November 1995
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol 6, No. 11 | November 1995 |
| CONTENTS |
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The Verdict and its Consequences
The End of Racism?
The “Tainted” Sources of The End of Racism
Those Pesky Facts
Samuel Francis Has Been Fired
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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The Verdict and its Consequences
O.J. Simpson is free and blacks are jubilant. Whites are sadder . . . and wiser.
by Jared Taylor
On the day of the verdict, the AR office received the following message from a main-stream conservative who is not a subscriber: “Today I moved a little further to the right. Tomorrow I will go shopping for a good rifle and a good handgun. Never before have I felt so alienated from blacks or so doubtful of their ability ever to participate as equals in our society.” This man, like so many others, was chilled at the sight of blacks celebrating the acquittal of the man who killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Television captured some of the festivities. At Howard University Law School, black future lawyers staged an impromptu Mardi Gras, howling and whooping like drunks. At Morehouse College in Atlanta, also “historically black,” hundreds of students gathered to watch the verdict on television. At the words “not guilty” the room erupted in cheers that lasted five minutes.
In New York City, five or six teen-aged girls walked onto a subway car, chanting “not guilty, not guilty.” As they got off, one turned to the whites and said, “Now he’s free and will assassinate someone else.” In St. Louis, as many as 30 black high school students celebrated the verdict by beating and kicking a white student and shouting “black power.”
If any of these celebrants had joined the ten blacks, two whites, and one Hispanic on the jury, they would have voted the same way. They would have ignored the evidence and voted to free a man who killed two whites.
If the verdict had gone the other way, there would have been riots. Los Angeles gangs tried to rule out any doubt about this when they covered walls with the message “O.J., you owe us your life.” They claimed that it was fear of their violent reaction that made the jury ignore the evidence and acquit Mr. Simpson.
The Fatal Mistake
Of course the prosecution made mistakes, as everyone keeps pointing out. But the fatal mistake was to let so many blacks on the jury. Prosecutor Marcia Clark and her black assistant, Christopher Darden, were no doubt convinced they were going to vindicate the good name of blacks and the integrity of the jury system when they declined to dismiss blacks. They left ten peremptory challenges unused. One of the jurors they let slip through, the man who gave Mr. Simpson the black power salute after the verdict, was a former black panther.
Miss Clark is not likely to make that mistake again. “[A] majority black jury won’t convict in a case like this,” she now says; “They won’t bring justice.” For Mr. Darden, there is no consolation. He is a decent man, who knew Mr. Simpson was guilty, and who believed that black jurors could be fair jurors. He has been called every possible variant of “Uncle Tom,” and received so many death threats he hired body guards. At a post-verdict press conference, he left the podium in mid-sentence and doubled over, sobbing.
This is hardly the first time blacks have shown that race solidarity, even “pay-back,” is so paramount in their minds that evidence and justice are distant concerns.
Many AR readers confidently predicted precisely the outcome that shocked the millions of whites who believe what the media tell them to believe. Fortunately, that number has now grown appreciably smaller.
One reader reports that on his New England college campus whites were staggered by the news. Since this was an (ex-) wife-killing, women have been especially shocked to see a murderer go free. White women, God bless their gentle hearts, are ordinarily the last to understand the significance of race. They are awakening to it as never before.
Heretofore, it was only prosecutors who knew that blacks often refuse to convict other blacks. It was only racial dissidents who knew that for most blacks race comes first. For the rest of white America, no better education could have been arranged than the trial of Orenthal James Simpson. No legal case has ever had such publicity. Never have so many people — thanks to television — had as good a look at the evidence as the jury itself.
The verdict and its aftermath show what so many whites refuse to understand: that blacks and whites can look at the same thing but see something completely different, that whites and blacks live in different worlds, separated by an unbridgeable chasm. The verdict and the celebrations were a nakedly anti-white message that even the most dewy-eyed could not fail to understand.
Mr. Simpson faces wrongful-death civil suits brought by the families of the two victims. The parents of Ronald Goldman have vowed not to settle. They say they will force Mr. Simpson to testify and we hope they will. Another well-publicized trial — this time in Santa Monica, where jurors are likely to be white — will only remind the country of the racial lesson it is so reluctant to learn.
Although the generic media are filled with pious editorials about how “the legal system failed,” and whether “reforms” are needed, it is no longer just a handful of whites who now understand what the verdict really means: that multi-racialism has failed.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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The End of Racism?
An attack on racism that is really a defense.
The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, Dinesh D’Souza, Free Press, 736 pp.
reviewed by Thomas Jackson
In the preface to The End of Racism, Dinesh D’Souza writes that he wrote the book to “enable the crusade against racism to recover the moral high ground it has lost.” This is a curious claim for someone who then attacks virtually every assumption that underlies current racial orthodoxy. In the end, Mr. D’Souza does the obligatory double back flip and affirms the dogmas he has discredited, but the book is so consistently inegalitarian it could be the basis for a segregationist manifesto.
Mr. D’Souza’s central thesis is one of those obvious truths that throw liberals into a frenzy: that “racism” cannot possibly account for all the woes of blacks. Mr. D’Souza devotes many workman-like pages to this proposition and to a swarm of corollaries: That compensatory programs based on combating “racism” will fail; that if white “racism” disappeared overnight little would change; that black “race merchants” need underclass degeneracy because it keeps whites feeling guilty; that affirmative action and “civil rights” are largely shake-downs; that it is rational for whites to fear and avoid blacks; and that even white liberals are beginning to give up on integration and equality. These things are worth saying and not said often enough, but this is well-plowed ground.
Dat Ol’ Debil
Rather more interesting are Mr. D’Souza’s arguments designed to show that whites, far from being the cancer of the planet, have been quite decent chaps. His account of slavery makes this point very clearly. He notes that virtually all peoples have practiced slavery, and that what makes whites unique is that they voluntarily abolished it. In the 19th century, when France and Britain outlawed the practice in their territories, African chiefs who had grown fat on the slave trade sent protest delegations to Paris and London. As Mr. D’Souza explains, Africans never developed a principled opposition to slavery; they denounced it when they were slaves but practiced it happily when they could. Slavery can still be found in Africa.
Nor was slavery in the United States quite the starkly one-sided business it is usually said to be. Blacks owned black slaves from as early as the 1640s, and some authorities credit a black man with first establishing perpetual servitude in the colonies. By 1830, some 3,500 free blacks in the South owned approximately 10,000 slaves. Most owned only a few, and some bought their spouses out of slavery and thus were technically their owners, but some blacks ran large plantations with dozens of slaves. They branded their property, advertised for runaways, and broke up families. William Ellison, a black South Carolina planter, was known to keep the worst fed, worst clothed slaves in the area. Black planters welcomed secession and supported the Confederacy.
As Mr. D’Souza points out, whites did not reserve slavery only for blacks. They first tried it out on Indians, but Indians could not be made to do farm work, and many escaped. Also, it was awkward to take slaves from nearby tribes that might send out rescue and revenge parties.
