January 1996

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 7, No. 1 January 1996

 

CONTENTS

Dispatches from the Front Lines
I. Fighting ‘racism’ rather than fires

II. My Battle Against Multiculturalism 
III. In the Academic Jungle
Two From the Social Contract Press (Book Reviews)
Philippe Rushton to Address AR Conference
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Dispatches from the front lines

I. Fighting “racism” rather than fires

A first-hand report on the consequences of affirmative action.

by Robert Charles

Affirmative action always has costs. Usually, the costs are lower standards, poor performance, bad morale, and lost profits. In a fire department there can be other costs: lost lives.

Fire Fighter Helmet

I joined the San Francisco Fire Department in mid-1966, in the days before affirmative action. I got my first house fire, just a couple of weeks out of the Fire College, while I was a probie (a probationary firefighter) assigned to Engine 36. The fire was in an apartment building of six or eight flats, just two blocks from Station 47. This meant the men from 47 would probably get to kick in the door and get first water on the fire, not us.

Sure enough, 47 was already there when we pulled up and hit the ground running. They were at the door of the burning flat, but because of the heat they couldn’t advance beyond the front door even though their nozzle stream was at full force. As we ran up the stairs, carrying bundles of hose, someone yelled, “There is an old couple in there; they’re not outside.”

Ed, a 20-year veteran who had been assigned to break in the new probie, grabbed my arm and said quietly, “Come on, kid.” I dropped the hose and we ran out the hallway door to the outside stairway with access to the back door of each flat. Smoke was seeping out of the door we wanted. With a couple of kicks, Ed shattered the panel next to the knob, reached in, threw the bolt, and we were in the back porch.

On our hands and knees, blinded by thick smoke, we crawled right onto two unconscious people. Ed hoisted one of them onto my shoulder, took the other himself, and we ran to the ambulance, which took them immediately to the hospital. Ed gave me a “Nice going, probie,” and we went back to work.

Back in quarters a couple of hours later, while cleaning equipment, I kept thinking how smoothly the whole thing had run, how each man had the strength, the size and the intelligence to do what had to be done, and did it without hesitation and usually without orders. Unfortunately, this is frequently not the case today.

Recently an Arson Investigator told me what he often sees when he arrives at fires still in progress: Inefficiency, hesitation, and confusion, mostly from non-white and female firefighters and officers, hired and promoted beyond their capabilities. His job in the Arson Bureau takes him all over town, and he confirmed that fires that would have been handled quickly and efficiently in the past now get out of hand and become greater alarms.

What has happened to the smooth-running department that I joined nearly 30 years ago? Why have the Eds of my first fire been replaced by all-too-many slackers, dullards and women who can’t pull their own weight? Water weighs eight and one third pounds per gallon, and always will. So why are we saddled with undersized quota hires who can’t drag water-filled hose lines, and are a liability in the six-man lift when we need to raise a 50-foot wooden ladder that weighs over four hundred pounds?

Why do I have to take orders from a quota-hire black lieutenant who went to a parking lot, looking for a “Cadillac” when he should have been looking for a “cardiac”? What kind of grade did a quota-hire black get on his entrance examination when he writes on an injury report, “He jump out the window and have sprangs in his angle”? And what is the IQ of another quota-hire black who wrote on an incident report, “The deceased greeted us at the door”? And what of the affirmative-action black who said he could interpret to a Hispanic woman what a fire had done to her kitchen, and told her “El stovo broko”?

I well remember a fire in August 1993, at which a woman quota-hire driver/pump operator was relieved of her duties on the spot because she couldn’t do the basic job: supply water to the building’s stand-pipe system and get water to her crew, who had taken their hose line directly to the seat of the fire.

Another failure of affirmative action occurred at the same fire, but with more tragic results. An inexperienced black lieutenant quota-hire lost his life because he didn’t recognize the signs of an impending back-draft (explosion). Eight other firefighters had thrown themselves to the floor to avoid the heat that was sure to come (later estimated at 2000 degrees), but the medical examiner’s report said the man had been standing, and had not properly used [M]any of his protective clothing. Shouts from the firefighter bashing in the door to “hit the floor,” along with the eerie calm that precedes a back-draft were wasted on this unfortunate man, who was hired and promoted beyond his abilities. Affirmative-action literally killed him.

There was a bitter epilogue to this incident. As they always do, hundreds of firefighters from the entire region attended the funeral to pay respects to a fallen comrade. The crowd spilled into the aisles and rear of the church. The former president of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association — who was hired and given four promotions because he is black — took the opportunity to lecture the congregation about racism. It is a miracle no one walked out.

The Mission of the Department

We got here, of course, through affirmative action. The mission of our department is to protect property and save lives, but judges and other unelected bureaucrats have decided that race- and sex-based hiring is more important than fighting fires. Standards of strength, size, and intelligence, have all been lowered in the name of diversity. The cost has been great.

The San Francisco Fire Department started its first race-based hiring program in 1970, just six years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was supposed to have ruled out race as a job qualification. Historically, the city had banned only women from the department, and there had been Hispanics on the force for decades. Blacks and Asians began to join in the mid-1950s, but their numbers did not satisfy the ethnic bean counters. Then, as now, the charge was that an “old boy network” explained the predominance of Irish, Italians, and Germans in the department.

In an attempt to remedy imagined wrongs, the city established something called the Fire Safety Technician (FST) program. The U.S. Department of Labor took a close interest in it because if it proved successful, it could be a model for departments all over the country. The program was to be restricted to non-whites and — this was crucial — they were exempted from taking the standard civil service examination.

The exam I took in 1965 had been given since about 1950, and was nearly identical in scope and difficulty to the test I took in 1959 to get into San Francisco State University. The problem for non-whites had never been an “old boy network;” Asians just didn’t take the test and the blacks who took it frequently failed.

The first group of 99 potential FSTs was cut down to 23 through literacy and background checks. That left 17 blacks, one Samoan, one Arab, two Hispanics, and two Asians. FSTs were supposed to have disadvantaged backgrounds, but this was a joke. One candidate’s father was a medical doctor, another was a high-placed civil servant, and at least two had parents who were wealthy property-owners. Some of these “disadvantaged” men had graduated from U.C. Berkeley and the University of San Francisco.

The idea was that FSTs would go through special training that would bring them up to the level of men who had passed the civil service examination, and they would then be put in the field as full-fledged firefighters. After a year, they would take a follow-up examination to see if they should be kept in the department. More than 20 years later, that exam has yet to be given.

How did the first class do? Within three years, the Samoan had gone back to Samoa, leaving an unpaid balance on a loan of more than $10,000 from the Firefighter Credit Union. When the Arab failed to understand a telephone message about a possible heart attack, he was sent to a community college to improve his English. This so upset him that he sued the department and the city and got a stress disability pension. One of the Hispanics had simply walked away from the job, and the other had died on duty — from an overdose of heroin. Six of the blacks have been fired or suspended for alcohol or drugs.

