. Surveys in the United States in the 1990s have found that about a third of black 13-year-olds have had sexual intercourse compared with 14 percent of whites and Hispanics, and four percent of East Asians. Similarly, a survey in Britain in 1990 found that by the age of 16, 18 percent of blacks had had intercourse compared with 13 percent of whites and five percent of Asians.

We consider finally the psychopathic characteristic described by the American Psychiatric Association as “inability to function as a responsible parent.” One of the most straightforward measures of this is abuse and neglect. The American Association for Protecting Children has found that black children constitute approximately 15 percent of the child population and about 22 percent of cases of child abuse and neglect. The First (1975) and Second (1985) National Family Violence Surveys carried out in America examined the use of violence towards children, defined as hitting them with the fist or with some object, and kicking, biting and beating them up. It does not include slapping or spanking. It found that 1.2 percent of white parents and 2.1 percent of blacks inflict this kind of severe violence on their children.

Data published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services for 1996 showed that maltreatment was about three times more common among blacks and about one-and-a-half times more common among Hispanics, than among whites.

The most extreme expression of the inability to function as a responsible parent consists of killing a child. Racial differences in the homicide of infants in their first year of life were examined for approximately 35 million babies born in the United States between 1983-91. This study found that 2,776 of these had been murdered, the great majority by mothers or the mothers’ husbands or partners. The rate of infant homicides for blacks and Native Americans was 2 per 10,000, compared with 0.6 per 10,000 for whites and 0.4 per 10,000 for East Asians. In the early 1990s the racial differences became even greater, with blacks having four-and-a-half times the infant homicide rate of whites and Hispanics.

Complete Consistency

There is almost complete consistency in the racial differences in outcomes that can be considered measures of psychopathic personality. In everything from child behavior to sexual precocity to adult crime rates we find Asians at one extreme, blacks and American Indians at the other, and whites Hispanics in between. These differences are not only consistent through time but are found in countries such as France, Britain, Canada, and the United States, which have very different histories of what could be called “racism.” Indices of high psychopathic personality in blacks are likewise found in the virtually all-black societies of Africa and the Caribbean.

Racial differences in psychopathic behavior persist even when IQ is held constant, and the same racial differences are found in essentially every kind of measurable behavior that reflects psychopathic personality. The most plausible explanation for these differences is that just as there are racial differences in average IQ, there are racial differences in what could be called “average personality,” with blacks showing greater psychopathic tendencies. The argument that white “racism” is responsible for black social pathology is increasingly unconvincing.

Richard Lynn is professor emeritus of psychology of the University of Ulster. This article is based on a longer paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, 2002, Vol. 32, pp.273-316.

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ARTICLE

Science in the Service of Ideology

Stephen Jay Gould was admired by journalists but not by scientists.

With the death of Stephen Jay Gould on May 20, 2002, the world has lost one of its most determined — and mendacious — advocates of the view there is no relationship between race, intelligence and brain size. Not surprisingly, he has been widely acclaimed in obituaries for his contributions to evolutionary biology and for his critiques of the concept of intelligence, its heritability, and race differences. The New York Times called him “one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century;” the Washington Post said he was “a brilliant scientist;” the Los Angeles Times pronounced him “a latter-day Darwin,” and the London Times called him “one of the most gifted evolutionary scientists of his generation.”

All this, however, is in striking contrast to the evaluation of his work by fellow-scientists, most of whom regarded him as a lightweight and even a charlatan. Professor Maynard Smith, a leading evolutionary biologist, has written that others in the field “tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as hardly to be worth bothering with.” Speaking for psychologists, Chris Brand has written that Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is “a masterpiece of deception;” and Professor Philippe Rushton has written of Gould’s “career of relentless special pleading.” Even anthropologists Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, who uncritically accept many of Gould’s distortions, have written that his writings “invariably have a not-so-hidden political agenda.” Professor Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist who largely agrees with Gould on intelligence and race, has said that “scientifically, he was a failure.”

Gould posed as a scientist concerned only with truth. He even wrote, “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of evidence for empirical truth.” Even to make such a claim suggests he had something to hide. His work was strongly politically motivated, and it is difficult not to conclude that he advanced his political views at the expense of scientific integrity.

And what were his views? “He learned Marxism on his father’s knee,” according to a sympathetic article in the magazine Skeptic, which he helped found. “Gould’s politics were solidly left of center” wrote Joel Achenbach in his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. It would be more correct to say that he was on the extreme left, and his writing consistently supported his politics.

In his work in evolutionary biology, Gould’s strategy was to latch onto an idea, give it a clever-sounding name, and promote it through his popular writings in magazines and books as an important new concept. His principal theory was what he called “punctuated equilibrium.” He asserted that evolutionary biologists from Darwin onwards supposed that evolution took place gradually and steadily. He announced this was all wrong, and that evolution takes place in fits and starts. For a long period, there are no changes, and then in a short space of time species evolve rapidly.

In so far as this occurs, it had been recognized long before Gould promoted it. Typically species evolve slowly over many millions of years but during some periods they evolve more rapidly. For example, the brain size of mammals has increased gradually and steadily over the last 60 million years or so, during which time it roughly doubled, but during the last 5 million years the brain size of the hominids, the evolutionary line from apes to humans, evolved much more rapidly and approximately tripled in size.

Still, Gould succeeded in convincing journalists he had had a brilliant new insight. For The New York Times it was “a revolutionary suggestion.” Among biologists it was generally understood that all Gould had done was to dress up with a fancy name something that had long been known . As the New York Times obituary discreetly put it, “Outside of academia, Gould was almost universally adored.” Implied but not stated was that inside academia, he was not held in much regard.

Gould on Intelligence

Gould’s reputation was even lower among psychologists than biologists. His writings on intelligence, particularly his The Mismeasure of Man, appeared systematically to misrepresent the truth. Gould frequently wrote that psychologists “reify” intelligence, and regard it as a “thing.” In fact, psychologists regard intelligence as a construct — something like gravity — a concept that explains a number of observable phenomena. This is an example of Gould’s strategy of setting up straw men and demolishing them.

The Mismeasure of Man was published in 1981, and a slightly revised second edition was republished in 1996. It is instructive to compare them. In the first edition Gould dismissed the idea that intelligence is positively related to brain size, although this had been established by the consistent results of some fifteen studies. The first to make this claim was Samuel Morton (1799–1851), who filled skulls with small seeds to compare their volume. Gould claimed to have remeasured Morton’s skulls, and found that Morton had doctored the results to prove whites have larger skulls than blacks. This is how Gould patronizingly describes Morton’s work:

Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action (p.97).