Of course, American Indians enslaved each other long before Columbus, and once blacks were made available to them, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles all become enthusiastic slave owners. Cherokees were good trackers and hired themselves out as slave-catchers, but had a reputation for killing slaves when they caught them.
Slavery is usually portrayed as constant torment, but Mr. D’Souza finds that “slaves were, in material terms of diet, health, and shelter, slightly better off than northern industrial workers, and far better off than workers in much of Europe.” As he points out, “no free workers enjoyed a comparable social security system from birth until death.” Moreover, life expectancy for slaves was only slightly lower than that of their owners. When slave owners had really dangerous work to do, they hired Irish navvies rather than risk their valuable property. Mr. D’Souza notes that when Frederick Douglass visited Ireland in the 1840s he was appalled at conditions there and wrote that he was almost “ashamed to lift my voice against American slavery.” Mr. D’Souza concludes: “In summary, the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”
That Southern slave owners devised elaborate biological and theological justifications for slavery was, in Mr. D’Souza’s view, a sign of the high moral character of whites. As he points out, in no other society did slavery require moral justification, because its legitimacy was never challenged.
He notes that slavery was much more brutal in Latin America, since the continuing slave trade ensured a steady supply of men to be worked to death. Slaves were kept in large, all-black gangs rather than taken into families as they often were in the United States. African voodoo and witchcraft were thus able to persist into the present day.
As for today’s blacks, Mr. D’Souza suggests that rather than nurse endless grudges they should be glad their ancestors were sold to whites who introduced them to the culture of the West. He quotes the black poetess from the 1930s, Zora Neal Hurston: “Slavery is the price I paid for civilization . . .” On balance, says Mr. D’Souza, whites owe blacks nothing on account of slavery.
Having downgraded black America’s favorite grievance to a distant irritant for which it might reasonably feel grateful, Mr. D’Souza takes aim at current black thinking. He has nothing but scorn for the rapidity with which blacks abandoned color-blindness as soon as color-consciousness began to work in their favor.
Thurgood Marshall was one of the worst hypocrites. As a lawyer, he made a career of echoing Justice John Harlan’s famous dissent in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson: “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” By 1986, when Justice Marshall was, himself, interpreting the Constitution and was in a position to enforce special favors for blacks, his view had changed: “We must remember . . . that the principle that the Constitution is color-blind appeared only in the opinion of the lone dissenter.”
Whites naively think they can make a strong case for race neutrality by appealing to Martin Luther King’s plea that a man be judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. Jesse Jackson now calls that sort of talk “intellectual terrorism” and Eleanor Holmes Norton says “Stop quoting dead saints.” As Mr. D’Souza points out, blacks invoke King’s moral aura but ignore his principles. “It is no exaggeration,” he writes, “to say that a rejection of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision . . . is a virtual job qualification for leadership in the civil rights movement today.”
Liberal whites have likewise convinced themselves that race-neutrality is wrong. In 1993, the New York Times took the position that “the struggle to achieve a healthy race-consciousness in our politics has been an ennobling part of our system.” Liberals have provided essential support for the campaign to lower standards, ban free speech, pervert justice, and demonize whites in the name of racial progress.
Racism
One of Mr. D’Souza’s most interesting defenses of the white man is his inquiry into what is usually thought to be his greatest crime of all: Racism. He starts with a definition, asserting that “racism is an ideology of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the biological characteristics of race.”
Unfortunately, this means that Arthur Jensen and Linda Gottfredson are racists but Eldridge Cleaver and Colin Ferguson are not. Unless Mr. Cleaver raped white women in the name of black superiority, he was merely being “ethnocentric,” as was Mr. Ferguson when he started killing white people on the Long Island Rail Road.
Blacks cannot be authentic “racists” unless, like the Muslims, they believe whites are inferior freak creations, or, like melanin theorists, they think whites are “albino mutants.” This definition is so strained that occasionally even Mr. D’souza slips up, calling the wilder blacks “racists” without noting the subtleties of their thinking.
What is the purpose of this definition? There are two, one useful one not. Mr. D’Souza’s account of the origins of biologically-based racism permits him to show how foolish are the liberals to argue that racism grows out of ignorance. The standard view is that since the races are equal, only whites who have not met and mixed with blacks are likely to be racists. On the contrary, scientific racism arose in the 18th century because whites did encounter nonwhites — and were astonished by their barbarity.
The meager attainments of pre-contact black Africans are well known. Mr. D’Souza tells us that according to contemporary accounts, Australian aborigines were even more primitive. They had “no property, no money . . . no farming, no houses, clothes, pottery, or metal . . . They had no idea of stock raising. They saved nothing, lived entirely in the present.” The most common Tasmanian medical treatment was “slashing the patient with deep cuts until the victim was covered with blood.”
Racism, says Mr. D’Souza, “was devoted to investigating the intuition that these two phenomena — barbarism and racial difference — were closely related.”
It therefore “began as part of a rational project to understand human differences,” and was “a bold intellectual enterprise to dispel ignorance.” “Far from being ignorant and fearful,” writes Mr. D’Souza, “the early European racists were the most learned and adventurous men of the age . . .” He notes that the subtitle to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was “The Survival of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” and that Darwin predicted blacks and indigenous Australians would be exterminated by superior races.
Mr. D’Souza reminds us that all sorts of famous, well-regarded people, from Hume and Berkeley to presidents of the United States were “racists.” The founder of Planned Parenthood and hero of the women’s movement, Margaret Sanger, was the worst of the lot. She said blacks were “human weeds” and established a “Negro Project” to promote sterilization, but wrote to a colleague in 1939: “We don’t want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”
Mr. D’Souza might, at this point, have been able to escape the Eumenides if he had obediently written that modern science has now proven Darwin, Hume, Sanger, and all the other racists wrong. But no. “Racism is [today] what it always was:” he writes, “an opinion that recognizes real civilizational differences and attributes them to biology.” Integration is today’s version of the voyages of discovery: “One of the risks of increased exposure to blacks is that it has also placed whites in a position to discover which of their preconceived views about blacks are true.” He then slips his leash completely and writes: “Increasingly it appears that it is liberal antiracism that is based on ignorance and fear; ignorance of the true nature of racism, and fear that the racist point of view better explains the world than its liberal counterparts.”
In the first few pages of the book, Mr. D’Souza assures us that biology does not explain racial differences in achievement and that he feels an “obligation to distinguish my principled positions from the ground occupied by bigots, and to attack racism no matter what its source.” Nevertheless, his defense of the environmental explanation for racial differences comes hundreds of pages after his admiring account of the European invention of “racism” and not until he has taken the reader on a tour of black neighborhoods where “the streets are irrigated with alcohol, urine, and blood.” His attempt to discredit the Jensen-Shockley-Herrnstein position is then so feeble, one wonders if his heart is really in it. Irate reviewers are on to something when they complain that this book is a defense of racism.
