American Renaissance magazine
Vol 11, No. 2	February 2000

 

CONTENTS

Do Americans Really Want Diversity?
White Slavery, 1999
We Should Not Support Patrick Buchanan
Book Review: Black Magic
Breaking Taboos in the Publishing Industry
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Do Americans Really Want Diversity?

For many whites, it’s a game of ‘let’s pretend.’

by Jared Taylor

Diversity of religion, language, culture and especially race is now one of the official benefits of living in the United States. From the President on down, public officials glory in the transformation of our country from a European nation into an Afro-Hispanic mish-mash. It is impossible to find a mainstream defense of homogeneity or even of free association, now that every American institution and major organ of communication is an ardent branch of the church of diversity.

But what do ordinary Americans think about diversity? Or at least what are they prepared to tell a poll-taker about it? Last December, the New Century Foundation, which publishes American Renaissance, hired a polling company to conduct a telephone survey. We had Opinion Research Corporation International of Princeton, New Jersey, ask a representative sample of about 1,000 Americans the following questions and propose the following possible answers:

(1) Would you rather live in a neighborhood where your race is in the majority, or one in which it is a minority?

a. Majority.
b. Minority.
c. Makes no difference.

(2) The Census Bureau predicts that if current levels of non-European immigration continue, in 40 or 50 years whites will become a minority in the United States. Overall, do you think this will be a good thing for the country or a bad thing for the country?

a. Good thing for the country.
b. Bad thing for the country.
c. Makes no difference.

(3) Until the 1960s, immigration to the United States was overwhelmingly from Europe. Now, with large-scale immigration from non-European countries, the United States is becoming more diverse in terms of race, language, religion and culture. Do you think this a good thing for the country or a bad thing for the country.

a. Good thing for the country.
b. Bad thing for the country.
c. Makes no difference.

The replies, tabulated in percentages and separated by race, are displayed in the three left-hand graphs below (the percentages of “don’t know”s and “refused to answer”s are small and are not displayed). Disregarding for now the three graphs on the right, what is most striking about these results is the number of people who claim that diversity-related changes make no difference. In the top left graph, for example, we find that 70 percent of whites and about 80 percent of blacks and Hispanics say the racial makeup of their neighborhood doesn’t matter. Likewise, for the second and third questions, the largest overall answer is “diversity” makes no difference.

Can we trust these answers? No. It is impossible to believe that 70 percent of whites don’t care whether they live in a white or black neighborhood. That, however, is the fashionable answer to a sensitive question, and when a pollster throws out the lifeline by offering “it doesn’t matter” as a possible answer, whites and non-whites alike gladly reach for it.

At the same time, since the poll made it easy not to take a position, the people who actually expressed an opinion were probably being honest — and their opinions are significant. By a margin of 26 to one (26 percent to one percent) whites would rather live in neighborhoods where they are the racial majority. Not surprisingly, non-whites are less adamant about being in the majority. Everyone knows white neighborhoods are desirable, and blacks and Hispanics probably assume that if they are going to be a minority, the majority is going to be white. Even so, almost four times as many Hispanics want to be a majority as want to be a minority (11 percent to three percent). For blacks the numbers are eleven percent to eight percent.

As for a white-minority nation, whites oppose it four to one. By a slim margin blacks want whites to become a minority, but Hispanics do not.

For all groups, the majority of people who expressed a preference say they think diversity is a good thing, with Hispanics leading by a considerable margin. Not surprisingly, whites (at 25 percent) are the most likely to say diversity is bad for the country.

Taken together, these three responses show that whites, at least, have contradictory opinions about “diversity.” They are in favor of it as a general proposition, but they don’t like its actual consequences, that is, more non-white neighborhoods and minority status for whites. This contradiction is not hard to understand. People have heard over and over that diversity is good, so they think they agree. What they have not heard over and over is what “diversity” really means. Whites don’t want to become a minority and they don’t want more neighborhoods to go south. They probably don’t want the other things “diversity” brings — more people who can’t speak English, more Santeria, more anti-white hatred, fewer white playmates for their children, more non-white television “role models,” etc. — but the poll did not go into all that.

The black replies are the most consistent. Slightly more than half want to live in black-majority neighborhoods and a slim majority thinks it would be good for the country for whites to become a minority. It is therefore perfectly consistent for blacks to be in favor of more racial diversity.

Hispanics want to be the majority in their neighborhoods, and since they are the largest current source of it it is no surprise they favor diversity. Why do they oppose whites becoming a minority? Perhaps they understand better than blacks that it is whites who have made this country a desirable place to live and that America would go downhill if whites disappeared.

What about the people who claim that none of this makes any difference? It is tempting to think many of them are lying. People who read AR are more concerned about racial questions than most Americans, but it is still hard to believe that more than half of respondents of all racial groups really think it makes no difference if their neighborhoods change race or whites become a minority.

Therefore we decided to ask Opinion Research to ask a different but statistically comparable sample of Americans the very same questions but not to offer “makes no difference” as a possible answer. We hoped to get more realistic answers by forcing respondents to take a position. The results of the second poll are displayed in the three graphs on the right side, below. It is striking that even when the polltaker did not offer it as a possibility, “makes no difference” was the largest overall winner in two out of the three questions. Are Americans really as indifferent as they say they are to these issues or are they once again hiding their opinions? It’s not easy to say.

Whites are the group we would most expect to be hiding their opinions, but when the easy way out of “makes no difference” is taken away from them, respondents who dodged the issue when they had the chance now take positions that are inconsistent. For example, if we compare the top two graphs asking the question about neighborhoods, when the “makes no difference” option wasn’t offered, the number of whites who said the race of the neighborhood didn’t matter dropped 26 percent — from 70 percent to 44 percent. And which way did those 26 percent go? Most of them gave the politically incorrect answer. Those saying they wanted a majority-white neighborhood jumped from 26 percent to 50 percent, while those claiming they want to be a minority went from one percent to only three percent. On the basis of this single answer, we would assume that a large number of whites who took the easy way out in the first poll were hiding unfashionable opinions that were smoked out in the second poll.

However, the white fence-sitters sorted themselves out very differently on the second and third questions, largely giving the politically correct answers. To the question about whether whites becoming a minority would be good or bad, the number saying it would be bad scarcely budged, going from 28 percent to 31 percent, while the number who said it would be good more than doubled from seven percent to 15 percent. Are true opinions being flushed out or are whites hiding behind the politically correct answer? It’s not possible to know. (It’s worth noting that this was the question that got by far the largest percentage of “don’t know” answers. For the first poll, when whites were offered the “makes no difference” option, six percent said they didn’t know. When the “makes no difference” option was taken away, that number rose to 15 percent.)

For the question about the overall benefits of diversity, nine percent of the white fence-sitters moved over to the politically correct, “good for the country” answer while only four came out against diversity. It is hard to know which poll gives the more accurate picture of what Americans really think.

Hispanics seem to be giving reasonably consistent answers. They are the most likely to say that it would be a good thing for whites to become a minority, and are most likely to say “diversity” is a good thing. They are currently the main source of “diversity,” so they are bound to like it. And at least in the second poll they don’t seem very bothered by the prospect of whites becoming a minority.

Here we have a classic group conflict: Hispanic advance comes at the expense of whites. Not even today’s browbeaten whites are very happy at that prospect of decline, but Hispanics don’t mind seeing their numbers grow. And, as a general matter, Hispanics are free to express their preferences about the changing population but whites are supposed to keep their mouths shut.

Opinion Research analyzed the answers in terms of respondent characteristics like age, sex, education, and income but the results were not particularly striking. For example, men and women gave similar replies to the first two questions, but five to six percent more women than men gave the politically correct answer to the third question about general diversity. Perhaps women were less able to grasp the contradiction between favoring diversity in the abstract and opposing its actual consequences.

Older Americans are consistently less “liberal” than young people. In the first poll, 37 percent of respondents age 65 and over thought the prospect of whites becoming a minority was a bad thing; only 14 percent of 18- to 24-years-olds did. In the second poll, 51 percent of the youngest group thought “diversity” in general was a good thing whereas only 32 percent of the oldest groups thought so. Americans appear to wake up to reality as they grow older. There were equivalent differences in the answers to all the questions.

Interestingly, the more education Americans have, the more likely they are to say they want to live in neighborhoods where theirs is the majority race. In the first poll, 31 percent of college grads but only 16 percent of high school dropouts wanted to be the majority. At the same time, perhaps hypocritically, college grads are considerably more likely to favor “diversity” in the abstract — 43 percent and 54 percent in the two polls, versus 18 percent 26 percent for high school dropouts.