Astonishingly, when Gould remeasured Morton’s skulls he confirmed that Morton was right! Gould’s “corrected” measures were brain sizes of 87 cubic inches for whites and 83 cubic inches for blacks. From this he concluded that “my correction of Morton’s conventional ranking reveals no significant differences among the races” — an incredible conclusion for a larger white brain size of approximately five percent.

During the 15 years between the first and second editions, there was a considerable amount of published work on the relationship between brain size and intelligence. In 1984 Professor Kenneth Beals reported world data for approximately 20,000 crania, and found white-black differences similar to those found by Morton. Professor Philippe Rushton has reported several data sets that confirm these results, and has recorded that he sent his papers describing these results to Gould. Gould did not reply, but must have concluded that the evidence was so strong he could no longer dispute it. Instead of writing a correction, he simply removed all references to brain size from the second edition.

Another issue on which Gould misrepresented the facts was the purported role of intelligence tests in excluding Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s. He asserted that IQ-tester and eugenicist Henry Goddard had identified immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe as having low average intelligence, and had claimed four-fifths of Jewish immigrants were feeble minded. Gould asserted further that this influenced the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which limited the numbers of immigrants admitted from Eastern and Southern Europe, with the result that many Jews could not come and perished in the Holocaust. By this chain of reasoning he was able to blame the Holocaust on the false conclusions of intelligence testers.

The first two steps in this chain of reasoning are certainly wrong. Goddard never claimed four-fifths of Jews were feeble minded. Moreover, there is no evidence Congress was influenced by his or anyone else’s work on intelligence in passing the 1924 Immigration Act. Immigration had been running at around one million a year, and Congress was worried about integrating so many foreigners. Finally, even if these assertions were correct, there were other countries to which Jews could have gone to escape persecution in Nazi Germany.

Carl Degler in his 1991 book In Search of Human Nature corrected a number of Gould’s mistakes about Goddard, but true to form, Gould repeated the same mistakes in the second edition of The Mismeasure of Man. According to Rita Colwell, director of the National Science Foundation, Gould “didn’t tolerate shoddy science.” In fact, when it suited him, he practiced it.

Professor John Carroll, an expert on the statistical method of factor analysis, is a leading psychologist critical of Gould. In a 1995 article in the journal Intelligence, Prof. Carroll begins by noting that The Mismeasure of Man has been “much discussed among intellectual dilettantes,” but is full of errors. He writes that Gould’s “account of the history of mental testing may be regarded as badly biased and crafted in such a way as to prejudice the general public and even some scientists against almost any research concentrating on human abilities.” He also writes of Gould’s “gross misrepresentation of Thurstone’s views and methods of thinking” on factor analysis and the nature of intelligence, and of his “many errors in interpreting factor analysis.”

Hans Eysenck (1916–1997), a psychologist who worked in London and wrote more than 70 books, summarized Gould’s work on intelligence in his posthumously published 1998 book, Intelligence — A New Look:

S. J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man is a paleontologist’s distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science. Gould is one of a number of politically motivated scientists who have consistently misled the public about what psychologists are doing in the field of intelligence, what they have discovered and what conclusions they have come to. Gould simply refuses to mention unquestionable facts that do not fit into his politically correct version; he shamelessly attacks the reputations of eminent scientists of whom he disapproves, on completely nonfactual grounds, and he misrepresents the views of scientists.

It is not difficult to understand why journalists writing for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books were so effusive about Gould, while scientists were so critical. Journalists have the same liberal-left beliefs as Gould. When they read him, they read what they wanted to hear, and they did not have the knowledge or integrity to question what he wrote. As for Gould himself, he must have known he was deliberately misrepresenting the evidence to suit his political agenda — and it was he who said scientists who do this deserve to spend the afterlife in the bottom circle of the Inferno.

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ARTICLE

The California Racial Privacy Initiative

Why whites should oppose a ‘color-blind’ California.

Six years after he led the successful campaign to pass Proposition 209, the ballot initiative that banned racial preferences in state hiring, contracting, and college admissions, University of California regent Ward Connerly is trying to get something called the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) before California voters. The measure would prohibit state and local governments from collecting information on race. People filling out official forms — birth certificates, school enrollment forms, employment and welfare applications — would no longer have to check a box indicating race.

According to Mr. Connerly, who heads a group known as the American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC): “The goal of the Racial Privacy Initiative is to acknowledge the increasing irrelevance of race classifications, the growing percentage of our population who are ‘multiracial’ or ‘multiethnic,’ and the desire for privacy when it comes to the question of ‘what is your race?’ There is no reason the government should classify its citizens along lines of skin color, ethnic background or where their ancestors came from.”

While Mr. Connerly may believe race is an “arbitrary social construct,” the initiative recognizes the reality of race in at least three areas: civil-rights law, medical research, and law enforcement. Under Paragraph (e) of the RPI, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which enforces non-discrimination law, is exempt for ten years from the prohibition against gathering race data. Race is apparently a valid idea when it comes to suing people for alleged discrimination — at least for another decade.

Paragraph (f), which says “Otherwise lawful classification of medical research subjects and patients shall be exempt from this section,” implicitly recognizes the biological reality of race. Mr. Connerly’s ACRC website (www.acrc1.org) concedes that certain diseases afflict some “groups” more than others, so it permits this “compelling, commonsensical exemption.”

The law enforcement exemption reads as follows: “Nothing in this section shall prevent law enforcement officers, while carrying out their law enforcement duties, from describing particular persons in otherwise lawful ways. Neither the governor, the legislature nor any statewide agency shall require law enforcement officers to maintain records that track individuals on the basis of said classifications, nor shall the governor, the legislature or any statewide agency withhold funding to law enforcement agencies on the basis of the failure to maintain such records.”

This means that if the RPI passes, police will still be able to describe suspects as black, white, Hispanic or Asian, but there will be no obligation for police departments to keep other records that indicate race. The ACRC says the RPI does not “foreclose the possibility” of local agencies doing so, provided they assume all the costs and risks. However, it is not hard to imagine a future court ruling — based on language in the RPI — that prohibits racial record keeping by local departments. The initiative also explicitly prohibits “profiling,” which the ACRC describes as pernicious and immoral, but given the high crime rates of blacks and Hispanics, it is every bit as “compelling and commonsensical” in police work as in medical research.