Mr. D’Souza’s second reason for defining racism as something that originated in the 18th century is that he can claim that “it remains profoundly consoling to know that racism had a beginning, because then it becomes possible to envision its end.” Racism, as Mr. D’Souza defines it, came about as close to ending as it ever will from about 1965 to 1985. Since then, it has staged a remarkable comeback. Mr. D’Souza himself concedes that most specialists now take the biological bases for IQ differences for granted. Even Robert Plomin and Leon Kamin, who once promoted the environmental view, have recanted, and Steven Jay Gould has shifted from dogmatic opposition to agnosticism. In any case, since Mr. D’Souza concedes that ethnocentrism is universal, eternal, and is sufficient grounds for genocide, what difference would the disappearance of his narrowly-defined “racism” make anyway?
Cultural Relativism
If biology is not the problem for blacks, and racism is not holding them back, something else must have gone badly wrong for them. The problem, we learn, is cultural relativism. Readers therefore get a good tour of the Franz Boas school of anthropology, with its dogma that all races, cultures, and civilizations are precisely, mathematically equal. We meet Boas’ disciples, mooncalves like Margaret Mead and her lesbian lover Ruth Benedict; Melville Herskovits, Kenneth Clark, and Gunnar Myrdal.
As Mr. D’Souza explains, cultural relativism was ideally crafted to discredit scientific racism. The Boas view was that there really were no soaring differences in civilizational achievement after all (if anything, primitive societies were superior to our own), so there was nothing for racism to explain. Adolf Hitler and the Second World War were probably the best possible gifts to this view, since racial nationalism became firmly associated with war and carnage. Soon, anyone who talked about superior and inferior cultures was the barbarian, and anyone who discussed race and IQ was an assistant führer.
This is all quite interesting, but Mr. D’Souza makes it the basis for a weak argument: a defective “culture” — and a relativist unwillingness to criticize it — account for black failure. If it explains what is going on in the ghetto, black culture must be a vicious thing indeed, and Mr. D’Souza spits on his hands and goes to work on it: “black culture also has a vicious, self-defeating, and repellent underside that it is no longer possible to ignore or euphemise.”
He writes of the disappearance of marriage and the resulting “bastardization of black America,” of “racial paranoia — a reflexive tendency to blame racism for every failure,” and that “much of the black community is parasitic on government for its basic livelihood.” Even many middle-class blacks are so consumed with anti-white rage, their minds barely stay on their hinges. Blacks are furious at the successes of other groups: “Whites and Asians . . . are hated for the human qualities that enable them to earn what they have. Black racism is a worldview built on frustration and jealousy.”
He cites the usual statistics of black failure and deviance but often he just lets underclass blacks paint their own portrait:
We put him in the car and went over to a field and put a rope over the thing you hook a trailer on with. We tied him on it and drag him in the field. He got skinned up all bad, tore his scalp half off. Got all dirt and gravel and stuff stuck in the blood. Then we put him back in the car and drove him over to where one of the homies had two pit bulls in the back yard, and we threw him in there with them. Man, they chewed him up — big ole chunks of meat comin’ off his arms and legs, blood pourin’ out, and him just screaming and cryin’ for us to take him on outta there. After we let him out the yard we made him kneel down and say stuff like: I’ll suck your dicks.
Whether or not this really happened, we believe it could have happened. “For many whites,” Mr. D’Souza concludes, “the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization.” Indeed.
How did this awful black culture arise, and what can be done about it? According to Mr. D’Souza, cultural relativism prevented whites (and blacks) from criticizing even the worst horrors of black behavior. Now that relativism and liberalism are on the wane, and we are free to say that degeneracy is not culturally neutral after all, blacks can begin the mighty work of “cultural reconstruction.” They can now patch up their culture, reject Afro-centrism, and “act white.” In a flourish of heroic implausibility, Mr. D’Souza’s final words are that if they manage this, “it will be blacks themselves who will finally discredit racism, solve the American dilemma, and become the truest and noblest exemplars of Western civilization.”
What if they don’t? What if blacks continue — as everything in The End of Racism suggests they will — to act black rather than white?
Mr. D’Souza never says. However, in “the emerging café au lait society” that he tells us intermarriage is bringing, most of us will be part black anyway.
Does Mr. D’Souza really think blacks will ever be the “noblest exemplars of Western civilization”? His book reads like “secret writing,” the technique Leo Strauss describes in Persecution and the Art of Writing, by which an author asserts conventional conclusions but makes strong arguments for heresy. Maybe Mr. D’Souza really does believe in “culture,” environment, and integration, but his book is a splendid gift to those who do not.
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The ‘Tainted’ Sources of The End of Racism
A contemptible streak of dishonesty runs through this book.
by Jared Taylor
In writing the book that he did, Dinesh D’Souza took a considerable risk. His facts and arguments are the kind that always prompt cries of “racism,” and a reputation as a racist is difficult to live down. The uproar that has greeted this book has surely confirmed Mr. D’Souza’s worst fears. In addition to the expected torrent of printed abuse, two reasonably sensible black “conservatives,” Glenn Loury and Robert Woodson, have severed ties with the American Enterprise Institute where Mr. D’Souza is a fellow. Time magazine was so furious about the book that it urged a boycott.
Mr. D’Souza knew he was likely to be treated as a moral inferior; how, then, to deflect liberal wrath? The traditional strategy of the pusillanimous right is to point the finger at people further to the right and say, “No, no, I’m not a bigot; those are the real bigots. I’m merely a bold thinker.” This is what Mr. D’Souza has done, and his primary targets have been me and American Renaissance. It is not my practice to write about myself or recount the fortunes of AR, but this regrettable incident requires an exception.
The tenth chapter of Mr. D’Souza’s book is called “Bigotry in Black and White.” The first five pages are an account of the 1994 AR conference in Atlanta, which Mr. D’Souza attended. Mr. D’Souza had been aware of AR since at least February 1994, when he became a subscriber and ordered every back issue. His subscription, renewed this year, is entirely up to date.
In making AR and the conference appear to be a swamp of wickedness, Mr. D’Souza faced a serious problem: all but a few pages of his book are entirely compatible with AR. How does one make a bogeyman out of someone with whom one largely agrees? Shamelessly misrepresent what he says. This Mr. D’Souza did. His distorted account of the conference begins just two sentences after he writes that “students should learn ways to seek to distinguish truth from falsehood, beauty from vulgarity, right from wrong.”
Fortunately, a copy of the galleys of The End of Racism fell into my hands before the book was distributed. I was amazed to find, among other misrepresentations, deliberate misquotations from American Renaissance. In an attempt to show just how vile a publication it is, Mr. D’Souza combed through his back issues and selected ten passages with which to shock the reader. Amazingly, he managed to transcribe only three accurately, and he deliberately changed several to make them sound especially provocative. Here is one example: “There are no mantras to numb the brain like: All men are created equal.”