Those who were still on the job were not doing very well either. The first promotions to which an entry-level firefighter can aspire are lieutenant, Arson Inspector, or Fire Prevention Inspector (which involves inspecting buildings for possible fire hazards). By the early 1980s, it was clear that none of the FSTs was preparing for the difficult examinations that must be passed to get these jobs, but an unexpected solution to their stagnating careers presented itself. The Bureau of Fire Prevention had suffered a rash of retirements, transfers, and promotions, and suddenly needed more inspectors.

Until then, the only way to become an inspector had been to get one of the top scores on the Bureau of Fire Prevention exam. Firefighters spend months and even years studying regulations and building codes in order to do well on the exam, and for good reason. Inspectors are paid 20 percent more than ordinary firefighters, do not have to work at night, and do not have to risk their lives fighting fires.

This time, inspectors would be chosen differently. The examination was waived, and selection would be based on seniority of those who volunteered for the job. It sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime chance for an easy promotion, and it was — but not for whites. Every one of the ten new no-exam inspectors was non-white: six blacks and an Asian from the FST program, and three other blacks with less seniority. When white volunteers with more seniority than those chosen asked what happened to their applications, the Chief of Fire Prevention told them they were “the wrong color.”

Fire Prevention Inspectors spend most of their time out of the office, presumably inspecting buildings. By 1987, it became common knowledge in the department that the Asian was working in his mother’s real estate office when he was supposed to be on duty, and that some of the blacks had rented a house, where they went to avoid work. The Asian and at least one of the blacks may never have visited any of the 600 buildings assigned to them that year and were filing false inspection reports. One claimed to have inspected 200 buildings in a single day, whereas a typical daily total for a conscientious inspector is fifteen.

By late 1987 the scandal was too widely-known to ignore and the department reluctantly conducted an internal investigation. Political correctness triumphed: No action was taken against the Asian and the black; instead, their white supervisor was reprimanded for not managing them properly.

Early in 1988, the same two inspectors, still under a cloud despite their official exoneration, claimed to have found a swastika in their office. Racial pressure groups and the liberal media made an enormous stink out of this incident, which “proved” there was racism in the department. The two inspectors filed suit for three million dollars in “stress” damages. Curiously, two other inspectors who shared the same office (one of whom was Jewish) told everyone that the incident had been staged, but no one was listening.

The FBI was called in, with much fanfare, and eventually exposed the hoax. The media suddenly went quiet, and the inspectors dropped their $3-million suit. Two months later, the black was promoted to lieutenant. The Asian has been on unpaid sick leave since mid-1992. Such have been the results of the department’s first try at race-based hiring.

Women in the Department

Although blacks were clamoring for special treatment in the early 1970s, the department didn’t hire women until 1987. By 1995, thanks to drastically reduced size, strength, and agility standards, San Francisco had hired more women firefighters than nearly any city in the country. Stories of physical weakness and actual cowardice are now legion. When the rats and cockroaches are running out of a burning building, some women find novel reasons to join them.

For example, some distaff firefighters have let all the compressed air out of their portable air packs, which means they have to go outside and get a new bottle. Others decide to take up the self-appointed and utterly unnecessary task of following hose lines from hydrant to pumper and pumper to building, while their crew mates are inside putting water on the fire. At another fire, a woman who had just climbed a 50-foot ladder onto a roof announced that she was “dehydrated,” and promptly climbed down again to get a drink of water. Another woman, told to connect a hose to a water source while her crew advanced the nozzle 100 feet closer to the seat of the fire, simply left the building without giving them water. “It was too hot,” she explained later.

Some women are simply too weak to raise even the 24-foot ladder, one of the lightest in use. A local Spanish television station came by one day to film the city’s first Latina firefighter during her mandatory daily drills. They politely excused themselves and left after she repeatedly dropped the ladder on her own head. Later, when her officer gently suggested that she start a weight training program, she accused him of sexism and filed a written complaint. Of course, women like her are in the department only because physical standards are so watered down they are virtually meaningless. When I talk to women about the pre-female test I had to pass nearly 30 years ago, their eyes bulge; not one that I have spoken to thinks she could have passed. The new non-standards apply to men, too, so we have weaklings of both sexes.

As if under-sized, under-muscled women were not bad enough, sex-quota hiring means that recent immigrants from Europe and South America have gotten preference over better-qualified, native-born San Francisco men. This only compounds the unfairness and weakens the department.

The best women are mostly lesbians. We have a group of athletic, outgoing, sock-you-in-the-arm women who are eager to at least try to perform at an acceptable level, without whining, without ducking work, and without filing frivolous sex-bias suits. They’re not as good as the pre-affirmative action men, but they can do the job.

Of course, there are exceptions among the lesbians. One was a mean-spirited, scowling, probable sociopath, who was lionized in the press as the first women and first lesbian to make lieutenant. It usually takes ten or 12 years for a firefighter to move up to that rank, but the department was under tremendous pressure from a consent decree, and promoted her after just two years.

She sued the department, making the astonishing claim that she had been sexually harassed in 20 of the 25 stations in which she had worked. The jury ignored the testimony of more than 40 witnesses against her, and awarded her $300,000 in damages. Fortunately, she is now looking for another job, because one of the conditions of the settlement was that she resign. She had such a foul disposition that even other lesbians in the department called her “the unhappiest dyke” they had ever met.

These are just a few of the sorry results of affirmative action. I used to talk to older, retired firefighters about what had happened to the cohesive, top-notch department they used to work for. Eventually they told me to stop; hearing about it just made them sick.

It is impossible to know how often it has happened, but quota hiring has undoubtedly meant that people have died who did not have to die. Buildings burned that did not have to burn. This is the price that all fire departments pay for race-based hiring schemes that lower standards, reward incompetence, overlook violations, and destroy morale.

Robert Charles is a San Francisco firefighter. His father, great-uncle, and uncle were also San Francisco firefighters.

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ARTICLE

II. My Battle Against Multiculturalism

Even on a New York City school board, it is possible to fight back.

by Frank Borzellieri

Nowhere in the United States is the fury of the political thought police greater than in New York City. It is here, in the multicultural Mecca, that the truth about culture and race faces the most brutal intimidation.

When I ran for election in 1993 to the District 24 School Board in Queens, I made a campaign promise to try to end taxpayer funding of anti-American multicultural books and materials in our schools and libraries. The New York City schools system graduates thousands of incompetents and illiterates every year but it still finds millions of dollars to spend on anti-academic, anti-Western trash.

Frank Borzellieri

Frank Borzellieri with some of the books he wanted school children to read.

After I was elected, I decided to inspect classrooms and libraries in our district. I came across loads of objectionable materials. One children’s book depicted Columbus as a pilferer and madman interested only in spices and riches. No mention was made of his heroism or of the fact that he brought Christianity to the New World. History books consistently focused on the brutality of slavery, while ignoring many of the glorious achievements of Western culture, the most successful and moral culture in history. On the walls of the classrooms were pictures of Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, not Thomas Jefferson or Paul Revere.