The RPI allows for other kinds of racial data collection, only if the legislature finds that “a compelling state interest” requires classification by race. Each exemption from the RPI would require a two-thirds majority in both houses, and the governor’s signature, which means there would be very few.

How do the voters feel about the initiative? A recently conducted Field Poll shows 48 percent in favor of the RPI, with 34 percent opposed. Whites and Hispanics support the measure 50 to 33 percent. Blacks are evenly split, 42 percent in favor and 41 percent opposed. Asians oppose the RPI, 42 percent to 35 percent. However, only one-quarter of Californians polled had even heard of the initiative.

The RPI has a good chance of becoming law, but is unlikely to be on the ballot this fall. On April 19, Mr. Connerly’s ACRC submitted 980,000 signatures to the state for verification. Election officials say they may not have enough time to see if 670,000 of them — the number needed to get on the ballot — are valid before June 24, the deadline for the fall election. This means the initiative will most likely go before the voters in March 2004. Mr. Connerly actually prefers the later date; he doesn’t want the RPI to become an issue in November’s gubernatorial election, probably because the Republicans want to stay away from it during the campaign. Some 61 percent of voters who support GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon say they would vote for the initiative, while 25 percent are opposed.

Mark DiCamillo, a pollster with the Field Institute, says the RPI could “make the candidates a little uncomfortable.” “There are reservations from the Republicans that this isn’t going to help,” he adds. “It could be viewed as a wedge issue.” (Republicans always think anything related to race is a “wedge issue.”)

Although his organization denies that Republicans have asked for a delay, Mr. Connerly reportedly submitted only enough signatures to trigger a name-by-name count rather than enough to get quick verification. A spokesman says the campaign needs more time to raise funds for advertising, and thinks it would be easier to win approval from the smaller number of voters who turn out for a spring primary.

Support for the RPI generally breaks down along ideological lines. The mainstream right — neoconservatives, business groups, etc. — are nearly unanimous in support because they claim to be in favor of a color-blind society. The left — a coalition of trial lawyers, racial pressure groups, and immigrant activists — is strongly opposed, because they think the RPI threatens identity politics. Without racial statistics, they will have a hard time “proving” racism and discrimination.

In this case, the left has the correct position, but for the wrong reasons. Without statistics, it will be harder to understand the California’s racial dynamics. The ethnic composition of the state and its various localities will be known every ten years as long as the federal census continues to ask about race. It is in other areas that the RPI will take its toll. There will be no racial record of births, deaths, or marriages in California — the most populous state in the union — so federal statistics will be incomplete. If police departments start ignoring race, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports will cease to be uniform. Federal programs like welfare, Medicaid, and housing subsidies collect racial data, but it is usually state agencies that do the counting. It is not clear whether California will submit this information.

The best reason to oppose the initiative is not that it will camouflage the state’s dispossession of whites — this cannot be hidden from the census — but because it conceals the high costs of blacks and Hispanics. For the entire state of California, it will be impossible to find information on racial differences in a whole host of standard categories like poverty, illegitimacy, AIDS, welfare use, and perhaps crime. For people willing to dig, it is often possible to find racial differences in accidental drownings, wife-beatings, child abuse, cigarette smoking, auto accidents, delinquency, loan defaults, expulsions from school, house repossessions, gun-shot accidents, disease frequencies, lack of health insurance, visits to emergency rooms, and a host of other indicators of who is a burden on society. The RPI would make it impossible to find out these things.

Non-whites will not, of course, let the absence of official statistics disturb their plans. When any school gets enough Mexicans, they will still demand that it be renamed for Cesar Chavez, or that Cinco de Mayo replace Presidents Day. Even if the school is not allowed officially to count Mexicans, Mexicans can be counted on to count themselves. And though it may be illegal for the state to count Hispanic state legislators, when there are enough of them they will still vote to make Spanish an official language and give in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants. The absence of racial statistics will conceal the failures and costs of non-whites without slowing their colonization of the state and its institutions. The RPI is for whites what sand is for an ostrich.

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ARTICLE

French Nationalists Stumble in Election

Jacques Chirac’s center-right is poised for victory.

The first round of the French legislative elections appears to have assured Jacques Chirac’s center-right coalition a majority in the National Assembly. With 43.4 percent of the vote, the French president’s supporters are projected to win 380 to 446 of the 577 legislative seats after the second round of voting on June 16.

With a disappointing 11.3 percent of the vote, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front survived into the second round in only 37 races — far fewer than the several hundred Mr. Le Pen had predicted. If the party had done as well as it did in 1997, and won 15 percent, it could have expected to be in some 135 second-round contests. Bruno Mégret’s breakaway National Republican Movement won a scant 1.09 percent of the vote, putting its very survival as a party in doubt.

Because the National Front has been frozen out by Mr. Chirac’s center-right, it may not win a single one of its 37 second-round races. According to French electoral law, a first-round win requires more than 50 percent of the vote. This is a difficult achievement in races that may have seven or eight candidates, and this year’s 40 outright first-round victories for Chirac supporters are an impressive performance. In those races with no majority victor, candidates who won at least 12.5 percent of the vote in the first round move on to the winner-take-all second round. In the past, National Front and Chirac candidates eliminated each other in the second round because the “conservatives” refuse to cooperate with the front the way the leftist parties cooperate with each other.

When more than one leftist candidates — Communist, Socialist or Green — survive into the second round, the ones with fewer votes always withdraw so as to avoid splitting the red-green vote, and to give the best-placed leftist a good chance of beating the candidate(s) of the right. Mr. Chirac has never let his followers cooperate in this way with the National Front, so the two parties tend to take enough votes away from each other to give the left unearned victories.

Gauche Chirac

The front would be happy to withdraw to mutual advantage, and in previous elections many of Mr. Chirac’s men were annoyed that their boss made them cut their own throats just so they could say they kept the odious National Front at arm’s length. As the cartoon above from the French weekly Rivarol explains, the long arm of the left (gauche) holds Jacques Chirac by the collar, telling him to tell his troops not to shake hands with the National Front.

