March 1993

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 4, No. 3 March 1993

 

CONTENTS

The Golden State Goes Brown, Part II
Liberty and Justice for All
Good Reasons, Bad Reasons, or No Reason at All
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Golden State Goes Brown, Part II

California’s whites are retreating before the rising non-white tide.

california-flag

by Marian Evans

The first part of this story described how California’s population has grown (a ten-fold increase from 1920 to 1990) and how it has changed (77 percent white in 1970 and projected to be 48 percent white in the year 2000.) The rise in crime, welfare, disease, and school failure that has accompanied this change is bankrupting the state. Nor has the new racial mix been harmonious.

As California loses its white majority, it is also losing any sense of ethnic or cultural coherence. This will be the state’s most devastating loss. Last May’s riots were a good indication of what could become more common in the future. The ostensible reason for three days of arson and rapine — the Rodney King beating — was presumably a black grievance, but more Hispanics than blacks were arrested for looting. The reason was that there are more Hispanics in South-Central Los Angeles than blacks. When the police disappeared, underclass Hispanics, who have only resentment and contempt for the nation that feeds them, were happy to join in the pillaging — on whatever pretext.

Recently a white policeman spoke about the black and Hispanic crowd that gathered around a badly-injured officer as paramedics tried frantically to save his life. “When he expired at the scene,” says the policeman, “the entire crowd cheered, clapped, whistled, when they put the blanket over his head . . . You see the parents doing it and the kids watching and it makes you sick.”

The riots were not, however, an alliance of “people of color” against the white oppressor. The hatred they share for whites is hardly enough to unify blacks and Hispanics. Though the press is squeamish about reporting it, the blacks in South-Central deeply resent the influx of Hispanics. AR has already reported on one of the irresolvable questions that face growing numbers of minorities: What happens to affirmative action benefits when there are no more whites left whose interests can be sacrificed?

At a more personal level, blacks in South-Central Los Angeles just don’t like Hispanics. In the Jordan Downs housing project, which used to be all-black but is now 20 percent Hispanic, blacks have taken to burning the newcomers out of their apartments. Hispanics have made an official request for an all-Hispanic building, separate from the others.

In better-off neighborhoods, blacks are tired of hearing Ranchera music at all hours of the night, of stumbling over chickens and goats on the sidewalks, and of being forced out of the parks by raucous soccer players. As the president of a black home-owners’ association explains:

It’s a different culture, a different breed of people. They don’t have the same values. You can’t get together with them. It’s like mixing oil and water.

Perhaps the long-forgotten whites who moved out of South-Central Los Angeles when blacks moved in used the same metaphor. Oil and water, indeed.

So where does this leave the poor bloody white man? It has begun to dawn on him that if public schools spend their time teaching Hmong and Guatemalans how to speak English there may never be time for algebra or Shakespeare. It has begun to dawn on him that as the number of tax money receivers overtakes the number of tax payers, he can look forward to having his very own, probably brown-skinned dependent to take care of. It has begun to dawn on him that the newcomers show few signs of becoming American and that they resent him because he is American. It has begun to dawn on him that as more than 600 black, Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Chinese gang members gun each other down every year, he might be caught in the cross-fire. Although there are times when parts of California still feel just like the paradise they used to be, more and more whites can see the future well enough to know that it holds no place for them. The white exodus has begun.

One tell-tale sign is the number of businesses that are moving out of California. A state that spends money on handouts to illegal immigrants but does not pay for roads is not attractive to employers. Utah, New Mexico, and Washington state all do a brisk business in helping companies relocate from California. In an early 1992 survey of 1,400 California companies, 23 percent reported that they were planning on moving some or all of their operations out of the state.

Transfers of drivers’ licenses from one state to another are the best indication of movement between states. People from age 18 to 29 are still coming to California, but people older than that — the ones who pay taxes and who have children to rear — are moving out. In 1992, for the first time in 20 years, more Americans left California than moved there. Their favorite destinations are Nevada, Washington state, and Oregon, which are still mostly white.

In the summer of 1992, the California exodus was more like a scramble. During the peak moving season, companies like Mayflower, Atlas, and Bekins could not balance their outbound trucks with incoming traffic. Bekins was moving three families out of the state for every family it moved in. Ryder and U-Haul were offering rock-bottom rates on trucks headed for California and charging a stiff premium for anyone going the other way. They were even driving empty trucks into the state to meet demand. The riots may have encouraged the outflow, but trucking companies reported that it was only part of a trend.

There is considerable movement of Californians within the state — from the brown south to the white north. Nevada County, in the gold country away from the big cities, is still 94 percent white. People leave their doors unlocked, know who their neighbors are, and send their children to first-rate public schools. In the last 20 years, its population has tripled, as have several other out-of-the-way, largely-white counties. Many refugees to Nevada County know exactly why they have come.

“I’d look at my daughter’s classroom and see two blondes,” says a real estate dealer who moved from San Jose; “It seemed like there was more of everything else but whites.” Whites who would doubtless find “ethnic cleansing” a loathsome horror in the Balkans do not hesitate to practice a form of it themselves.

