October 2004

American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 15, No. 10 October 2004

CONTENTS

The Racial Politics of Policing in Chicago
Arrogantly Biased
Stupidity as Virtue
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Racial Politics of Policing in Chicago

A case study of how white officers take the rap.

Cabrini Green in Chicago is one of the most notorious housing projects in the country. Horrific crimes by blacks against blacks are fast and frequent. Some make the national news, as in the 1997 case of “Girl X,” a young black woman who was savagely and repeatedly raped, beaten, forced to drink gasoline, strangled with her own T-shirt, and eventually left for dead in a stairwell. She survived, but lost the use of her hands. A fellow Cabrini resident, Patrick Sykes, got a 120-year sentence for the crime.

The welfare and degeneracy of Cabrini make it the perfect incubator for a flourishing drug trade. There are no whites in these buildings, with the exception of the police officers who run up and down the stairs chasing dealers, and the occasional “walkup” or “roll through” by white addicts looking for drugs. Unlike Hispanic gangs, which defend their territory against all comers, black narcotics dealers are under orders from the top not to hurt white clients. People who fear for their lives do not make good customers, and for black gangs money trumps everything.

Lately, Cabrini Green has been less violent than it used to be, but only because, in desperation, the city reduced the population by sending many residents to some unlucky suburb. Still, as a country fellow might say, a half bag of rattlesnakes is still a bag of rattlesnakes. The residents are not shy about calling the police when they need help, but they sometimes ambush responding officers with sniper fire.

This, then, was the scene of a standoff a year ago between the police and members of the “Crazy Crew,” which produced a media frenzy and the standard city-government reaction when the crooks are black and the police are white: hang the cops out to dry. This is the inside story of what happened, and it is dedicated to the nation’s hard-working police officers who are tired of race-baiting, and of being treated as expendable garbage by politicians.

The Crazy Crew is the Cabrini Green faction of the Gangster Disciples or GDs, who were once the nation’s largest street gang. The very capable Larry Hoover used to run the gang — which controlled more territory than Al Capone ever did — and even after his 1974 conviction for murder, he kept it going quite efficiently from his jail cell in Joliet State Prison. Only after 1997, when the authorities caught on to what was happening and transferred him to Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana, did the Disciples start falling apart.

The GDs used to control killing and drug dealing in a centralized, scientific way, but now there is no organization beyond the block level. Most of the Crazy Crew were kids back in the Hoover era, but they filled the vacuum at Cabrini Green.

The Incident

It is April 17, 2003, approximately 10:30 p.m. The police have their eye on a van filled with known drug traffickers. This is a Chicago neighborhood near Cabrini Green that does a booming drug business, and police have just seen a typical hand-to-hand transaction: Another known gang member handed a brown paper bag to one of the men in the van. The police roll up and officers recognize Rondell “Nightfall” Freeman, the alleged shooter in two homicides, and Antonio “P.M.G.” (Playa’ Money Gangsta’) Parker, the named offender in an aggravated battery of a police officer (he punched the arresting officer in the face and got away, though the police recovered narcotics and a gun). The officers can see these men only through the front windshield because the other windows are heavily tinted.

The van pulls into Cabrini, which could not have been better laid out for drug dealers if they had designed it themselves. There are only two ways in, and the gangs can monitor these easily while they do their business. There are wrought-iron fences that keep the police from driving straight up to the doors, so it is easy to make a hand-to-hand and disappear into a building. For added tranquility, the gangs sometimes make a false 911 call to a different part of town to divert the police. This means uninterrupted business for at least 20 minutes. With the lookout system, they almost always know the police are coming, and this time is no exception. Someone in the van probably phoned ahead.

The van stops, but the occupants refuse to get out. Hundreds of project residents gather, surrounding the police and the van. The police immediately call for backup, yelling “10-1! 10-1!” (Officer in need of immediate assistance.) over the radio. Police units start flying in. A sergeant arrives, and officers keep the area around the van clear.

Under these uncertain crowd conditions, you don’t want to risk trouble by arresting everyone, so the sergeant starts negotiating with the driver, Rondell Freeman. The sergeant tells the group he wants only Antonio Parker, the man who punched an officer, and if he comes out peaceably, the rest can go home. Mr. Freeman’s response? “F**ck you!”

Part of the problem is the van’s tinted windows. Tints are illegal in Illinois, because an officer doesn’t know if someone inside is pointing a Tek 9 or a fully automatic “street sweeper” shotgun at his head. In any case, these gangsters usually have something to hide. The van is shut up tight as a clam; the driver’s side window might have rolled down a crack once or twice

Residents start throwing rocks, cans, bricks, and bottles from the high floors of the surrounding buildings. These are the same people who call the police every day. “Baby’s daddy just jumped on me and I have a stomach ache.” “I want him locked up, he stole my Link card (used to collect welfare payments).” Police also get a lot of calls about violations of orders of protection, which are restraining orders on people accused of domestic battery. Many men cozy back up to their women, and everyone forgets about the order of protection until the man spends the welfare money on booze or cocaine. Some women suddenly remember the order and call the police if they catch their man cheating. Now we are all the enemy.

A lieutenant arrives on the scene. The negotiations with the men in the van go on while the crowd grows. Even a guy in a wheelchair comes out to have a look. It’s still raining cans of corned beef hash, and the mob is getting out of control. Fights are flaring up between residents, and the police have to use force to arrest some of them. The lieutenant calls for more assistance citywide.

The negotiations take 30 to 45 minutes, which is an amount of time astonishing only to anyone not a Chicago police officer. There is an unwritten policy in the department for handling situations like this — white officers, black criminals, crowds of hostiles — very carefully. If the least little thing goes wrong, there will be a stink and heads can roll. All the officers know that if there is a hullabaloo the higher ups will not hesitate to fire officers if they think that will quiet angry blacks.

In this case, the men in the van are going to have to come out one way or another. The police alternatively beg, plead, insist, and demand, until they are convinced nothing short of force will do the job.

The lieutenant tells his men to break into the van. An officer smashes a window, and police fire pepper spray into the vehicle. Other men break more windows, both so they can see inside and so the offenders can breathe. Officers reach in through the broken windows and open the doors, igniting an uproar from the mob and the people hanging out of the buildings. More debris come sailing down on the police.

The scene is one of great confusion. No one in the van follows directions. The passengers have to be dragged out of the van, and if you have to get close enough to a felon to drag him out of a car, there is no telling what he may do. You don’t know what weapons he may have, and you must assume his sole purpose is to maim or kill you.

The officers order the four men to lie down on their stomachs, with their hands behind their backs so they can be cuffed. There are four or five officers for each man, and some resist more than others. “Nightfall” Freeman, the first man out of the van, is putting up the biggest fight. Several officers have him on his stomach, but he refuses to do as he is told. He is lashing out with his arms and legs, kicking and squirming, and appearing to reach for his waistband. He is known to carry a knife and maybe even a gun. Officers have to assume he is going to pull out a gun and shoot them all. There are no second chances or do-overs in police work; only trips to the hospital, funerals — or successful arrests.

One or two officers start punching and kicking Mr. Freeman. There is a simple logic here: Once he has suffered enough he will do what the officers are shouting at him to do. All the men in the van understand this: Lie still and let the police cuff you, and the pain will stop.

In this case, the officers want to be out of there as quickly as possible. With a Cabrini Green crowd at their backs anything could happen. Now that white officers have manhandled blacks, someone in the buildings might even open fire.

The officers have to be persuasive with Mr. Freeman. They could inflict more pain if they used batons, but there are too many officers and they are too close to each other to get a good swing without hitting each other. They aim their kicks and punches at his sides, arms, and legs, and are careful not to hit him in the head. He finally does what he is told, and the officers cuff him. They get him to his feet, and hustle him into a paddy wagon driven by Officers Joseph Groh and Bryan Vander Mey. They drive him across the street to the 18th District station.

Officers search the men carefully, and find no drugs or weapons. The police ask if any are injured, and whether they want to go to the hospital. They all say “no.” However, a quick-thinking sergeant knows better. There is no telling what injuries these felons could claim later, and he sends them to a local hospital for pepper spray decontamination and an injury check. A doctor finds no injuries, and signs a document saying so. The Police Department sends an evidence technician to take pictures. Again, there are no signs of injury. (It is best to take pictures without too much warning. Suspects may bite their lips to get blood and smear it around, or puff up their cheeks to make their faces look swollen.)