The sentence I actually wrote was: “There are no racialist or even conservative mantras to numb the brain like ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘We are a nation of immigrants,’ or ‘Diversity is our strength.’” This is not so much an attack on the idea of equality — though it is also that — as an attack on the mantra-like thinking of liberals. Since one of the mantras is from the Declaration of Independence, Mr. D’Souza appeared to feel justified in going on to write that AR stands for “rejection of the principles of the American founding.”
Authors with any hope of credibility do not falsify someone’s written text and pass it off as a direct quotation. This trick is too hard to conceal and too obviously dishonest. Yet Mr. D’Souza did this several times (see sidebar). At least the words he selectively chose to print were, for the most part, words I had used. This was not the case in his account of my speech at the AR conference.
Mr. D’Souza wrote in the book’s galleys that I had said immigrants were “malodorous and unsanitary.” Because the speech was recorded it is easy to show that I said nothing of the kind. He wrote that I called Asians “people utterly unlike ourselves,” whereas I did not talk about Asians at all.
Mr. D’Souza’s worst offense was his account of a conversation he had with me during the conference: “Taylor described himself as a lapsed Protestant who has become a kind of Nietzschean. ‘I believe in tribalism, in shared historical memory, and in an assertion of power.’” I did say I was reared in a Protestant Christian family, but the rest is about as close to pure fiction as journalism ever gets.
About the conference in general, Mr. D’Souza expressed the views that it:
— “will suggest to many that the Klan is making a comeback in the 1990s.”
— conveys “the new spirit of white bigotry.”
— promoted an ideology “formulated explicitly on the model of black power.”
— was “organized by activists seeking to articulate a politics of white power.”
He also noted that “there were no confederate battle insignia or swastikas in sight,” implying that there somehow should have been. Needless to say, he did not mention that of the ten speakers, four held doctorate degrees, two were nationally-syndicated columnists, one was a Jesuit priest, and four — including an orthodox rabbi — were Jews.
Just in case the reader still wasn’t convinced that the conference was a nest of vipers, Mr. D’Souza wrote: “Here were people who were by all appearances urbane and educated, yet they did not flinch from terms like ‘chink’ or ‘nigger.’” I never heard anyone speak that way at the conference, nor did any of the half-dozen people I have since asked about it. I think this is just another invention.
Mr. D’Souza’s mind must have slipped into a special gear when he wrote about us. In 556 pages of text, he mentions the names of hundreds of people, many of whom he has met in person. The only people whom he describes physically (always unflatteringly) are speakers at the conference — and only in connection with the conference. For example, there is a serious treatment of Prof. Michael Levin’s justifications for rational discrimination, and in a footnote Mr. D’Souza expresses gratitude to Prof. Levin for having sent him an unpublished book manuscript. But as soon as Prof. Levin shows up at the AR conference, he becomes “a bespectacled academic with a nasal voice.” Likewise, I am “a gaunt Southern man.” Also, although Mr. D’Souza goes to some trouble to define terms like “racism” and “ethnocentrism,” he calls the conference participants “bigots,” a term he does not define and uses in almost no other context.
Book Burning
I wrote to Mr. D’Souza’s editor at the Free Press, Adam Bellow, threatening legal action if these falsifications were not corrected. Lawrence Auster and Samuel Francis, who also spoke at the conference, joined me in protesting distortions of their remarks as well. As it happens, by this time, the first run of bound books was already being delivered. Mr. Bellow referred our letters to the company’s lawyers. The result was that changes were hurriedly made to the text and, as far as we can gather, the entire first press run was destroyed. The book in stores now is largely free of deliberate or merely sloppy misquotations. Some have been “corrected” by use of ellipses. That is to say, sentences that are already out of context have been tortured into small fragments. Mr. D’Souza no longer notes the absence of battle flags or swastikas, but he still claims that the people at the conference were “bigots” and used racial slurs.
The final version shows other signs of — dare we say it? — bigotry. In his book, Mr. D’Souza makes many of the same arguments about the follies of race relations that I do in Paved With Good Intentions and he often uses the same examples to support them. In a book that bristles with thousands of footnotes, as his does, it is at the very least odd that my book not be referenced even once.
In fact, there is an amusing indication that this is deliberate. When Mr. D’Souza cites a magazine article his rule is to include the name of the author in the footnote. In a reference to an article I wrote for National Review, the name of the author does not appear. Mr. D’Souza seems to have been so determined to keep my name out of the footnotes that he broke his own bibliographic rules. Since he had decided to offer me up as a prominent bigot, he could hardly give the impression that he might have learned something from me.
Mr. D’Souza’s contemptible tactics did not even work. He has been pelted with absurd charges of racism, and there is no reason to think the accusations would have been any wilder if he had not savaged the AR conference. One newspaper has actually seen through his ruse. Writing in the Oct. 1 issue of the Washington Post, a book reviewer who is black writes that although Mr. D’Souza claims to be unbiased, he has obviously learned a great deal from his “mentors,” Jared Taylor and Michael Levin!
The real pity is that Mr. D’Souza’s dishonesty was completely unnecessary. He has written an impressively researched and bravely argued book. He has shown a firm grasp of many slippery issues. There is no reason why he could not have presented AR and the people who write for it as a reasoned response to the racial madness of our times — a madness he describes more thoroughly and more persuasively than virtually any other writer in America.
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Those Pesky Facts
As a writer during his college days, Dinesh D’Souza reportedly earned the nickname Distort D’Newsa because of his carelessness. Here are examples from his later years.
Misquotation from American Renaissance: “An acceptance of racial inferiority might be good for blacks. The assumption of inferiority makes it easier to accept meager circumstances.”
Actual Text of AR (note “differences” rather than “inferiority” in first sentence): “If anything, an acceptance of racial differences might be good for blacks. The nineteenth century free person of color was certainly not ‘devastated’ by general assumptions about black inferiority. Not even slaves showed signs of the degeneracy that freedom subsequently brought to some of their descendants. Surely, the assumption of inferiority made it easier to accept meager circumstances. Surely, a great deal of today’s black hatred stems from the belief that blacks are being cheated out of success that should by rights be theirs.”
Misquotation from AR: “Nelson Mandela is now president of South Africa. The grisly gods of ‘democracy’ have now been satisfied.”
Actual Text of AR: “Nelson Mandela is now president of South Africa, and all liberals are rejoicing. No matter how much of a mess blacks make of the only properly functioning economy in Africa or how much cruelty they mete out to whites, the grisly gods of ‘democracy’ have now been satisfied.”
Misquotation attributed to me: “The alternative to slavery was Negro pandemonium, which is basically what we have now.”
In fact, I explained to Mr. D’Souza that I do not approve of slavery, and that even many antebellum slave-holders thought that slavery was immoral. However, they were not abolitionists because they feared that large numbers of suddenly-freed slaves would create, in their words, “Negro pandemonium.” I added that their fears may have been justified. By putting the words “Negro pandemonium” in my mouth, Mr. D’Souza tried to make me an advocate of slavery.