As one 10-year resident of Nevada County explains, “People come here . . . to go someplace where racial problems don’t exist. They’re looking for safety, shared cultural assumptions, a more communal society.” The black home owners in South-Central Los Angeles are no doubt looking for exactly the same things.

Whither America?

For many years, California has pointed the way for America. What appeared first in California was sure to be adopted by the rest of the country. On a smaller scale, though, the demographic changes of California have already been mirrored all across the nation. When neighborhoods lose their white majorities schools decay, crime increases, taxes rise, welfare proliferates, and what was once an outpost of civilization subsides into barbarism. There are virtually no exceptions to this iron law of racial erosion, yet America remains officially blind to what all can see, treating every dying city and every decomposing neighborhood as an incomprehensible exception to the dogma of racial equality. As the tide of color rises, ordinary whites quietly retreat before it, becoming refugees in their own land.

Clearly, a nation that has permitted aliens to displace natives, and that grants citizenship and public benefits as carelessly as the United States does, has lost a vital part of the will to survive. The transformation of California — or at least important parts of it — from a land that beckoned to a land that repels was a tragic betrayal of a people’s trust. Those few public officials who may see clearly what lies ahead are paralyzed by the knowledge that any attempt to protect the racial or cultural integrity of California will be denounced as “racist.” And thus are the race and the culture supplanted.

Perhaps the most interesting question is whether those who are leaving southern California have really learned anything. What will happen when the tide of color rises toward Nevada County, Washington state, and Oregon as it inevitably will? Will the white refugee again move on? Where will he go? How many times must the white man watch his community melt away beneath his feet before he stands and fights? Only for so long can whites let themselves be paralyzed by charges of “racism” before they find themselves dispossessed completely.

As Hegel wrote, “What history teaches is this — that people and governments have never learnt anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” A people that has failed to learn the lessons of Miami, of Detroit, of Newark, and of Los Angeles, may yet fail to learn the lesson of California.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

ARTICLE

Liberty and Justice for All

In more and more court cases, race matters more than the facts.

by William Robertson Boggs

As it inevitably must in a multi-racial society, race is distorting our criminal justice system. In trials both famous and obscure, racial passions are becoming more important than the evidence.

The second trial of the four Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King has begun. It is difficult to view it as anything other than a political show trial. Most people who have seen the 29 days worth of evidence that was presented to the jury during the first trial believe that the acquittals were justified. Even a writer for Legal Times, a cautious professional legal journal, concluded after a lengthy analysis that he would probably have voted just as the Simi Valley jurors did.

The very legality of the second trial is doubtful, inasmuch as the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution forbids multiple trials for the same offense. The legal fiction is that the federal crime for which these men are now being tried — deprivation of Mr. King’s civil rights — is different from the state crimes for which they were originally tried. Of course, this alleged crime consists of precisely the same actions that brought the original assault charges. The second trial appears to be little more than an attempt to placate blacks and to nourish the self-righteousness of whites who have dismissed the previous jurors as racists.

Can the officers get a fair trial? Every juror will know that the last time these men were found innocent, Los Angeles erupted in riot and arson. There will be tremendous pressure on jurors to find the officers guilty. Also, since the absence of blacks on the last jury has been so roundly criticized, there will certainly be blacks on this one.

On the other hand, civil rights charges are more difficult to prove than charges of criminal conduct. The prosecution must show that the officers had a “specific intent” to deprive Mr. King of constitutional rights, which implies some kind of planning and coordination. There is little reason to believe that the four officers planned or coordinated anything.

The requirements of the law, enormous social pressures, the weight of the evidence, and whatever racial feelings the jurors bring to their deliberations will all combine in a volatile way that is unlikely to result in even-handed justice.

Unknown Soldiers

At the very least, this trial will receive a great deal of attention, whereas the outcomes of some racially charged cases are virtually unknown to the public. Last December a jury returned a verdict in a case that received no media attention at all but that suggests how the justice system in an increasingly non-white America is likely to treat white defendants.

In June 1990, a white man named Kevin Strom took part in a small, peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C. to protest the official visit to America by Nelson Mandela. After the demonstration, Mr. Strom and the other participants returned to their cars and prepared to leave.

Two white plain-clothes detectives approached and started asking, in a belligerent tone, who the demonstrators were and where they were from. When a detective turned on Mr. Strom and asked who he was, Mr. Strom replied that he did not want to answer any questions. The detective then attacked Mr. Strom, perhaps because he mistook Mr. Strom’s camera for a weapon. He threw Mr. Strom to the ground, kicked him, put him in what Mr. Strom describes as a choke hold, and arrested him for assaulting an officer.

Mr. Strom is of slight build, and is much smaller than the detective. He had not acted aggressively in any way and has testified that he put up no resistance. Still, he was cuffed hand and foot and thrown face down into a D.C. paddy wagon. He was held overnight in a prison in which most of the other inmates were black. According to Mr. Strom, the detective tried to stir up hostility towards Mr. Strom by talking loudly about his membership in the KKK and his plans to assassinate Mr. Mandela. This was pure invention, but several black inmates later threatened to kill Mr. Strom.