No matter how these results are interpreted, it is clear that only a minority of whites are prepared to express to a poll-taker views that we wish were more widespread. Still, we are by no means a tiny minority. According to the second poll, half of all whites don’t want to live in minority neighborhoods, nearly a third dislike the idea of becoming a minority, and a quarter say that diversity is bad for the country. They say these things in the teeth of very strong official opposition to these views. There is no doubt that some whites — perhaps many — were afraid to tell a stranger what they really think. This means we still have a substantial base of racially conscious whites who, if mobilized, could have a tremendous influence on the future of our country.

ARTICLE

White Slavery, 1999

Why do so many young prostitutes come from Minnesota?

by Nelson Rosit

Back in 1977 the nation learned about the Minnesota Strip in Manhattan’s Times Square, where teenage runaways from the upper midwest prostituted themselves for black pimps. Two crusading Minneapolis vice squad officers, Al Palmquist and Gary McGaughey, uncovered a pipeline that funneled girls from this region into the New York sex trade. The detectives generated much publicity but little immediate action. Over the past two decades, Times Square was cleaned up somewhat and the Minnesota Strip faded into memory; however, the problem of teenage prostitution has only gotten worse.

Last August federal prosecutors indicted fifteen members of a Twin Cities prostitution ring that for 17 years had recruited hundreds of girls from Minnesota to work in strip bars, escort services, and massage parlors in 24 states and Canada. The indicted men are members of the Evans family, a clan of black con men and hustlers. Their leader, Levorn Evans, has racked up 102 criminal charges in the past 20 years. This was the largest prostitution ring ever uncovered by federal authorities, and the arrests were the culmination of a two-year investigation. The prostitutes, some as young as 13, handed over all their earnings under the threat of beatings or death. One detective who worked on the case is quoted as saying, “This is as close to modern slavery as you can get.”

People who try to help young prostitutes reestablish their lives know that they are not dealing with a victimless crime. The average age at which juvenile prostitutes enter the trade is 14, and 93 percent are victims of violence from customers and/or pimps.

These teenagers can quickly become so hardened and corrupted that potentially valuable members of our community may be lost forever.

The arrests in this case were headline news in Twin Cities newspapers for several days and follow-up stories appeared for several weeks. Some of the police and reporters involved even asked: “Why Minnesota?” Sgt. Andrew Schmidt of the Minneapolis police said:

“I talk frequently with cops from Vegas, Phoenix, and other places, and hands down, most of them say that we are the country’s biggest producers of young prostitutes. I don’t know why that is. Maybe the girls here are more naïve and vulnerable. And from my experience, most of these girls are not the poor kids from the inner city. They are the kids — a few runaways — from good homes from the suburbs and rural communities.” None of the police or media commentators dared delve too deeply into the racial aspects of the case. Maybe Minnesota girls are more naïve and trusting than most, but there is more to it than that. Minnesota, the land of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Eugene McCarthy, has been one of the strongholds of modern liberalism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism — ideologies that fuel minority racism while promoting white guilt and undermining the confidence of many white children. Could this help explain why so many Minnesota girls have let black pimps force them into degradation?

Mr. Rosit lives in Minnesota.

ARTICLE

We Should Not Support Patrick Buchanan

Why I believe Michael Masters is mistaken.

by Shawn Mercer

In the December 1999, issue Michael Masters writes that the Republican Party should make a frank appeal to white voters by strongly opposing immigration and affirmative action. He concludes that if the GOP fails to do this, racially conscious whites should support Patrick Buchanan, whose positions come closest to theirs. I believe Mr. Masters’ analysis is incorrect, and given the high stakes in this year’s elections his arguments should be reconsidered.

First, there is little evidence that strong stands against quotas and immigration are the silver bullets Mr. Masters makes them out to be. These ideas certainly have huge majority support in polling, and black businessman Ward Connerly’s ballot initiatives continue to knock down state racial preferences programs as if they were dominoes. But these ideas don’t seem to work as political tools for the Republicans.

For example, Mr. Connerly reports that California’s Proposition 209, banning preferences, was nearly sunk when Robert Dole and the GOP injected themselves into the campaign. Throughout 1996, the initiative had enjoyed broad support, even drawing a majority of self-identified Democrats. But when the Dole campaign, trailing badly and desperate for a lift, tried to ride the measure’s popularity by backing it, 209’s support immediately fell. Poll analysis suggested that voters saw Mr. Dole’s involvement as a cynical ploy, and support for the initiative began to divide along party lines. Mr. Connerly pleaded with the GOP to butt out of his campaign. The proposition passed, but the Republican drag reduced its originally overwhelming support to only 54 percent. And despite the success of the initiative, Mr. Dole — who had supported it — lost California in the presidential election by a whopping margin. What worked as a voter initiative didn’t seem to work as a campaign issue.

Opposition to immigration doesn’t fare much better as a political strategy. Polls suggest that support for immigration restriction is broad but shallow. It is simply not something most non-border state voters get exercised about, especially in good economic times.

Moreover, a recent California poll showed that even with whites now in the minority, the now-dead Proposition 187, which would have cut off illegals from virtually all state benefits including public education, is still supported by roughly the same margin by which it passed in 1994. It even continues to enjoy considerable support from Hispanics and Asians. These groups support Democrats because they have come to view the GOP as not just backing commonsense restrictions on public benefits, but as being against them. The issue mobilizes nonwhites against the GOP but just doesn’t move enough white voters to make up the difference.

It is true that Republican Governor Pete Wilson campaigned on the measure and was reelected comfortably but he was helped by the incompetence and militant tone of the campaign against 187, as well as by the national Republican tidal wave that year. Four years later, with California’s white population declining even further, Republican Dan Lungren never stood a chance. Mr. Masters gets it wrong when he says the Lungren campaign’s overtures to immigrants “cost the GOP the California governorship.” The Republicans never had a chance — partly because of their anti-immigrant image.

Mr. Masters also argues that recent “Hispanic-friendly” gestures by the party leadership, like a vote on Puerto Rican statehood, yielded no returns. This is not true. Robert Dole got only 21 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1996, but Congressional Republicans took 37 percent in 1998 — basically a return to normal levels. National Hispanic support for the GOP has always fluctuated between a quarter to a third and has never been as meager as Mr. Masters suggests. In fact, Hispanic support in Texas for George W. Bush hit 39 percent (the figure of 49 percent has been bandied about), while his brother Jeb in Florida won 60 percent. Whether we like it or not, Hispanics can be wooed without offending the white base.

The pattern seems clear: the two issues of greatest importance to AR readers are not yet effective political weapons. Their appeal doesn’t transfer to politicians if people think they are being used to stir resentment for political gain rather than being addressed sincerely. And if it isn’t a sensible strategy for a major party with an established base, it is folly for a minor third-party candidate.

If Patrick Buchanan “speaks for” white middle class and blue collar workers as Mr. Masters says, someone should tell them. He doesn’t poll very well with these groups, and the Teamsters, who should be his natural allies, recently decided not to endorse him. Since he has had two high-profile runs for President before, to say nothing of his exposure as a television pundit and syndicated columnist, it would be hard to argue that Americans aren’t familiar with him.

Many see him as a little man whose fifteen minutes of fame are up but who refuses to leave the stage. He claims to have abandoned the GOP for reasons of “principle” but his new, black Marxist comrade Lenora Fulani arranges meetings for him with Al Sharpton! Are these the actions of someone who values principles over the pursuit of power?

It is tempting to look to the recent success of our philosophical counterparts in Europe and dream that the same thing might happen here. Put aside for a moment the question of whether Mr. Buchanan could actually lead such a movement. A closer look at the Austrian Freedom Party’s and the Swiss People’s Party’s victories raises questions about what similar results would mean in the United States.

Final support for both parties was well below 30 percent, under a system of proportional representation that guarantees seats in the legislature. Even a national vote at this level — unlikely given the historically abysmal record of American third parties — would not necessarily net a Buchananite party a single seat in the House. Third party candidates would have to run district by district against the two major parties, and their presence could siphon off enough conservative voters to reduce our imperfect allies, the GOP, to a laughable minority.