This year, because the front did so poorly, there will be only 10 “triangular” races that pit the front against a leftist and the center-right (of the 27 remaining second-round ballots in which the front is taking part, it faces only one other candidate, either a leftist or a Chirac supporter.) However in all ten cases, the front won fewer votes than the center-right, so if a cooperation agreement were in place, it would be the front candidate who would withdraw to give the Chirac forces a better chance against the left. In multi-party elections, a decline of just a few percentage points of the national vote makes a huge difference, and front activists are scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.

The French seem to suffer from a certain schizophrenia when it comes to the Mr. Le Pen. In a poll taken just one week after he won 18 percent of the vote in the runoff against Jacques Chirac for president, no fewer than 28 percent of French voters said they backed his stances “on most issues.” In 1999, only 11 percent gave that answer. According to the latest figures, 49 percent of the French are “totally opposed” to the National Front, but that is a decline from 63 percent in 1999.

The lefty newspaper Le Monde, which reported the findings, was distressed to find that 59 percent of respondents said they thought there are too many immigrants in France. “Ordinary xenophobia,” the paper sniffed, has been “liberated,” and the French are parading their prejudices “without shame or discomfort.” The paper went on to decry a growing “Lepenization of the mind.” Despite this good news, there are signs the demonization campaign in the runup to the presidential election had an effect. In 1999, only 33 percent of those polled thought the National Front was a “threat to democracy.” Now, 70 percent think it is.

The demonization campaign has, of course, been in high gear once again. On June 3, just a few days before the vote, Le Monde published reports from several Algerians who claim Mr. Le Pen tortured them during his three months in Algeria in 1957 during the Franco-Algerian war. One man actually claims Mr. Le Pen flipped the switch to turn on the electric shocks. Mr. Le Pen “totally and formally” denies the charges, and says he will bring suit for libel. There have been charges of torture in the past, but this is the first time — 45 years later — that anyone claims to have been an actual victim.

One of the ironies of this campaign has been that the party the lefties love to hate is the only one to meet the requirements of the idiotic “law of parity,” which goes into effect this year, and levies fines on parties that do not run male and female candidates in equal numbers. Two-hundred seventy, or 49 percent of the front’s candidates are women, which puts it well ahead of both the Socialists (36 percent) and Jacques Chirac’s Gaullist coalition (20 percent). “Jean-Marie Le Pen believes in us,” explains National Front candidate Alexandra Hardy who, at age 25, is one of the youngest of all the candidates. “Our movement has confidence in women when other parties do not,” she adds.

During the debates on the law last year, feminists pushed it on the theory that women are natural legislators, just like men, but are kept out of rightful positions of power by wicked chauvinists. They are furious that the National Front has hijacked their ideological victory and run candidates for the opposite reason: “Women need to be represented by women,” explains front candidate Nicole Aureau. She says men and women are different, and have different political interests. And those interests are particularly maddening to the feminists who pushed through the law.

The front wants to ban abortion, and to encourage French women to have more children. In order to lift the birthrate, the government would pay women to stay home with their families, and would offer full state pensions to mothers who had at least three children. Needless to say, it would want to limit child-bearing subsidies to French citizens.

The left, of course, wants abortion and lady lumberjacks. It also hates discrimination in favor of citizens, but is loathe to stir up the rubes by attacking it head-on. For example, the front has long favored citizen-preferences in employment, but rather than come right out and say there should be no preferences for nationals, opponents argue that this would require a constitutional amendment, which would be too difficult to arrange. A recent article in Rivarol explains why this is not even true. The 1932 law to which it refers would be sensible legislation for the United States as well.

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ARTICLE

Why National Preferences Would be Legal

Despite what has been repeated endlessly by pseudo-experts trying to delegitimize the National Front and make Jean-Marie Le Pen look ridiculous, there is no need to amend the Constitution in order to give employment priority to French workers. All that is required is a return to the law of August 10, 1932, which was passed unanimously by the French legislature (the Communists having abstained).

Under this law, foreigners recruited for jobs could not compete with native workers, in particular with regard to salaries. Any company wanting to hire foreigners had to demonstrate its need for labor and also the unavailability of French workers. The company had to sign a contract that allowed the immigrant to be issued a work permit for one year.

Furthermore, under the law of August 10, 1932, the work permits of unemployed foreigners were not to be renewed, and such people were invited to leave France. In fact, this law established employment priority for French workers.

It was the same French legislature, by means of the law of July 17, 1984 — also passed unanimously — that stripped the French work force of its priority. The sole permit became the residence permit, and its validity was extended to ten years. This is only a theoretical limit because it is renewable, and no matter how high unemployment rates may climb, this is not grounds to withhold renewal. The new law does not permit the slightest distinction between French workers and immigrants. It strictly forbids any offer of employment that considers “ethnicity, nation, race or specified religion,” which is exactly the same formulation used in the Gayssot law [which forbids “incitement to hatred” on these grounds]. This law is enforced. Recently a company president was found guilty of having permitted an ad in Careers and Employment that said “voting permit required.” The 17th Correctional Court of Paris ruled that such language clearly intended to exclude candidates who were not French.

Another way of putting it is that unemployed foreigners cannot be sent home. They remain in our country entirely at their own pleasure; they may remain indefinitely.

In fact, the 1984 law is illegal because it conflicts with the preamble of the Constitution of October 27, 1946, which is still in force and applies to the current Constitution of 1958. The preamble states that “everyone has a right to work and the right to obtain employment.” In other words, the government is required to defend a citizen’s right to work. And when there are not enough jobs how better to ensure this right recognized by the Constitution than by granting the citizen a preferential right to the jobs that are available?

Furthermore, the law that was to be passed on July 17, 1984, had been ruled invalid in advance by a Dec. 8, 1978, decision of the Council of State. The government body given the authority to rule on law explained clearly: “The right to work and employment cannot be invoked by foreigners . . . The existing legislation excludes the idea of a foreigner’s right to work.”

In order to avoid debate and to conceal the fact that it was no longer defending the national workforce, the political elites first tried to make us feel responsible by claiming immigrants have rights “because we brought them here.” Since it is now apparent that they come of their own accord and since they are mostly Arabs, Africans, and Asians, they have changed the debate. They now hide behind words and say that to defend French workers would be “racism” and contrary to the traditions of French greatness and dignity.

There is certainly a humanitarian argument to be made for maintaining excess foreign workers indefinitely. However, to render such service to foreigners who seek employment has the effect, by multiplying the number of job-seekers, of rendering a considerable disservice to unemployed Frenchmen.