The next morning, Mr. Strom was released but was scheduled to be tried for assaulting an officer. While preparing for the defense, his lawyers learned that an undercover police cameraman had videotaped part of the incident. The tape showed a violent, apparently unprovoked attack on Mr. Strom, and the prosecutor promptly dropped the charge of assault. In turn, Mr. Strom brought suit against the detective for assault and for violation of civil rights.

Last December, an all-black jury completely exonerated the detective and decided against Mr. Strom. What probably swayed the jury was the judge’s decision to permit cross examination of Mr. Strom about his membership in a white rights group called the National Alliance, and about his beliefs about race. This had nothing to do with whether the police acted unlawfully, but once Mr. Strom’s political views were established, the jury apparently decided to ignore the video tape.

Mr. Strom’s lawyers have petitioned for a new trial on the grounds that Mr. Strom’s political opinions were irrelevant to the case. Unfortunately, there is no legal remedy for something else: that a white activist simply may not be able to get justice from non-white jurors.

In the past, when it appeared that blacks could not get fair treatment from white jurors there was a great commotion, and federal laws were passed to circumvent state courts. It is these federal laws that are now being used to justify the second trials of the officers who beat Mr. King. Needless to say, there has been no public interest in Mr. Strom’s case.

CAUSE, a group of lawyers who often represent white activists, is trying to raise money for an appeal in this case. Its address is Box 1235, Black Mountain, NC 28711.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

Good Reasons, Bad Reasons, or No Reason at All

A remarkable book that explains why all anti-discrimination laws should be repealed.

Forbidden Grounds, Richard Epstein, Harvard University Press, 1992, 530 pp., $39.95.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Forbidden Grounds, by Richard Epstein, is exhaustively researched, clearly written, persuasively argued, published by a prestige press, and likely to have virtually no influence. Such is the fate of books, no matter how brilliant, that arrive at unacceptable conclusions, and Prof. Epstein’s conclusions are unacceptable: All anti-discrimination laws should be repealed. Beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 right up to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, Prof. Epstein makes a virtually air-tight case for the view that they are all unnecessary and do enormous damage.

Forbidden Grounds by Richard Epstein

The book’s case against anti-discrimination principles is both theoretical and practical. The theoretical attack starts from the position that freedom of private contract is the linch pin of capitalism. People should be free to do business as they see fit, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. Capitalism outperforms socialism because it assumes that individuals understand their own interests better than governments ever can.

Government need only ensure that contracts are enforced and that they are not arrived at through coercion or fraud. It should have no interest in the contents of private contracts as long as they are voluntary. As Prof. Epstein puts it, “If consent can be observed, benefit can be inferred.” People enter into agreements because there is something in them for both sides and government should not second guess its citizens.

Anti-discrimination laws, whether they forbid discrimination by race or sex or age or handicap, make a crime out of something that in no society has ever before been a crime — the refusal to do business. It becomes a crime not to do something, that is, not to hire a woman or serve lunch to a black. The refusal to do business is thereby treated like active wrong-doing, just as if it were theft or assault.

Profit is Indiscriminate

Some people might well accept Prof. Epstein’s theoretical position and yet object that in the absence of government regulation discrimination would be rampant. It is in rebutting this view that Prof. Epstein is at his most original and instructive.

Once again, he is both theoretical and practical. The theory is straightforward: If some employers refuse to hire capable blacks, then blacks should be willing to work for less than the prevailing wage. Other employers will discover this and profit by hiring inexpensive black labor. This will give these companies a competitive edge and put other companies under pressure to hire blacks too. The price of black labor will then be bid up to something very close if not equal to that of whites. This process may not be perfect and may not work equally well in all fields, but Prof. Epstein’s view is that in unfettered markets competence will almost always matter more than race.

This argument does not depend on the assumption that the black work force is just as qualified as the white work force. It assumes only that there are some blacks who are more capable than some whites, which is obviously true. A rational employer will hire these blacks, as long as his desire for profits is greater than his dislike for blacks.

As a practical matter, Prof. Epstein shows that desire for profits is almost always greater than dislike of just about anyone, and that this has always been so. Given the choice, employers hire whomever they think will do the best job for the least money. Thus, in the Jim Crow South, blacks had to be kept out of the professions by law because that was the only way to keep them out. White workmen could not count on white employers to maintain an all-white work force if capable blacks were willing to work for less than the prevailing wage.

The same was true even during slavery. In 1857, whites petitioned the Atlanta City Council to forbid free blacks from seeking certain types of work. Whites railed against “negro mechanics” who could “underbid the regular resident mechanics” and poach work. The “negro mechanics” could do this only because whites were happy to hire them.

Separate But Equal

The 1898 case of Plessy v. Ferguson is famous for having ratified the legal concept of “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites. Most people do not realize that when Homer Plessy sued a Louisiana railroad for making him ride in a blacks-only car, the railroad probably hoped Mr. Plessy would win. It was a Louisiana state law — not the desires of the railroad — that required separate cars for blacks. The railroad would have preferred to cut costs by carrying all passengers in the same cars.