As bad as things are now, surely no AR reader wants the havoc Democrats could wreak: worse immigration laws, an emasculated border patrol, public schools turned into multicultural indoctrination centers, and pro-quota Supreme Court justices. The non-white strategy is to wait until there are no longer enough whites to mount a real opposition and then fight over the spoils once they achieve dominance. We must not be frustrated into a kamikaze effort that would help make this happen.

One last try for the GOP

Our strongest position both strategically and substantively is continued, if tentative, support for the GOP. It is true that George W. Bush’s current position on immigration is indistinguishable from that of the Democrats, but he does come across as a decent man who might listen to reason. He is nothing if not a savvy politician, and as Mr. Masters points out, the very survival of the GOP is threatened by nonwhite immigrants. (This is why virtually all prominent restrictionists in the two major parties are Republicans: Lamar Smith, (R)-TX, Elton Gallegly, (R)-CA, and Bob Stump, (R)-AZ, for example, and why even the leaders of Democratic constituencies for whom restrictionism would be an obvious benefit — labor unions, environmentalists, advocates for blacks, etc. — don’t press for it.)

If Mr. Bush takes the White House in 2000 and carries a GOP Congress with him, we will have an established and viable party that is privately sympathetic to our concerns in complete control of government for the first time since the immigration and “civil rights” revolution of the 1960s set us on the road to disaster. And, more importantly, we might well have the only Republican with enough political capital with nonwhites to avoid the kind of racial backlash that has dogged his party for so long. It took a strong anti-Communist, Richard Nixon, to open up Red China; it may well take a Hispanic-friendly moderate to say “enough” to multiculturalism run amok.

It will not be easy for AR activists to hold their noses and support a party that attacks their philosophy with as much ferocity as liberal Democrats do (just ask the Council of Conservative Citizens). Still, it is worthwhile to help grant full operational power to the GOP. If it fails us as it has in the past we should certainly reassess our support, but we owe it to ourselves, if not to the Republicans, to give them one more try.

Shawn Mercer lives in Milledgeville, Georgia.

BOOK REVIEW

Black Magic

A cautious but useful endorsement of racial differences.

Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, Jon Entine, Public Affairs, 2000, 387 pp., $25.00.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

To the usual yelping that accompanies the slightest dissent from racial orthodoxy, someone has finally written a book that states the obvious: blacks dominate many sports because they have a genetic edge. Bravo for author Jon Entine but bravissimo for Public Affairs publishing, which has broken with what is one of the most conformist and cowardly industries in the country (see Mr. Entine’s account below).

Only two kinds of people will be surprised or offended by this book — crazed egalitarians and people who have never watched the Olympics or a pro basketball game. Since it is the former group that sets the intellectual tone for the country, reviewers will probably either ignore this book or cluck worriedly over it, but whatever happens, another blow has been struck against anti-scientific foolishness.

But is this a good book? For people who like their racial analysis stuffed with facts and close reasoning, and devoid of pulled punches — for people who enjoy Michael Levin, Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, and Richard Lynn — this is thin gruel. It’s breezy and meandering, and does its own share of clucking about the “slippery slope of racism,” but it does a great many useful and important things. And by doing them in a mass-market book that will probably find its way into the hands of a great many sports fans it could accomplish more than books by scholars and scientists.

The first useful thing Mr. Entine does is attack the goofy notion that race is some kind of optical illusion. He argues instead that race differences may be as old as the human species. He points out that whether one accepts the out-of-Africa-recent-differentiation theory or theories of dispersed evolution, “there has been ample time for [racial] differences to have evolved.”

To be sure, there is a great deal of the human genome that is common to all races, but Mr. Entine explains that tiny differences can have huge consequences. After all, he writes, dogs and humans differ in only five percent of their genome, and there are plenty of gene sequences unique to different races. Speaking of dogs, Mr. Entine notes that in 1998 the American Kennel Club recalled the latest edition of The Complete Dog Book after complaints that it perpetuated “pernicious stereotypes” about breeds rather than treating them all as equals. Breeds are the equivalent of races, he explains, adding that “the belief that dog breeds do not have stereotypical personalities is as intuitively ridiculous as claiming that there are no meaningful differences between human populations.”

Different kinds of dogs even get different diseases, just like different races of humans. Why is it so hard to accept racial differences in athletic ability, asks Mr. Entine, when it is widely accepted that the races differ in susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia, prostate cancer, Tay-Sachs disease, osteoporosis, and diabetes?

One of Mr. Entine’s most effective tactics is to use the record book to show just how concentrated certain kinds of athletic performance are in certain groups. The chart on this page, reproduced from the book, is worth studying carefully. It is a percentage analysis by race or country of origin of the 100 fastest times in the eight most common distances in track and field. In the sprints up through the 400 meters West Africans (including British, American, and Canadian blacks who are of West African origin) are crushingly dominant, but they are completely out of the picture at distances greater than 800 meters. Beginning at that distance, other Africans take over — North Africans and East Africans, especially Kenyans. At 5,000 meters, African dominance (here represented in three separate bars) exceeds 90 percent, with the remaining times held by whites. East Asians appear on the chart only in one event, the marathon. As Mr. Entine points out, only genetic differences can plausibly account for such marked athletic specialization by race.

The reason Kenya gets its own separate bar on the graph is due almost entirely to the remarkable running abilities of one tribe, the Kalenjin, who have won 70 percent of Kenya’s Olympic gold medals. Kenya’s Nandi district, in the heart of Kalenjin country, has only 1.8 percent of the country’s population but accounts for 35 percent of its top runners. Mr. Entine reports that the Kalenjin laugh at anything other than biological explanations for their prowess; they know they are naturally gifted runners. Another little-known tribe of prodigies are the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico. Mr. Entine reports they are best in the world at the gruesome 100-mile Leadville, Colorado, race that ends at an elevation of 11,000 feet. They don’t often bother to compete, but have been known to breeze to the finish in traditional sandals rather than running shoes.

In the United States, black dominance of basketball and football is virtually complete, and blacks are over-represented in baseball. For women, too, the racial differences are almost as stark, with whites offering no competition in sprints and not much in basketball. Seventy percent of the players in the National Women’s Basketball Association are black, as were nine of the ten women chosen in 1999 for the first and second all-NWBA teams.

Mr. Entine points out that during the Soviet era, there was a plausible argument to be made that with enough training white women, anyway, could compete with blacks. East German and Soviet women who had been through the national sports factories kept West Africans from dominating the sprints. Now we know that those Communist women looked so mannish and performed so well because they were doped up on steroids and hormones. Coaches wouldn’t let some of them speak to reporters or into a microphone because they had such deep voices. In the decade or so since Communism collapsed and drug testing became more sophisticated, Russian and East German athletes have dropped back in the pack to join the rest of the whites.

East and North Africans do not (yet) dominate women’s middle- and long-distance events, but Mr. Entine says this is only because African societies have kept women out of sports. As more African women start competing, whites and Asians will be squeezed out.

Blacks didn’t always crush whites in sports, of course, but this was because many American sports were segregated, blacks got little training, and Africa was a primitive wilderness. Even so, the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Not since the 1950s has a white ball player had the most steals in a season, and it has been 40 years since a white man, Armin Hary of Germany, held the world record in the 100 meters.

Needless to say, it is not just American sports teams that are now larded with blacks. Only two percent of the population of Britain is black, but 20 percent of its pro soccer players are. A track meet between the Canadian and American national teams would settle only the question of who has the fastest Africans.

Physical Differences

What are the physiological correlates of black athletic superiority? Mr. Entine writes that as long ago as 1939, Eleanor Metheny of Iowa State University looked into sports biology and found that blacks had longer arms and legs, a shorter trunk, narrower hips, and heavier bones than whites. Hundreds of studies have since confirmed and supplemented her findings. We now know that West African blacks have more muscle, less fat, hands relatively longer than forearms, and feet relatively longer than lower legs (which are relatively longer than thighs). They have higher serum testosterone levels, which increases muscle mass and aggressiveness, and smaller chest and lung capacities, which is why they wear out at longer distances. Heavy bones and less fat explain why so many blacks are “sinkers” in the pool, and low lung capacity is a problem in swimming events as it is in long-distance running.

West African blacks have a larger percentage of what is called fast-twitch fiber in their muscles, which is what the body needs for explosive bursts of speed. It also helps blacks jump. The best whites can jump straight up 50 percent of their height; blacks can go over 60 percent.

East African blacks have a larger lung capacity than whites and process oxygen more efficiently. They do not suffer as much from lactic acid buildup in their muscles and are therefore less susceptible to fatigue. They naturally have the slim build of good distance runners.