When the media claim that the Constitution must be amended in order to establish employment priority for the French, they are grasping at straws. In order to oppose their adversary they try to emphasize the difficulties of his politics. If necessary, they invent difficulties. In fact, in order to defend a citizen’s right to work, all that is necessary is a return to the law of August 10, 1932, which is entirely in accord with the current Constitution.

Translated with permission from the May 10, 2002 issue of Rivarol, 1 Rue d’Hauteville, Paris, France.

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Feds Raid Nuwaub Nation

The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors sits on 473 acres of central Georgia not far from the town of Eatonton. It is a colony of some 100 to 150 black followers of a man they call “the master teacher,” and who once described himself as “the Supreme Being of This Day and Time, God in Flesh.” He has gone by such exciting names as Isa Muhammud and Abd Allh Idn Abu Bakr but his real name is Dwight York. The Nuwaubian Nation may now be about to crumble; on May 8, police arrested Mr. York and four followers on charges of child molestation and transportation of children across state lines for illegal purposes.

Mr. York has had a colorful, energetic career. Born in 1945, he got his first criminal conviction — for raping a 13-year-old — at age 19. In 1965 he went to jail on other charges, but got out in 1967 and joined the Black Panthers. He left the Panthers, and in 1970 started a Muslim sect in Brooklyn called the Ansaru Allah Community, whose members dressed in white robes. The sect went through several changes in both name and theology, and was known variously as Ansaar Pure Sufi and the Nubian Islamic Hebrews. Mr. York got in trouble with other New York black Muslim groups and decided to leave town.

In 1993 the master teacher paid $975,000 for a former game ranch in Georgia, and moved the group south. At first, he and his followers wore cowboy hats and boots, and more or less blended in with other rurals, but then Mr. York decided his people were Nuwaubian or Moorish, and they started dressing up like ancient Egyptians. Mr. York attracted further attention by claiming to be a native of the planet Rizq in the galaxy of Illyuwn, and promising that in the year 2003 a spaceship would arrive and gather up 144,000 followers for rebirth in another galaxy. Mr. York sometimes says he is Chief Black Eagle, the reincarnated leader of a lost tribe of Yamassee Indians. Sometimes he is content with the name Malachi Z. York. Whatever name he uses, he teaches that white people are descended from the Biblical Canaanites, that they are inferior to blacks, and that their whiteness is a genetic defect.

Over the years, the Nuwaubians have turned parts of the ranch into a faux-Egyptian complex with pyramids and ceremonial gates, and have named it Tama-Re, which is supposed to mean “Egypt of the West.” Every year in late June, the Nuwaubs celebrate Savior’s Day, which happens to be Mr. York’s birthday. In the mid-1990s, when the cult was at its height, the event could attract as many as ten thousand admirers.

The arrests for child molestation are not the Nuwaubians first brush with the law. Putnam County authorities have cited the compound several times for building code violations. In 1998, Egypt of the West opened a nightclub called Ramses in a building that had permits for use only as a warehouse. The county sheriff shut down Ramses, prompting the arrival of out-of-town talent to lead the charges of “racism.” Christian ministers showed remarkable ecumenicism in their support of Tama-Re. Al Sharpton held a rally in Eatonton to denounce the “oppressors” who closed the night club, and Jesse Jackson arrived the next year to tell a crowd of whooping Moors that they were, oddly enough, “living the American dream.”

People learned about Tama-Re through its Internet site or from information in dozens of bookstores around the country. In Georgia, there were Nuwaub leaflets in bookstores in just about every good-sized town, and many offered classes in Nuwaubian thought and even Nuwaubic, a language invented by Mr. York. Nuwaubian beliefs are recorded in “the 39 scrolls,” which are a collection of 1,800 pages written by Mr. York — presumably in English. They are reportedly a mishmash of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Egyptian mythology.

The master teacher is said to have established all rules and dogmas himself, and to have enforced them strictly. He took charge of members’ bank accounts, and told them what they could eat and how much. Mr. York lived in a nice house of his own while the followers lived in a collection of 15 double-wide trailers. He resisted the view that he ran a cult, however, preferring to call it a fraternity, specifically Lodge 19 of the Ancient Mystic Order of Melchizedek.

Lodge 19 took special care of children. They were separated from their parents and home schooled, and allowed to see their parents only with Mr. York’s permission. No fewer than 15 witnesses have stepped forward to say the master teacher liked to copulate with children and under-age girls — some as young as four. Police have found videotapes and photographs of some of these encounters, which included sodomy and other kinds of abuse. Mr. York’s “main wife,” 33-year-old Kathy Johnson, reportedly helped supply the children, and taught them the sexual techniques Mr. York particularly liked. Miss Johnson and three other Nuwaub women are now in jail on the same charges as Mr. York. Rumors have long swept the area that teen-age Nuwaubs were having babies at local hospitals and refusing to name the father, but the current case does not touch on this.

Police moved in on Tama-Re with special care to avoid violence. They arrested Mr. York and Miss Johnson when the two were away from Tama-Re, and then moved in with 200 FBI agents and 80 sheriff’s deputies to secure the compound. Because the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors is so much the creation of one man, it may not survive his incarceration. [Robert Stacy McCain, Nuwaubian Nightmare, Washington Times, June 5, 2002. Bill Osinski, Leader of Sect Arrested in Raid, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 9, 2002, p. A1. Bill Osinski, FBI: Kids From 4 to 18 Were Abused in Group, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 14, 2002. Bill Osinski, Racial, Legal Issues Cloud ‘Egypt of the West,’ Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 20, 1998.]

The Death of Britain

It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 to maintain a stable population but the fertility rate for British women sank to 1.64 in 2001 — the lowest level since the government began keeping track in 1924. Women are either delaying having children or having none at all. The average age for first-time mothers in Britain is 29, up from 25 in the early 1970s when the fertility rate was 2.4. At 20 percent, more women remain childless in Britain than in any other European country. [Simon Briscoe and Marianne Brun-Rovet, Fertility Rate Falls to Lowest Level For 78 Years, Financial Times (London), May 16, 2002.]