Back at Cabrini, everyone knows that some “brothers” had a dustup with the police, and about 100 citizens march over to the station and start throwing rocks and bottles. The commander doesn’t want any trouble, and orders the men to take only defensive action. He is as afraid as anyone of a racial beef. The canine units go out to protect the patrol cars, which the mob would love to burn. The officers arrest a few people on misdemeanor charges, but no police are injured, no cars are damaged, and the station is safe. The crowd gets bored and goes home.

The Video

The next day, on the television news, there was a grainy video [view the video here] of the arrests at Cabrini Green, taken from an upper floor of one of the buildings. The station ran the video without the sound track; they wouldn’t want to expose their audience to a mob of blacks calling the police “white b**ches” and “white devil mother f**kers.” The news also failed to mention that everyone in the van had criminal records, and was resisting arrest after more than a half-hour of negotiation. The newscasters all mentioned Rodney King.

The then-Chicago Police Superintendent, Terry Hillard (he is black, but it hardly matters) proclaimed, without the need for any investigation, that “a little more than excessive force was used” and that “I have viewed the tape, and I am personally upset about what I have seen.” He goes on to say: “The Chicago Police Department has worked too long and too hard in all our communities to build very strong relationships with our residents. These types of incidents undermine that relationship.” At this point we have the typical switch, and it is now the police who are on trial and the criminals who are “victims.” In Superintendent Hilliard’s defense, he has never taken a stand for any copper under the gun, so why should he start now?

In the video, it doesn’t look as though Mr. Freeman is having a good time. However, if you pick a fight with the police and decide not to do what you are told, you open yourself up to some nasty moves, and it is all totally by the book. There is no such thing as “half way” in police use of force, and it is either warranted or it isn’t. If you put up a fight, it’s warranted.

In all the classic videos, including the one of the arrest of Rodney King, look closely: Mr. King gets the stick only when he makes a move. The officers are telling him to lie still and he refuses. That is why they were acquitted at their first trial.

In the case of the Los Angeles cops, it was President George H.W. Bush who panicked after the city went up in flames and told us the officers were guilty despite the verdict. The police in Chicago did not need the President. They had a police chief to tell the world they were guilty.

After the King incident, the LAPD switched to the “swarm” method of gang-tackling an offender to subdue and cuff him. That is supposed to be more humane than clubbing him. At Cabrini, the police had to get up close to the criminals and had no choice but to swarm them, but that is not the method they prefer. Why not? Because the first officer in the swarm stands a good chance of being punched in the face, and not many officers want that kind of punishment. The academy gives us better advice: Distance equals shielding. If possible, use the baton, because if you can reach the felon with your stick he probably can’t reach you with his fist.

In the Cabrini Green video, Mr. Freeman gets nothing like the number of strikes Mr. King did, but that makes no difference. You haven’t signed a contract with the thug who is fighting you. There is no agreement that says, “OK, after five strikes — fist or baton — you promise to go down, and quietly let me put the cuffs on you; any violation of the rules can result in serious litigation!” Sometimes it takes more than five strikes — maybe a lot more. The armchair quarterbacks of the courtroom and the mayor’s office should have to go out into the wild with the cops, and see what it is like dealing with some of the world’s problem people.

How the politicians react to an incident like this depends to a huge extent on factors that have nothing to do with what an officer actually did. The most important is how much media coverage there is, and whether there is a race angle. A video tape that can be made to look like “racists” in action — and that gets a lot of air time — is about the worst thing that can happen to an officer.

Mr. Freeman filed a complaint with something called the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), and the city chose the two officers who drove him to the station, Joseph Groh and Bryan Vander Mey, to take the fall. On June 1, 2003, OPS charged them with “discharging pepper spray without permission,” and with “battery” of Rondell Freeman. In fact, it is not entirely clear they even did the things they are charged with, since the only evidence was probably filmed from ten floors up, and is not much clearer than a “Bigfoot” video. There is a pile of people, and there are some kicks and punches, but it’s not at all clear who anyone is. There was so much chaos at the scene that not even the other officers are entirely sure who was doing what. The sergeant says he had pepper spray in his eyes, and the lieutenant says there were men at the scene he did not recognize.

As for spraying pepper without permission, technically that’s true. However, it is so common to use pepper under circumstances like these, the lieutenant wouldn’t have thought twice about it. This is the sort of charge you get in a political case. The local media said the police used “tear-gas grenades.” This is pure sensationalism. Chicago police carry pepper dispensers on their belts similar to the ones the public can buy.

Later, the District Attorney even brought criminal charges against Mr. Vander Mey for which he is likely to go on trial, but first a word about the Office of Professional Standards. The department already had something called the Internal Affairs Division, which looks into officer misconduct, so a second bureaucracy wasn’t necessary. The OPS was set up to improve community relations — probably to please blacks — and encourages the public to call if someone has a problem with the police. This means OPS has become the perfect tool for anyone who wants to stir up trouble against the police.

This, needless to say, includes criminals, and if they have a cell phone chances are they have the OPS number on their speed dial. Often, when an officer makes a simple traffic stop, the driver is already on the phone to OPS before the cop can make it to the driver’s side door. Even a completely baseless complaint — the huge majority — means time-consuming paper work, and any working Chicago police officer can expect to “do paper” on at least one complaint every other week.

It is because of groups like OPS that officers have to list the race of everyone they stop. OPS says these statistics will affect only a small percentage of officers, but “affect” means disciplinary measures. The message is simple: “Write up too many minorities and we’ll drop the hammer on you.” These groups have never heard of racial differences in crime rates.

Of course, the statistics also list Hispanic criminals as “white,” which artificially inflates the white crime rate, and makes blacks look less crime-prone than they are. Statistics are a wonderful thing in the hands of publicity-conscious administrators. An attempted murder can miraculously become an aggravated battery, and a “hate crime” can become a mere assault. As most any cop will tell you, a crime is a “hate crime” only when the perpetrator is white and the victim is a minority. All it takes is the click of a mouse to sanitize an entire district, but even after all possible adjustments, blacks are still the most serious offenders, and Chicago still leads the nation in homicides.

The OPS has its own agenda. Lori Lightfoot, black head spokesman for the office, went on a black public access television program called “The Munir Muhammed Show” and listed the names of the officers under investigation in the Cabrini case before there were any official findings. This is against policy, but the police department would not dare reprimand a prominent black for this blatant violation.

On the program, Miss Lightfoot failed to mention a little investigation carried out by representatives from OPS, Internal Affairs, and the State’s Attorney’s Office. They visited “the gym” in Chicago’s police academy, where officers learn use of force guidelines, and showed the famous video to the officer in charge. He quickly determined that it showed standard procedure, not police brutality. He told them the “victims” were, in fact, assailants. The witch-hunters didn’t want to hear this, so they went to the man’s immediate supervisor, who just happened to be a black woman. She would certainly give them the answer they wanted. Wrong! She agreed with the first officer. Nothing more has been heard of these opinions, and both the officer and the sergeant have since been transferred out of their jobs at the gym. Rumor has it that Miss Lightfoot took her video (without the colorful soundtrack) to the Cook County State’s Attorney, but was laughed out of his office.

None of this came up on “The Munir Muhammamed Show,” where Miss Lightfoot was clearly trying to fuel the racial fire and create a name for herself in the black community.

One curious fact in this case is that Officers Vander Mey and Groh stayed at their jobs for seven months after the Cabrini incident. If the department really thought they were violent, run-amok officers — and all the brass had seen the tape — they would have been off the street immediately. At a minimum, they would have gone to a center that takes non-emergency calls over the phone. This is a desk job a suspect or injured officer can take and still be paid. Cops call it “crips and criminals duty.” Some of the officers who work in callback have even killed people — justified or not.

But no, the Cabrini officers continued to work. Watch commanders continued to fill their gang activity reports with information about the Crazy Crew. The reports regularly mentioned Rondell Freeman as its leader. Members of the Crazy Crew were the main suspects in a series of home invasions in the Cabrini area, but the residents were afraid to testify about what they saw. Watch commanders continued to warn us that these men fight the police, so we were to use extreme caution around them.

Rondell Freeman, the “beating” victim, was arrested again on Jan.16, 2004, for violating bail bond and for a weapons charge, after he was stopped for a tinted-windows violation. Once again, Mr. Freeman would not get out of his car. A sergeant had to be called in, but this time he got out without a fight. Officers found a push dagger in plain view on the floor of the car, where he had been sitting. They also found a group of bullet holes below the passenger-side airbag. From the tight grouping, it looked as though they were probably made with an automatic weapon.

While he was being processed at the station, Mr. Freeman threatened the arresting officers, saying he had a “working relationship” with Internal Affairs (IAD), and that he could have the officers transferred out of the district. Mr. Freeman had a visitor’s pass to IAD in his possession, which suggests the department had called him in for a nice talk. Mr. Freeman has since been locked up again, for getting into a fight at a nightclub.