Mr. Entine writes that blacks respond to athletic training more quickly than whites and require less of it. Sprinter Carl Lewis worked out only eight hours a week when he was training for the 1984 Olympics; whites may work out nearly that much in a day. East Africans can reportedly take months off from training but quickly regain top form.

This sort of thing is fascinating and entirely to the point, but there is not that much of it in Taboo. Mr. Entine could have made his case in about 100 pages. The rest of the book is taken up with stories about Kipchoge Keino and other famous Kalenjins, stories about the Communist sports factories, and a long, wandering history of race and American sports. This may be interesting to sports fans, but the chart on the previous page is worth a hundred stories about Jesse Owens and Michael Jordan. The early heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, who snarled over prostrate white opponents and carried on publicly with white women, was a colorful figure, and very few people know professional football was (re)integrated with no fanfare the year before Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947 — but so what? Mr. Entine seems to be trying to parry charges of “racism” with sympathetic accounts of black sportsmen who fought segregation.

Still, he has assembled the necessary facts and they all hang together. What we know about racial differences in biology conforms perfectly with what we see on the playing field and in the swimming pool. So what’s the problem? Why can’t the country admit what everyone knows and make it official? The problem — and the answer to the question in the book’s subtitle — is that honesty about athletics could lead to honesty about intelligence. This is why we have near-universal dishonesty, which leads to all sorts of nuttiness. Mr. Entine quotes Bob Herbert of the New York Times, that praising blacks for athletic ability is “a genteel way to say nigger.” An early pre-publication story about Taboo in the Times, quotes a black who says scientific investigation of athletic ability is an “underhanded way” of saying that blacks are “closer to beast . . . than they are to the rest of humanity” and it quotes a white as saying, “Didn’t we hear all this in Germany in 1936?” Mr. Entine has collected many examples of this sort of non-thinking.

Sadly for the egalitarians, the evidence for racial differences in intelligence is far more systematic, far more carefully studied, and much better understood than the evidence for athletic differences. Everyone knows this, which is why everyone pretends so diligently and hysterically not to.

Mr. Entine knows it, too, but tries not to show it. He has laced the book with anti-racist pieties, calls the Pioneer Fund “a magnet for white supremacists,” sneers at Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, and writes happily that the 1938 rematch victory of heavyweight Joe Louis over the German Max Schmeling “was a knockout blow to the smug Nazis and their legion of Aryan-supremacist sympathizers around the world.” He even stoops to what can only be called disingenuousness: The book’s “only real message,” he writes, is that “for all our differences, we are far, far more similar.” That is not the book’s real message; it is a transparent sop to the censorship commissars.

However, despite all the jabber about “racism,” Mr. Entine is careful never to deny the possibility of intelligence differences. He even writes sentences like: “The evolutionary crucible has left population groups with distinct physiques, musculature, testosterone levels, metabolic efficiency, reaction time, and a slew of other characteristics.” (emphasis added) He even writes that black babies are born after a shorter gestation period and mature more quickly than white babies. He knows, all right.

Some day Americans will start saying what they really think about race. If they can’t yet talk about intelligence let them at least begin with sports. May Taboo sell and sell.

ARTICLE

Breaking Taboos in the Publishing Industry

The Struggle to Get Taboo Published.

by Jon Entine

There are only 800 million blacks, or one in eight of the world population, but athletes of African origin hold every major world running record. Blacks make up 70 percent of the NFL and 85 percent of professional basketball. Even in sports in which blacks are not a majority — baseball, soccer, rugby, cricket, even bobsledding in some countries — blacks are represented in greater numbers than their share of the population. In my book, Taboo, I report the very uncontroversial scientific conclusion that environment and culture alone cannot explain this remarkable phenomenon.

“If you can believe that individuals of recent African ancestry are not genetically advantaged over those of European and Asian ancestry in certain athletic endeavors,” observes Vincent Sarich, a renowned biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “then you probably could be led to believe just about anything. But such dominance will never convince those whose minds are made up that genetics plays no role in shaping the racial patterns we see in sports. When we discuss issues such as race, it pushes buttons and the cortex just shuts down.”

To the degree that it is a purely scientific debate, the evidence of black superiority in athletics is overwhelming, and decisively confirmed on the playing field. As equality of opportunity has increased in sports over the last 30 years, equality of results — the diversity of the races of the elite players — has declined. Greater opportunity has actually led to greater inequality.

Popular thinking — or at least what people are willing to say publicly — lags behind the genetic revolution, which has undercut the supposedly politically-comforting belief that all humans are created with equal potential. Evidence spilling forth from the Human Genome Project shows that some functional characteristics do differentiate populations — most clearly in the proclivity to certain diseases and in athletic ability — although the classic racial trichotomy of sub-Saharan black/European white/Asian is indeed fuzzy around the edges. Genetically-linked, highly heritable characteristics such as skeletal structure, the distribution of muscle fiber types, reflex capabilities, metabolic efficiency, lung capacity, or the ability to use energy more efficiently are not evenly distributed across racial groups and cannot be explained by known environmental factors.

But don’t expect a dispassionate public discussion about a subject that has become wholly political. Since World War II, anthropological orthodoxy has held that the very concept of race is a loaded, social construct. “People feel if you say blacks are better athletically, you’re saying they’re dumber,” Frank Deford, the respected author and sports reporter once noted. “But when Jack Nicklaus sinks a 30-foot putt, nobody thinks his IQ goes down.”

I should not have been surprised that my book would cause a brouhaha considering the rough going I faced a decade ago writing and producing an NBC documentary with Tom Brokaw, Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction. In 1988, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, a prognosticator with CBS Sports, had been fired and publicly ridiculed after making an off-handed comment that slave owners had bred blacks to produce the best physical specimens and that this contributed to black success in sports. Mr. Brokaw and I decided that maybe it was about time finally to address the issue openly.

The program provoked intense reaction and it divided public opinion, frequently along racial lines. A white columnist at Newsday called it “a step forward in the dialogue on race and sports” while a black writer at the same daily wrote that “NBC had scientists answer questions that none but a bigot would conjure up.” “[Mr. Brokaw] utterly ignore[d] the facts in favor of the speculation of several scientists,” charged Ralph Wiley in Emerge magazine. “His program played like a badly cast farce.” Still, Black Athletes went on to win numerous awards including Best International Sports Film.

A few years after the documentary, at the urging of literary agent Basil Kane, I circulated a book proposal to publishers to explore the issue in more depth. The reactions were consistent: “By even suggesting that blacks may have a genetic edge in sports, you are opening up the Pandora’s box of intellectual inferiority.” In other words, great proposal, racist idea.

After more than a dozen rejections, an independent-minded editor at Mac-millan, Rick Wolff, offered me a contract for what was to become Taboo. The turn of good fortune proved fleeting. Soon after, Mr. Wolff moved to Warner Books and though he wanted to take the book with him, Warner balked. “It was considered too dicey a subject,” he recalls. “Once the other editors heard it was about racial differences, they wouldn’t even let me present it at an editorial meeting.”

I was stuck with writing the book for Mr. Wolf’s eventual replacement as sports editor at Macmillan, Natalie Chapman, who knew nothing about the subject. Miss Chapman was encouraging when she reviewed the early manuscript, but then apparently got cold feet. Eight months later, she sent me the brush off. “Much of the manuscript is smoothly and elegantly written, and most of it is quite enjoyable to read. [But] while I admire the goals of the book, I must regretfully inform you that [it] lacks sufficient persuasiveness “to avoid being torn apart by critics, reviewers, and readers.”

Years of work on an important subject were suddenly in mortal danger. Basil, my agent, embarked on a full court press to find a new publisher. Again, most everyone was too frightened even to read it. Basic Books, a first-rate independent publisher affiliated with Harper-Collins, wanted to do it until an African American consultant nixed the book as “potentially racist.” One female editor lectured Basil for a half hour about how insensitive he was even to propose such an idea. Would she please read the book? “I don’t have time for such trash,” she replied.

That reaction was all the more infuriating given the lengths to which I went to bring different perspectives to the book. In recognition of the complexity of the issues in sociology, anthropology, and population genetics, I submitted the manuscript for review to a board of advisors and experts drawn from a range of races, professional expertise, and countries. To a man and woman, they loved the book and thought it fair and provocative.