As the ranks of white children thin out, non-whites are taking their places, and British school principals now want to replace French and German courses with African and Asian languages like Somali and Urdu. The British National Association of Head Teachers is presenting a motion that calls on the government “to promote the status of Asian and African languages and to encourage their study as a qualification in addition to or instead of languages of European origin.” [Macer Hall, Drop French, Say Heads and Teach Urdu Instead, Telegraph (London), June 2, 2002.]

Driving While Black

For nearly a decade, the New Jersey State Police have been accused of “racial profiling” because they stop a higher proportion of blacks than whites. The officers have always said they make stops for cause — speeding, missing tags, reckless driving, etc. — but critics have brushed this aside with blanket charges of “racism.”

In 1999, the state decided to find out whether officers might actually be reacting to racial differences in driving rather than indulging prejudice. Fully expecting to find no racial differences, they hired researchers with radar guns and cameras to sit by the side of the road in unmarked vans, where they photographed every driver and clocked his speed. The results, which have never been officially released, show significant racial differences. Three percent of black drivers in 65-mile-an-hour zones drove at 80 miles-per-hour or higher, while only 1.5 percent of white drivers did. The racial disparities were even greater for drivers blazing along at 90 or more.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) did not like these results, which undermine its own pet theories of police “racism.” The department attacked the study’s methodology and is trying to suppress it. Robert B. Voas of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, one of the researchers who conducted the study, insists his work will pass any competent scientific review. “We looked solely at numbers, and that’s what the report shows,” he says. [Jerry Seper, Report Saying Blacks Speed More Held Up, Washington Times, March 22, 2002, p. A1] The DOJ should not have been surprised by the New Jersey study, since it paid researchers at North Carolina State University more than $400,000 to conduct a similar study — with similar results.

New figures released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reveal that blacks are less likely than whites to wear seatbelts — 69 versus 74 percent. In states with mandatory seatbelt laws, that means blacks are more likely to be pulled over. State Farm Insurance Company, the nation’s largest auto insurer, wants to find out why blacks do not wear seat belts as much as whites (they should read this month’s cover story). On May 31, the company announced it will spend $10 million over the next five years to study black attitudes towards seat belts and child safety seats. An estimated 125 lives would be saved and 2,500 injuries prevented every year if blacks buckled up at the rate of whites.

One way to increase seatbelt use is for every state to adopt tough seatbelt enforcement laws, but that would offend some black groups. “It’s just another excuse to stop us, and we think it can be used unfairly in terms of racial profiling,” said Mary Ann Lee, of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. [Nedra Pickler, Study Focuses on Why Blacks Don’t Buckle Up, AP, May 31, 2002.]

Lighting the Way

The INS says more than 300 illegal aliens die each year trying to sneak across the Mexican border into the US. The families of 14 illegals who died near Yuma, Arizona in 2001 are actually suing the US government for not having made it safer to break the law. INS Commissioner James Ziglar has now decided to build six 30-feet-tall safety beacons in the area. Topped off with a light that flashes every ten seconds, the solar-powered beacons are supposed to help illegal aliens who get lost. The towers also have an alarm button for calling the Border Patrol. The instructions for using the button are printed in Spanish and English, and explained in simple pictures for illegal illiterates. The Mexican government plans to construct similar 100-foot towers on its side of the border.

Mr. Ziglar says the government will also begin arming border agents with non-lethal pepperball guns, which use compressed air to fire plastic pellets that contain a chemical that irritates the eyes, nose and mouth. This way agents should be able to subdue dangerous illegals without hurting them. [INS Puts Beacons on US-Mexico Line, Las Vegas Sun, May 24, 2002.]

Run for the Border

In 1999, Juan Manuel Casillas killed two teenagers in Los Angeles and fled to Mexico. Mexican officials refused to extradite him because the murder charges he faced carried the death penalty. In 2000, LA County got a new District Attorney, Steve Cooley, who told the Mexican government he wouldn’t seek the death penalty. Mexicans then arrested Mr. Casillas, but a month later, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that people facing life sentences without parole couldn’t be extradited either.

Mr. Casillas is one of more than 60 Mexicans who have gone back to Mexico after killing people in the United States. “It’s becoming a haven for murderers,” says Mr. Cooley. Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano has noted the same thing. “It’s a total disaster,” she says. Miss Napolitano has joined the other 49 state attorneys general in writing to US Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of State Colin Powell to draw attention to the problem.

Mexico is indifferent to American concerns. “We have to understand that Mexico and the United States have two different legal systems,” says Jorge Garcia-Villalobos of the Mexican attorney general’s office. He says that if a Mexican citizen faces a harsher penalty elsewhere than he would at home there can be no extradition. [Mexico Increasingly Becoming a Haven for American Fugitives, AP, May 27, 2002.]

Fraudulent Foreigners

Non-English-speaking students who want to study at US colleges must demonstrate proficiency in English by taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) in order to get a student visa. The Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N. J., which administers the test, found that some Middle Eastern students were paying imposters to take the tests for them, and last May, the FBI arrested six test-takers and more than 50 Middle Eastern students on charges of conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Lawyers for three Saudi Arabian students arrested in Seattle say their clients are victims of racial profiling. Jennifer Shaw says her client, 20-year-old Amr Attallah, was just trying to get a better score on the exam. [Bobbi Nodell, ‘Zero Tolerance’ for Visa Fraud, Seattle Times, May 10, 2002.]

Try, Try Again

In the summer following last year’s bloody Mardi Gras riot, the city of Seattle held a unity festival, during which black activist Omari Tahir-Garrett smashed then-mayor Paul Schell in the face with a five-pound bullhorn. Mr. Schell got a broken nose and a crushed eye-socket, and still has vision problems. Mr. Garrett was arrested for assault.

At his trial in May, jurors heard five witnesses say they saw Mr. Garrett hit the mayor. Mr. Garrett, representing himself, denied he did it. Instead, he accused city officials of framing him because he wants to bring a black heritage museum to Seattle. Mr. Garrett said the witnesses all had ties — either official or unofficial — to the city, and could not be trusted. This convinced two jurors. After a day and a half of acrimonious deliberation, the jury split 10-2 in favor of conviction. One of the two was black. Jurors say the two who voted to acquit had had bad experiences with the police or the city (which they failed to disclose to prosecutors). At one point, a white juror suggested to Darren Wright, the black holdout, that he was on Mr. Garrett’s side because he was black. Another thought Mr. Wright and the other holdout were too stupid to understand the term “reasonable doubt.”