Mr. D’Souza also quoted from the speech by Lawrence Auster, author of The Path to National Suicide (Mr. D’Souza managed to get the title wrong): “Intermarriage, he [Mr. Auster] warned, would lead ‘not just to the dilution of white America but to its complete elimination.’”
In fact, Mr. Auster was making the point that a number of main-stream liberals have suggested that the only way to overcome racial conflict and inequality is to get rid of racial distinctions by merging all races into one — that they are proposing the complete elimination of white America.
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Samuel Francis Has Been Fired
The ax has fallen on the best and bravest syndicated columnist in America. Already under a cloud because of his iconoclastic views, Samuel Francis was finally fired from the Washington Times because of a column written by Dinesh D’Souza in the Sept. 24 issue of the Washington Post. Mr. Francis’ syndicated column continues to run in 80 or 90 newspapers but it remains to be seen whether the Washington Times will continue to publish him.
Among the sentiments the Times appears to have found unacceptable was a quotation in Mr. D’Souza’s article from a speech that Mr. Francis delivered at the American Renaissance conference in May, 1994:
The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.
This is not merely a defensible statement; it is overwhelmingly likely to be true. Mr. Francis did not write it in the Washington Times, which was free to edit or reject it if he had.
Mr. Francis is therefore being punished for expressing, on in his own time, views with which his employer may disagree. This is a chilling commentary on how narrow a view the Washington Times takes of the bounds of permissible discourse. To refuse to publish a point of view is one thing. To forbid employees even to express a point of view is something else entirely. It is a sure sign of how desperate the defenders of orthodoxy have become when they are so afraid of certain ideas that they must prohibit their very expression.
Ironically, the Washington Times is a “conservative” newspaper, which prides itself on bold, principled positions. For readers who wish to express themselves to Mr. Francis’ former employer, he is Wesley Pruden, Editor in Chief, Washington Times, 3600 New York Ave. N.E., Washington, DC 20002.
| IN THE NEWS |
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O Tempora, O Mores!
More Black Justice
Another mostly-black jury has delivered a curious verdict. Earl Williams of South Carolina, a 22-year-old black, was accused of shooting a police officer who was trying to recover a stolen car. The officer, also black, survived the attack and identified Mr. Williams, whose fingerprints were found in the car. Another witness also identified Mr. Williams, who admitted to relatives that he shot the officer. In court, however, he changed his story and claimed that he had admitted to the shootings because he was covering for the real shooter, his accomplice, Rafer Jones. He said he had no choice but to take the blame because Mr. Jones has voodoo powers and would turn Mr. Williams into a wolf if he did not do as ordered.
The jury acquitted Mr. Williams. Its members appear to think that the accomplice, Mr. Jones, is guilty. However, there is not enough evidence to indict him because all witnesses — except Mr. Williams himself — say that Mr. Williams was the gunman. [Lisa Green, Man didn’t shoot cop, jury says, The State (Columbia, SC), 9/30/95, p. 1.]
Florida Follies
On September 13, 1993, a British tourist was shot to death at a freeway rest stop in Florida. It has taken three trials to nail him, but the killer, a teen-aged black named John Crumitie, has finally been convicted. He managed to hang two mixed-race juries by claiming that every prosecution witness was lying. In the first trial, a single black held out for acquittal, and in the second, two blacks did. The third jury, which finally convicted him, was composed of ten whites and two blacks.
Mr. Crumitie grew up in rural Monticello, Florida, which state juvenile authorities thought was such a wholesome place they sent three black Tallahassee delinquents there to live in the hope that they would reform. Instead, they befriended Mr. Crumite, who had never been in trouble before. A few months later Mr. Crumitie was a murderer. [Michael Browning, City hoodlums sent to country: a deadly error, Miami Herald, 9/17/95, p. 1B.]
Imported Crime
Many immigrant shopkeepers keep money at home rather than use banks, which they do not trust. Immigrants of the same ethnicity have taken to invading their homes to steal the cash. Often they torture members of the household to extract information about where the swag is hidden. Criminals and victims tend to be Hispanics or Asians.
Perpetrators are well-organized gangs whose members deliberately use false names even with each other so that if one is arrested he cannot identify the others. Recent illegals who have not yet been arrested and whose fingerprints are not on file make the best operatives. It is even better if they cannot speak English and are unable to talk to the police.
During the first nine months of 1995, more than 750 such robberies were reported in New York City alone. Police estimate that the real number is much higher; the cash that many immigrant shopkeepers keep at home is unreported to the IRS, and victims do not want to call attention to their shady practices. [Clifford Krauss, Gangs find shop owners easy prey at home, NYT, 9/15/95.]
Of the 24,361 cases of tuberculosis in the United States in 1994, 7,627 were reported by patients who were foreign-born. That was 32 percent of all cases, up from 22 percent in 1986. Most of the sick foreigners were from Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam. In Los Angeles County 64 percent of the TB cases were foreign-born people and in Hawaii the figure was 82 percent. It is not known how many Americans caught the disease from foreigners. [Reuters, Atlanta, Sept. 28, 1995.]
Ivy League Confederates
With one important excepted category, Harvard University has erected memorials to all alumni who died on the battlefield, including one who fought for Nazi Germany. The university does not, however, honor Confederates, even though one third of the Harvard men who died in the War Between the States fought for the South. Yale and Princeton pay equal tribute to their Confederate and Union dead. [Confederate memorial splits Harvard, Commercial Appeal (Memphis), July 5, 1995.]
Blacks are 10 percent of the civilian work force but are more than 18 percent of both state and federal work forces. Blacks are therefore almost twice as likely to work for government than they are to work for private employers. Since 43 percent of all black managers and professionals work for government (as compared to 14 percent for whites), if public employers hired as selectively as private ones, the black managerial class would shrink by perhaps 20 percent.
For anyone whose eyes are not firmly shut, the reason for this concentration in government is obvious: The public sector does not face competition and can hire deadwood without going broke. [Jonathan Tilove, Minorities have thrived in public sector jobs, Grand Rapids Press, July 30, 1995, p. A8.] Besides helping to explain why government works so poorly, the over-representation of blacks means something else — “diversity” preferences should no longer apply to black public-sector job seekers. No whites are likely to point this out, but some day it will dawn on Hispanic or even Asian activists, who will then start yelling about it.
Although Denver public schools are more segregated than ever, a federal judge has ruled that the system can end its mandatory busing program. In 1968, public schools served 101,000 students, 63 percent of them white. It now has 59,000 students, of whom only 30 percent are white. The largest number, 48 percent, are Hispanic, and some schools are 95 percent nonwhite. Everyone recognizes that a return to neighborhood schools means something close to complete segregation. However, nonwhites now control the school board, as well as the lavish, $7,300-per-student budget that goes with it. Nonwhites appear to be content with segregation, so long as their schools get as much money as white schools. Denver now spends as much on students as the tuition at better private schools, but student performance is an embarrassment. Only two thirds of students manage to graduate, despite ever-lower standards. [James Brooke, Court says Denver can end forced busing, NYT, 9/17/95.]
Full Circle
A Boston lawyer has filed suit on behalf of his 12-year-old daughter, who was not admitted to the prestigious Boston Latin School because she is white. The school sets aside 35 percent of its places for blacks and Hispanics, and officials admit that Julia McLaughlin would have been admitted were it not for the quota. One hundred and three blacks and Hispanics with qualifications inferior to hers were admitted. The judge hearing the case is Arthur Garrity who, 20 years ago, started a program of forced busing that has brought the school system close to collapse. [Michael Matza, Race case has stung Boston, Houston Chron, 9/16/95, p. 20A.]
Touch of the Tar Brush
Betty Crocker the blue-eyed, creamy-skinned General Mills symbol of all-American wholesomeness since 1921, is to have a makeover. Although her hair style and costume have changed every decade or so, she is now to be made into a product of miscegenation. General Mills plans to take the photographs of 75 American women — representing all races — and “morph” or merge their features and skin-tones into the new Betty Crocker. Russell Adams, chairman of African American studies at Howard University says that the new Miss Crocker “will be less white bread and more whole wheat.” Her face is to appear on packages early next year. [Rebecca Quick, Betty Crocker plans to mix ethnic looks for her new face, WSJ, 9/11/95, p. 1.]
The British Commission for Racial Equality has mounted a campaign against racism, called “All Different All Equal.” It has unveiled “public service” posters across Britain that show a row of four brains. Three are the same size and are labeled “African,” “Asian,” and “European.” The fourth brain, much smaller, is labeled “Racist.” The poster has gone up in 29 sites in London alone. In Wales the poster is in both English and Welsh. [Commission for Racial Equality (all different all equal) press release No. 587, Sept. 21, 1995.]
Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam is hoping to organize a “million man march” on Washington, DC. That would be three times as many participants as in Martin Luther King’s 1963 “March on Washington.” Curiously, the event is not being billed as a demand for handouts. “We have looked for too long to the government to solve our problems,” explains Minister Farrakhan. He says the march will be “a day of atonement to accept our responsibility for our women and our communities.” Feminists are annoyed that women will not be allowed to participate, and skeptics wonder whether black men will bother to demonstrate if there are no women to meet. The national coordinator for the march is Ben Chavis, former executive director of the NAACP, who was fired when it was learned he had spent $322,400 of the association’s money to hush up a sexual harassment suit. The NAACP does not support the march and predicts a poor turnout. [Edward Boyer, ‘Million man’ may end up short, Houston Chron, 9/17/95, p. 29A.] The NAACP, itself, has not done well lately. In September, fewer than 100 people turned out for an affirmative action rally in Connecticut that was supposed to draw thousands. [Connecticut, USA Today, sept. 11, 1995, p. 10A.]
His True Calling
A Haitian chiropractor has joined the list of immigrants who bilk American society for false insurance charges. Joseph Douze of Palm Beach, Florida, would send out “runners” to recruit people to stage false accidents for whom he would then file insurance claims. In several years, Dr. Douze filed some $5 million in claims. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary here, except that Mr. Douze is a former candidate for the presidency of Haiti. [AP, Chiropractor charged in insurance claim scan, Miami Herald, 9/19/95.]
Lawmaker, Lawbreaker
Maggie Glover is a black senator in the South Carolina state house. On Sept. 15th, she was clocked at 53 miles per hour in a zone marked for 30 and was pulled over. The officer discovered that her license had been suspended and told her he would have to arrest her. Miss Glover locked herself in her car and refused to come out. The officer, realizing he had a difficult case on his hands, radioed for help. Eventually nine policemen were on the scene, trying to persuade Miss Glover to give herself up. Finally, another black state legislator was found to come give her a ride home.
Miss Glover now says she could not be sure whether the officers were authentic policemen or were impersonators out to make trouble. “Rodney King got out of his car, too,” she told reporters. The state’s top prosecutor has decided to investigate the incident, a decision that another black state senator welcomes. “[I]t will show stupidity, how far these guys will go to target black elected officials, which is very, very far,” he explains. [Lee Bandy & Jim Davenport, State to investigate Glover incident, The State (Columbia, SC) Sept. 30, 1995, p. B1.]
The number of prison inmates in the United States has tripled to 1.5 million in the 15 years from 1980 to 1995. Half of all inmates have committed violent crimes and 80 percent have prior convictions. Fifty percent of the prison population is black. An additional 3.5 million convicted criminals are out of prison on probation or parole, which means that about three percent of the adult population is under the control of the criminal justice system. In Texas, nearly 4 percent of the adult population is on probation or parole.
One in every three black men in their 20s is either in jail, on probation or on parole. Only five years ago, the figure was one in four. In a few years half of all black men in their 20s are likely to be under supervision. [Alan Miller, Prison, probation rolls soaring, Chi Sun-Times, 8/28/95, p. 20. Fox Butterfield, More blacks in their 20’s have trouble with the law, NYT, 10/5/95, p. A8.]
Violent crime is not only becoming more common, its nature is changing. In the 1960s, more than 90 percent of murders resulted in arrests. This was because the vast majority of killers were acquainted with their victims. Now, so-called “stranger murders” are the majority of homicides, and they are much harder to solve. What’s more, there are proportionately fewer officers to solve them. Thirty years ago, there were three policemen for every violent crime reported. Now there are three violent crimes for every policeman.
Another trend is increased violent crime among the very young. With the surge of crack children and welfare-bred feral children, 14- to 17-year-olds are vastly more dangerous than before. By the year 2005 this age group will have increased by 23 percent. Adam Walinsky, who has studied crime rates for many years, predicts that by then there will be 40,000 murders a year, up from the 25,000 or so in the 1990s. [The Coming Crime Wave (editorial), NY Post, Aug. 19, 1995.]
Forgive and be Forgotten
In July 1986, Steven McDonald was a 29-year-old New York City police officer, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Shavod Jones was a 15-year-old thief. Mr. McDonald was investigating bicycle thefts in Central Park and came across Mr. Jones and two friends. He asked a few questions but was met with hostile stares. He bent down to pat a suspicious bulge in the pants of one of the young black men. Mr. Jones pulled a gun and shot Mr. McDonald three times, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.
Mr. Jones went to prison for attempted murder. Mr. McDonald publicly forgave him and dreamed of the day when the two would travel the country speaking to school children about the futility of violence. He began a correspondence with Mr. Jones, which ended when Mr. McDonald refused to help the convict get parole, saying he did not know enough about his prison record.
As it happens, Mr. Jones’ record was awful. He got into fights, refused to obey direct orders, and was a chronic trouble-maker. Still, after only nine years in jail, Mr. Jones was released. Mr. McDonald still believed he could redeem Mr. Jones and by joining forces to help children turn away from crime, could make some sense of his own shattered life. Mr. Jones never contacted Mr. McDonald. Three days after his release, he got on the back of a powerful motorcycle driven by a friend who was on parole for first-degree manslaughter. The man tried to do a wheelie on Madison Avenue, lost control, and slammed into two cars. Mr. Jones was killed. Mr. McDonald is still seeking redemption. [Dan Barry, 2 lives: attack, injury, hope, death, NYT, 9/19/95, p. B1.]
Insanity Reaches New Heights
A ten-year-old Long Island white boy has been put on trial for a hate crime. Patrick, a 5th grader, got into an argument with a black boy named Gary. He reportedly called Gary a “nigger” and threatened to kill him. No punches were thrown, but the black child’s mother promptly called the police. Patrick’s mother called Gary’s mother to apologize, but police charged Patrick with a hate crime.
Ordinarily, whites admit guilt, grovel, and are ordered to take therapy. Patrick’s parents refused. They said they had not taught him to use the word “nigger” and insisted there was nothing wrong with him. Patrick went on trial in juvenile court. Gary, the black child, also ten years old, was a key witness, so he had to take the stand. He gave 45 minutes of terrified testimony until, under cross-examination, the defense asked him if, in his entire life, he had ever lied. Gary looked like he was about to cry. The judge called a recess, and Gary’s mother decided to drop the case. Patrick is now a free boy. [Ellen Yan, LIers put bias charge on trial, New York Newsday, July 14, 1995, p. A7.]
Good Riddance
Gov. George Pataki of New York plans to fire 105 of the state’s 131 affirmative action officers. These are essentially patronage jobs for Democrats, and pay from $35,000 to $80,000 a year. Most affirmative action officers are women and nonwhites. The new Republican governor plans to eliminate most of the state’s racial preference programs and thinks the officers are worse than useless. [Fredric Dicker, Gov to ax ‘quota cops,’ NY Post 9/12/95.]
Gov. Pataki has also implemented a new state law that permits him to deport criminal aliens before they have finished their sentences. Two hundred thirteen non-violent offenders will be booted out, saving the state $7 million over the lives of their unserved prison terms. The first 86, all Colombians, were to be flown home in August. The Colombian authorities were to check if any are wanted for crimes in Colombia but will not imprison them for the remainders of their terms. [Ian Fisher, Pataki announces aliens’ expulsion, NYT, 8/29/95, p. A1.]
Another Skirmish in the Undeclared War
In September, a gang of Los Angeles Hispanics attacked a family of whites who took a wrong turn and drove down their alley. At first, they tried to box the car in with garbage cans, but when the driver started frantically to escape, they opened fire. A four-year-old girl was hit in the head and killed, as she lay in her mother’s arms in the back seat. Her two-year-old brother was hit in the foot. The driver was hit in the back but managed to drive the family to safety.
The family was on its way home after attending a birthday barbecue for a friend. [Gate Holland, Tot slain in wrong turn onto ‘Avenue of Killers,’ USA Today, 9/19/95.] It’s only offense was to be white in a Hispanic part of Los Angeles. This incident was briefly national news but quickly dropped from sight. It is not hard to imagine the massive, saturation-coverage manhunt that would ensue if white thugs had shot up a nonwhite family.
Another Casualty
In September, Ryan Kieth Moody of Lubbock, Texas received a 99-year sentence for shooting to death a white, 39-year-old stockbroker. According to an FBI affidavit, an acquaintance quoted Mr. Moody as saying that he and a friend were going to drive into the white part of town and kill the first white man they found. They saw Randy Lawson sitting in his car in a well-to-do neighborhood less than a block from his house, and shot him with a rifle. Mr. Lawson’s widow testified that she did not hate the killer and that she would pray for him.
During the trial, Mr. Moody took the stand and testified that he had been having breakfast with his girlfriend at the time of the killing. He was so obviously unconcerned about what had happened to the white man, that the jury took less than an hour to convict him. There were no blacks on the jury, which has resulted in an outcry from the usual quarters. [AP, Man guilty in racial shooting, Sept. 13, 1995.]
Another Casualty
Twenty-year-old Kimberly Antonakos’ big mistake was to make friends with Joshua Torres’ girlfriend. She let the couple and their infant child use her Brooklyn apartment, which Mr. Torres noticed was nicely furnished. Mr. Torres and two other Puerto Ricans, Nicolas Libretti and Jose Negron, decided to kidnap Miss Antonakos. On March 1st, they forced her into the trunk of her own car, drove her to an abandoned building in Queens, and tied her up in the basement. They left her in the unheated building for three days while they unsuccessfully tried to leave a ransom message on her father’s answering machine. They did not have sense enough to wait for the beep, and never left a message.
The three then realized they were in over their heads and decided to dispose of Miss Antonakos by burning her. She was alive but unconscious when they poured gasoline over her and burnt the house down. Some time later, Mr. Torres became convinced that Mr. Negron was going to talk to the police, so he shot and killed him.
When the charred remains of Mr. Antonakos’ only child were discovered by firemen, he posted a $10,000 reward for information about her disappearance. Someone who had overheard Mr. Torres and Mr. Libretti discussing the kidnapping was tempted by the reward and came forward in September, leading to the arrests. A Queens prosecutor has called the incident “one of the most brutal and savage homicides” ever to occur in his district. [AP, 2 charged with burning woman alive, Chi Trib, Sept. 9, 1995, p. 17.]
Richmond’s Finest
Richmond, Virginia’s longest-serving city councilman has stepped down, after he was video-taped selling heroin. Henry Richardson, who had served for 18 years, was a hero to Richmond blacks, despite having a brush with the law nearly every year. He has been convicted of assaulting a police officer and for speeding and causing an accident in a city car. In 1988, he was convicted of possession of cocaine and heroine, but did not go to jail. He has since won reelection four times. “It must have been a setup,” said a thirty-year-old welfare mother, who represents the core of Mr. Richardson’s constituency, “They don’t want a good man to help us.” [Richmond official quits after drug charges, NYT, 9/19/95.]
Get Rich Quick
Two illegal aliens from Mexico, Gabriel Diaz and Luis Ramos have been arrested for counterfeiting and selling identification papers. They were the leaders of a group offering Chicago immigrants complete sets of documents, including birth certificates, for $335 a set. Their ring was making profits of $1 million a month. Demand was so high — and the risk of arrest so small — that members of the group were stopping foreign-looking people on the street, asking them if they needed papers. [Rebecca Carr, Arrests break fake document ring, Chicago Sun-Times, 8/25/95, p. 9.]
African Americans
What may be the best-preserved West African tribal community has been found in the jungles of — South America. In the 17th century, African slaves were brought to work the plantations of Surinam. Many escaped and fled into the wild interior to establish villages. Today, there are six tribes of Maroons, so called from the Spanish word cimarron, which means a runaway horse that has gone wild. Maroon villages are still unlinked by roads and can be reached only by canoe.
Maroon society is matrilineal, as it is in Africa, and in the evening parents tell their children spider fables from Ghana. The Maroons worship snakes, and build thatched spirit houses for them along the forest paths. Recently, the Maroons have decided to promote tourism. “We want to show white people we are clever and smart, that we have a culture equal to theirs,” explains a tribal leader. [Laurie Goering, ‘Pure’ African culture thrives in S. America, Chi Trib, 9/11/95, p. 11.]
Felled by Freedom
South Africa’s first black-owned bank, which flourished for 20 years under apartheid, has closed its doors. African Bank, which had mostly black customers, was dragged down by a mountain of bad debt. [S. Africa’s 1st Black-owned bank closes, Chi Sun-Times, Sept. 12, 1995, p. 30.]
Separate in Death
The funeral parlor business is one of the most segregated in the country.
In most parts of the country, undertakers handle clienteles that are either exclusively white or exclusively black. Until 1985, funeral homes were labeled “white” or “black” in state directories, and there are still separate, black and white national undertakers’ organizations. The business is actually getting more segregated. Until recently, small towns supported only one funeral director who buried everyone. Now, families are more likely to drive to a nearby town to get service from someone of the same race.
Undertakers who still do handle both races say that traditions differ. Whites like to put the body in the ground in two to four days, while blacks often wait eight to ten days for family members to gather. White services are reserved, while black funerals are boisterous and full of song. Whites tend to show their sympathy for the bereaved during a visitation period, while blacks like to attend the funeral itself. Nationally, in 1993, 21 percent of American corpses were cremated, but fewer than one percent of black corpses were cremated. “Why burn twice?” is a common objection. [Suzi Parker, Equal but separate, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 9/6/95, p. F1.]
Ethnic groups also differ in whether they want to be told they have fatal diseases. Only 35 percent of Korean Americans think patients should know the truth. The figure for Mexican-Americans is 48 percent; blacks, 63 percent; whites, 69 percent. [Lindsey Tanner, Truth not always best, doctors told, Houston Chronicle, 9/13/95, p. 11A.]
AR Conference Planned for Next MayThe second American Renaissance conference will be held next year over Memorial Day weekend (May 25-27) in Louisville, Kentucky. Many of the best-received speakers from last year’s conference — Michael Levin, Samuel Francis, Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, Lawrence Auster — will be returning, along with some exciting, new people with whom we are still holding discussions. The conference is likely to take place in Louisville’s most distinguished downtown location, the Seelbach. We are negotiating special group rates at this elegant, four-star hotel, which has recently added firstclass meeting facilities. Like the previous conference in Atlanta, this will be an unforgettable gathering of sore of the boldest, roost incisive thinkers of our tine. More details will be forthcoming in the next issue. Please mark your calendars for May 25-27, 1996. You will not want to miss this extraordinary event! |
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — As a prisoner, I found the October lead article, “White Man in a Texas Prison” quite interesting. It should be noted that prison conditions vary from state to state and from prison to prison within a state.
My understanding of the Hispanic situation is a little different from that described by Mr. Zatukel. When their numbers are small, Hispanics stick together, but as their numbers increase, Mexicans separate from Cubans and Puerto Ricans, the former thinking themselves superior, based in part on the claim that they do not have any black blood. In institutions where their presence is minimal, Hispanics seem to side with blacks against whites. This may be because of their common urban and drug experience, as well as their “victim” status.
Mr. Zatukel writes about the noise blacks make during televised sports programs. I am a bit surprised he did not mention the televised freak shows like “Jenny Jones.” Whenever a white racialist appears, or white parents complain about their children’s involvement with blacks, the noise is earsplitting. Mr. Zatukel should be grateful that his facility does not get Black Entertainment Television, with its constant rap music and ain’t-whitey-horrible whining.
It is also worth noting that affirmative action means that prison staffs often reflect the inmate population, not the surrounding population. For example, the population of my state is only eight percent black and one percent Hispanic-and-other. However, nonwhites make up more than half of the prison population and account for more than half of the guards. “Brothers take care of brothers” is a common refrain among black prisoners and guards.
Lest anyone be concerned about the plight of white prisoners, almost all of them had white victims, and in more than 20 years of imprisonment I have yet to meet anyone who was convicted of stealing food to feed his family. My experience is that most young white prisoners can appropriately be called “whiggers” (white niggers). Ninety-five percent of white prisoners are as worthless as their nonwhite counterparts.
Name Withheld
Sir — Erik Peterson’s “The War With Mexico” was a good overview, but misses one of history’s ironies: the failure of the United States to acquire Baja California.
President Polk appointed the despicable Nicholas Trist to negotiate the peace with Mexico, which had been soundly defeated. Trist was instructed to get an outlet on the Gulf of California but he botched the negotiations. Trist also quarreled with General Winfield Scott, delayed starting the negotiations, and then compromised with the prostrate Mexicans. Polk eventually noted in his diary that “Trist was contemptibly base,” and regretted appointing him to the job. However, in the end, Polk lacked backbone as did Congress in accepting the deal.
John Kundrat, Lewiston, Id.
Sir — I was disappointed to learn from Glynn Custred’s letter that whites “oppose racial preferences but refuse to stand up and be counted.” If they keep that up there will soon be nothing left to count.
Robert Briggs, Punta Gorda, Fla.
Sir — I was glad to see your account of the follies of black congresswoman, BarbaraRose Collins of Detroit. She recently held a press conference to defend her record, saying “I give myself a good B-plus.” By the standards of Detroit public schools, she probably deserves a B-plus.
Naturally, she said that press attacks on her have been “racist.” When asked how they could be racist when the information about her incompetence has come from former staffers who are black, she replied, “Racists have always been able to find Uncle Toms. There are black people who will do what white people want them du to.” This, too, sounds like something she learned in a Detroit school.
Susan Clegg, Pontiac, Mich.
Sir — In your October “O Tempora” item, “No More Japanese?” you write that 3.2 percent of all American births are to parents of different races. In fact, according to the National Center for Health statistics, the 1992 figure was 3.9 percent. This does not include births in which one parent was Hispanic and the other was not, since the U.S. government does not treat Hispanics as a racial category.
How many American births are to mixed, white-Hispanic couples? It is impossible to say. According to census data, 2.2 percent of all American married couples are mixed, Hispanic-non-Hispanic but there is no breakdown of the non-Hispanic partners by race. It is not necessarily true that most of these couples included a white spouse. Hispanics are less educated than whites, less skilled, more likely to be on welfare, and more likely to live in the inner city. Many do not move in the same circles as whites or have much in common with them, so are unlikely to marry whites.
In any case, the rate of mixed marriage is still remarkably low, given the official and unofficial pressure to which European-Americans have been subjected to deny their racial identity and to “intermix.”
Joseph Fallon, Rye, N.Y.