“You will be accused of spouting old fashioned racism for even raising the issue of African American superiority in athletics,” wrote Earl Smith, Chairman of the Department of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Wake Forest University, a leading black scholar and author of several books on race and sports, and one of my board members. “All this beating around the bush has to stop. This is a good book. I am quite excited with the arguments that are raised.”

Dr. Smith’s endorsement, along with reviews and letters of support from the editor of the Journal of the African American Male, the president of the Human Biology Association, Olympic Committee scientists, and top athletes didn’t make a difference. When it comes to race, “the cortex shuts down.” No one would give Taboo a chance.

The log jam broke when Geoff Shandler, an editor at PublicAffairs, another independent publisher, also affiliated with HarperCollins, read it and loved it. “I understand what you are trying to do with this book,” he wrote. “We’d be honored to do it.”

Even with a respected publisher behind the book, the hysteria continues. In early January, The New York Times magazine told me it was killing plans to publish an adaptation, calling it potentially “dangerous.” “Our reluctant decision to drop the project is no reflection of my regard for your work, which remains high,” wrote Kyle Crichton, an editor who had championed the article. “In brief, the whole subject worries my editor”.” ABC 20/20 also suddenly backed out of doing a story on Taboo. An executive explained that “higher management” got scared.

The book is now finally in the hands of the public. Will it be as skittish about the contents as the publishing industry? I doubt it. The African American community in particular has become irritated to the point of anger about the patronizing censorship and codes of silence that many journalists and institutions employ to “protect them.” Science is a method of interrogating reality, a cumulative process of testing new and more refined explanations, not an assertion of dry, inalterable facts. It is a way of asking questions, not of imposing answers. I suspect American readers of all ideological and racial stripes are far more open to dispassionate inquiry than many “leaders” of American letters.

Mr. Entine is a writer and Emmy-winning producer for NBC and ABC News, and has won a National Press Club Award. Taboo is his first book.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Rocking the Boat

Just when we thought the Soviet Union was gone for good, it reappears in the United States. Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, John Rocker, will undergo a psychological evaluation because he told Sports Illustrated that New York City is so full of foreigners it makes him feel like a stranger. He also said he doesn’t like to share the subway with AIDS carriers and unwed mothers. After the shrink’s report comes in, baseball commissioner Bud Selig will choose an appropriate punishment. It doesn’t matter that Mr. Rocker, 25, has groveled piteously and insisted he is not “racist.” He is now a dissident, and like Soviets who doubted Communist orthodoxy, the only sane player in baseball has to have his head examined. (Ronald Blum, Baseball Orders Rocker to Undergo Psychological Tests, AP, Jan. 6, 2000.)

Professional sports are full of rapists, robbers, and all manner of thugs. Many players leave a trail of illegitimate children from coast to coast. But no one can remember anyone being ordered to have his head examined. George W. Bush is all for it for Mr. Rocker, of course. “The fellow said some incredibly offensive things,” he explained. “He is a public person. And I appreciate them [the baseball authorities] trying to get the man help.” (Bush Agrees With Rocker Decision, AP, Jan. 10, 2000)

No Nonsense in Lusaka

Dawson Lupunga is the Community Development Minister for the African nation of Zambia. He has vowed to rid the capital city Lusaka of blind beggars because they give visitors the “wrong impression.” Mr. Lupunga singled out blind beggars as “work-shy.” “Begging is easy,” he says. “They don’t sweat when they ask for money. They don’t want to till the land. That is why they beg.” He complains that the blind have been given too much freedom under what he calls the current regime of democratic rule. Mr. Lupunga, a wealthy farmer, says Zambians should not expect government handouts and that everyone, including the disabled, must work for a living. In October, police drove 200 blind people out of the city and many are now said to be in a resettlement camp in the north of the country. Thousands more are reportedly in hiding in the townships around the capital, fearing forcible removal. (Ishbel Matheson, Destitute Blind Are Thrown Out of Lusaka, Telegraph (London), November 16, 1999.)

Corrupting the Japanese

Japan is a homogeneous country whose population is only one percent non-Japanese, and every year only about 20 people meet its strict definition of a “refugee.” It has no racial or ethnic anti-discrimination laws, and foreigners are sometimes barred from bars, clubs, public baths, and anywhere else Japanese feel like being among themselves. A recent court case may have breached this freedom of association.

Ana Bortz is a commentator for Brazilian television who came to Japan six years ago. Recently she was escorted out of a jewelry store because the proprietors didn’t like the way she was acting and because they thought Brazilians are more likely to commit robberies than Japanese. Miss Bortz sued the owners under, of all things, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Japan stupidly signed in 1996. A Shizuoka District Court judge ruled that the jewelry store owner violated Japan’s treaty obligations, and awarded Miss Bortz $47,000 in damages. The New York Times heralds Miss Bortz as someone who may go down in history as the Rosa Parks of Japan. (Howard French, Japan’s Cultural Bias Against Foreigners Comes Under Attack, New York Times, Nov. 15, 1999.)

Making Waves

AR editor Jared Taylor has been a guest on about 20 radio programs to discuss an opinion poll commissioned by the New Century Foundation. Mr. Taylor noted that many whites express support for diversity in the abstract but oppose it when asked about its specific consequences. Because the NCF press release simply reported the poll results and invited further inquiry, some very liberal hosts invited Mr. Taylor to speak. A number of Public Radio stations, for example, expected him to join in hand-wringing over lingering white “racism,” but were disappointed. A typical exchange:

Q: So what can we do to help whites overcome their fears about becoming a minority?

A: Those fears are legitimate and any attempt to downplay or pooh-pooh them is simply an expression of the anti-white desire to see whites displaced by non-whites. We encourage whites not just to express these fears but to act on them.

It is easy to imagine the astonished gibbering this provoked.

On December 27th, the Washington Times published an article called “Poll Finds Ambivalence About Diversity,” and Mr. Taylor was interviewed about the poll by a reporter for The Trentonian (NJ) newspaper.

Be Tolerant or Else!

New Hazelton is a town in British Columbia in an area where about half the people are Gitksan Indians. According to school board policy, elementary school students must be “sensitized” to “native cultures” by attending courses taught by Gitksan Indians. Predictably, the Indians started telling the students how much finer and nobler than whites they were. They also started teaching Indian religion.

One father pulled a seventh-grade boy out of class when he came home saying that Indians were superior to whites because they love nature. Another boy’s parents did the same thing when he reported that God had saved the Gitksan Indians with a clam shell and an eagle feather. The parents thought this was too close to religious instruction, and asked for more work on reading and arithmetic instead. The school has suspended the students who would not attend the sessions, and has banned them from school property. Sharon Beedle, the acting school superintendent, says sensitivity classes correct a curriculum that is “Euro-centric,” and that skipping them is like refusing to go to science class. (Stewart Bell, B.C. School Ejects Boys for Refusing Indian Class, National Post (Canada), Nov. 11, 1999.)

Feder on Diversity

Boston Herald columnist Don Feder has written a column on diversity that could have appeared in AR. Here are excerpts:

Of the many myths of liberalism, perhaps the most improbable is the notion that diversity makes us stronger. As immigrants arrived, the native-born fled. New York [City]’s non-Hispanic white population has plummeted from 63 percent in 1970 to 35 percent today. Due to immigration, nationally, whites will constitute a minority by 2050.

In New York City, the fastest growing immigrant groups are from Ghana, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Egypt. These countries are all impoverished, backward and far removed from our culture.

Many of us in the great, overburdened middle class understand what the elite does not: That due to unrestrained immigration and multiculturalism, America is losing it’s identity.

Has a country ever grown stronger through disunity? Our differences may make us interesting; they do not unite us. What happens when a growing portion of the population feels no allegiance to our national ideals, disdains our heroes and clings to its separateness?

The elite celebrates diversity; others have to live with it. (Don Feder, Divided, We Do Not Stand For Anything, Boston Herald, November 15, 1999.)

Doesn’t Look Jewish

National Catholic Reporter is one of the best-known Catholic papers in the country. It recently held a contest to update the image of Christ for the new millennium, and drew 1,700 entries from 19 countries. The winner was Janet McKenzie, a 51-year-old from Island Pond, Vermont who entered a painting called “Jesus of the People.” Miss McKenzie, a self-described “devout agnostic,” will collect $2,000 for showing Jesus as a black and with an Asian Yin-Yang and a feather symbolizing American Indian spirituality. The background is pink. Jesus of the People was featured on the cover of a special millennium issue of National Catholic Reporter.