Another passenger in the van in the Cabrini incident was Adam Sanders. He has since been jailed for stealing a truck. After he crashed the truck, he got out and fought police officers, so he faces multiple charges of aggravated battery, too. In an act of great creativity Mr. Sanders is suing the department, claiming false arrest in retaliation for the famous April 17, 2003 incident — as if the police slid a stolen truck under his body.

There were other unsung developments in the case. While the police had their hands on the Cabrini incident van, they ran a search for a “trap.” This is a hidden compartment built into a vehicle for storing weapons, drugs, etc. They are hard to find, because it may take a sophisticated sequence to open one — like turning on the air conditioning full blast while tuning the radio to a specific frequency. In fact, there was a trap in the van, but it was empty. In Chicago it is a misdemeanor to have a trap in your car, but by the time police found it, the case had blown up so big the top brass probably figured they’d be accused of planting the trap in the car if they publicized it. No charges were filed.

In February, a Chicago paper ran another scathing article about police “racism.” It was a collage of stories, but the two main ones were the Cabrini incident and one about a Chicago firefighter who allegedly said “nigger” over the radio. The point was to taint all the stories with the “N word,” and a creative newspaper artist can easily link stories like this to “200 years of oppression and slavery.” By then Chicago had a new police superintendent, a white man named Phil Cline, and this was too much for him. Two weeks after the story, on March 2, 2004, he suspended Officers Vander Mey and Groh without pay. The department had officially named their scapegoats.

The internal, administrative investigation had gone nowhere because there was so little to build a case on, but when there is enough media pressure prosecutors can build a case against just about anyone. On June 3, 2004, the Cook County DA charged Mr. Vander Mey with four counts of “official misconduct by a police officer,” alleging that he assaulted the “victim,” Rondell Freeman, while he was handcuffed.

This was more than even the media had bargained for, and the papers noted that it was “unprecedented” for an officer to face criminal charges in an incident that produced no injuries. However, when a society is rotting, the latest outrage is always “unprecedented.” When the media kick up a fuss and race is involved, the “unprecedented” should never be a surprise. In any case the accusations are preposterous. Observers say no officer struck Rondell Freeman after he was handcuffed.

(Actually, there is nothing in the use of force protocol that says an officer can’t strike a man after he has been cuffed. You may be in cuffs and on the ground, but if you are kicking officers, you are fair game for wrist locks, arm holds, baton strikes, and punches. If you have an officer’s neck in a leg lock, he has grounds even to shoot you. Most officers probably wouldn’t, but they have to make split-second decisions, and a mistake can be fatal.)

In any case, the main purpose of the indictment is to pacify blacks and maybe even ensure the re-election of State’s Attorney Dick Devine. The rumor among police officers is that the word to charge Officer Vander May came straight from Mr. Devine himself. Rumor also has it that his subordinates warned against bringing such a weak case.

There are other signs there is nothing to this case. Despite all the media hype, Jesse Jackson, who lives right in Chicago, hasn’t moved a muscle. Johnnie Cochran’s main office is in Chicago, but he has been quiet, too. You can be sure he would be all over this case if he smelled money.

Even the DA knows he has a lousy case. Several times, he has offered to let Mr. Vander Mey plead to misdemeanor battery of the lightest kind — it would carry no jail time, and would be expunged from his record if he kept out of trouble. Mr. Vander Mey has refused to plea bargain, partly on principle, partly for practical reasons. He is convinced he is being railroaded simply for doing his job and has nothing to apologize for. Also, even a no-jail-time, no-record misdemeanor, which would not be a handicap for most people, would be a big problem for a police officer. It would be grounds for dismissal, and he wants to stay with the force.

The fact remains that Officers Vander May and Groh have been suspended without pay since March 2, 2004. They are not even at the non-emergency call center. Mr. Vander May’s police administrative hearing has been put off until after his criminal trial, and that could drag out for another year. No trial date has been set. Mr. Groh — likewise on leave without pay — is still subject to administrative hearing, but his seems to have been put on hold, so he is in limbo.

In the meantime, these two officers are off the payroll. An indicted cop has a hard time finding work in his usual line of business, but Mr. Vander Mey managed to scrape up a part-time job. With charges pending he can’t carry a weapon — not a pleasant situation for an officer who has put away a lot of Chicago criminals and who is now famous.

Now, for the crime of leaving the station to help officers in need, he faces four counts of felony “official misconduct.” He doesn’t have many options. For a Chicago cop, a jury trial is suicide, so he will go before a judge. Many jurisdictions allow a case that has already been prejudged in the press to be relocated to a different jurisdiction, as was done with the cops who arrested Rodney King. This has never happened in Cook County.

Needless to say, cases like this send police morale straight to the bottom. If a man can face jail time for doing his job, it makes cops hesitate when they are on the street, and that can put their lives at risk. Even many of the bosses are disgusted. Officers Vander Mey and Groh join a long list of cops who have been thrown to the dogs because they did their jobs, and the media blew it up into a racial incident.

The politicians and police brass will do anything to avoid controversy, especially if there is the slightest whiff of anything that could be call “racism.” It is easier to sacrifice the little guys than do what’s right. Politicians stare at the crystal ball and try to predict how the public will act. For the men on the force, it is a question of guts; and they think the politicians don’t have any. And that is why you get the levels of crime, and contempt for the police from blacks that you see all over this country.

Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago the “hog butcher of the world.” The stock yards moved out long ago, but the city continues to live up to its name. Blacks still like to call police “pigs,” and any officer who takes his job seriously knows that every assignment could be his turn to be run through the meat grinder.

Mr. Henderson is a former police officer who lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

Arrogantly Biased

A lifelong liberal exposes anti-white media bias.

Bernard Goldberg, Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, Warner Books, 2003, 310 pp., $26.95.

Virtually any American with common sense is aware of blatant anti-white double standard, specifically media double standards. Over the years, organizations like Accuracy in Media have emerged to monitor and expose liberal bias, and conservative broadcasters and pundits bellow about it. Even former liberals like David Horowitz denounce racial double standards.

Bernard Goldberg, Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite

What makes Bernard Goldberg’s contribution to this field significant is not so much his revelations — though they are extremely interesting and important — as his perspective. Mr. Goldberg worked as an on-air correspondent and producer for CBS News for nearly 30 years. He has won seven Emmy awards. To this day he calls himself a liberal. He supports “gay rights,” sympathizes with feminism, has never voted for a Republican for president, takes joy in the “civil rights” movement of the 1960s, and says he was moved by the speeches of Martin Luther King. Mr. Goldberg raises some hope that there actually are liberals in influential positions who still have some sense of fair play, and are willing to risk the wrath of the establishment by pointing out the obvious.

Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite began as an op-ed piece about liberal media bias Mr. Goldberg wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1996. Before the column appeared, he phoned CBS colleague — and the most powerful man at the network — Dan Rather to tell him what was coming. He was worried Mr. Rather would not react well to criticism of CBS, but Mr. Rather assured him, “Bernie, you were my friend yesterday, you’re my friend today, and you’ll be my friend tomorrow.” Mr. Rather has not spoken to him since the article appeared.

The article caused a small earthquake within the offices of big media, and Mr. Goldberg followed it up with his 2002 bestseller, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, which went into much more detail. Although Bias touched on race, this sequel, Arrogance, deals with the subject in a much more profound and detailed manner.

“There are few forces on earth more powerful than white liberal guilt,” Mr. Goldberg writes. “It has no known limits. In the hearts and minds of plain old regular liberals, it’s bad enough. But in the hands of journalists, white liberal guilt becomes a very dangerous force indeed.”

Mr. Goldberg asserts that deep down, many of his colleagues suspect they’ve got it wrong about race, but cannot bring themselves to come clean. He explains why: “By hanging on to the old party line for dear life — and conveniently seeing anyone with contrary views as ‘racially insensitive’ Neanderthals if not out-and-out racists — they get to continue to do what too many liberals enjoy doing best: bask in their own moral superiority.”

This is why on certain extremely divisive questions the press has only one opinion. As Mr. Goldberg explains, “The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), an organization that represents every major paper in the country, is downright obsessed with diversity and affirmative action, concepts the editors apparently don’t regard as even mildly controversial.”

Since all journalists engage in group think, it never occurs to them that there can be any other view on the issue. Racial preferences are not just good, they are normal, and anyone who disagrees is on the fringe. Of course, as Mr. Goldberg points out, love of diversity does not extend to ideas or viewpoints.