I was interviewed by a reporter from Newsday, a major New York daily newspaper, and decided to show her some of these books. One of them, I Hate English, was designed to make Americans feel guilty about expecting immigrants to learn English. Another was Jambo Means Hello: The Swahili Alphabet Book, which is promoted by radical multiculturalists who want to force Afro-centrism on a student body that, according to surveys, doesn’t know that Abraham Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation.

I also criticized a children’s book by Alex Haley, Young Martin’s Promise, which portrayed Martin Luther King as a virtual saint. I pointed out that King was a plagiarist, embezzler, adulterer, and known communist fellow traveler, and that it was ridiculous to canonize him but disparage Columbus. I was quoted as referring to King as “a leftist hoodlum with significant communist ties.” I wanted to know why we must commit national suicide by focusing on every third world basket-case culture when we already have our own superior culture, which should be taught to American children.

The interview just about turned the city upside down. In a whirlwind of publicity, I appeared on virtually every local television and radio news program and on the full gamut of national television talk shows. Geraldo Rivera nearly passed out when I said that the NAACP was a “liberal freak organization.” Former New York City mayor, Ed Koch, asked me on his television program why the press had not “discovered,” during my campaign for the school board, that I was “the next David Duke.” Newsday ran an editorial entitled “Mr. Whitebread.” Noting that I had told Newsday that “we are a white Christian, British Protestant nation,” an editorial in the New York Daily News asked sarcastically: “Could you please point to the Borzellieris on the Mayflower passenger manifest?”

Then there was the school board meeting in Corona, Queens (a multiracial heartland), where a vicious crowd of 500 people spent four hours denouncing me. The audience included supporters of Leonard Jeffries, the black supremacist who says that blacks are the “sun” people and whites are the inferior “ice” people. There were also representatives of the NAACP, which six months earlier tried to have a book banned in the public schools in Fairfax, Virginia because they thought it was “offensive to blacks.” In this dangerous atmosphere, I needed a police escort to get home.

A Wide Gulf

However, when it comes to matters of race and culture, there is a wide gulf between official, establishment opinion, and the true sentiments of the silent majority. With the exception of two local radio hosts and National Review magazine, I had no public support. But letters came pouring in by the hundreds, almost unanimously in favor of my views. Dispossessed white people were writing as if I had relieved them of a great burden. “It’s about time!” they all seemed to be saying, noting that I had said out loud what they were thinking privately.

Despite this man-in-the-street support, people in positions of influence were silent. Many told me they agreed with me, but were terrified at the thought of being seen defending me. My Republican city councilman said, “I know you’re right, but I’ve worked too hard to get where I am to put up with flack from my colleagues.”

This pathetic lack of backbone is also typical of the people who have the power to make the greatest difference in the schools — principals, teachers, administrators, librarians, and even parents. A respected veteran principal in the district told me, “I’ve been waiting for years for someone like you to come along.” When I suggested that his support would certainly help the cause, he replied sheepishly, “You want me to say this publicly?”

Socrates said that men are by nature slaves. I strongly believe in a slight variation of this, namely, that people are by nature conformist cowards. They are consumed with fear of being lynched by the same hysterical mob I encountered. Their fear of being called a racist rivals only the fear of death itself. This silence by the very teachers and administrators who are in the best position to support my complaints is in stark contrast to the total lack of inhibition or fear shown by my totalitarian enemies.

In fact, most people exaggerate the dangers of speaking out. Except for an occasional unfriendly school board meeting I have never feared for my physical safety, and I have received no “threatening” mail. Until the public at large overcomes its fears and is willing to express its true beliefs we will continue to be dispossessed by fanatical multiculturalists who are taking our nation down the road to cultural and racial ruin.

So far, although I have attracted a great deal of attention, I have not been able to remove any anti-Western books from our schools. This would require a majority on the school board and, so far, I am the only conservative. The sad irony is that the board has a seven-out-of-nine white majority, who represent conservatives, but lie about their intentions at election time.

It would be possible to get a conservative majority on the school board — and restore some sanity to the schools — but it would take a great deal of money and effort. It would also be the greatest political earthquake in New York’s history.

Strong as my local support is, even my own reelection in May 1996, is not assured. The political and media establishments could unite in an effort to defeat me. On the other hand, non-white votes are likely to be split among several liberal challengers. I certainly expect to win, but only if I work hard and manage to raise enough money to get the message to the middle-class neighborhoods where I am popular. It is not easy to fight the machine, but if you are determined you can do it.

Contributions to Mr. Borzellieri’s campaign can be sent to Box 863525, Glendale, NY 11386.

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ARTICLE

III. In the Academic Jungle

A law student, suspended for political activism, sues his school.

by Kristina Saxon

Temple University

Temple Law School has seen better days. Today the campus is entirely surrounded by North Philadelphia slums. Armed robberies, assaults, and car thefts are common. Last spring, several locals murdered a white undergraduate who was withdrawing money from an automated teller machine in broad daylight.

The university administration downplays the danger. It thinks it is being reassuring when it reminds students that the campus police force ranks fourth in size in the entire state of Pennsylvania — just behind the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh police departments.

There have been violent students as well. Temple Law School has admitted a convicted murderer who served time in prison. It also admitted a “homeless person,” and actually let him live in the law library. One morning the homeless man woke up and choked a law student who had walked into his sleeping room to use a computer. The two were wrestling on the floor when police arrived. The school refused to expel the attacker, saying that he probably suffered from “Vietnam Syndrome.”

Several years ago, a black janitor at the law school stabbed someone with a screwdriver and then went back to work. A witness said he was dumping trash when the police arrived. It has been reported that the dean of the law school, Robert Reinstein, served as a character witness for the janitor, asking the city prosecutor for leniency.

What happens, though, when a white, notoriously conservative student defends himself against a black attacker? The same dean of the law school, Robert Reinstein, throws him off campus, calling him “a clear and present danger.” The story and its aftermath are a dismal reminder of the political and racial climate on American campuses, but there is always hope — for those who are willing to fight back.

Clear and Present (Political) Danger

In 1993, Lincoln Herbert, a third-year student at Temple Law School, founded a student organization called the Western Heritage Society (WHS), which sponsored a program of lunch-hour lectures. Among the speakers were syndicated columnist Samuel FrancisAmerican Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, and author Lawrence Auster. Prof. Linda Gottfredson, who has done pioneering work on race and IQ, was a speaker, as was Raymond Wolters, author of The Burden of Brown.

Mr. Herbert advertised the lectures on bright red, 11” × 17” posters on which he reproduced political cartoons and wrote provocative essays about the subjects of the lectures. He also wrote a spirited column called Notes From the First World for the law school newsletter. He inveighed against “sodomites,” “MTV jungle music,” “white guilt,” “speech codes,” and the “cult of multiculturalism,” claiming that most law students, especially the liberals, were as brainwashed as the “American sheeple.”