Editor Michael Farrell writes, “We got a strong impression that the era of the blond, blue-eyed Jesus is over. When the church was overwhelmingly a Western institution, we made Jesus in our likeness . . . This work of art may be prophetic of where and how Christianity will flourish in the next millennium or two.” (David Crary, Updated Jesus Has Dark Skin, AP, December 13, 1999.)

Mr. Farrell has a point; today, whites are a minority of the world’s Christians. Fifty-eight percent of Protestants live in Latin America. So do two thirds of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians — whose churches began relatively recently in the United States. Last year, at the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglicans, only 316 of the 736 bishops were from Europe or the U.S. Africa sent 224 and Asia sent 95. One in three Roman Catholics is a Third-Worlder, and both Asia and Africa have more Cardinals than the United States (15 and 14, as opposed to 12).

Christianity particularly appeals to non-white women. Seventy percent of members of African churches are women as are 70 percent of Latin American Pentecostals. In China, 80 percent of church members are women, as are most of the leaders of Korean church cell groups. “Jesus of the People” might as well be a woman. (Gayle White, Mission Fields Come Full Circle, Washington Times, Jan. 10, 2000, p. A10.)

The Usual Story

Last April, Omobonike Odegbami, a graduate student at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, said she was getting threatening, racially-charged e-mail. The campus newspaper ran a front-page story about her and the FBI started investigating classmates and instructors. Miss Odegbami eventually admitted she sent the e-mail to herself and in December was sentenced to 200 hours of community service, mental health counseling at her own expense, and to write a letter of apology in the campus newspaper. She gave no explanation for her behavior and apparently none was asked. (Jennifer Freehan, Woman Sentenced in Racist E-Mail Hoax, Toledo Blade, December 24, 1999.)

Not a Bias Crime

In Manhattan, a white, 25-year-old television producer was walking home from work early one December morning when a black man grabbed her and jabbed something hard into her back. He reportedly threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate and forced the woman into a stairwell, where he raped, sodomized and beat her. According to news reports: “During the attack, the assailant, who is black, also berated his white victim with racial curses, police sources say. But cops did not classify it as a bias crime.” (Murray Weiss, Don Kaplan, Paula Doneman and Cathy Burke, Cops Fume Over Lousy Video of 6th Ave. Rapist, New York Post, December 22, 1999.)

NBC Surrenders

Last summer non-whites threatened to boycott television networks because there aren’t enough minority characters on new network programs. NBC has now worked out a deal with the NAACP. Next fall, it will hire at least one new non-white writer for all its second-year programs, and will encourage producers to hire non-whites for free-lance writing. NBC will also increase job-training and internship positions for non-whites and has promised to spend an additional $10 million on purchases from minority-owned businesses over the next 18 months. ABC, CBS and Fox are all expected to announce similar programs; somehow there is no word on whether Black Entertainment Television or the Hispanic networks Univision and Telemundo are planning similar diversity efforts. (NBC to Hire More Minorities As Part of Deal With NAACP, Washington Times, January 6, 2000, p. A2.)

A day after NBC threw in the towel, the minority coalition that had pressed for more non-whites splintered over the deal. Hispanics, Asians and American Indians complained that NAACP head, Kweisi Mfume, did not consider or consult them. Esteban Torres, a spokesman for Hispanics in the coalition, said Mr. Mfume “agreed to join this coalition, and before we knew it he holds a press conference announcing this deal. Not good.” Norman Mineta, who represents the Asians, says Mr. Mfume failed to get promises of a vice president of diversity in each network. “The three remaining coalitions will continue to act as one,” says Mr. Torres. “The first die was cast, of course, by the NAACP going on its own.”

Just how badly are non-whites excluded from television? Sixty-six percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild are white, eight percent are black, Hispanics are four percent, Asians are just over two percent, and twelve percent decline to list their race. The minority coalition does not seem too concerned that whites are actually under-represented given that they account for 72 percent of the population. (Dana Calvo and Greg Baxter, NBC-NAACP Diversity Plan Irks Coalition, Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2000.)

‘Unique Humanness’

A 60-year-old black man who dressed up as a woman to rob a bank near Pittsburgh has a novel defense. Brian Gamble of Philadelphia says white racism gave him post-traumatic stress disorder, which led him to pull a gun on tellers last year. Both judge and prosecutor said he is welcome to attempt such a defense. Mr. Gamble wants to be examined by a black psychologist and hopes the results will show he is insane and therefore innocent. He says a white psychologist would not have, “the empathy, moral courage and responsibility, as well as the intellectual depth or the peculiar understanding . . . of the African-American’s unique humanness, sensitivity, and the traumatically acquired psychological aberrations . . . (of) White Racism.” (AP, PA Robbery Suspect Blames Racism, December 23, 1999.)

Fighting Integration in Malaysia

Malaysia’s 22 million people are 58 percent Malay, 26 percent Chinese and 7 percent Indian. There is little social interaction among the different groups and the country’s University of Science would like to change that. It has started by integrating the dormitories, but students are resisting. Chinese complain that Malays, who are Muslims, wake them up with early-morning prayers. They are also uncomfortable eating pork around Muslim roommates. Many students have left the dorms and have moved into apartments with members of their own race.

Those who stayed don’t mix. Students sit with their own groups in the cafeteria and eat different foods. The Malays play soccer while the Chinese swim and play badminton. Passive resistance is giving way to agitation, and hundreds of students of all races have marched against integration. “Sooner or later, they’ll have to listen to us,” says chairman of the Students Council, Fairaz Mat Yusof. Other universities are thinking twice about their own integration plans. “Leave us with our freedom to choose the people we want to stay with,” says a student at the University of Malaya. (Sean Yoong, Students Resent Mandated Integration of Dormitories, Washington Times, November 26, 1999, p. A24.)

(Getting) Out of Africa

Skilled South African whites are clearing out as racial preferences get worse, and many are going to Australia. “Youngsters are saying they can’t get a job unless they’re black,” says a Perth employment agent. “Unfortunately it [affirmative action] seems to be creating a new generation of racists.” Initially it was mostly Anglo-South Africans who made the “chicken run” (escaping black rule) but now Afrikaners and even Indians are leaving. In the year ending June, 1999, Australia granted 5,704 “skill stream” visas to South Africans who were let in to improve the workforce. It also admitted 850 South African entrepreneurs who must invest between three and eight million rand ($500,00 to $1.33 million) in new businesses. Many South Africans who have stayed are hedging their bets by sending their children to college in Australia. (Lindsey Arkley, Affirmative Action Behind Chicken Run, The Sunday Independent (South Africa), December 11, 1999.)

Because so many young whites are leaving, old people face their final years alone. “It is horrible here at Christmas,” says retired school principal Dawn Darby. Mrs. Darby was upset when her children left but now realizes it is for the best. “This is no place to bring up children. The standard of schooling is definitely dropping . . . I think it’s going to get worse here.” (Anton La-Guardia, Elderly Whites Face Life Alone, Washington Times, December 30, 1999, p. A16.)

All-Purpose Invective

Al Gore’s campaign manager, black woman Donna Brazile, has riled black Republicans by saying they don’t care about helping blacks. “They [Colin Powell and J.C. Watts] would rather take pictures with black children than feed them,” she says. Congressman Watts let fly with a furious letter to Mr. Gore, in which he called Miss Brazile’s remarks . . . “racist.” (Inside Politics, Washington Times, Jan. 5, 2000, p. A6. J.C. Watts Lashes Out at Gore Over Campaign Manager’s Race Remarks, Drudge Report, Jan. 5, 2000.)

The California Cauldron

“Social promotion” is the practice of promoting students to the next grade even though they have not mastered the material. In the Los Angeles school district about half of the students have failed to learn enough to advance and should be held back a grade. Two-thirds of eighth-graders do not deserve to enter ninth grade. In 1999 the school district had hoped to end “social promotion” but does not have the stomach to hold back 50 percent of the students. It will end social promotion in the second and eighth grades only, in the hope of phasing it out in other grades over the next four years. The district has decided to blame superintendent Ruben Zacarias for all this, and is buying out his contract. (Louis Shahagun, 50% of Pupils Not Ready to Pass, L.A. District Says, L.A. Times, Dec. 1, 1999, p. A1.)

We note in passing that 70 percent of the students in the district are Hispanic. Fifty-seven percent are classified as having “limited English proficiency.” About half of California’s Hispanics fail to graduate from high school.