“How in the world,” he asks, “can a journalist report fairly on affirmative action and racial preferences after the organization for which that journalist works has already taken sides? And not merely taken sides, but declared only one position good and fair and moral? How can he or she even pretend to represent honestly the views of those millions and millions of decent Americans who do not think affirmative action is an open-and-shut moral case; who believe, to the contrary and with equal passion, that affirmative action is nothing more than a nicer way of saying ‘reverse discrimination’?”

Mr. Goldberg put together a television program about the controversy over Texas law school professor Lino Graglia’s 1997 remark that blacks and Hispanics do not do as well as whites in school because their families do not care very much about education. “After it aired,” he writes, “a top producer on the program — white and very liberal — came up to me, shaking his head in disbelief over what he considered the incredibly backward things the professor had to say. ‘Can you believe this guy?’ he asked. The question was meant to be rhetorical — there was not a scintilla of doubt in his mind that I, like everyone else in the wide world of big-time journalism, shared his contempt for the professor.”

But Mr. Goldberg replied, “I could,” leaving the producer in shock. “I had covered too many stories for CBS News in what we used to call ‘the ghetto,’” writes Mr. Goldberg, “where that encouragement just didn’t exist, where kids were left to fend for themselves after school, where there wasn’t a book in the house.”

In another illuminating anecdote, Mr. Goldberg describes preparations for a CBS story on a group of juvenile house thieves who were terrorizing a nice neighborhood in Orlando, Florida. Before heading off to Orlando, his producer, a liberal white woman, asked him, “Are the juvenile delinquents black or white?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Goldberg replied. “I didn’t bother to ask. Is that important?”

She replied, “They need to be white.”

It was clear that the piece would never air if the hoodlums weren’t white, so Mr. Goldberg called his contacts in Orlando to see if it was even worth the trouble to report the story. They were white, so he did the story.

Mr. Goldberg seems to think the rest of us have not noticed how often the media fail to report the race of a criminal suspect, even the race of “a rapist — who is still at large — for fear of offending blacks (in and out of the newsroom)” because they are afraid of “feeding into racial stereotypes.” “Never mind,” he adds, “that telling their readers everything they can about the suspect, including his race, might actually help find the monster preying on women. That’s not important enough, apparently — not in the hands of ‘deferential’ liberal newspeople.”

Should the touchy matter of a black-on-white hate crime arise, Mr. Goldberg explains that the media practice “good racial manners” and “bend over backwards to make the assault look like nothing more than a misunderstanding between the races.”

Mr. Goldberg tells the story of the Philadelphia Daily News’s August 2002 cover story about the 15 murder suspects then on the loose in the city. It put the mug shots of all 15 on the cover — not one was black. “Before you could say, ‘Racist,’” he writes, “the phones at the paper were ringing off the hook. The callers were angry, not because they claimed the story was false, but because of the impression it might leave.” Rather than defend the story, the paper’s managing editor wrote a craven apology: “The front-page photos from last Thursday sent the message to some readers that only black men commit murder . . . In addition, the stories didn’t address a key question: Why are there no white suspects on the loose? That was also a mistake.”

In response, a Philadelphia police official pointed out that white murderers were locked up and black ones weren’t because blacks don’t trust the police and don’t help them catch criminals. Mr. Goldberg writes: “If distrust of cops in the black community is really so pervasive that it outweighs even concerns about safety and security, that in itself would make a terrific story. What is the police response to that kind of distrust? To what extent is it legitimately the result of law-abiding black citizens’ deeply felt sense that cops hassle anyone who’s black, and how much of it is a product of decades of divisive antiwhite and anticop rhetoric put forth by black activists?” (He should have added, “and white liberal media execs.”)

“Think it’ll ever be written?” Goldberg asks. “Don’t hold your breath.”

White journalists are just as supine in their dealings with black journalists. One black reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote in his memoir that when a white woman colleague made a story suggestion he didn’t like, he wanted to “grab her by the throat and shake her like a rag doll.” A black at the Washington Post bragged in print about how, when he was younger, he found that “f***ing up white boys made us feel real good inside . . .” and that sometimes he wanted to “take one of those white boys where I work and bang his head against a wall or stomp part of him in the ground . . .”

Mr. Goldberg asks the obvious question: “Can anyone even begin to imagine a white reporter writing such words about a black colleague and living, professionally speaking, to tell about it?”

When there is a racial angle of any kind to a story, the media can be counted on to give it a liberal spin. During the summer of 2002, there was a series of child abductions across the country that was regularly making the news. In Philadelphia, a black child named Erica Pratt was kidnapped, thrown in the basement of an empty house, and tied up with duct tape. Courageously, she chewed through the tape, kicked open the basement door, escaped through a window, and screamed until someone rescued her. This was a great story, and since black groups had been blasting the media for focusing only on abductions of white children, the Pratt case was the perfect opportunity for the media to display its virtue.

It soon emerged, however, that this was not a typical kidnapping. Erica Pratt’s family was deeply involved in the drug trade, and some of her family had been murdered. There was clearly a drug angle to the story, and the abductors knew her family. It appeared that someone owed someone money, and that the criminals had kidnapped Erica in retaliation. Her family were clearly losers.

The police knew this and local papers reported it, but the major networks refused to mention the family angle. Mr. Goldberg explains that this was typical: “I had a whole catalog of examples where politically correct senior producers put concerns about race above their concerns about telling the truth. They were always worried about showing too many black criminals in jail even when the prison was loaded with black criminals. They were worried about showing a few black men looting stores after a hurricane, even though the looting was happening on a Caribbean island where just about everybody, including the cops who arrested them, was black. And now, with Erica Pratt, it was looking like they were going PC again.”

Mr. Goldberg found out the truth about the Pratt case only when he watched “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox Television. He wanted to write an article about the way the national media covered the case, so he called Jim Axelrod, the CBS reporter who had done the Pratt story, and asked why he omitted the drug angle. Mr. Axelrod would not comment. Mr. Goldberg e-mailed John Yang, the reporter for ABC News, asking the same question. Mr. Yang replied, “Before committing to do this, I’d like to know what angle you’re pursuing.” When Mr. Goldberg explained, Mr. Yang never replied.

Part of the value of Arrogance lies in the attention it has received. Although Mr. Goldberg writes about many of the media’s ideological failings — feminism, the homeless, the military — it is on race that he shows the most insight. The shots he has taken at major news executives have made him persona non grata in powerful circles, but he says there is also a quiet circle of gratitude and support for him among his colleagues. Needless to say, this book does not even venture into the media hysteria — or silence — about such things as race and IQ, the displacement of whites through immigration, the heritability of intelligence, or the folly of promoting “diversity.” Still, within the limits of what can be published today, Mr. Goldberg has rendered a valuable service.

Mr. Borzellieri, a frequent AR contributor, is the author of The Unspoken Truth: Race Culture and Other Taboos.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

Stupidity as Virtue

Whites — not Hispanics — are the key to GOP success.

Samuel T. Francis, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future, Representative Government Press, 2003, 62 pp., $10.00.

There have been many books and articles about the influence of mass non-white immigration on the American economy, culture, and even the national identity, but relatively few about its impact on politics. In his latest monograph, syndicated columnist and frequent AR contributor Samuel Francis explains how race and immigration are altering the American political landscape.

There have been more than 30 million immigrants since 1970, and both political parties are trying to appeal to these newcomers, even at the expense of abandoning previous positions and constituencies. The Democrats were the first to become dependent on non-whites. Since the 1960s, blacks in particular have voted Democratic overwhelmingly — in the 2000 presidential election, Democrats got 90 percent of the black vote. Because they are so dependent on blacks, Democrats must treat people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton with respect. Hispanics are not quite so loyal to the Democratic Party — they give it about two thirds of their votes — but the increasing influence of Hispanics in the Democratic Party accounts for across-the-board support among party leaders for a full amnesty for illegal aliens, bilingual education, voting rights for immigrants, etc.

“The irony of these patterns of racial and Hispanic immigrant voting,” Dr. Francis writes, “is that, while the Democrats have become in many respects the prisoner of the black and Hispanic racial minorities on whom they are dependent for political success, the Republicans have become no less dependent on a strategy and ideology that seek to attract the same minorities, even though they have been unable to attract very many to their ranks.”

Whereas the Democrats really do need non-whites, the Republicans — Dr. Francis’s Stupid Party — only think they do. As Dr. Francis explains, this is because Republicans failed to understand the political appeal of immigration reform after California’s 1994 vote on Proposition 187. This ballot initiative was to deny public benefits, including education, to illegal aliens. They myth inside the Beltway is that support for the initiative killed the Republican Party in California, a state that had once been critical to it in national elections. Until 2000, no Republican had ever won the White House without taking California.