Closer to our own time, South African apartheid laws forced discrimination on employers who would have preferred not to discriminate. The law forbade employment of blacks in professions “reserved” for whites, but companies routinely broke those laws and were fined for doing so. They hired blacks because it was profitable, not because they opposed apartheid.

In the pre-Civil Rights South, there were ways to keep the races apart even when Jim Crow laws did not apply. Why, for example, did no one make a fortune by serving blacks who were not welcome in white establishments? Plenty of people wanted to but selective law enforcement prevented them. When employers or hotel-keepers tried to integrate their businesses, neighbors would smash windows or threaten violence. Since the police believed in segregation too, they looked the other way. Segregation had no economic cost for the police and for the neighbors, so it was easy for them to force it on businessmen for whom integration could have been profitable.

Needless to say, a willingness to do business with blacks does not require any particular liking for them. Southerners who would have horse-whipped their daughters rather than let them marry blacks were happy to hire blacks or sell them lunch. People still make distinctions of that kind. Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, has gotten into trouble for referring to some of her highly-paid players as “million-dollar niggers.” Mrs. Schott may very well dislike blacks, but that does not stop her from paying them a great deal of money if she thinks they can play baseball.

The profit motive thus has a marvelous power to sweep away even strongly held feelings. Prof. Epstein would argue that if it could make whites break the law under apartheid or commit “racial treachery” under Jim Crow, it can surely be counted on to provide blacks with jobs today.

Remarkably, Prof. Epstein goes further still. He believes that whatever employment discrimination remained in a completely free market would probably be a good thing. Companies run more smoothly when their employees have similar tastes and the employees are happier too. As Prof. Epstein writes, “If thousands of prospective employers are offering different associational mixes, then the probability that any employee will find the ideal work setting is far greater . . .”

There is no reason why black nationalists, white separatists, nudists, fruit-juice drinkers, and Unitarians cannot work among people like themselves. As Prof. Epstein correctly points out, the current craze for “diversity” is actually a totalitarian imposition of the same mix of people on every possible setting.

A return to free association would also end the pointless controversy over affirmative action. Employers or universities could discriminate in favor of or against whomever they liked.

Prof. Epstein proposes only two exceptions to the rule that people should be able to hire, fire, promote, or do business with anyone they choose. Monopoly businesses and governments, neither of which are subject to competition, might need supervision. If the state taxes everyone it should not arbitrarily refuse to hire certain people, and the only electric company in town should not be able to turn away paying customers.

It is a delight to find so much good sense between the covers of a single volume. Unfortunately, Congress and the courts are well past listening to good sense, much less acting on it. “Discrimination” can now be detected when there is not even the slightest intent to discriminate and the doctrine of “disparate impact” (see “Tales of Gothic Horror,” AR, May 1992) means that no employer is safe from prosecution unless his work force has the same ethnic mix as the surrounding population. Today’s enforcement bureaucracy acts as if employers spend most of their waking hours scheming how to avoid hiring even the most competent blacks.

New Worlds to Conquer

Though Prof. Epstein devotes much of his book to explaining how antiracism has run amok, he is just as illuminating on the campaigns to stamp out “discrimination” against women, old people, and the handicapped. Nearly every year the anti-discrimination bureaucracy unearths more age-old business practices that are discovered to be immoral and must be forbidden.

To some extent, traditionalists have only themselves to blame. It was the opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 who included sex in addition to race as a forbidden ground for discrimination. They thought the idea of banning sex discrimination was so preposterous that by adding it to the bill they could sink the whole thing. They were wrong.

Today, an employer has virtually no legal grounds to exclude women from any kind of job. The only permissible reason is what is called a “bona fide occupational qualification,” and courts have interpreted these very narrowly. A prison, for example, may refuse to hire women to conduct body searches of male prisoners.

The mere fact that it may cost more to employ women is not a good enough reason not to hire them. In many traditionally male jobs like construction or fire-fighting, women are usually less capable than men and their injury rates are much higher. An employer may actually lose money on every woman he hires but hire them he must.

Sometimes the law cuts both ways. Day care centers usually have female employees because women are good at looking after children and enjoy doing it. Now, if a “qualified” man shows up looking for work, a day care center may not turn him away — even if new rest rooms have to be built for him and even if the rest of the staff do not want to work with men.

One well known result of anti-discrimination law is that men and women must now pay the same rates for life insurance and receive the same monthly pension payments. Women live longer than men, and actuaries have always worked this into their calculations. Now, if men and women are to have the same pension payments, men must subsidize women because women live longer and collect more payments.

Disabling Employers

Questions of cost are no more a defense against being forced to hire the handicapped than they are against being forced to hire women (or men). The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 makes companies hire people for whom they must make all kinds of expensive accommodations. As Prof. Epstein points out, this is not only a hidden transfer payment to the handicapped but a particularly inefficient one. It might be cheaper simply to give handicapped people tax money or to put special facilities into just a few companies that could then hire many handicapped people. But no, cost is no object once, as Prof. Epstein puts it, Congress has embraced “the fatal separation of the right to order changes from the duty to pay for them.”