Mexico, New and Old

District Judge Robert Robles of New Mexico has ruled that the state’s Dona Ana county must let people serve on juries even if they don’t speak English. The county has a population of 167,500 of which 58 percent is Hispanic, and 18 percent say they speak little or no English. The October ruling threw the county’s court system into chaos, and 15 trials had to be delayed while judges dismissed and reconvened jury pools. There is some question about how non-English speakers are going to do their jobs, but interpreters anticipate boom times.

All of New Mexico is now awaiting a state Supreme Court ruling on whether every county will have to hire interpreters. Judge Robles based his decision on a passage from the 1911 New Mexico constitution that says no person may be kept off a jury because of an “inability to speak, read or write the English or Spanish languages.” It sounds as though Twee- and Tagalog-speakers could soon be serving on New Mexico juries, too. (In New Mexico County, Jurors Need Not Speak English, Washington Post, Dec. 16, 1999, p. G9.)

Ford Cleans House

Ford Motor Company has announced it will grade its 20,000 executives on the curve. Ten percent will get an A, 80 percent will get a B and ten percent a C. The Cs will see their bonuses and stock options go to As and some Bs. Anyone who gets Cs two years in a row could be demoted or fired. There has been some speculation that this will cover an attempt to clear out white men and promote women and non-whites. In August, Vice President Richard Parry-Jones started tongues wagging when he wrote, “we are trapped in a monocultural environment that is dominated by old white males. We need to change. We need more employees who are more reflective of our customer base.” (AP, Ford Ties Executives Perks Pay to Merit, Dec. 24, 1999.)

Diminishing Returns

According to religious law, only someone whose mother is a Jew can claim to be a Jew. However, under what is called the Law of Return, anyone with a single Jewish grandparent is eligible to immigrate to Israel and many non-Jews have begun to arrive. In the first three months of 1999, non-Jewish immigrants outnumbered Jews, 55 percent to 45 percent, and the 225,000 gentiles who have come from the former Soviet Union are beginning to show political strength. Rabbis complain there are now plenty of butcher shops that openly sell pork.

Religious Jews, in particular, want to change the Law of Return. Rahamim Malul, a Knesset member from the religious Shas party, says “The loopholes in the law must be closed so that the state will not turn into a country where a large percentage of its citizens are gentiles.” Officials in the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption have drawn up proposals for restricting non-Jewish immigration. (Mark Lavie, Israelis Debate Immigration Laws, AP, Nov. 29, 1999.) Initially, the Law of Return applied only to Jews as defined by religious law. Israel later broadened its scope to include people with one Jewish grandparent so as to match the Nazi definition of a Jew.

Brainless

The teacher of the year at Walton Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, is under investigation for racial insensitivity. Gloria Nelson, who is black, may be temporarily suspended because she told black third-graders that some people think blacks have smaller brains than whites and are less intelligent. Miss Nelson does not deny saying this, but explains that she was trying to motivate the children by telling them ignorant people might doubt their abilities. School authorities accept her explanation, but must investigate her because at least one child was psychologically wounded when he thought she was saying blacks really do have small brains. (Martha Deller, Honored Walton Elementary Teacher Facing Suspension Over Racial Remarks, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Dec. 14, 1999.)

Satchmo Speaks

Oxford University Press is bringing out a new collection of the writings of legendary trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, which shows him to have been insufficiently “black” in his thinking. Louis Armstrong in His Own Words traces the showman from his humble birth in 1901 and finds that he decided early that the way to get ahead was to make friends with whites rather than fight them. He once wrote, with his peculiar punctuation, that a fellow musician had advised him, “always have a White Man (who like you) and can + will put his Hand on your shoulder and say — “This is ‘My’ Nigger” and, Can’t Nobody Harm’ Ya.” Armstrong did not have a racial chip on his shoulder and once proudly dressed up as “King of the Zulus” for a Mardi Gras float, despite criticism from militants. He was also candid about his own people, complaining of the poor blacks with whom he grew up in Louisiana:

It seemed as they were Jealous of each other, especially if one Negro had a little more than the other, no matter how hard he saved and got it. They always wanted somebody to give them something but too Lazy to work for it.

By the time Armstrong died in 1971, his racial attitudes were very unfashionable, and his letters suggest that he felt shut out by blacks. Currently there are plans to turn his last home, in a working-class neighborhood in Corona, Queens, into a museum. (Timothy Gardner, Louis Armstrong, Just Getting to Know Ya, Reuters, Dec. 21, 1999.)

No Cause For Alarm

When Silvio Izquierdo-Leyva shot four co-workers and one stranger to death at the Tampa Radisson Hotel last December it briefly became national news. Only in Florida did the man’s background and interests get any coverage — and they were, to say the least, multicultural. Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva, 36, is a legal immigrant from Cuba who had just returned from a visit to his homeland, where he had begun a year-long apprenticeship to become a baba lao or Santeria priest. Santeria is a primitive, African amalgam of animism and Catholicism that originated among Cuban blacks and has immigrated to the United States. One of its most colorful rituals is animal sacrifice, which the Supreme Court has found to be a religious practice protected under the First Amendment.

Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva’s family say that since his decision to seek the priesthood he had been a changed man. All his clothes — even his shoes — had to be white, the color of Santeria purity. He filled a backyard shed with holy fetishes and came every day to offer them luncheon meat. He did not, however, lose his taste for horror movies.

Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva showed no emotion or agitation when he was arrested. “When I arrived on the scene, it was just like someone having been stopped for a traffic violation,” said Tampa police chief Bennie Holder. “He was not upset, he was very calm. He’s upstairs sleeping; he’s obviously not too concerned about it.” Santeria experts say Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva was probably in a spiritual trance when he started blazing away. (Kathryn Wexler, Suspect Devoted to Santeria, St. Petersburg Times, Dec. 31, 1999. George Pawlaszyk, The Suspect, Tampa Tribune, Jan. 1, 2000. Kathryn Wexler, Trouble Lay Hidden in Shooting Suspect’s Past, St. Petersburg Times, Jan. 1, 2000.)

Curiously, there seems to have been no move to connect these killings with the shooter’s unusual interests, an omission that would be unthinkable had Mr. Izquierdo-Leyva’s passions been, for example, the Doctrine of Enumerated Powers or the Constitutionality of anti-discrimination law.

Scales Fall From Eyes

Charles Francis Adams III (1866-1954) was the great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, sixth President (1825-1829) and Secretary of the Navy from 1929 to 1933 (under Herbert Hoover). In the May 1906 issue of Century magazine, he described a trip to the Sudan and how he came to realize that American thinking about race was a snare and a delusion:

Looking about me among Africans in Africa far removed from that American environment to which I have been accustomed the scales fell from my eyes. I found myself most impressed by a realizing sense of the appalling amount of error and cant in which we of the United States have indulged on this topic. We have actually wallowed in a bog of self-sufficient ignorance — especially we philanthropists and theorists of New England. We do so still. Having eyes, we will not see. Even now we not infrequently hear the successor to the abolitionist and humanitarian of the ante-Civil War period — the ‘Uncle Tom’ period — announce that the difference between the white man and the black man is much less considerable than is ordinarily supposed, and that the only real obstacle in the negro’s way is that ‘he has never been given a chance.’

For myself, after visiting the black man in his own house, I come back with a decided impression that this is the sheerest of delusions, due to pure ignorance of rudimentary facts; yet we built upon it in Reconstruction days as upon a foundation-stone — a self-evident truth . . .

. . . Baker, writing in 1865, closes his long enumeration of conditions [in the Sudan] with a startling clarity: ‘So long as it is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same management, so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong.’

If true, this strikes at the very root of the American polity — the equality of man before the law. We cannot conform to it. If the fact must be conceded, so much the worse for the fact. By all good Americans, at least, the theory will none the less be maintained, the principle confidently asserted.

What, then is to be our American outcome? The negro squats at our hearthstone; we can neither assimilate nor expel him . . .

Meanwhile, one thing is clear — the work done by those who were in political control at the close of our Civil War was work done in utter ignorance of ethnologic law and total disregard of unalterable fact. Starting the movement wrong, it will be yet productive of incalculable injury to us.

The negro after Emancipation should have been dealt with not as a political equal, much less forced into a position of superiority; he should have been treated as a ward and dependent — firmly, but in a spirit of kindness and absolute justice. Practically impossible as a policy then, this is not less so now. At best it is something which can only be slowly and tentatively approximated.

. . . [W]e will in America make small progress toward a solution of our race problem until we approach it in less of a theoretic and humanitarian and more of a scientific spirit.