On one poster, advertising a lecture about affirmative action, he wrote, “Are there not striking parallels between the techniques of thought control in Huxley’s [brave new] world and those of the propagandists of Affirmative Action . . . ? How better to wheedle majority America into acquiescence to their own economic, cultural, and political dispossession than by making Inherited Guilt the new religion?”

Almost single-handedly, Mr. Herbert battled the political orthodoxy that otherwise silences dissent at Temple University. His mix of provocation and populism kept the administration, faculty, and liberal students in an almost constant uproar. At one point, alarmed liberals proposed an emergency Student Bar Association resolution, which would have disqualified the Western Heritage Society from receiving its share of university funding that is available to all other organizations, regardless of political view. It failed by just one vote, 19 to 18.

Things came to a head in April, 1994, when Mr. Herbert won the “David Horowitz Student Activism Award” at Harvard University from the National Association of Scholars. He exultantly publicized the award with his trade-mark red posters. Two days later, Dean Reinstein wrote a personal “Letter to the Law School community,” sharply attacking Mr. Herbert and the WHS for their “message of hatred and vitriol.” The letter was posted all over the Law School (even over men’s room urinals) and then published in the student newsletter. Mr. Herbert was denied the opportunity to publish a reply.

About two weeks later, a black campus trespasser accosted Mr. Herbert, demanded money, pursued him into the law school, and shouted threats at him. The man claimed to have a knife and threatened to use it. Mr. Herbert had been a victim of street crime on three previous occasions since enrolling at Temple Law School, and had started carrying pepper gas. When the man rushed toward him inside the law school, Mr. Herbert sprayed him. Campus police arrived, restrained the spluttering man, and took him away in handcuffs. Mr. Herbert gave the officers a full statement, went home, and thought no more of the incident.

Two days later, Dean Reinstein called Mr. Herbert into his office and handed him a letter suspending him from the law school for two and a half years. The letter did not even accuse Mr. Herbert of violating school regulations. Dean Reinstein wrote that he thought Mr. Herbert’s account of the black man’s threatening behavior was “fabricated,” and pronounced him “a clear and present danger to the safety of the law school community.” Mr. Herbert asked if he might shut the door to the office and talk privately. “No, leave it open,” replied the dean; “you’re dangerous.” The dean had the astonished student escorted off campus by an armed guard. Dean Reinstein warned him that if he returned to campus he would be prosecuted for “criminal trespass.”

Ordinarily, such an act of political intimidation might have gone unchallenged, but Mr. Herbert filed a $6,000,000 law suit in federal court contesting the suspension. In October of this year, 17 months after the suspension — and five months after Mr. Herbert would have graduated had he not been suspended — a three-judge panel concluded that Dean Reinstein had not followed procedural due process in suspending Mr. Herbert. The dean, a former civil rights lawyer, had violated the student’s civil rights. In November, the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the dean’s motion that the October decision be overturned.

This, however, is only a very partial victory. The dean should not have suspended Mr. Herbert when he did, but the court left the school’s later conduct untouched. The law school’s disciplinary committee eventually suspended Mr. Herbert officially and ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. These decisions, taken after Mr. Herbert filed suit, must be the subject of yet more litigation — which will be expensive.

In its ruling, the appeals court intimated that the pepper gas incident was a pretext for punishing someone the law school had other reasons to dislike. Mr. Herbert, if not an actual political prisoner, is certainly a victim of political persecution. Anyone wishing to find out more about his case or to help financially can reach him at 155 Windsor Ave., Lansdowne, PA 19050, (610) 284-9928.

Kristina Saxon is the pen name of a Temple law student who fears reprisals if she used her real name for this article.

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BOOK REVIEW

Two From the Social Contract Press

The patient, factual case against immigration.

The Immigration Invasion, by Wayne Lutton & John Tanton, Social Contract Press, 1994, 190 pp., $4.00 (soft cover)

Affirmative Action for Immigrants, by James Robb, Social Contract Press, 1995, 120 pp., $12.50 (monograph)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Of all the threats to our national stability, immigration is in many respects the most obvious and ominous. Anyone with the slightest understanding of history and human nature knows that the arrival of large numbers of aliens can dramatically change any society. When those aliens are culturally and racially different from a society’s original majority, change will be profound and probably irreversible.

The Immigration Invasion by Wayne Lutton and John Tanton

Non-white immigrants are transforming America. This is obvious in Texas, Florida, New York, and California, which receive the most immigrants, but newcomers are pushing their way steadily into every part of the country.

No healthy society permits this kind of transformation if it can help it. Every non-white nation, including ones like Mexico and China that send huge numbers of their own people to the United States, controls its border with a firm view to keeping aliens out. The urge to protect one’s tribal, racial, or national boundaries is almost as old and almost as strong as the urge to protect one’s family. Every non-white group does this instinctively, without reflection or apology.

White nations appear to have lost this primeval urge. All have officially rejected race as a necessary element of nationhood and some, like Canada and the United States, have even rejected language and culture. Any group, we are told, in virtually any number, can become American or Canadian. The United States, in particular, is said to be an “idea” in which Kurds and Xhosas can participate just as authentically as descendants of the Pilgrims.

This is perhaps the first time since the beginning of history that human groups have taken this view of their own identities. Tribes and nations have always understood instinctively that cohesion requires blood-kinship and shared history, and that membership is not open to all comers. No nation in which this instinct has died can survive against the depredations of nations in which it is still vigorous.

And yet instinct, almost by definition, is not supposed to die. People do not usually have to be persuaded to care for their children or to act in their own interests or to eat. People who do not do these things are so incomprehensible we hardly know how to help them.

Like people, nations or races rarely fail to act in their own interests. When they fail consistently, they are just as incomprehensible as a human being that has lost ordinary urges. This is the tragedy facing Americans who are trying to call attention to the growing demographic crisis. In this country, it does little good to appeal to instincts of national and racial survival because if those instincts were still operating normally, there would be no immigration problem in the first place. White Americans who do not want their children to live in what Peter Brimelow calls an alien nation therefore have the unnatural task of supplying rational justifications for behavior that should be instinctual.

No American, certainly no white American, should have to explain why it is wrong for one sixth of the population of Haiti to be living in the United States. No one should have to point out why it is suicidal to grant American citizenship to the children of indigent Mexicans who cross the border to have babies. And yet, just as we must explain to a man who has lost his appetite that if he does not eat he will die, we must explain to whites who have lost their instincts for racial survival that if immigration is not stopped their nation will die.

The Social Contract Press

Every quarter since 1990, The Social Contract has been building the factual case against immigration. It describes the effects of immigration on schools, the environment, our culture, our language, and our prospects as a nation. It is not usually explicit about race, but it makes every other possible argument against current policies.

The Social Contract has spawned a small publishing company of the same name. It has reprinted the classic (and explicitly racial) anti-immigration novel, The Camp of the Saints, and has published several original titles. Of these, the most significant is The Immigration Invasion, by Wayne Lutton and John Tanton.