According to the new law, AIDS is a handicap. This means that an employer cannot refuse to offer health insurance to someone who is sure to run up high medical bills. A single AIDS patient can bankrupt a small company’s insurance plan and end coverage for everyone.

Tremendous mischief is also being done in the name of ridding America of discrimination against the elderly. Most people have never thought about the costs of eliminating such things as mandatory retirement age but Prof. Epstein describes them in grim detail. For example, if a company must show cause every time it puts an employee out to pasture, it must collect information on the creeping incompetence of its workers — a clear invitation to intrigue and deception. Also, if no company may have a mandatory retirement age, employers will use every possible subterfuge to avoid hiring older workers since they might have no means of sending them away.

Since the fight against “prejudice” can be milked for so much self-righteousness and media approval, Congress passes anti-discrimination laws with much fanfare and little thought. Any law based on the assumption that the market is riddled with terrible mistakes in judgment that only Congress can detect and correct is bound to be folly. The failure of central planning might have taught us this lesson, but no. And once the legislature has made a botch of things the Supreme Court then has the opportunity to make them worse.

Our country would probably never have flung itself so recklessly into anti=discrimination on all fronts had the hysteria over “racism” not been so great. It was probably inevitable that the reforming frenzy that seized our highest government institutions would spread. Forbidden Grounds is an exhaustive and sobering account of how far the rot has gone.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Punished for Free Speech

Marge Schott, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team has been fined $25,000 and suspended from the sport for one year. After a two-month investigation, baseball’s ruling executive council decided that Mrs. Schott had brought “disrepute and embarrassment” upon the game because of her disrespectful remarks about blacks, Jews, and Japanese. Apparently, she has often referred to blacks as “niggers,” to Japanese as “Japs,” and has spoken of “Jew bastards” and “dirty Jews.” Of course, none of these things is a crime and ours is a nation in which free speech is thought to be guaranteed by the Constitution. Mrs. Schott could probably have been arraigned for murder without the baseball authorities concluding that she had brought “disrepute and embarrassment” upon the game.

Predictably, blacks have complained that the punishment is not severe enough. As Hank Aaron, a former player who is now a senior vice president for the Atlanta Braves put it, “She won this one. I am very much disappointed.” Mrs. Schott’s banishment from the game can end in eight months rather than one year if she completes a multicultural training program acceptable to the baseball council. [Baseball bans Reds’ Schott for one year, Louisville C-J, Feb. 4, 1993, p. A1.]

Song and Dance

A new Pepsi commercial has been designed for the singer, Michael Jackson. Mr. Jackson was to be shown performing the song I’ll Be There, but with shots interspersed of him singing the same song when he was a child performer with “The Jackson Five.” The idea was scrapped because the juxtaposition of Mr. Jackson then and now drew too much attention to his extensive plastic surgery and skin bleaching.

The commercial’s producers then decided to find someone else to play the young Mr. Jackson and after several months of auditions chose a light-skinned black child. Mr. Jackson was still not satisfied. He chose a white boy to play the part. [The Boy in the Mirror?, Houston Chronicle, p. 2A probably January 1993.]

Will Michael Jackson Buy Them?

Multiskins International of Stamford (CT) has started selling bandages in various shades of brown. As the company’s president, Mitchell Eisenberg, explains, “We saw a void in the marketplace. It made no sense that people with darker skin had to wear a bandage of someone else’s skin color.” [Leon Wynter, “Business and Race,” WSJ, late 1992, no date or page.]

Racism Spreads AIDS

The National Commission on AIDS has just released a report in which it concludes that racial discrimination contributes to the fact that AIDS is now a disproportionately non-white disease. Noting that in 1990 and 1991, the numbers of AIDS cases increased by more than 10 percent among blacks and Hispanics but dropped by 0.5 percent among whites, the Commission decided that racism must somehow be the cause. The 12-man group, which included one black and one Hispanic, warned that traditional public health initiatives were inadequate for non-whites because they have a legitimate distrust of government.

Blacks are now 3.6 times more likely than whites to have AIDS, and Hispanics are 2.7 times more likely to have the disease. The Commission is worried that once it appears that whites have learned how to avoid AIDS, the nation will lose interest in finding a cure for it. [Warren Leary, Commission says racism contributes to AIDS spread, NYT Jan. 16, 1993.]

Tolerance Reigns

For 77 years, the Kappa Alpha fraternity at Auburn University in Alabama has had an Old South parade, in which members of the fraternity dressed in Confederate uniforms and escorted ladies in ante-bellum dresses. The parade has naturally come under attack as “racist,” and last year it had to be rerouted to avoid gangs of hostile protesters. This year, under great pressure from activist student groups, the fraternity decided to end the tradition.

Carmella Davis, former president of the Auburn Black Student Union, unbosomed a particularly edifying comment on learning that the parade had been killed. “Maybe they’ve realized the need for tolerance and diversity,” she said.