Equality results not from law, but exists because things are in essentials alike; and a political system which works admirably when applied to homogeneous equals, results only in chaos when generalized into a nostrum to be administered universally. It has been markedly so of late with us. (Quoted in Reflex Light From the Negroes of the Nile, The Scrap Book, Nov. 1906, p. 333.)

Remember the Alamo?

Hispanics are nearly 65 percent of the population of San Antonio, Texas, and are starting to remake the city. Local businessmen, in conjunction with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, have announced a plan to make the city completely bilingual. Called “Imagine San Antonio,” it calls for a five-year effort to integrate Spanish into local businesses and the school system. Public officials will have to be bilingual and a new school will be established to teach Spanish to anyone who doesn’t speak it.

Rita Elizondo, president of the local Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says bilingualism will help tourism and commerce: “We are trying to take advantage of the area’s natural resources such as its proximity and historic ties to Mexico. Many people realize that our relationship with Mexico is important and professionals should be bilingual to be better prepared to face the new millennium.” To promote the plan the group will run television commercials of students talking about the joys of being bilingual. (Plan Proposes That San Antonio Become Totally Bilingual, EFE (Spain) News Service, January 10, 2000.)

Protecting Illegals

In October, the Hispanic woman who chairs the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Ida Castro, expanded its jurisdiction to cover illegal aliens. One of its first test cases involves Quality Art, a lithograph distribution company in Gilbert, Arizona. A four-month investigation concluded that managers used racial slurs and groped 25 women who were illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala.

The women say the company also strip-searched them to uncover a suspected theft. The women resigned en masse last August after a sympathetic supervisor was fired. Quality Art denies discrimination and says it fired the women when it learned they were illegals. Under the new EEOC policy, illegals cannot get their jobs back but can collect damages and back pay. (Jim Walsh, U.S. Finds Race Bias at Company, Arizona Republic, December 30, 1999.)

Vanishing Europeans

Europe is suffering a severe population decline. A forthcoming United Nations report says the European Union could lose five million people by 2025 and 40 million by 2050. Italy and Germany have the lowest fertility rates, with populations falling by 0.9 and 0.8 percent a year. Italy’s current low birth rate means its population could go from 57 million today to 41 million in 2050, a decline that would be faster than the collapse of the Roman Empire. Populations are predicted to age as well as decline. If current trends continue, by 2050 Italy’s workforce could fall by half while its number of pensioners doubles, which would play havoc with the pension system. Only Britain appears to have a growing population but the UN does not expect that to last long. Naturally, the UN thinks Third-World immigration is the solution. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, EU ‘Will Need Immigrants’ as Working Population Falls, London Daily Telegraph, January 11, 2000.)

ANNOUNCEMENT Register Now! Places are filling for the March 31-April 2 AR conference. Don’t miss the chance to hear Phil Rushton, Richard Lynn, Samuel Francis, Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and others including Jean-Marie Le Pen’s right-hand man, Bruno Gollnisch. Please telephone (703) 716-0900 or visit our web page at AmRen.com for details. See you there.

Protecting Illegals

In October, the Hispanic woman who chairs the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Ida Castro, expanded its jurisdiction to cover illegal aliens. One of its first test cases involves Quality Art, a lithograph distribution company in Gilbert, Arizona. A four-month investigation concluded that managers used racial slurs and groped 25 women who were illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala.

The women say the company also strip-searched them to uncover a suspected theft. The women resigned en masse last August after a sympathetic supervisor was fired. Quality Art denies discrimination and says it fired the women when it learned they were illegals. Under the new EEOC policy, illegals cannot get their jobs back but can collect damages and back pay. (Jim Walsh, U.S. Finds Race Bias at Company, Arizona Republic, December 30, 1999.)

Vanishing Europeans

Europe is suffering a severe population decline. A forthcoming United Nations report says the European Union could lose five million people by 2025 and 40 million by 2050. Italy and Germany have the lowest fertility rates, with populations falling by 0.9 and 0.8 percent a year. Italy’s current low birth rate means its population could go from 57 million today to 41 million in 2050, a decline that would be faster than the collapse of the Roman Empire. Populations are predicted to age as well as decline. If current trends continue, by 2050 Italy’s workforce could fall by half while its number of pensioners doubles, which would play havoc with the pension system. Only Britain appears to have a growing population but the UN does not expect that to last long. Naturally, the UN thinks Third-World immigration is the solution. (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, EU ‘Will Need Immigrants’ as Working Population Falls, London Daily Telegraph, January 11, 2000.)

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I want to share a story that high-lights a small victory. Last summer I got on radio station WXYT in Detroit after the talk radio host (Jimmy Barrett) said something to the effect of “Why does it seem only whites commit heinous crimes against non-whites?” He said this on the Monday following Benjamin Smith’s shooting rampage in which he killed a black and a Korean. I didn’t like that so I pulled over and called the station from my car phone. After several minutes, I got on the air, explained that what Mr. Smith had done was deplorable and then very carefully started making the case about interracial crime that was presented in The Color of Crime.

I said that based on eyewitness and victim reports compiled in a U.S. government study, the National Crime Victimization Survey, blacks are about 56 times more likely to commit criminal violence against whites than the other way around and that they commit 90 percent of black-white interracial crime. When I further said that according to NCVS, blacks are 102 times more likely to rob whites than the reverse, Mr. Barrett objected and said this was be-cause they needed money. Instead of challenging him, I reported that in 1997 blacks committed approximately 30,000 interracial rapes while whites committed only 5,400 and that since there are about six times as many whites as blacks, it meant blacks were about 40 times more likely to rape in this way.

I think Mr. Barrett realized he was headed for checkmate and he cut off the phone call. I quickly turned on my car radio and heard Mr. Barrett suggest that when it comes to rape, perhaps black men are just less prejudiced and suggested black-on-white rape was a “love crime!” I think he was mortified by what I was pointing out on the air and had a paranoid damage-control fit.

Tim Lenane, Royal Oak, Mich.

Sir — Your piece on Lothrop Stoddard was very good and made me wonder why we never hear of men like Stoddard. He was obviously an influential scholar and a best-selling author, and his predictions have been proven correct. Conservatives, to the extent that they still care about immigration and Western civilization, should be writing about him and his scholarship and what he has to say about today’s problems. Stoddard should be in the same league as Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, and James Burnham.

Unfortunately, I think today’s writers — even conservatives — have never heard of Lothrop Stoddard. The ones that do know about him probably just dismiss him as a “white supremacist.” I am pleased AR does not fall into either category.

Joseph Kowalski, New Britain, Conn.

Sir — I would like to ask your readers’ support for a new political action committee called MichImpac (Michigan Immigration Pac). We established it in August, 1999, for just one reason — to defeat U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham, who is an open-door agent for unbridled immigration and who has gutted the Immigration Reform Acts of 1986 and 1996. We will conduct a frontal assault on this man, mainly through TV spots and print media. I have engaged a television production company to create a minimum of four spots, replete with documentation. One is ready for broad-cast now.

Our board consists of 12 people from around the U.S. There are no paid employees and we follow strict accounting procedures. If you would like to contribute to our efforts or learn more about us please call 1-888-248-6970 or write P.O. Box 182370, Shelby Twp., MI 48318-2370. This is our last chance to stop the Third-World invasion.

Joe McCutcheon, Fort Smith, Ark.

Sir — I read with much interest your review of The California Cauldron. The author William Clark is no marginal character — he teaches at UCLA — but he obviously recognizes that turning America into a piece of the Third World is a disaster. For every William Clark who manages to get a subversive book of this kind published, there must be 50 college professors who see things as he does. Why do these people not have an organization that is actively countering the nonsense that passes for university instruction today? Are they really not there after all — or are they just cowards?

Sam Harper, Winston Salem, N.C.

Sir — I read with some concern your “O Tempora” account of tuberculosis coming to North Dakota. Ultimately, the most dangerous immigrants could be microbes, not people. Doctors are very concerned about the spread of drug-resistant TB — which got that way because Third-Worlders both here and abroad do not stick to a full course of treatment, thereby encouraging germs to mutate. You could be spending your last days in a sanatorium that feels just like New York City’s Number Seven subway.

Constance Kimble, Dallas, Tex.

AR is Hiring! We will be needing a new Assistant Editor later this spring. This is a full-time position for someone who can write and who understands computers. Experience is less important than commitment and ability. Please send resumes to Box 527, Oakton, VA 22124.