The reality is that Prop. 187 passed overwhelmingly, with 59 percent of the vote statewide, and enjoyed majority support among every ethnic group except Hispanics (nearly a quarter of whom also voted for it). GOP governor Pete Wilson, who had been written off politically prior to embracing 187, won with 55 percent of the vote, and the Republicans picked up four congressional seats in California, which helped them take control of Congress for the first time in nearly 50 years.

Any but the stupidest of parties would have realized immigration was a winning issue, but as Dr. Francis points out, there were many Republican functionaries and propagandists — the so-called neoconservatives — who were already beholden to the Open Borders lobby. When GOP presidential candidate Robert Dole lost to President Clinton in 1996, the neoconservatives claimed it was the smoldering resentment of alienated Hispanics, and not Sen. Dole’s lackluster campaign, that cost them the election. They pointed out that Sen. Dole received just 21 percent of the Hispanic vote, compared to Ronald Reagan’s 37 percent in 1984. This interpretation of Prop. 187 is so wrong-headed it approaches the perverse.

Hispanic vs. Southern Strategy

What really cost Sen. Dole the 1996 election was that he won only 46 percent of the white vote. Although today’s Republicans are loathe to admit it, they cannot win anywhere without a solid majority of whites. Earlier generations of Republican strategists understood this simple fact, first enunciated by Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1961, when he told an audience in Atlanta that, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” The ducks were mainly in the South, and this was the origin of the so-called Southern Strategy, employed by the GOP in its winning presidential campaigns from 1968 to 1988. The strategy, writes Dr. Francis, “consisted of appealing to whites, in the South as well as among ethnic, largely Roman Catholic, and working class voters in the urban and suburban Northeast, by invoking patriotic, moralistic, and religious values and social concerns about rising crime rates, eroding public morality, and the apparent inability or unwillingness of the Democratic leadership to control or stop such trends.”

“The Republican appeal to white voters,” Dr. Francis continues, “also included what was at least subliminally an explicit racial appeal, a subtle message that, while not overtly stigmatizing blacks or inciting racial antagonism, played on existing white anxieties about blacks.” When Republicans made racial appeals, they won. When they did not, as in 1976, 1992, and 1996, they lost. Dr. Francis believes George W. Bush made a weak racial appeal in 2000 by refusing to apologize for speaking at Bob Jones University and by vetoing a hate crimes bill passed by the Texas legislature. Because it was a weak appeal, he won only 54 percent of the white vote and lost the popular vote to Al Gore (in the five presidential elections won by the GOP since 1972 it has won an average of 60 percent of the white vote).

Still, by 2000, the Hispanic Strategy had become the official GOP party line, as Dr. Francis demonstrates with the following quotes. Republican pollster Lance Tarrance: “We have now moved from the Southern strategy we pursued for the last three decades, since Richard Nixon, to a Hispanic strategy for the next three decades.” Presidential advisor Karl Rove: The Southern strategy is an “old paradigm” that “past GOP candidates had employed in a calculated bid to polarize the electorate and put together a predominantly white majority.” Republican operative Ralph Reed: “This is a very different party from the party that sits down on Labor Day and cedes the black vote and cedes the Hispanic vote, and tries to drive its percentage of the white vote over 70 percent to win an election.”

But does the Hispanic Strategy work? Republicans first made overt appeals to Hispanic voters in statewide elections in California in the late 90s. They failed. George W. Bush made Hispanic outreach a key part of his campaign in 2000, often speaking in Spanish and running advertisements on Spanish-language radio and television stations. He won only 31 percent of the Hispanic vote, about what Republicans usually get, and only a few percentage points more than the number of California Hispanics who voted for Prop. 187! In the current presidential campaign, Pres. Bush is once again pandering to Hispanics. He has a group called Viva Bush doing Hispanic outreach, runs Spanish-language television ads featuring the Mexican and other Latin American flags, and even delivered a few lines of his convention acceptance speech in Spanish. Yet polls show him only attracting about 32 percent of the Hispanic vote. Blacks, of course, are breaking for Sen. John Kerry by nine to one, and non-whites as a whole by three to one.

“In almost all cases, then, since 1994, the results of every real political test of the Hispanic strategy have been the same,” Dr. Francis writes: abysmal failure. However, when Republicans run on immigration restriction, they win, as did Pete Wilson in 1994. When they run on pro-immigration platforms, as did Robert Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000, they lose (at least the popular vote). “For all the rhetoric of the ‘new Republicans’ about wooing non-whites,” writes Dr. Francis, “the lesson of the 2000 election and every other recent election for the GOP ought to be clear: Trying to win non-whites, especially by abandoning issues important to white voters, while neglecting, abandoning, or alienating whites is the road to political suicide; the natural and logical strategy of the Republican Party in the future is to seek to maximize its white vote as much as possible.”

To illustrate this point, Dr. Francis cites UPI and Vdare.com correspondent Steve Sailer’s analysis of the 2000 election. George W. Bush won just 54 percent of the white vote in one of the closest elections in US history. Had he won 57 percent of the white vote (George H. W. Bush won 59 percent in 1988 with the help of the famous Willie Horton ad), the election would have been an electoral college landslide for Mr. Bush, 367 to 171. Even if securing that extra three percent of the white vote had lost him a further eight percent of the non-white vote, he would still have won handily. Whites are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, the core constituency of the Republican Party. The Hispanic Strategy will never bring enough Hispanics into the party, and will only drive away white voters. Had Pres. Bush not angered his white base with his foolish amnesty plan, it is unlikely the 2004 election would be as close as most pundits predict.

What today’s Republicans don’t seem to understand, and what makes Dr. Francis’s monograph so important, is that race matters. It matters culturally and it matters politically. This is especially true for whites, though most are too brainwashed to realize it. As Dr. Francis writes, “to an increasing degree, American politics revolves around race and immigration and the constituencies created by them — not around the traditional white European-American core of American politics and government. As the white European portion of the American population continues to dwindle toward what the Census Bureau has repeatedly projected will be a minority of the population by 2050, and as mass non-white immigration continues unabated, white voters and constituencies can expect to find themselves and their interests increasingly marginalized and increasingly irrelevant to the national political campaigns and candidates of both major parties.” Once that happens, Dr. Francis warns, “they and the country they have historically led face an uncertain and alarming future with whites facing the possibility of becoming a politically inert and powerless racial minority in the new, majority non-white America of the coming century.”

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Blackboard Jungle

Ninety-two percent of the students of Brentwood Middle School in Charleston, S.C., are black. In the 2002-3 school year, Brentwood suspended 61 percent of its students at least once and expelled 3.4 percent of them. A school nurse says the school was “total chaos” that year. Many of the students loitered around the halls all day rather than go to class. “The decibel level in the halls when there was supposed to be school going on . . . was unbelievable,” she says.

Brentwood performs academically as one would expect. Fifty-two of the school’s 842 students are 15 or older, which means they have been held back at least twice. This year, the district decided to move 11 of the over-age students up to North Charleston High School, despite their failing grades. “If you’re 16 years or older, middle school is not age appropriate,” explained a school official. A teacher at the high school is not pleased: “We’ve got a failing school here. How are we supposed to get any better if they just dump on us every year?” North Charleston High is 81 percent black, and no fewer than 53 percent of its students are also over-age for their grades.

Brentwood also discriminates against whites, according to three white teachers who have filed lawsuits with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) this year. Even the school district admits that when Brentwood hired John Smith, the black principal Wanda Marshall told him “in the eyes of the students, he would have two strikes against him, because he was a white male.” Mr. Smith claims he was “rendered totally ineffective in managing and instructing his classes” because the principal “would not allow students to be disciplined for racial slurs or other disruptive behavior towards white teachers.” On April 13, Miss Marshall told Mr. Smith he could not teach a second year at Brentwood because he didn’t fit in, despite the fact that he had “successfully completed” his first year of teaching. After the school learned that Mr. Smith was going to file with the EEOC, school officials decided his first year was “unsuccessful.” Mr. Smith wants to keep his job. “I want to continue to help these kids,” he explains.

Former Brentwood teacher Elizabeth Kandrac is also suing for racial discrimination. At the beginning of April, she filed with the EEOC claiming the school ignored her complaints about school discipline. Students used foul language, misbehaved, and threatened and assaulted her several times. Once a student threw a desk at her. The administration ignored her complaints about discipline and criticized her for asking for help so often. After she filed with the EEOC, the school responded properly to her discipline referrals, and even kept another adult in all her classes to ensure safety. On April 21, however, the school told her not to come back to Brentwood because of “safety concerns.”

According to the lawyer for Brandy Stokes, another white teacher suing the school, the Principal Marshall “condoned and facilitated a racially hostile environment.” Miss Stokes claims the principal let students harass her, which only made them more aggressive. In her complaint to the EEOC, Miss Stokes says the principal told her to “accept the students’ behavior because it was part of the students’ culture and background.” The principal reportedly explained that “the students did not have parental supervision and that this is the way they were.” The chaos culminated in Nov. 2002, when a student punched her as she tried to break up a fight. The blow broke a tooth, dislocated her jaw, and knocked her back on a chair, injuring her spine. After three months of sick leave, Miss Stokes asked to come back, but Miss Marshall refused.

Miss Stokes is not the only teacher to suffer violence at the hands of Brentwood students. On August 11, two black sisters repeatedly hit white teacher Solange Brewer on the arms and head when she tried to break up a fight between them. The police charged the students with “lynching,” which South Carolina law defines as any act of violence by two or more people against another, regardless of race.

The district has transferred Miss Marshall to a high school, where she is an assistant principal. [Allison Bruce, Teacher Ousted for Own Safety, Post and Courier (Charleston), April 22, 2004. School District Denies Racial Discrimination, AP, July 30, 2004. Third Teacher Files Discrimination Suit, AP, Aug. 28, 2004. Seanna Adcox, One Girl Still Held a Week after School Fight, Post and Courier, Aug. 19, 2004. Seanna Adcox, Over-Age Eighth Graders Moved Up to High School, Post and Courier, Sept. 2, 2004.]

Sensible Aussies

Although it has abandoned its official “White Australia” immigration policy, many Australians, perhaps including present prime minister John Howard (facing reelection this month), still see themselves as a nation of European origin, and want to stay that way. This annoys some Asian neighbors.

Addressing a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) organization last year, Singapore prime minister Goh Chok Tong told delegates Australia would never really be a part of Asia until its population was majority Asian. “Over time,” he explained, “when there’s more Asians going to Australia and the population tips 50 percent non-whites, and the rest white, they are immediately regarded as Asian.”

Mr. Howard said he would not change immigration policy in favor of Asians, calling the idea “absurd,” and adding that Australia would never surrender its current identity in order to join an Asian free trade area. [Malcolm Farr, Howard Defends National Identity, Courier and Mail (Australia), Oct. 21, 2003.]

Falling for Romeo

Black pimp Woodolph Romeo is facing 25 years in prison on charges that he forced two young white runaways to work as prostitutes in Queens, New York. DA Richard Brown says Mr. Romeo repeatedly beat and raped the 13- and 14-year old girls and forced them to have sex with as many as 15 men a night. He also kept them as virtual slaves from October 2001 until May of this year, and made the 14-year-old girl tattoo his name on her arm. In January 2001, police discovered the body of another white teenage girl, Crystal Jones, suffocated in a Bronx flophouse. Miss Jones had the name “Romeo” tattooed on her back, and police have not ruled out Mr. Romeo as a suspect. Miss Jones was part of a group of 10 runaways from Burlington, Vermont, who were recruited into a prostitution gang operated by Jose “Ritchie” Rodriguez, who is now in prison. Mr. Romeo was one of his lieutenants. [Scott Shifrel, This Romeo’s Called a Pimp, New York Daily News, Aug. 24, 2004.]

Gana la Verde

The reality television show “Gana la Verde,” or “Win the Green,” offers Hispanics the chance to win free legal representation from an immigration lawyer to get a green card. The contestants try to outdo each other at revolting and dangerous stunts, such as eating burritos filled with beetles, fighting off barking dogs, jumping between speeding 18-wheel trucks, washing windows on a skyscraper, lying in a sealed coffin with rats, and eating worms. The show begins with staged shots of each contestant crawling through barbed wire, with simulated US Border Patrol helicopters flying overhead. The program began on July 1 and airs in Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, and Dallas. It attracts one million viewers.

Although the show casts the contestants as illegal immigrants, Lenard Liberman, of Liberman Broadcasting, which produces the program, says they all sign a waiver claiming they are here legally. (One wonders why they are so desperate for legal advice.)

The show has drawn much criticism from Hispanic and liberal immigration groups. In August, several wrote a letter to KRCA-TV, the Los Angeles station that airs “Gana la Verde,” asking that it drop the program: “This show takes advantage of people’s fears, offers them false promises, functions as a magnet to encourage people to enter this country without documentation, and makes them potential targets of our government’s misguided immigration polices . . . Each day ‘Gana la Verde’ is on the air demonstrates your contempt for immigrants.”

No one has yet criticized it because it trivializes immigration law. “We’re just trying to help people out here,” says Mr. Liberman. “I don’t know what all the controversy’s about. If we gave away breast implants or plastic surgery, no one could care. But try to help Maria go from a nanny to a nurse, and everyone raises an outcry.” [Jerry Seper, Going Extreme to Pursue a Dream? Washington Times, August 18, 2004.]

Joys of Diversity

Miriam Mirabal is a 61-year-old Cuban immigrant and a high priestess in the voodoo-like Palo Mayombe religion, which was introduced to Cuba by West African slaves in the 19th century. Practitioners conduct ceremonies around iron cauldrons containing human bones — which is what led Miss Mirabal afoul of the law. Prosecutors in Newark, New Jersey, say Miss Mirabal ordered her followers to break into a Newark cemetery to dig up bodies. They say she gave the remains to another Palo priest who used them in ceremonies in the basement of a store selling religious items. She has been charged on various counts of burglary, theft and conspiracy. [‘Grave-Rob’ Priestess in N.J. Trial, New York Post, April 16, 2004.]

More Joys of Diversity

Last April 5, a group of black students attacked a Hispanic girl at Maxine O. Bush Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona. Administrators and black parents dismissed the incident as a lack of discipline or routine bullying. That did not sit well with Hispanic parents, two of whom — Juana Mendoza and Juan Luis Galeno — are suing the Roosevelt School District, principal Walsdorf Jenneford, and several other employees for $25 million, claiming the assault was racial.

“There were 25 kids that jumped (all) over my daughter,” says Miss Mendoza, “and the $25 million was arrived at by our family, and we deserved that for all the damages, stress and that, which started before my daughter was assaulted. It’s something that they need to compensate us for.”

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) supports the parents. John Ramos, president of the South Phoenix LULAC chapter, denounces “an inability of leadership to control the problem that has been festering for 27 years. I say 27 years because my wife was threatened in the same fashion when she was a student (there).”

The lawsuit also demands that the school board fire the principal, train all employees in diversity, and issue a formal letter of apology in English and Spanish. [Betty Reid, Roosevelt Faces Bullying Claim, Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Aug. 27, 2004, p. 1.]

Colonizing Britain

According to the British Home Office, Britain granted permanent settlement to a record 139,675 people from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) in 2003, 20 percent more than in 2002. (The EEA consists of the nations of the European Union, plus Leichtenstein, Norway, and Iceland.) Those settling in Britain cannot vote or receive full state benefits, but they become eligible for citizenship after five years. The number of non-Europeans granted permanent settlement has more than doubled from 60,000 in 1997. Africans accounted for 32 percent of this year’s total (44,565); immigrants from the Indian sub-continent, for 21 percent (29,995); and other Asians for 18 percent (24,890). Compared to 1999, Africans were up by 65 percent.

More than 300,000 students came to the UK in 2003, 24,500 from Africa, 24,725 from the Indian sub-continent, and 112,380 from the rest of Asia. Britain deported 64,390 people in 2003, almost twice as many as in 1999. This included immigrants refused entry, and those removed from the interior.

Sir Andrew Green, who chairs the restrictionist British think-tank Migration Watch, noted that although Britain rejects six of ten asylum seekers, it manages to expel only one in ten. He also noted Britain issues 1.5 million visas every year, but has no procedure to make sure visitors leave. The British are getting upset about immigration. In the mid-1990s only five to ten percent mentioned immigration as a concern, but a recent poll found that now 56 percent do, making immigration the top concern. [Home Office (London), Control of Immigration: Statistics United Kingdom, 2003, August 24, 2004, Sir Andrew Green, “Let Everyone In” is a Dangerous Policy, The Times (London), Aug. 28, 2004.]

Censorship Watch

On February 19, three mothers of children in a preschool run by Rhode Island College (RIC) had an angry argument about welfare and race. One of the women condemned interracial relationships and said non-whites have more rights than whites. This offended one of the mothers (races of all the mothers are unspecified, but it is not hard to guess), who ignored attempts to apologize, and left in a rage. On February 27, the offended party asked Prof. Lisa B. Church, coordinator of the preschool, to bring the incident up at a meeting. Prof. Church refused, saying she didn’t think the school should be involved in disputes between private individuals. The offended party then insisted Prof. Church take disciplinary action against the outspoken mother. When Prof. Church again refused, the aggrieved mother accused her of discrimination.

On April 30, Prof. Church learned that the offended party had complained to the university, charging her with discrimination, intimidation, and violating the college’s equal opportunity policy. This policy says the college “recognizes a higher order responsibility to create, promote and ensure a positive climate where individuals may learn, teach and work, free from discrimination.” Prof. Church pointed out she could hardly punish the outspoken mother for exercising her right to free speech, but as the school’s director of affirmative action explained, “[O]n the college campus, certain types of remarks will not be tolerated, no matter what the intent.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is representing Prof. Church. It points out that “a formal disciplinary proceeding has a tremendous chilling effect on free speech.” [FIRE Press Release, Rhode Island College to Try Professor for Refusing to Punish Protected Speech, Aug. 24, 2004.]

On April 9, David Williams, a columnist for The Daily Barometer, the student newspaper at Oregon State University, wrote a column called “A Message From a White Male to the African American Community” in which he criticized blacks for supporting black public figures who have behaved badly. He cited R. Kelly, who received musical awards and an NAACP image award despite accusations he made child pornography. Mr. Williams softened his column by conceding that there were “thousands and thousands of successful and upstanding black role models” and admitting that many would question his judgment because he had not experienced “racism,” as blacks had.

Nevertheless, the column provoked angry letters to the editor and a full-fledged rally three days later. “For me it wasn’t as much anger,” said one black. “It was disappointment that someone would have those feelings. That someone would be so ignorant.” One protester held a sign reading, “How far will the Barometer go?”

The newspaper fired Mr. Williams and published an editorial that said: “We apologize to everyone for printing the column. While the opinions expressed in columns are not representative of the staff members of the Barometer, we have a policy never to print material that is discriminatory, racist or sexist.” [David Williams, A Message From a White Male to the African American Community, The Daily Barometer (Corvalis, Ore.), April 9, 2004. Dan Traylor, Barometer Column Focus of Campus Protest, The Daily Barometer, April 13, 2004. Taking the First Step in Apologizing, The Daily Barometer, April 13, 2004.]

The Enemy Within

While most of the civilized world expressed shock and outrage at the September 3 massacre of hundreds of people (including more than 150 children) by Muslim Chechen rebels at a school in Beslan, Russia, Muslims were largely silent — or worse.

Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, leader of the British-based sect al-Muhajiroun, says Western mistreatment of Muslims justifies terrorism. “If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq,” he explained. “As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay.” Killing women and children deliberately is forbidden, he adds, blaming the deaths on Russian forces.

Mr. Mohammed, a Syrian native, was deported from Saudi Arabia and made his way to Britain in 1985. While the government reviews his status, it has granted him a five-year stay in Britain. [Rajeev Syal, Cleric Supports Targeting Children, Telegraph (London), Sept. 4, 2004.]

Sad Story

Mainstream reporting on illegal immigration often descends to the maudlin, pitting lovable illegals against heartless immigration bureaucrats. The more heart-breaking the story, the better. Case in point: the Castillo family, formerly of Clarion, Iowa.

In 1995, Mr. Castillo lost his job in Mexico. He smuggled his family — wife Patricia and children Santiago, Veronica, and Alejandra — across the border, where they caught a bus to Clarion, home of Patricia’s sister. Mr. Castillo found work (illegally) at a factory while his wife worked (also illegally) for Electronic Data Systems. The family bought a house, were active in community events, and enrolled their children (at taxpayer expense) in local schools. The law caught up with the Castillos, and they were ordered deported.

The AP reported their preparations for the trip south: “ ‘It is sad. The kids just don’t want to go,’ Patricia Castillo said by telephone as she began to cry. ‘I tell them I would give my life if it is possible, and my husband will do everything he can to try to bring you back again . . . Their friends were with them, hanging around for hours and the whole time they were crying and crying and praying and praying. It’s so emotional.’”

“Santiago, the Clarion-Goldfield junior varsity quarterback, fought back anger and frustration over the legal system that gave his family no other choices. ‘I don’t want to run around like every other family, hide and not be able to do anything,’ he said. ‘That’s not the life that I want and it’s not the life my sisters want.’”

The Castillos are presented as model citizens whom the community is so sorry to see go that it raised money to challenge the court order. “Berta Alberts, an interpreter and family friend who has helped the Castillos since they first arrived in Iowa, said the people of Clarion don’t want to give up. ‘The citizens of this community are trying to do everything that is possible. This is a wonderful family. Everybody’s confused, asking what we can do.’”

Once they are back in Mexico, they might apply for a student visa for Santiago so he can go back to the school where he played football. However, he is such a family-oriented boy, “he’s not sure he would return if it meant leaving his parents and sisters.” [David Pitt, Mexican Family Gives Up Deportation Fight, AP, Sept. 1, 2004.]

Homeward Bound

Black Migration by State

Millions of blacks fled the South to northern industrial cities during the “great migration” of the first two thirds of the 20th century, but the trend is now the other way. Between 1975 and 2000, more than 600,000 blacks moved south, while the rest of the country saw a decrease in the number of blacks. California, for example, once a prime destination for blacks, lost more during the late 1990s (65,000) than any other state except New York (165,000). The new migration is led by college-educated blacks, who are flocking to cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Memphis, and to all southern states except Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Demographers say the reasons are better job prospects for blacks in the “New South,” an improved racial climate, and strong cultural and family ties. [Go South, Young Man, The Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2004, p. 48.]

Overreaction

Austin, Texas-based Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., once a part of Motorola, hoped to make a big splash with its inaugural advertising campaign, placing ads in national magazines like Time and Business Week. The ads received a lot of attention, but not the kind the chip maker wanted. The ads, intended to introduce the company to the public, showed a lion hiding under a light-colored sheet with holes cut out for eyes, ears and nose.

The image, which reminded sensitive readers of Klan regalia, “was interpreted differently than we planned,” explains spokesman Scott Stevens. Mr. Stevens says the company pulled the ad, has fired the ad agency, apologizes for insensitivity, ordered diversity training for employees, and formed a diversity panel to review all future advertising. [Jane Larson, Freescale Pulls National Ad Due to Insensitivity, Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Aug. 27, 2004.]

Adopting Blacks

In August, a Texas missionary visiting Nigeria discovered seven black American children, also from Texas, ranging in age from eight to 16-years-old, diseased, malnourished and living in a local orphanage. He recognize them as Americans from their accent. It appears that their adoptive mother, Mercury Liggins, who is black, took them to Africa and dumped them. The State Department has since sent the children back to Texas, where Houston’s Child Protective Services (CPS) is looking after them.

Miss Liggins adopted the four girls in 1996, and the three boys in 2001. CPS began getting complaints about her treatment of the children as early as 1997 — one staffer at a Boys & Girls Club said “the kids were always just telling us they were hungry” — but authorities could find no evidence of abuse. The agency got its last complaint in September 2003, a month before Miss Liggins took the children to Nigeria, where a friend lived. Since their return, the children have told investigators Miss Liggins beat them with switches and a cane, and said that if they told CPS about the beatings she would take them to Africa.

Miss Liggins enrolled the children in a Nigerian school and then went back to the US last December. She continued to bank $3,500 a month from the state ($500 for each child), but payments stopped for only the girls last March, after she told CPS they were going to live with her mother. She claims she sent the friend in Nigeria between $1,500 and $2,000 a month to support the children, but Nigerian child welfare workers found them in a wooden shack and sent them to the orphanage. Authorities are still investigating Miss Liggins and have yet to file charges. [Adoptees Found in Africa Level New Charges, AP, Aug. 19, 2004. 7 Kids Found in Nigeria to Stay in State Custody, AP, Aug. 26, 2004.]

Authorities may not have investigated the Liggins case very carefully because it is so hard to get blacks to adopt the many black children who are available. Adoption agencies are looking for white adoptive families outside the United States, and are keen on Canada. The Open Door Adoption Agency in Augusta, Georgia, has sent black children to 150 white Canadian families since the 1990s and Adoption-Link, Inc., of Chicago has sent 70.

Canadians, says Open Door’s Walter Gilbert, “live in a multicultural society for the most part, and these children blend right in and are wonderfully well accepted.” “The one difference,” explains Margaret Fleming of Adoption-Link, “is that there is not the degree of racism against black people as in the United States. Darker-skinned people are often viewed as unusual or exotic. But they don’t have the same history of slavery and racism we have.”

Many blacks think black children should have black parents, and don’t want whites to adopt them. [Sheila M. Poole, Canadians Adopting Black U.S. Children, Cox News Service, Aug. 28, 2004.]

Black Logic

A black sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, is working with the US Department of Energy to promote the silly idea that the Human Genome Project proves there is no such thing as race. They are sponsoring seminars across the country to get the word out, particularly to non-whites.

The audience at a seminar last year in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, can be forgiven if the discussion left it confused. On the one hand, University of Alabama assistant professor of biology Guy Caldwell explained that the project proved there really is no scientific basis for race. “Our concept of race is a social construct that doesn’t exist in DNA,” he said. “Our DNA says that we are 99.9 percent the same. And as far as DNA is concerned, we’re all one race. When we understand that basic thing, it does away with the stigmatisms (sic).” The professor then went on to say the Human Genome Project would help scientists discover the “racial link” to disease, which would force drug companies to spend a lot of money developing medicines for particular groups. He said some drug companies were otherwise not likely to develop race-specific drugs because there wouldn’t be much profit in them. [Tiffany Lacey, ‘We’re All One Race,’ Says Genome Project Speaker, Tuscaloosa News, Feb. 23, 2004, p. 1B.]

Indian Cuisine

We reprint the following item from the Hindustan Times verbatim and in toto:

A woman was hacked to death allegedly by her husband to propitiate the Goddess Kali to ‘cure’ their son who was said to be under the influence of a ghost in the Rajpur region of Dehra Dun.

Bharat Lal was offering prayers at the Kali temple along with his wife Kamla Devi when he hacked her to death with a sharp-edged weapon last evening as the couple’s three children watched, police said.

Lal also cut off his wife’s tongue and ate it before setting her body on fire.

The gory incident took place in the presence of the couple’s three children. Lal has been arrested and a case of murder has been registered against him.

During interrogation Lal admitted killing his wife.

[Man Sacrifices Wife, Eats Her Tongue, HindustanTimes.com, July 10, 2004.]

A Liberal Opens One Eye

Someone once said the purpose of a college education is to give people the proper attitude towards blacks and the means to live as far away from them as possible. What happens to a person who has the proper attitude but not the means?

Michele Kirsch, a liberal New Yorker living in London, found herself with a low income and a growing family. She moved with her husband and children into a “council estate,” the British equivalent of public housing. Nearly everyone was black, and Miss Kirsch was excited about living in a place where “black guys went with white girls and had beautiful children. It was Benetton on the dole, and I thought it was great.”

Her attitude began to change when her upstairs neighbor, a black woman, began throwing trash into her garden. The woman called her a “white bitch” for telling her and her sons to stop throwing trash. The woman had a boyfriend who would urinate in her garden, holding his organ in one hand while he ate fried chicken with the other. She was so disgusted by this she wrote about it for a British newspaper. A black friend said this was “racist.”

“What was interesting,” Miss Kirsch writes, “was that I hadn’t said he was black. Though he was. It didn’t seem important. It was the stench of his urine, not the color of his skin that upset me . . . I started to ask myself some uncomfortable questions, which reached a frenzied liberal height when my then 4½-year-old daughter announced, after another incident with the . . . woman upstairs, that she didn’t like black people. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shrieked: ‘You don’t mean that! Don’t say that!’” Miss Kirsch made sure to feed her daughter positive images of blacks — she even gave her a black doll.

Later, from her living-room window, she saw one drug-addled black kill another drug-addled black. Miss Kirsch and her family then moved to another housing project, but found the same problems. “It started to get ugly, a couple of years in, when one kid started to call my daughter names, all prefaced by ‘white,’ so it was white witch, white poison, ugly white face. I wanted to kill this kid, who was all of six or seven, but I had learnt my lesson from the last estate. Head down, don’t complain about the kids, don’t make eye contact with the parents.” Her children soon stopped playing outdoors, and once her daughter had to be escorted home by a local shopkeeper because blacks bullied her on the way to the store and she was too scared to leave. A pit bull that roamed the project menaced her and her family as did a gang of young blacks. As soon as they could afford it, Miss Kirsch and her family moved to a white part of London.

“. . . I felt relieved. All of us did . . . My nervous children were replaced by relaxed, happy and confident ones. My daughter started going to the shop on her own again. My husband loved to walk down the road after work and see loads of people coming home from work as well, something he didn’t see so much in the estate.” In other words, escaping from blacks made Miss Kirsch and her family, in her words, “obnoxiously happy.” [Michele Kirsch, How My Multicultural Dream Went Sour, The Times (London), Aug. 5, 2004, p. 4.]

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Letters from readers
LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Thank you for the excellent article by Stephen Webster about the visa lottery program. I try to keep up on immigration matters, but had forgotten all about the lottery. That our country should choose its inhabitants this way is, of course, disgraceful, but it fits perfectly with the liberal view. Liberals often describe mass immigration as a tribute to American society — immigrants want to come because our country is so wonderful. They then get confused, and say that accepting this tribute is one of the reasons we are wonderful. I wonder if it doesn’t give liberals a little thrill to think America is so great that the right to live here is like the jackpot in a lottery.

Of course, non-whites come in such large numbers because they have failed to build countries that work and, if we let them, they will keep coming until America is as miserable as the countries they leave behind. I suppose it should not be surprising that liberals fail to understand this, since there are so many other things they fail to understand.

Paul Anderson, Hoboken, N. J.

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SirI was surfing the Internet, and landed on your site. I live in Belgium. Thanks for the kind words you have said about the “Vlaams Blok.” It is the only party that openly talks about the great taboo, which is Muslim immigration. Over the last few years, the government has again legalized thousands of Muslims, creating much unhappiness and increasing crime. I live in a nice area of Brussels, but I can’t even put my nose out the door without the risk of being attacked by a young “Arabic” gang. The stupid politicians keep saying we must understand them. Europe always had high unemployment and poverty, and yet they imported the misery of the Third World. Muslims are now threatening our Christian values. We even had a leftist politician who said, “it’s about time we forget that we belong to a Christian society.”

You have no right to freedom of speech in Belgium. Whatever you say, they immediately charge you with “calling for racial hatred.” Nearly all of the judges are leftists of some sort — Socialist, Marxist, Trotskyite — and they demand severe punishment for anyone they suspect of “hate.”

You Americans seem to be the most normal people, but it must be difficult for you living in a system with just two political parties. Why don’t you create an ANF, an “American National Front?” With Jared Taylor as the president of the party, I’m sure you would have many people on your side.

Alex Cools, Brussels, Belgium

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Sir — Anthony Young is correct to say in his September letter that my claim in August that Ronald Reagan advocated a lower minimum wage for blacks is hard to believe. It is nevertheless true. I quote below from the Carter-Reagan debate on October 28, 1980. Governor Reagan is responding to a question from moderator Howard K. Smith:

Now, the President spoke a moment ago about that I was against the minimum wage. I wish he could have been with me when I sat with a group of teenagers who were black, and who were telling me about their unemployment problems, and that it was the minimum wage that had done away with the jobs that they once could get. And indeed, every time it has increased you will find there is an increase in minority unemployment among young people. And therefore, I have been in favor of a separate minimum for them.

Reagan didn’t say “lower;” he said “separate” but clearly he meant lower.

Jud Jackson, Downers Grove, Ill.

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Sir — I respectfully take issue with the letter writer from Sacramento who suggests in the September issue that there is racial harmony in Hawaii. If a white man wanders away from the well-trodden tourist traps, he will soon find he is not only unwelcome but risks assault or worse. There are even signs on some roads that predict dire consequences for whites. The authorities do not remove the signs, nor do they attempt to round up the posters.

George Bolton, Carlsbad, Calif.

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Sir — The AmRen.com website now seems milktoast weak and ineffectual compared to the way it looked three or four years ago. It strikes one like some unmanaged wire service list of marginally interesting material. The (former) black crime archive section needs to reappear and feature prominently, as it was one of the very best resources of its kind for our people. Thanks, and best wishes.

Name Withheld

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Sir — I was pleased to see your account of how whites turned the tables on an “immigration reform panel” that open-borders companies put on at a Denver high school. It is very important for activists to attend public events and make straightforward remarks and ask sharp questions. To begin with, their point of view is often reported in the press, and it is always good for the public to hear common sense on this subject. At the same time, it is a tonic for potential sympathizers in the audience. They may be inspired to speak out some day. Finally, it puts the opposition on the defensive, and it is good for the public to watch them squirm. Immigration-control groups are springing up all over the country, and the more action they initiate the better.

Jane Frederick, Ann Arbor, Mich.

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