The Little Rock he Leaves Behind

Little Rock (AR), the town that Mr. Clinton left behind on his way to Washington, has a population of only 177,000 but real big-city problems. In the past two years, Little Rock’s murder rate has soared, and its inhabitants have as good a chance of being killed as people living in New York or Los Angeles. A 20-block area that is poor, black, and full of drugs and weapons, is at the center of the crime wave. It has become known for “walk-by shootings,” which are drug-related killings by criminals too young to get a driver’s license. [no ref.]

Jackson (MS) has also seen a rash of newfangled crimes directed, for some reason, against a store called Super D Discount Drugs. People had been smashing the plate glass windows and making off with merchandise, so the store installed plexiglass. After the thieves started prying off the plexiglass with crowbars, store officials put steel bars over the windows. Thieves then crashed automobiles through the windows. Now there are steel posts embedded in the concrete in front of the windows, and weary merchants are wondering what will happen next. [Toni Lepeska, Crash and dash break-ins, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, no date or page.]

Barriers to Crime

Other cities are trying different methods to prevent crime. One that is gaining popularity is to block off city streets so that residential neighborhoods are accessible only at certain points. Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami have all set up barriers that make it hard for robbers to drive into an area, commit crimes, and zoom off. In South-Central Los Angeles, after barricades were set up to turn some neighborhoods into labyrinths of dead-ends, drive-by killings were down by 40 percent and all crime had decreased by 12 percent. [Isabel Wilkerson, Chicago Plans Barriers to hinder street crime, NYT 1/23/93.]

In Houston (TX), Mayor Bob Lanier is likely to allow citizens to block off streets and even to set up neighborhood security posts. The guards would not have the right to stop anyone, but they would take down the license numbers of suspicious-looking cars and call police if there were trouble. Most of the Houston neighborhoods asking for security posts are white, so there has been the usual huffing and puffing about “racism.” Judson Robinson, a black city council member, says that guards at the entrances of white neighborhoods are a bad idea and that they would not be “good press for the city.” [John Williams, Lanier pushes plan to let residents block streets to deter crime, Houston Chronicle, 1/20/93, p. 1A.]

On the contrary, they might make the city more appealing. Even so, that American cities should be turning themselves into labyrinths in an attempt to stop crime is an illuminating commentary on our times.

Fear of Blacks Found Legitimate

The American legal system never fails to astonish. Six years ago, a white Miami woman named Ruth Jandrucko was mugged by a black man while delivering a package for her employer, an Atlanta company called Fuqua Industries. She claims that the attack has left her with a paralyzing fear of black men. She has since sued Fuqua because the company refuses to give her a working environment that is free of blacks. Last December, a Florida compensation claims judge ruled that Miss Jandrucko suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is therefore entitled to $500,000 as compensation for having to work with blacks. The NAACP has joined Fuqua Industries in appealing the decision. [Edward Felsenthal & Arthur Hayes, Race Phobia Case Settled, WSJ, 12/23/92.]

The Persistence of Delusion

Hartford (CT) is locked in a battle that can have no satisfactory outcome because it ignores biology. In the city’s public schools, 90 percent of the students are non-white and half are on welfare. Their test scores are about what one would expect. A suit has been brought to force a merger with suburban schools, where the students are 80 to 90 percent white.

Significantly, Hartford’s schools are not claiming that money is the problem. Spending per student in Hartford is more than in some of the white suburbs and the average teacher’s salary, at $44,525, is more than $3,000 higher than the state average. The problem, which the merger plan recognizes in an oblique way, is that once the Hartford student population reached a critical mass of blacks and Puerto Ricans meaningful learning came to an end. As a bilingual education teacher explains, years after students have left her first-grade class, they have learned neither Spanish nor English and “cannot complete a single sentence in one language.” Presumably, if these children sit next to white children their problems will be solved.

Not so long ago, the city’s schools were white and prosperous. In just the last ten years, however, Hartford’s Hispanic population has grown by 59 percent and Puerto Rican children, at 49 percent, now outnumber all other groups. The differences in achievement between Hartford and the non-white suburbs are dramatic. Farmington spends $750 less per student every year in its 90 percent-white schools, but 93.4 percent of students are at or above grade level in reading as opposed to 39.3 percent in Hartford. More than 90 percent of Farmington students take the SAT and get combined scores, on average, that are about 300 points higher than the 57 percent of Hartford students who take the test. [George Judson, Data Portray School System in Crisis, NYT, 1/2/93, p. 23. George Judson, “Battle with poverty in Hartford Schools,” NYT, 12/26/92, p. 26.]

A recent New York Times (Jan. 18, 1993) article endorsed the amalgamation of Hartford and suburban schools in these words:

City children would attend suburban schools, suburban children would attend city ones, and the towering political, psychological and racial barriers dividing city from suburb would come tumbling down. [George Judson, “Vision of tumbling racial barriers is part of suit,” NYT, 1/18/93, p. B5.]