Mr. Garrett smiled after the hung jury was announced, and said the trial was a waste of money, but his victory may be short-lived. King County prosecutors will retry him. [Nancy Bartley, Squabbling Jury Declares Deadlock in Garrett Case, Seattle Times, May 10, 2002. Christine Clarridge, Why Jury Deadlocked on Garrett, Seattle Times, May 11, 2002. Lynn Thompson, New Trial Ordered in Schell Attack, Seattle Times, May 24, 2002.]

Human Freight Agents

It is a status symbol in China to have a relative working in the US. The money Chinese send back can make a family seem rich, and Chinese people smugglers, known as “snakeheads,” charge as much as $40,000 to get someone to America.

Chao Kang Lin was a human freight agent for two Chinese Triad crime groups operating in Seattle. In January 2000, he was expecting a shipment of 18 Chinese packed in a container aboard the freighter Cape May. Responding to a tip, US immigration officials intercepted the container, and found the illegals had been sealed in total darkness for the 10-day voyage, without enough food and drink. There was vomit and human waste everywhere, and three of the Chinese were dead. A fourth died later. On May 9, Mr. Lin, who was sneaked in from Mexico in 1997, was sentenced to nine years in federal prison for conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens. [Mike Carter, Smuggler Gets 9 Years for Deaths on Ship from China to Seattle, Seattle Times, May 10, 2002.]

Shortly afterwards, Richard Sung Kim, also living in Seattle, went to prison for 31/2 years for smuggling illegal Koreans into the US from Canada. Before his career ended, Mr. Kim, himself an illegal, had brought in at least 57 illegal Koreans. [Korean Sentenced for Smuggling Alien, Everett Herald (Washington), May 14, 2002.]

‘Bombingham’

Liberals like to associate Birmingham, Alabama with the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls (for which 72-year-old former Klansman Frank Cherry was convicted in May), and have given the city the derisive nickname “Bombingham.” The Birmingham Chamber of Commerce wants to boost the allegedly flagging self-esteem of the city with a $1 million ad campaign using images of Martin Luther King. The ads encourage city residents to overcome the past by “living the dream” and “remembering the roots,” and show unrealistic scenes of whites and blacks working and playing together.

Lawyer Jim Rotch, who is white, thinks the city must stamp out racism. His solution is something called the Birmingham Pledge, which states, in part, “From this day forward I will strive daily to eliminate racial prejudice from my thoughts and actions. I will discourage racial prejudice in others at every opportunity.” City residents who sign pledges can mail them to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which displays them in a permanent exhibit. [Janita Poe, Revisiting ‘Bombingham,’ Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 2002, p. A1.]

Galactic Grievance

George Lucas’s new movie, Attack of the Clones, is drawing the ire of Hispanics and Arabs because of the swarthy hue of the actor who plays the sinister bounty hunter Jango Fett. Fett serves as the genetic template for an army of clones, engineered by aliens to be docile and obedient. Hispanics say the bounty hunter looks like a Mexican, lives on the planet Kamino (camino is Spanish for road) and that the clone army is a metaphor for the hordes of illegal Mexican immigrants invading America. Not to be left out of the ethnic grievance game, Arabs say Jango Fett is an insult to them. “I frankly think the bounty hunter is Arab,” says college counselor Imad Nouri. “He’s basically a terrorist, and ‘baba’ is Arabic for father.” Jango Fett’s cloned “son” calls him “Baba.” The actor who plays Jango Fett is neither Mexican nor Arab; Temuera Morrison is a New Zealand Maori. [Michael H. Hodges, Critics Say ‘Clones’ Has Racial Stereotypes, Detroit News, May 18, 2002, p.1D.]

Denmark for the Danes

Denmark has just passed a sensible new law on asylum seekers. Dismissing charges of “racism,” the Danes have decided that anyone coming into the country must support himself, and should not go on welfare for seven years. Refugees will no longer have the automatic right to bring in spouses, and no one under the age of 24 can bring in a spouse under any circumstances. Applicants for Danish citizenship must pass a culture and language test that corresponds to the knowledge of a Danish 14-year-old. To keep foreigners from bringing in their parents, there is a blanket prohibition on admission of anyone over age 60. Finally, the Danes have done away with the old 15-day grace period, and will require all rejected asylum-seekers to leave the country immediately. No asylum-seeker who goes underground will ever get consideration no matter how good his claim.

Pia Kjærsgaard

Pia Kjærsgaard

Sixty percent of Danes are said to favor the new law. They say foreigners, who already make up seven percent of the country, soak up public benefits and threaten the famed Danish welfare state. The Danish People’s Party has been the main force behind the new laws, and its leader, Pia Kjærsgaard, is forthright in her views of foreigners. “Asylum-seekers are often under-educated and illiterate,” she says. “I don’t need them.” “Muslims,” she adds, “have a taste for committing mass rape.”

There has been predictable anguish among other Europeans, most comically in Sweden. Swedish immigration minister Mona Sahin calls the Danish law “dangerous,” and complains Denmark’s policy pushes the problem onto other countries. Indeed, during the first three months of 2002, the number of asylum seekers arriving in Denmark dropped 38 percent in anticipation of the new law, and increased 68 percent in Sweden.

The solution, of course, is for all Europeans to pass sensible laws. They will have an excellent opportunity to consider this at a forthcoming meeting in Seville to debate “harmonization” of immigration law. The Danes take over the European Union’s rotating presidency on July 1, so will be in a good position to lead the discussions in a fruitful direction. [Denmark Passes Tough Migrant Laws, CNN.com, May 31, 2002. Toby Helm, Denmark Calls Halt to Soft Line on Asylum, Electronic Telegraph, June 1, 2002. Christian Weinberg, New Laws Erode Denmark’s Image, AP, June 1, 2002.]

Rewarding the White-Haters

On June 2, blacks shot and killed a white Zimbabwe farm manager. Charles Anderson, 40, ran a farm 50 miles north of Harare, which was scheduled to be expropriated and turned over to an official in the agriculture ministry. No “war veterans” had been camping on the farm, and the killing may have been only the finishing touch to a robbery. The murder brings to 11 the number of white farmers killed since Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe started encouraging dispossession of whites. [Michael Hartnack, White Farmer Killed in Zimbabwe, AP, June 2, 2002.]

Meanwhile the American government has announced another $5 million in food aid to starving Zimbabweans. A State Department spokesman says the money will buy 7,500 metric tons of corn meal and 1,000 metric tons of corn-soy milk. The World Food Program reports that this year’s corn crop will be 67 percent lower than the previous year, mainly because of the mayhem on occupied farms. A reported six million Zimbabweans face starvation. [Loughty Dube, US Offers More Food Aid to Zim, The Independent (London), May 31, 2002.]

The Black Cat

MGM Studios plans to remake the 1963 comedy classic, The Pink Panther, which starred Peter Sellers as the bumbling French Inspector Clouseau. This time, the role of the Sûreté’s finest will be played by foul-mouthed, jive-talking black comedian Chris Tucker, who appears with kung-fu Chinaman Jackie Chan in the Rush Hour films. It isn’t yet known if Mr. Tucker will attempt a French accent. [Black Actor to Play Starring Role in Pink Panther Remake, Telegraph (London), May 29, 2002.]

Whose Fault Is It?

Seattle is fretting over a wide-spread problem that might be better understood in light of the thesis of this month’s cover story: Teachers suspend and expel black students more often than white students. One city newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has done a study to see if things like poverty, absent fathers, etc. account for the differences. The paper did find that these things are correlated with discipline problems. And, indeed, blacks are more likely to be poor, to be reared by single mothers (only 30 percent of black students in Seattle live with two parents), and more likely to be in special education, but even when these factors are held constant, blacks are still twice as likely as whites to be disciplined.

The newspaper had no trouble finding people who claim this remaining difference is due to “racism.” Others, though, insist that blacks are simply more disruptive. “We, as a people, are loud,” concedes Jacob Ellis, a black counselor at Nathan Hale High School. David Fisher, a white teacher at Cleveland High School, says this causes problems:

[Y]ou ask them to pipe down, tone it down, and it escalates up. Then when you ask again, you’re picking on them. Then they confront you. Then it gets to the point where you can’t teach your class, where they’re so confrontational [you] have to ask them to go out.

One white administrator says it is all very well to try for racial balance in discipline rates, but the only way to do that is to ignore unacceptable behavior. “If they get in the face of a teacher and say, ‘You f*in’ bitch, I’m not going to do that,’ what are we supposed to do?” asks Karma Torklep, principal of Denny Middle School.

One white teacher says he has a class in remedial geometry that is largely black. One day he was having students make geometrical shapes out of drinking straws, the kind of hands-on activity blacks generally like. One girl arrived ten minutes late, and swore loudly when she tripped over a chair. As the teacher spoke to the class she kept repeating “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” When he offered to help, she ignored him. He finally took her outside the classroom for a talk, and she started screaming at him that it was his fault she couldn’t learn. He finally had to take her to the principal’s office. He argues that in situations like this, there is no choice but to discipline a student.

Other teachers point out that white children are more likely to submit quietly when they are caught in a minor infraction, while blacks react defensively and aggressively. This quickly escalates to an unacceptable level of insubordination.

The Seattle school authorities have foolishly promised that by 2005 they will eliminate the racial gap not only in discipline rates but in test scores. [Rebekah Denn, Blacks are Disciplined at Far Higher Rates Than Other Students, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 15, 2002.]

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Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS


Sir — Your most recent issue, which discusses nationalist politics in Europe, raises the obvious question: Why is there no equivalent movement in the United States? It appears to me that the culprit is the political system, not an absence of racial sentiment. In a parliamentary system — especially one that operates according to proportional representation — it is easy to start new political parties, but we are stuck with Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.

After all, David Duke did win the majority of the white vote in a state-wide Louisiana election despite his arm-band past. If the country had the opportunity to vote for a smart, articulate Sam Dickson or Jared Taylor-type candidate would it be foolish to expect 15 percent or more of the vote? That seems to be the figure that sends you into ecstasy when the Europeans manage it, and I don’t think the average American is any more passive and brain-washed than the average European. What we lack is not the will but the way.

Fred Hooper, Mussel Shoals, Ala.

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Sir — Speaking as a prisoner who lives in the kind of savage environment described by Jared Taylor in his review of No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, I can attest to its accuracy. Blacks and Hispanics exploit whites, mostly singling out the old, the young, the weak, or the alone. While white racial gangs do exist in prison, they operate covertly, because the blacks will crush by sheer numbers alone any opposition from whites. Blacks outnumber whites in some prisons by as many as twenty to one. I myself have been the only white man in 96-inmate units. Whites are often forced into alliances with Hispanics to protect themselves from blacks. It is the only thing that keeps the whites alive.

John Burietta, Baltimore, Md.

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Sir — In his review of Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West, Dwight Frye criticizes Mr. Buchanan’s failure to recognize the racial underpinnings of Western society. Yes, the replacement of white babies with brown ones is the decisive factor that will destroy our civilization, but should we not ask why this is happening? Although Mr. Buchanan seems to have understood the importance of this intuitively, he is right to emphasize that the West had a Christian beginning. The significance of this is that it had a religious beginning. The religion could have been Islam or Buddhism, as long as people had their lives filled with an ideal.

Without the idealism that religion provides, what motivates people? It is what we see today: shopping malls, humanistic brotherhoodism and the “me” generation. In other words, we have decadence, and it is white decadence that is leading to our demise on all fronts. I am critical of the white nationalist movement in general for not recognizing the importance of religion. Religion gives idealism beyond individualistic concerns, and protects from the regression that flows from mass self-centeredness.

Wayne MacLeod, Vancouver, Canada

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Sir — I recently viewed the videotapes of the 2002 American Renaissance Conference, and thought both the speakers and the questions from the audience were excellent. I highly recommend the videos, and am sharing mine with family and friends.

I do have a question and a comment for Nick Griffin of the British National Party (Tape V02-04). He says that while we are already in the midst of a revolution, we must be careful not to call it that, and should never cross the line into physical confrontation. He seems to think this particular revolution will succeed through the education of “Joe Sixpack,” and an eventual win at the ballot box. My question is this: Which past revolution was waged effectively without bloodshed? And has not a considerable amount of blood already been spilled? (It is mostly whites doing the bleeding, but I guess we are not supposed to talk about that.) How long do we turn the other cheek?

Mr. Griffin also mentions how much better nationalist organizations would be with more women members, but then makes the observation that most politically-oriented women are wackos. I fail to see how comments like this will get more women involved.

Mary Westman, Mojave, Calif.

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