This handy, pocket-sized volume is really an anti-immigration handbook, packed with up-to-date information. Part One, called “The Problem,” has chapters on such things as immigrant crime, welfare costs of immigrants, and the impact of immigrants on labor markets and the environment. A chapter on race and culture describes the divisive effect of aliens.

Part Two offers a historical perspective, which starts with a history of immigration law and explains who has been supporting current policies. The book concludes with a firm statement about the moral basis for immigration reform, and includes a reading list and a directory of activist organizations.

Every chapter is both a good introduction for people who are not aware of the immigration problem and an up-to-date reminder for people who are. Each page seems to offer its bit of intellectual ammunition. Almost a random selection turns up such nuggets as this:

  • Twenty-nine percent of immigrants from Vietnam are on welfare while 3.9 percent of those from Switzerland are.
  • The average cost of an uncompensated admission of an illegal alien to a publicly-supported hospital is $4,700.
  • Fifty-five percent of the Chinese over age 65 who have come to the United States since 1980 are on welfare (as opposed to nine percent of native-born Americans). Many are well off but give their assets to their children so as to qualify for handouts.
  • After the 1994 California earthquake, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s no-questions-asked compensation policies were so generous that there was a surge of illegal immigration just to take advantage of it.
  • It costs the state of California $2 billion a year to educate illegal alien school children, who are seven percent of the school population.
  • Fifty-three percent of all the refugees who have settled in California since 1973 are on public support of some kind.
  • In New York City, entire professions have been colonized by aliens and are essentially closed to Americans.
  • Over three million illegals have taken advantage of the 1986 amnesty.
  • Welfare agencies welcome immigrants because they increase the need for welfare.
  • More than half of all faculty in American universities under the age of 36 are foreign-born.
  • In Denver, although whites are 80 percent of the population, 57 percent of criminal gang members are Hispanic and 36 percent are black.
  • Illegal immigrants, who cannot (yet) vote, are counted for Congressional and other districting purposes, so non-whites can often be elected to office with a much smaller number of votes than whites need.
  • The mafia has been pushed out of the heroin trade by Chinese, Israeli, Nigerian, and Mexican gangs.
  • Foreign gangs are virtually impossible to infiltrate because of language and cultural barriers.
  • Nearly one million Arabs now live in America, and are lobbying for racial preferences. Almost all arrived since 1965.
  • More than one quarter of the inmates of federal prisons are aliens.

The Immigration Invasion shapes a mountain of facts into a well-organized argument for strict limits on immigration. It is written in careful, non-provocative language, and is an excellent book with which to waken slumbering instincts. It is priced low enough to be bought in bulk, and deserves wide circulation.

The Cruelest Blow

Of more specialized interest is James Robb’s monograph, Affirmative Action for Immigrants, which is not an ordinary, type-set book but a bound, double-spaced research paper.

Few of today’s racial lunacies are as infuriating as racial preferences for non-white immigrants. A weak, but not completely preposterous case can be made for compensating the descendants of former slaves, but there is no possible justification for discrimination in favor of immigrants. Affirmative action has expanded so smoothly from its original clientele to include virtually all non-whites, only because racial preferences are part of a larger view of American society that is increasingly anti-white.

Mr. Robb is surprised to discover that no one in government seems to know whether there is a legal basis either for including non-white immigrants in affirmative action programs or excluding them. Apparently the issue has never been litigated, most probably because no employer who operates preference programs has ever turned away a Nigerian or a Mexican simply because he was not a U.S. citizen. Many companies care more about filling government-mandated racial quotas than about hiring Americans.

In an investigation of the extent to which affirmative action accounts for the large number of foreign students and teachers at American universities, Mr. Robb has come across what is perhaps the one occasion on which a major institution actually gave the matter any thought. Stanford University had long had strong financial incentives to persuade academic departments to hire non-whites, but discovered in 1993 that more than half of its non-white faculty were foreign-born. It finally occurred to someone that a native of Senegal might not be the most effective “role model” for a black from Chicago. Stanford therefore decided to restrict its racial preferences to American citizens.

The new policy was greeted with derision and talk of lawsuits. Stanford promptly backed down and, according to a spokesman, “tried to avoid resolving these questions.” It is surprising that American-born non-whites have not made more trouble over policies that work to their disadvantage by widening the field of available quota-fillers.

The Stanford fracas is only one of the absurdities that Mr. Robb chronicles. Unfortunately, he takes the saccharin position that racial preferences for aliens are wrong because they take jobs from deserving American non-whites; he doesn’t seem to mind anti-white discrimination. Nevertheless, this is probably the only serious treatment available of what is nothing less than a national outrage.

Prices quoted above include postage. Two copies or more of The Immigration Invasion cost only $2.00 each. Orders can be placed by calling (800) 352-4843.

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ARTICLE

Philippe Rushton to Address AR Conference

We are pleased to announce that the author of Race, Evolution, and Behavior will speak at the AR conference over Memorial Day weekend. Philippe Rushton’s r-K theory of the evolution of racial differences has put the academic world in such an uproar that in 1989 the Attorney-General of Ontario investigated him for possible violation of Canada’s “hate laws.” It took the Attorney-General six months to conclude that Prof. Rushton was “not criminal.” In 1991, the Ontario Human Rights Commission charged Prof. Rushton with violating the province’s Human Rights Code by “poisoning the academic learning environment.” This charge was finally dropped only in November 1995.

Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, and has written six books and 150 journal articles. In recent years, no other theorist on racial differences has been reviled as savagely as Prof. Rushton. It will be an honor to present this courageous man to readers of American Renaissance.

Send in your registration form today!

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

What Whites May Think

Blacks have recently been offering a selection of views on how whites should think about race. Glenn Loury, a “conservative” professor at Boston University, says they shouldn’t think about it at all; he wants people to stop writing about “black crime” and “black illegitimacy.” “We should be colorblind as we gaze upon welfare mothers, juvenile felons and the cognitively deficient . . .” he writes; “[W]e should see human beings with problems, not races of people plagued by pathology.” [Glenn C. Loury, Racial fixations on the right, Washington Times, Nov. 3, 1995, p. A19.] Presumably we should see “human beings in conflict” in the former Yugoslavia rather than notice that there are Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

Joseph Lowry, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has a low opinion of colorblindness. “It’s the most stupid, unlearned position a supposedly intelligent, educated person could take,” he explained at a three-day rally to commemorate passage of the voting Rights Act of 1965. [Vickii Howell, Lowery: ‘Colorblind’ actions not answer to racial problems, The Birmingham News, Oct. 10, 1995.]

Columnist William Raspberry, is willing to let whites think about race, but only so long as they think about other races. He disapproves, in the following terms, of an officer in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who has started an Association of White Male Police Officers:

It is hard to think of whites-only groups formed for the benefit of their members that could gain our approval. Perhaps an organization of white LA police officers formed to help its members improve their attitudes towards minorities . . . It’s always illegitimate for white men to organize as white men. [William Raspberry, Dubiously Exclusive, Wash Post, Nov. 24, 1995.]

Meanwhile, on October 24th, the city of Los Angeles sponsored a Day of Dialogue to talk about race. “Specially trained mediators” were provided by the city to 100 different locations in such places as churches, schools, and fire stations to help the public struggle with its feelings about race. [Crucial Dialogue in a tense time, LA Times, Oct. 26, 1995, p. B10.] It is difficult not to recall that a black-Korean mediation group that was put together with fanfare after the Rodney King riots was disbanded because the participants kept getting into shouting matches.

New Depths of Degeneracy

Jacqueline Williams, a 28-year-old black woman from Schaumberg, Illinois, had three children but could not have any more. Miss Williams’ cousin, Laverne Ward, had fathered a child with a white woman named Deborah Evans and she was known to be pregnant, probably with his child. Miss Williams and Mr. Ward, together with Miss Williams’ boyfriend, decided to wait until the white woman was nearly ready to have the baby, kill her, remove the fetus, and claim that it was Miss Williams’ child. They carried out their plan in November.

The three blacks entered Miss Evans’ apartment and stabbed and shot her to death. They quickly removed her unborn child, which appears to have survived the operation without trauma. Besides her mulatto toddler, Miss Evans had two other children who were white, a ten-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. The three criminals stabbed the daughter to death in her bed, but carried off the son and tortured him before stabbing him to death. The mulatto toddler — son of one of the murderers — witnessed the killing of his mother and sister but was spared. In preparation for the crime, Miss Williams had been telling neighbors she was pregnant. She returned home with the newborn, claiming it was hers.

The murdered woman was on welfare, but was by all accounts an otherwise responsible, loving mother. [Andrew Martin & Tracy Dell’Angela, 3 charged in addison slayings, Chi Trib, Nov. 20, 1995, p. 1. Gretchen Reynolds, 3 are held in slayings of mother and children, NYT, Nov. 20, 1995.] [Shortly after the killings, House Speaker Newt Gingrich evoked her case as an example of the harm that welfare is doing to American society.]

Beat the Devil

In Detroit, Halloween is now better known as Devil’s Night. The preferred form of celebration is to set house fires. In 1994, there were nearly 200 fires on Oct. 31, far higher than the daily average of 50 to 55. Last Halloween was, by contrast, a huge triumph: the number of fires was kept to 61. The price of success was a six p.m. curfew and mobilization of 30,000 volunteers who patrolled the streets with walkie talkies. Four thousand police officers, 2,000 firemen, and thousands of other city employees were also on alert over the weekend. Planning for the mobilization began in May, and the police chief, Isaiah McKinnon likened it to war. “This was our Desert Storm,” he said. [Jack Kresnak & Lekan Oguntoyinbo, ‘Next Halloween we will be ready again,’ Det. Free Press, Nov. 2, 1995, p. 1B. Detroiters Smother Flames, Det. Free Press, Nov. 2, 1995, p. 1A.]

Majority-black Camden, New Jersey has developed its own version of Devil’s Night. In 1991, its worst year, this city of 87,000 had more than six times as many fires as on a usual night. For the latest Halloween, it doubled the usual number of firemen on duty and quadrupled the number of police. Thousands of volunteers fanned out to try to keep blacks from burning the city down, and two helicopters patrolled over head. As in Detroit, the effort paid off; there was only an average number of fires. [Melanie Burney, Volunteers aid Halloween eve initiative, Record (Bergen County), Oct. 31, 95.]

Jews for Farrakhan?

The November 7, 1995, issue of the Village Voice ran a full-page ad by an organization called Jews for Farrakhan. Part of the text read as follows:

With skill, dedication and commitment, Minister Farrakhan has brought the Nation of Islam out of many years of isolation. He has catalyzed and encouraged dialogue among the broadest possible range of Black leaders . . . To the ordinary Jews of America, we say, join with us. There is no need to repudiate Minister Farrakhan. There is a need to repudiate our own leadership.

Jews for Farrakhan is located at 200 W. 72nd St., Ste. 37, New York, NY 10023. The telephone number is (212) 642-5207.

The Welfare Wage

The libertarian Cato Institute recently calculated how much a single mother of two would have to make, before taxes, in order to have the same standard of living that welfare (including food stamps and other ordinary benefits) provides. There is much variation from state to state, but assuming a 40-hour work week, a mother would have to make $17.50 an hour in Hawaii and $5.53 an hour in Mississippi. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia offer general welfare benefits that equal the after-tax earnings of a job that pays more than $10.00 an hour.

In eight states and the district, welfare pays more than the national average salary for a first-year teacher ($21,600). In 12 states and the district, welfare is the equivalent of more than 90 percent of the average wage in the area. There are actually four states — Hawaii, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Alaska — in which welfare provides a better living than the average wage. [Michael Tanner & Stephen Moore, Why Welfare Pays, WSJ, 9/28/95.]

Green Sheen

The Agency for International Development (AID) has been practicing blatant racial favoritism in its assistance to South Africa, Early in 1993, the director of the South African mission, Leslie Dean, launched an across-the-board program to ensure that as much of the $100 million-a-year AID budget as possible was funneled through black-owned companies, both American and South African.

A beneficiary of this policy was Soft Sheen Products, a company that makes hair care products for blacks. It got $300,000 to train South Africans to be beauticians. Oddly, the grant came just as Soft Sheen was introducing its own products in South Africa. Soft Sheen was supposed to put 2,000 new people to work in beauty parlors, but only managed to place five. The most visible way the company spent money was to hold a gala screening in Johannesburg of Spike Lee’s anti-white movie, “Malcolm X.” This was supposed to raise money but lost $16,000.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation collected $100,000 to help South Africans “develop a system of viable non-racial local government institutions.” This was spent on a one-day seminar in Pretoria about housing and on bringing a handful of black South African legislators to the Black Caucus’ annual convention in Washington. Given that members of the black caucus vote on AID’s budget, it was highly irregular to have made a grant of any kind.

The Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta has swallowed $555,000 to help South Africans learn about racial harmony. A full $40,000 of this went to rewrite the application for the grant; the center’s first application was not up to AID standards.

Racial preferences have been so obvious and have resulted in so much money going to organizations that know nothing about foreign aid, that AID employees have rebelled and the South African government has complained. The employees were transferred and the government was ignored, but the Office of Management and Budget has started an investigation. [Sara Fritz, AID in S. Africa Draws Fire for Race Criteria, LA Times, Nov. 18, 1995, p. A32.]

Grim Harvest of AIDS

The United Nations estimates that 70 percent of the world’s AIDS cases are in Africa, and that Uganda probably has the highest infection rate in the world. So many young adults are cut down by the disease that one in sixteen Ugandan children have been orphaned by it. School enrollment is dropping because children must now work and because so many teachers are dying. Farms lie uncultivated because their owners are dead. A bank in Kampala is reported to have trained two people for an important job because it could not afford to be left in the lurch if it hired only one and he died.

The urban, educated classes are hardest hit because they are more promiscuous. Their children are often taken into the families of relatives. “I have two children,” says a Ugandan UNICEF worker. “I lost three brothers. Now I have 13 children more to feed . . .” In Uganda the disease is reportedly called “the new slavery.” [John Balzar, In Uganda, a scourge on families, LA Times, Nov. 18, 1995, p. A1.]

In the United States, three percent of black men between the ages of 27 and 39 have the HIV virus. For whites, the figure is 0.7 percent, and for Hispanics it is 1.7 percent. [AP, Lauran Neegaard, Study says 1 in 92 young men has HIV, Nov. 24, 1995.]

A Real Hoot

Hooters is an Atlanta-based hamburger chain that hires only young women to wait tables and dresses them in tight shorts and tank tops. “A lot of places serve good burgers,” explains Vice President Mike McNeil, “but the Hooters girls, with their charm and all-American sex appeal, are what our customers come for.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has noticed this. It says the company must pay $22 million to men who were not hired, and that company executives must be given sensitivity sessions. Hooters has declined. [James Bernstein, Male waiters at Hooters? Forget it, company says, Birmingham News, Nov. 16, 1996.]

African Affinity

Many banks offer what are called “affinity” credit cards, through which the bank pays a small percentage of its revenue from the card to a designated organization. There are cards for universities, popular among alumni, and even one for the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The Boston Bank of Commerce recently introduced the Unity Visa card, an affinity card for blacks. The bank plans to donate one percent of every dollar charged, to seven black charities, including the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The card’s promoters point out that five million blacks hold cards from Visa or MasterCard and hope to persuade 20 percent of them to switch. “African-Americans’ greatest affinity is being African-American,” says Senior Vice President Teri Williams. [James Hirsch, New credit cards base appeals on sexual orientation and race, WSJ, 11/6/95, p. B5.]

Racism Rides the Rails

Last fall, the New York Metropolitan Transit authority raised the price of a subway ride from $1.25 to $1.50, or 20 percent. At the same time it raised the average commuter-train fair by only nine percent. The Urban League sued the transit authority, claiming that the increases were illegal and “racist” because 60 percent of subway riders are non-white but only 20 percent of commuter-train riders are. Astonishingly, in November a white judge, Robert B. Patterson, ruled that the increases violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and ordered them rolled back. An appeals court promptly reversed Judge Patterson and let the higher fares take effect. However, it warned the transit authority that it would probably let Judge Patterson try the case, and if the fare increases turned out to be illegal, the authority would have to come up with a way to make refunds to riders. The authority argues that it gets money from state, city, and federal governments that is specifically earmarked for different parts of the transit system and therefore cannot switch funds from one to another. [Richard Perez-Pena, Court hears arguments over possible bias in fare increases, NYT, 11/15/95, p. B1. Melanie Kirkpatrick, How much is a subway ride? Ask the judge, WSJ, 11/15/95, p. A21.]

In Jeopardy

Maya Angelou, the black poetess who recited one of her creations at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, is annoyed that there are so few blacks on the television quiz program “Jeopardy:” “I mean, I have not seen a black person for two years on ‘Jeopardy’ . . . so I’m boycotting it, although I love it.” A perplexed spokesman for the program explained there is no discrimination in how it selects guests. All that is required is that they pass a general knowledge test . . . [Maya Angelou disappointed ‘Jeopardy’ has so few black contestants; boycotts show, Jet, Nov. 13, 1995.]

Prop 187 Gutted

Federal judge Mariana Pfaelzer has struck down most of the provisions of a California voter initiative that would have cut off most public benefits to illegal aliens. In a 72-page ruling she wrote that the state may not set eligibility rules for programs that receive federal subsidies, which most do. She also wrote that the provision to deny public education to illegals runs counter to a 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe, in which the state of Texas was forced to educate children of illegal aliens. Judge Pfaelzer also ruled that measures to keep tabs on suspected illegal aliens were state usurpation of the federal government’s exclusive power to regulate immigration. She let stand a provision that establishes criminal penalties for the sale and use of fake citizenship documents. The state will appeal the ruling. [Paul Feldman, Major portions of Prop. 187 thrown out by federal judge, LA Times, Nov. 21, 1995, p. A1.]

White Man’s Burden

Gary, Indiana is a once-thriving city that has been turned into a pest-hole by shifting demographics. Now 90 percent black, it usually comes to national attention only because of its high ranking in national crime statistics. Its downtown is a ruin, and in 1992 it issued only four residential building permits for all of its 50 square miles. Forty-three percent of its children live below the poverty line.

In 1967, Gary made news as one of the first significant cities in America to elect a black mayor, and it has been run by blacks ever since. That is, until November, 1995, when it elected its first white mayor in 28 years.

When Thomas Barnes, the incumbent, decided not to run, a 44-year-old white lawyer, Scott King, entered the Democratic primary — the only one that matters in Gary — and won. This shocked Marion Williams, a black who decided to run as an independent rather than leave the field to a white man. Mr. Williams found that race worked against him: “When I went door to door, people said ‘We don’t want any more of you people for mayor.’ Those were African-Americans.”

The outgoing mayor supported Mr. Williams, and wrote a letter to constituents urging them to keep a black man in charge, but to no avail. The white Mr. King — conveniently married to a black — outpolled Mr. Williams better than four-to-one. [Peter Kendall, Gary’s black citizens appear ready for a change, Chi Trib, Nov. 9, 1995, p. 3.]

As Others See Them

U.S. News & World Report says more blacks would rather be called “black” than anything else. This is the preference of 44.2 percent, followed by 28.1 percent who want to be “African-Americans.” The rest are split between Afro-American (12.1 percent), Negro (3.3 percent), colored (1.1 percent), “some other term” (2.2 percent), and “no preference” (9.1 percent).

Half of American Indians would like to be called “American Indians,” while 37.4 percent want to be “Native Americans.” Only 11.7 percent of Hispanics prefer the trendy term “Latino,” while 57.9 percent are happy to be “Hispanic.” A surprisingly large number (12.3 percent) say they want to be called “of Spanish origin.” [American Pie, US News & World Report, Nov. 20, 1995.]

Wretched Refuse

Prof. Donald Huddle of Rice University in Houston, Texas, calculates that immigrants cost the American economy about $51 billion in federal, state, and local assistance programs last year. This is over and above all taxes they paid. [Study cites the costs of aiding immigrants, Orange County Register, Oct. 26, 2995.] Separate in Death

The funeral parlor business is one of the most segregated in the country. In most parts of the country, undertakers handle clienteles that are either exclusively white or exclusively black. Until 1985, funeral homes were labeled “white” or “black” in state directories, and there are still separate, black and white national undertakers’ organizations. The business is actually getting more segregated. Until recently, small towns supported only one funeral director who buried everyone. Now, families are more likely to drive to a nearby town to get service from someone of the same race.

Undertakers who still do handle both races say that traditions differ. Whites like to put the body in the ground in two to four days, while blacks often wait eight to ten days for family members to gather. White services are reserved, while black funerals are boisterous and full of song. Whites tend to show their sympathy for the bereaved during a visitation period, while blacks like to attend the funeral itself. Nationally, in 1993, 21 percent of American corpses were cremated, but fewer than one percent of black corpses were cremated. “Why burn twice?” is a common objection. [Suzi Parker, Equal but separate, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 9/6/95, p. F1.]

Ethnic groups also differ in whether they want to be told they have fatal diseases. Only 35 percent of Korean Americans think patients should know the truth. The figure for Mexican-Americans is 48 percent; blacks, 63 percent; whites, 69 percent. [Lindsey Tanner, Truth not always best, doctors told, Houston Chronicle, 9/13/95, p. 11A.]

African Americans

What may be the best-preserved West African tribal community has been found in the jungles of — South America. In the 17th century, African slaves were brought to work the plantations of Surinam. Many escaped and fled into the wild interior to establish villages. Today, there are six tribes of Maroons, so called from the Spanish word cimarron, which means a runaway horse that has gone wild. Maroon villages are still unlinked by roads and can be reached only by canoe.

Maroon society is matrilineal, as it is in Africa, and in the evening parents tell their children spider fables from Ghana. The Maroons worship snakes, and build thatched spirit houses for them along the forest paths. Recently, the Maroons have decided to promote tourism. “We want to show white people we are clever and smart, that we have a culture equal to theirs,” explains a tribal leader. [Laurie Goering, ‘Pure’ African culture thrives in S. America, Chi Trib, 9/11/95, p. 11.]

You Tax Dollars At Work

New York State has discovered that at least 700 prisoners collected welfare during 1994-95 while they were in jail. It is illegal to do so, but people simply sell or give away their welfare-benefits and social services cards. The state estimates that at least $200,000 was spent in the name of people who were actually behind bars; many got kickbacks from the new beneficiaries. The state makes no attempt to recover the money or to prosecute cheaters, so this is a no-risk crime. [Beating the System, Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1995.]

The Vanishing Negro?

The state of Michigan recently passed laws to add the category “multiracial” to official documents. This was done at the urging of Project Race, a national advocacy group for mixed-race children, which thinks that making children claim the race of only one parent damages their self-esteem. A black state representative, Ed Vaughn led the campaign against the new measure, which he calls a “tragedy.” [Michigan Passes Law for Multiracial Category, Jet, Oct. 23, 1995.]

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LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Those who read your December article on the Kansas City school system will be relieved to know that a solution is in sight to all the problems you pointed out. Mayor Emanuel Cleaver has just appointed a task force to conduct what he calls “the first honest and in-depth examination of race relations in Kansas City in a quarter century.” He says that “unless we make race an issue today, it will still be an issue tomorrow . . . If we are able to somehow erase this problem of race in our community, we will become the number one city on the planet.” The mayor’s task force will be overseen by the Urban League.

Am I the only one to notice that Mayor Cleaver is implicitly conceding that race is the only thing keeping Kansas City from being heaven on earth? Separation is, of course, the only way to keep race from being “an issue tomorrow,” but I somehow doubt that the Urban League will recommend it.

Stanley Hooke, Plattsburg, Kansas

Sir — Judge Clark’s unconstitutional usurpation of the Kansas City, Missouri school system reminded me of a prediction I have made. First, some federal judge’s ruling will violate the constitution, either state or federal. The offended state’s governor will reply, privately and via press conference, that if the judge wants to enforce his ruling he will have to deal with the state militia. The “rest of the story” will prove to be very interesting.

Name Withheld, Lewiston, Maine

Sir — In his November review, Thomas Jackson calls Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism “splendid” and “impressively researched and bravely argued.” This glowing praise is inconsistent with the pervasive intellectual dishonesty that Mr. Jackson also finds in the book.

Indeed, The End of Racism is even more dishonest than Mr. Jackson lets on. Throughout his 600-page book Mr. D’Souza insists that there is a cultural explanation for the deficiencies in average black intelligence and behavior that he relentlessly catalogues, and he labels as “racist” anyone who believes that these black disadvantages may be at least partly hereditary. But when he finally discusses the hereditarian position at length, Mr. D’Souza, after much hemming and hawing, reluctantly admits that he has no arguments against it: “The Bell Curve makes a strong case that cannot be ignored . . . The conclusion of most scholars is that despite many caveats, there is no scientific basis for rejecting the possibility that race differences in IQ are partly hereditary.”

Having quietly conceded what he loudly denounces as “racist” everywhere else in his book, Mr. D’Souza looks for an escape hatch: “It is possible to reject the fatalism of genetic theories of IQ differences, as I do. My view is that . . . it is a ‘reasonable hypothesis’ that [racial] IQ differences can be explained by culture and environment.” But Mr. D’Souza offers not a shred of support for that “reasonable hypothesis,” other than his wish that it be true, and his hope that some future evidence may confirm it.

Thus Mr. D’Souza’s trumpeted “end or racism” — by which he means the end of the belief in intrinsic racial differences in civilizational abilities — turns out to be a transparent fraud. But you don’t necessarily have to read the book to see that. One evening this past autumn as I got on a New York City bus with a copy of The End of Racism in my hand, the driver looked up at me and said: “What is that — science fiction?”

Lawrence Auster, New York City

Sir — I think the two articles you referred to in the December O Tempora item, “Straws in the Wind” are a significant and encouraging sign. Ten or even five years ago would a mainstream columnist like Scott McConnell have dared to write anything that was not unremittingly hostile to the idea of racial separation? It is likewise very significant that a distinguished Brit like Paul Johnson should write calmly and almost casually that the failure of blacks to fit in in the United States means that they cannot be assimilated in Britain either and should be encouraged to leave.

Once people have actually seen in print the forbidden thoughts voiced by Mr. McConnell and Mr. Johnson their minds cannot help but be permanently shifted — if ever so slightly — to the right.

Andrew Harding, Tully, New York

Sir — I was glad to see your report on Cecil McCool and Richard Will, two whites who were stopped by black Chicago police officers. The officers concluded that the driver was drunk, and impounded the car. Mr. Will, as you note, was later beaten and then burned to death by blacks. Mr. McCool originally claimed that Mr. Will begged the officers for a ride out of that dangerous part of town, and their refusal was reported as possibly “racist.” Your readers should know that Mr. McCool has now recanted, saying that Mr. Will did not make such a request. This appears to have been just what the press needed. It can now treat the incident as one of racial provocation by Mr. McCool — a typical, white attempt to blame blacks when something goes wrong. The fact that a white was beaten and burned by blacks is now a mere detail.

David Goldberg, Evanston, Illinois

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