The city of Dallas is struggling with the same intractable facts of biology. It has been forcibly integrating its schools for years, but as whites fled to the suburbs the city stumbled upon a metaphysical problem: How do you integrate a school district that is now 85 percent non-white? School officials claim that they can do nothing about housing segregation and that they have done all they can both to integrate the schools and to improve the scores of black and Hispanic students.

Special Learning Centers have been set up in heavily non-white areas, with before- and after-school programs, specially chosen staff, longer school days, and twice the money to spend per pupil than in other schools. Test scores refuse to improve, and even the most ardent proponents of forced integration are beginning to concede that the achievement gap cannot forever be blamed on past segregation. Dallas may be nearing the point where it finally gives up on integration. [Joseph Garcia, DISD effort to integrate analyzed, Dallas Morning News, 1/21/93, p. 1A]

No Balm in Gilead

The Los Angeles Black-Korean Alliance was formed six years ago to bridge differences between blacks and Koreans. Late last year, it decided the job was impossible and disbanded.

Third World Press Going Strong

Publishers Weekly, the premier magazine of the publishing industry, devoted the cover of its Dec. 7, 1992 issue to congratulating a black-owned publisher called Third World Press. As PW noted, Third World can now boast of “twenty-five years of progressive Black publishing.”

Several Third World books are shown on the cover. We cannot claim to have read any, but the titles tell us all we wish to know. One is The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D., which appears to be prophecy as well as history. The cover drawing shows a mounted European man-at-arms swinging a sword at a black man armed with shield and assegai.

Another book is somewhat enigmatically called Chosen People from the Caucusus, but the subtitle is clearer: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deception and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization.Another book, called Why L.A. Happened, claims to be “Implications of the ‘92 Los Angeles Rebellion.” No doubt the word “rebellion” was deliberately chosen instead of “riots.”

Inside PW, Third World Press assures us that it is moving into its second quarter century “with a renewed commitment to Black literature as a weapon for liberation and development.”

No Official English

Puerto Rico has a sense of national identity that appears to be stronger than that of the United States. When Puerto Rican legislators introduced a bill to make English, along with Spanish, an official language of the island, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people poured into the streets in protest. Puerto Ricans are not happy about “Americanization” of their island and see official English as a threat to Puerto Rican nationality. No bilingual education or bilingual ballots for them.

Will There Always Be An England?

Now that South Africa has taken irrevocable steps towards black rule, it has been readmitted to the world of international sports. Last year, England and South Africa resumed their rugby rivalry with a game in Twickenham. The national anthems of the two teams are played at such international games, but Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress sent word that the South African anthem, Die Stem must not be played. It contains no words that could remotely be considered racial, but the ANC said the anthem was symbolic of apartheid. The English Rugby Football Union agreed to obey.

The Union considered playing no national anthems at all, but began to wonder if English fans might be miffed not to hear “God Save The Queen.” It then asked the South African Rugby Union and the ANC for permission to play the British national anthem. The ANC graciously said yes, so the British were allowed to play “The Queen” while the South Africans were made to do without Die Stem. [Insulting Our Guests, Spearhead, p. 3, Jan. 1993.]

FBI Plays the Numbers Game

In January, the FBI released its national report on hate crimes. There are more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, but only 2,771 participated in the hate crimes study. Of those 2,771 agencies, 73 percent reported no hate crimes at all. Not a single hate crime was found in the entire states of Kentucky, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Indiana; Tennessee and Mississippi had only one each. New York state had the most, at 943, and New Jersey was second with 895.

All this is good reason to think that the FBI report may be meaningless. There is no uniformity across the country on how hate crimes are defined, only a minority of law enforcement agencies participated, and the state-to-state variation in numbers is implausible. Nevertheless, the FBI says that of the 4,755 hate crimes reported in the country during 1991, anti-black crime, at 1,689 cases was the most common, followed by anti-white (888 cases) and anti-Jewish (792). The FBI also found 421 anti-homosexual, three anti-heterosexual, and four anti-atheist hate crimes.

Virtually every news account of the report clucked over the large number of anti-black crimes and said nothing more. However, the FBI also included data on the race of the perpetrators of hate crimes. Though the agency breaks out anti-Hispanic crimes as a separate category, it inexcusably lumps Hispanics in with whites in the perpetrator category. “Whites,” so defined, therefore committed 65 percent of all hate crimes in which the race of the perpetrator was known, while blacks committed 30 percent. Since whites are 75 percent of the population and blacks are 12 percent, even if all those “whites” were really white, it would mean that blacks were 2.87 times more likely than whites to commit hate crimes. Needless to say, we know of no other publication that thought to analyze the data in this way.

Pre-Columbian Cuisine

Those who lament Columbus’ discovery of America can get a taste of what life was like under the Aztecs at a Mexico City restaurant called Don Chon. “Our most popular plates by far are insects,” says the proprietor, who bills his restaurant as “the cathedral of pre-Hispanic food.” The most sought after dishes are chapulines tostaditos (toasted crickets), guasanos de maguey (maguey plant worms) and escamoles a la mantequilla (sauteed ant eggs).

Diners who do not fancy insects, can try rata de campo (field rat). “We cut their little legs, the and the tail,” says the proprietor; “It ends up looking like a rabbit dish.” [Andres Oppenheimer, Insect dishes popular at Mexico City eatery,” Miami Herald, 12/26/92, p. 1A.]

AIDS Carrier Goes to Jail

Twenty-eight-year-old Alberto Gonzalez has been sent to prison for 9 and a half years for having unprotected sex with women despite the fact that he knew he had AIDS. Two of the man’s former sex partners have tested positive for the AIDS virus and one has died of the disease.

Because Mr. Gonzalez is Hispanic, he insists that his conviction was a “racial vendetta.” His defense lawyer, Karolyn March thinks so, too. She described the prosecution as having a “lynch mob mentality.” [HIV carrier sent to prison for having unprotected sex, Louisville C-J, 1/1/93, p. A4.]

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •


LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Mr. and Mrs. Mabrito (letters, Jan. 1993) are right and Bailey W. Norfleet (letters, Feb. 1993) is wrong. We whites must have more children. Writing in his book, Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe, Dr. Roger Pearson says this about Sir Francis Galton:

Quite correctly, as events have demonstrated, the call for a reduction in the rate of procreation has only been heard and responded to by those same, intellectually superior and morally responsible individuals who, Galton argued, should be producing more, not less, children . . . Malthusian propaganda for birth control in fact works to reinforce the dysgenic forces which dominate society.

Mr. and Mrs. Mabrito are wisely looking ahead and are having many children. I hope other highly intelligent couples are doing the same.

Arminius, Athens, Ga.

Sir — In his perceptive essay, “Racial Differences — Why They Matter,”, Mr. Boggs writes, “. . . there is evidence that the average North Asian is more intelligent than the average Caucasian.”

However, Roger Pearson, in his book Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe, points out that the term “white” is sometimes stretched to include individuals of mixed race and that “this methodological laxity may well contribute to the overlap of scores between racial groups under study.” He adds that “while Japanese have experienced little admixture with the descendants of tropical races, statistics of the IQ of American and British white populations are now muddled by the inclusion of many who are not of pure white descent, and this makes comparison between IQ scores of Japanese and Chinese, for example, with contemporary ‘whites’ somewhat misleading so far as true racial comparisons are concerned.”

While I would not scream “Racism!” if North Asians were shown to be on average more intelligent than white Caucasians like myself, I do think Dr. Pearson’s point ought to be taken into consideration before reaching any definite conclusions.

S.E. Parker, London, England

Sir — As a “statistics freak” I found Paved With Good Intentions extremely good reading and valuable. However, relying on Justice Department statistics on cross-racial crimes can be misleading. In victimization figures, Hispanics (Mexicans, etc.) are broken out separately, but the same breakdown is not provided for perpetrators.

This means that when a Hispanic gang member in Los Angeles shoots a black, it is recorded as a white-on-black crime. Also, when a Hispanic victimizes an “Anglo” it is recorded as a white-on-white crime. In both cases, the “white” crime rate is artificially inflated.

Edward Kerling, Michigan City, Ind.

The FBI report discussed on p.10 of this issue practices the same sleight of hand.  —  Ed

Sir — We studied your February 1993 issue at our caucus meeting last night, and we were startled to notice that you slapped Americans of European origin with the term “anglo” on page one, and that you more or less validated the negative term, “white non-Hispanic” on page three.

If we accept a name imposed on us by Latinos like “anglo” or if we accept a name in the process of being imposed on us by Asians like “Caucasian,” then we have marginalized ourselves.

Stanley Womack, Resisting Defamation Caucus, 2530 Berryessa Road #616, San Jose, Cal. 95132

On page one, Miss Evans wrote, “. . . . ‘Anglo,’ to use the currently fashionable term that reflects the Hispanic perspective.” Surely, she made her distaste clear enough. “White non-Hispanic” was a direct quotation from an application form.  —  Ed.

Sir — In your January issue (O Tempora, O Mores!) you mention Sir Cyril Burt and Prof. J. Philippe Rushton. In fact, the British Psychological Society has withdrawn its finding of Burt’s being guilty [of faking data about IQ scores], even if it did so in a backhanded way. Further, the Society has agreed to hold a major symposium this year as a kind of re-hearing of the Burt affair.

Nor is it strictly true, as you say, that Prof. Rushton “in the past had to wage his intellectual battles [about race and IQ] virtually unaided.” By 1990 some 45 or more academicians had written his university in his behalf, including such luminaries as Edward O. Wilson, Daniel R. Vining, John C. Loehlin, Lloyd Humphries, Thomas J. Bouchard, and Daniel J. Freedman. Probably for every one willing to write, another 50 cowered in silent sympathy.

Name Withheld, Manhattan, Kan.

Sir — I was pleased to see your gratifyingly full account of the misbehavior while in Japan of members of the Texas Southern University marching band. Neither the New York Post nor the New York Times saw fit to mention that all the band members were black. The Times even gave the opposite impression by clucking about how “the incident could contribute to the unfavorable image many Japanese hold of Americans”!

Name Withheld, New York, N.Y.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •