American Renaissance magazine
Vol 11, No. 8	August 2000

 

CONTENTS

The Racial Transformation of Britain
Book Review: Black Insurrection
Some Thoughts are Worse Than Murder
Book Review: Do Genetic Differences Justify Racism?
Special Report: The Galton Report
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Racial Transformation of Britain

How Enoch Powell’s warnings went unheeded.

by Richard Lynn

During the closing decades of the twentieth century the large-scale immigration of Hispanics, Asians and blacks made the United States an increasingly multiracial society. However, this transformation has not taken place only in America. This strange process of self-effacement has also taken place in Canada, Australia and throughout Western Europe — particularly in Britain.

There have been small numbers of non-whites in Britain for hundreds of years. Blacks first appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century following the beginning of the slave trade in 1563. English slavers picked up blacks from West Africa for transport to the Caribbean and America, and brought a few back to England. They acquired such a bad reputation that in 1596 Queen Elizabeth wrote to mayors and sheriffs throughout the country saying there were “already too many here” and should all be expelled. The Queen must not have been completely obeyed because five years later she issued another proclamation requiring that the “said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this Her Majesty’s dominions.”

Despite such decrees, a few blacks continued to be brought to England to work as servants. Several hundred runaway American slaves came to England after the end of the American Revolutionary War. According to Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: a History of Blacks in Britain, many became beggars on the streets of London. The government considered them a serious social problem, and set up a plan to resettle them in Sierra Leone. Three hundred fifty were actually sent there. By the beginning of the twentieth century there were very few blacks in Britain and the only significant black communities were in the ports of Liverpool and Cardiff. In 1919 there were serious race riots in both cities.

It was after the end of the Second World War that large numbers of blacks and other non-Europeans settled in Britain. The process began with the British Nationality Act passed in 1948 by Clement Atlee’s Labour Government. This act conferred British citizenship on the people of the British colonies and gave them the right to enter, settle, and work in Britain. At that time the colonies consisted of India, Hong Kong, Malaysia, much of Africa, most of the Caribbean, and a number of other smaller territories. The act gave similar rights of entry and residence to citizens of the British Commonwealth, consisting of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Thus the act covered many hundreds of millions of people, most of whom were not white.

Why did Parliament pass such a law? British historian Andrew Roberts wrote in his 1994 book, Eminent Churchillians, that it probably reflected gratitude towards the Commonwealth nations that had supported Britain during the war against Germany. He writes that the law was “drawn up at the height of enthusiasm for the concept of ‘Commonwealth’ . . . all political parties embraced the ‘Commonwealth ideal’ with a fervour and naiveté which may seem absurd today.” He also points out that the act was a kind of afterthought that actually reflected an “absence of policy.”

Just as was the case with the watershed 1965 immigration reform in the United States, hardly anyone pointed out what might happen if huge numbers of non-European people actually came. One of the few to raise this question was a young Conservative Member of Parliament named Enoch Powell, but government spokesmen and senior members of his own party assured him that very few would actually arrive in Britain.

These reassurances were ill-founded. In May, 1948, within a few weeks of the act becoming law, the first boatload of blacks arrived from Jamaica. They were to be followed by many more from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and by lesser numbers from Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. In the 1950s quite large numbers of blacks and Indians were entering and settling in Britain, and towards the end of the decade it was becoming apparent that while Indian immigrants adapted to life in Britain, blacks did not. One problem was that many whites didn’t like them. It was common, for example, for advertisements for rental property to specify “No Blacks,” though this was later made illegal. Other events that called attention to blacks were the 1958 race riots in which blacks looted and burned shops in the Notting Hill district of London and in the city of Nottingham.

Following the riots a few Conservative politicians began to voice disquiet about the presence and continuing immigration of blacks. One of these was Lord Salisbury, who said he was “extremely apprehensive of the economic and social results, for Europeans and for Africans alike, that were likely to result from an unrestricted immigration of men and women of the African race into Britain.” The Times of September 3, 1958, reported that whites resented blacks because “they are alleged to do no work and to collect a rich sum from the assistance board” and “they are charged with all kinds of misbehavior, especially sexual.” Later research was to show that these perceptions had an element of truth in so far as blacks were found to have about twice the level of unemployment of whites, about six times the level of crime, and high rates of illegitimacy.

By 1961 it was estimated that there were in Britain approximately 210,000 blacks from the Caribbean and 122,000 Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from the Indian sub-Continent. The Conservative government of the day, led by Harold Macmillan, decided it was time for immigration to stop. In 1962 it passed the Commonwealth Immigration Act, which removed the right of entry to Britain of citizens of the Colonies and Commonwealth, except for parents, spouses and children of those already in the country, and for those hired for jobs no British citizen was capable of doing. In 1963 the government issued 30,130 such employment vouchers but this number gradually declined to 2,290 in 1972.

Rivers of Blood

The Labour Party bitterly opposed the 1962 act, but it realized that the majority of the population did not like immigration, and did not repeal the act when it came to power in 1964. Nevertheless, though the intention of the 1962 act was to end immigration into Britain, it soon became apparent that it was continuing at a great rate. In 1968 Enoch Powell decided it was time to raise the issue publicly. By then a leading Conservative politician, Powell had been a brilliant classical student at Cambridge, became professor of Greek at the University of Sydney at the age of 26, and had served in the Second World War with distinction. He had been a cabinet member in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government and was a member of the Conservative shadow cabinet when the Conservatives went into opposition in 1964.

His much-publicized address has become known as the “rivers of blood” speech because of what Powell said about the tensions continued immigration would bring: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.” The classical allusion was to a passage in Vergil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas hears a prophecy that when he returns to Italy there will be war and “foaming blood” in the Tiber. It was to prove a more arresting phrase than Powell seems to have realized, and he said later he wished he had given the quotation in Latin.

In the speech, Powell cited the social problems caused by blacks in the United States as a warning of what would happen in Britain: “The tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch in horror on the other side of the Atlantic, which is there interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming to us here by our own volition and our own neglect.” He continued by quoting an aphorism from classical Greece: “Those whom the gods seek to destroy, they first make mad,” and continued, “We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in building up its own funeral pyre.” He called for repatriation as the only solution to the problem.

An opinion poll carried out shortly after the speech showed that 74 percent of the population agreed with Powell, but the government ignored their wishes and immigration continued. The 1991 census found that the number of blacks had risen more than fourfold since 1961 to approximately 900,000 (1.6 percent of the population), while South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) had increased more than tenfold to approximately 1,500,000 (2.7 percent of the population). There were also approximately 650,000 Chinese (1.25 percent of the population), but these figures were all underestimates because many immigrants, particularly illegals, do not fill in census forms and go uncounted.

Post-war immigrants have always congregated in the major cities. A survey carried out in 1999 found that approximately one third of school children in London do not speak English at home. Probably about another third are English-speaking blacks and Asians. When these non-whites become adults they will outnumber whites, just as they do in most big cities in the United States.

Why did the 1962 act fail to halt the rise in the number of non-whites? First, immigrants are mainly young adults who soon have children, and they tend to have more children than whites. Many enter illegally or as legal tourists who never go home. Some enter as spouses, and many enter as a result of arranged marriages. There have been press reports of young Asian women, legally resident in Britain, who are taken to India, Pakistan or Bangladesh and forced into marriage so their husbands could come to Britain. Others enter as asylum seekers — with 70,000 heads of household entering in 1999 alone. Claims for asylum have to be examined, which takes about 18 months. If the claim is refused the asylum seeker has the right to appeal. If the appeal is refused the claimant is generally allowed to stay anyway, or else by this time has disappeared into the underground economy. By early 2000 there was a backlog of 102,000 asylum seekers waiting for their cases to be heard, which can take several years.

Powell was right about the continuation of racial conflict. In 1980 blacks rioted in Bristol and in 1981 in the London district of Brixton and the Toxteth district of Liverpool. In 1985 there were race riots in the Hansworth district of Birmingham and again in London. Racial attacks are frequent.

Thus, despite its resonance with the population at large, Powell’s 1968 speech had little practical effect. Most of the media and even many leading conservatives denounced the speech. Edward Heath promptly dismissed Powell from the shadow cabinet, and in 1974 Powell resigned from the Conservative Party over the issue of the European Community, which he opposed. He continued to make speeches predicting further growth of the immigrant population, the rise of racial tensions, and the need to repatriate immigrants. In 1988 he reiterated his warnings: “I cannot foresee how a country can be peaceably governed in which the composition of the population is progressively going to change, in the way that the population of great parts of England is certainly going to change. I am talking about violence that can only be described as civil war. I cannot see there can be any other outcome.” Enoch Powell died on February 8, 1998, aged 86. At his funeral service a few members of the public left wreaths. One bore a card that read, “You were right, Enoch.”

How the Races Adjust

In 1976 Powell observed that blacks in Britain had a high rate of crime and were particularly involved in mugging, a word which, he said, was “used by one part of the divided society to describe its treatment at the hands of the other.” Apart from this, he did not have much to say about the degree to which different groups of immigrants have adjusted to life in Britain. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that blacks, Indians, Chinese and Pakistanis together with Bangladeshis have adjusted quite differently. Statistics for some of the major studies on this issue are summarized in the table on this page.

	Date	Whites	Blacks	Indians	Pak/Ban	Chinese
ESN %	1970	.68	2.33	.32
IQ	1984	100	88	98
Unemployed %	1991	11	25	13	29	10
Men in prison %	1995	.15	.98	.11	.11	.06
Adults married %	1994	60	39	72	74	62
Single teenaged mothers %	1994	6	21	1	11

Blacks do poorly. A study published in 1970 showed that black children were about three and a half times overrepresented in schools for the educationally subnormal (ESN), but this was not the case for either Indian or Pakistani children. Later in the 1970s the problem of the poor performance of black children in school became so widespread that the Government set up a committee to investigate its causes. In 1984 the committee published a report that included a paper by Nicholas Mackintosh, professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge, and his colleague Nicholas Mascie-Taylor, in which they concluded that the problem was that the average IQ of black children was 88 and that of Indians and Pakistanis 98, in relation to a white average of 100. This report — astoundingly candid for a government document — was tucked away in an appendix and has been consistently ignored.

It has also been found in Britain that blacks have high levels of male unemployment, crime, and single teenage motherhood, and are averse to marriage. Indians and Chinese have adjusted well and perform about equally with whites in these respects. Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis have adjusted less well, probably because many of them have not yet learned English. These racial differences are similar to those in the United States, where blacks are the principal problem group while Asians are “the model minority.” Behavior of this kind has a strong genetic basis, so the same differences show up in all environments.

Even successful immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and China often retain their cultural and religious identities. Significant numbers from the subcontinent are Muslims, whose primary loyalty is to Islam. Although they do not have problems of high crime, unemployment, low IQ, and illegitimacy as blacks do, their presence in large numbers changes the fabric of society and tends to undermine and displace traditional British culture.

Powell’s Failure

One could draw pessimistic conclusions from the history of immigration to Britain in the second half of the century. Unlike in other Western countries, a senior mainstream politician — Enoch Powell — spoke out against non-European immigration in a forthright way and never backed down. Despite the support of the great majority of the population, Powell’s warnings had no effect and the number of immigrants has continued to increase, just as he predicted.

Does this suggest that continued immigration is probably unstoppable in liberal western democracies? It is now widely predicted in the United States that whites will become a minority of the population in the second half of the twenty-first century. The same transformation is possible for Britain though the timetable for such a change is difficult to predict.

It is possible to make projections based on the increase of non-Europeans from 1962 to 1991. In spite of strict immigration controls, the rise was from approximately a third of a million in 1961 to 3 million in 1991. This is almost a tenfold gain over a thirty-year period.

Even if the growth rate of the non-European immigrant population slows, it will inevitably be substantially greater than that of whites because of its young age structure, its high fertility, and the continued arrival of dependents, illegals and asylum seekers. The 1991 census showed that while non-European immigrants were 5.5 per cent of the population, they amounted to 9.3 percent of the children through age nine. David Coleman, one of Britain’s leading demographers, has estimated that in the 1990s the non-European proportion of the population was growing at about 5 percent a year, which doubles the numbers every 14 years. If this is projected forward, the number of non-Europeans can be expected to increase to around 48 million by the middle of the 21st century and would roughly equal the number of whites.

A more optimistic scenario proposed by Dr. Coleman is that the fertility of non-Europeans will fall to that of whites and that immigration will be held at around 32,000 net intake a year. On these assumptions, the non-European population will approximately double to around 6 million (11 per cent of the population) by the year 2177 and will continue to grow at about the same rate thereafter. The major unknown in these estimates is whether the government will take action to curtail the number of non-European immigrants.

Europeans are beginning to wake up to the threat mass immigration poses to their societies. This year the Freedom Party entered government in Austria and the will to maintain sanctions against it appears to be crumbling. In April, an anti-immigration coalition in Italy showed dramatic gains in local elections. The increasing appeal of nationalist parties in other European countries is another sign of opposition to immigration and to the social tensions it invariably brings. It is true that the failure of Enoch Powell’s campaign shows that the political difficulties in restricting immigration are formidable but Powell himself would have looked forward to eventual success. As he once explained: “Too often today people are ready to tell us ‘This is not possible, that is not possible.’ I say, whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.”

Richard Lynn is Professor Emeritus of Psychology of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

BOOK REVIEW

Black Insurrection

The plot to exterminate the people of Charleston.

Denmark Vesey, David Robertson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, 202 pp., $23.00

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Denmark Vesey was the leader of what was by far the most complex and elaborate attempt to mount a slave insurrection in the United States. The plot failed when loyal blacks informed the white authorities, but by then some 9,000 slaves had agreed to rise up on July 14, 1822, kill every white in Charleston, South Carolina, and escape by ship to Haiti. Novelist and biographer David Robertson has written an absorbing account of the Vesey plot but spoils it with racial moralizing.

Mr. Robertson reports that we have only bare-bones accounts of Denmark Vesey’s early life. He was probably born in the early 1760s, either in Africa or the Virgin Islands. He took his name from Captain Joseph Vesey, a slave trader who first sold him in Haiti as a cane field worker. Vesey did not care for field work and he faked epileptic attacks to convince his master he was an invalid. Captain Vesey obligingly took back the “defective” merchandise, refunded the sales price, and put Denmark to work as an assistant in the slave trade. He must have realized that his slave had faked his disability, but he had singled him out early for his “beauty, alertness, and intelligence,” and by all accounts treated him kindly for the 19 years he owned him.

Capt. Vesey lived in Charleston when not at sea, and in 1800 Denmark bought the winning ticket in the city lottery. Richer by $1,500, he bought freedom for $600 and established himself as a carpenter. For 22 years he lived as a free man, eventually joining the prestigious Second Presbyterian Church and living in a comfortable house only three blocks from that of the governor, Thomas Bennett. He was prosperous, and well liked by blacks and whites.

Free blacks were not uncommon in Charleston. In 1800, blacks outnumbered whites 63,615 to 18,768 but 1,475 blacks — or 2.3 percent — were free. Many were mulattos and some were prominent citizens. The finest hotel in town was owned by a free person of color, Jehu Jones, and Governor Bennett favored him with the official patronage of the administration.

Vesey did not invite men like Jones into his plot, fearing they would side with the whites. He did not approach a single free black, and seems to have been deeply suspicious of mulattos. It was only slaves he wanted for his insurrection, and he spent several years and traveled as far as 60 miles to recruit them. Although he mixed with whites at the Second Presbyterian Church, he found that the African Methodist Episcopal Church was an effective network for rebellion, and many of his close confederates were AME members.

Vesey worked out his plans with great care. He chose the night of July 14, for example, for several reasons. First, many whites, including a large number of military officers, fled the heat of Charleston in the summer to vacation in the north. Second, July 14 was to be a moonless night, and finally, it was the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.

Vesey organized his attack so that slaves, who had been steadily caching stolen weapons, were to form armed columns and converge on Charleston from the north, south, and west. They were to take the federal arsenal, loot weapons shops, and murder every white they could find. All conspirators with access to horses were to ride through the streets attacking whites. Trusted house servants of the governor, mayor, and other men in authority were to murder their masters as they slept. The only whites to be spared were ship captains who would sail them to Haiti, and a few women they would bring along for purposes Mr. Robertson does not specify.

Vesey told his followers — probably falsely — that he was in contact with the government of Haiti, which would send an army to back the uprising. He also claimed he had arranged for a refuge somewhere in Haiti. Although this was probably not true either, he planned to rob all the banks before burning Charleston to the ground, so the ex-slaves might have bought themselves a welcome somewhere in the Caribbean. Some of Vesey’s plans were fanciful. A few blacks were to disguise themselves as whites by painting their faces and wearing wigs and beards made from the hair of whites. This was to allow them to approach close enough to whites to kill them.

A leak derailed the plot. On May 25, a conspirator named William Paul approached another slave with word of the rebellion. That slave was loyal to his master and quickly told the authorities, who arrested Paul on May 31. Under interrogation, Paul described the extent and participants of the plot, but whites refused to believe him. That the governor’s trusted slave, Ned Bennett, had agreed to murder his master in his sleep, that thousands of slaves from the surrounding area planned to exterminate the whites of Charleston — this was too preposterous to be believed.

And yet, evidence continued to mount, and whites arrested more ringleaders. Despite the many fingers pointing at Vesey, he remained at liberty for several more weeks — until June 22 — because the authorities could not believe a prosperous, well-behaved free black would lead an insurrection. In the meantime, as his henchmen were rounded up, Vesey tried to advance the date of the attack to June 16. Word of this, too, got out but Vesey, though still free, was unable to rouse his people to the attack. Whites passed a sleepless but uneventful night standing guard over the city. By the time Vesey was finally arrested even the black womenfolk were wondering openly why he was still at liberty.

The conspirators got formal but quick trials at the Work House where they were held, with masters often acting as defense counsel for their slaves. Most whites seem to have thought their blacks incapable of disloyalty, and Mr. Robertson enjoys describing the loss of their illusions. In this account of the arrest of John Horry, he includes passages from a contemporary source:

‘[W]hen the constables came into Mr. Horry’s yard to take up his waiting man,’ the slave’s master, Elias Horry, insisted ‘they were mistaken, that he could answer for [John’s] innocence, that he would as soon suspect himself.’ Elias Horry attended his slave’s later trial at the Work House, and, upon hearing the state’s evidence, plaintively asked his waiting man: ‘Tell me, are you guilty? For I cannot believe unless I hear you say so . . . What were your intentions?’ To which John Horry . . . answered, ‘To kill you, rip open your belly, and throw your guts in your face.’

It clearly pleases Mr. Robertson that whites trusted and even loved blacks who hated them.

In all, the authorities arrested 131 conspirators and executed 35. Vesey was hanged on July 2 despite fears there would be a slave uprising to save him. The city tried to conduct the executions without fanfare but there were reportedly large crowds of both whites and blacks to witness the hanging. If he spoke any final words they were not recorded.

Vesey himself remains a mystery. Mr. Robertson seems to take it for granted that any free black would want to lead slaves in exterminating their masters, but this was obviously not the case. Vesey himself did not trust free blacks and apparently thought only slaves would be willing to fight. He, himself, led a comfortable life and could have emigrated to Haiti any time he wanted. It must have taken an unusual degree of racial solidarity to risk death in an undertaking in which he had so little to gain, but nothing is known about the man’s psychology and Mr. Robertson does not speculate.

It must also have taken unusual ability to organize a network of no fewer than 9,000 men (feminists are no doubt grieved that Vesey invited no women to take part). Vesey and his lieutenants threatened to kill traitors but it is still a wonder the uprising stayed secret as long as it did. If thousands of slaves really had mounted a surprise, dead-of-night attack on the city, there is no telling how much murder would have ensued.

Of course, it is now fashionable to think of Denmark Vesey as a noble freedom fighter. In 1976 the city of Charleston honored him by hanging an imagined portrait of Vesey in the municipal auditorium.

Mr. Robertson himself adopts a condescending attitude towards 19th century whites that is as silly as sneering at them because they didn’t have electricity or automobiles. Irritating 20th-century moralizing crops up whenever the motives of whites are not known; Mr. Robertson assumes they were low. Blacks, on the other hand, do no wrong, except to betray Vesey, whom Mr. Robertson calls “an attempted great liberator.”

Mr. Robertson’s prejudices lead him into contradictions. He marvels at the extent and complexity of the Vesey plot but thinks the hangings were harsh and excessive. With no apparent sense of irony, he asks us to admire a plan to exterminate the whites of Charleston but to condemn the execution of 35 ringleaders. He repeatedly suggests the trials were unfair, yet leaves no doubt that those found guilty were determined to commit murder, arson, and robbery on a grand scale.The current hysteria about race may make this sort of thing inevitable, but moralistic preening is not the same as writing history.

ARTICLE

Some Thoughts are Worse Than Murder

by Jared Taylor

The cover story of the June issue of Atlantic Monthly is a long article about the life and motives of Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. This sympathetic, detailed investigation of the career of a serial killer is interesting enough in its own right, but the unintentional light it casts on the political prejudices of our times is even more interesting.

The basic facts about Mr. Kaczynski are these: He was born in 1942 and grew up in the Chicago area. He was something of a loner but was a brilliant student who enrolled at Harvard at age sixteen. He went on to get a Ph.D. in math at the University of Michigan in 1967, and taught briefly at Berkeley. In 1971 he fled civilization to live in the Montana wilderness, and in 1978 began sending bombs to people he thought were promoting technology and industry. He sent at least 16 bombs, which killed three people and seriously injured two. By 1996 he was so notorious that the New York Times and the Washington Post agreed to publish copies of a 35,000-word essay he called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which became known as The Manifesto. His brother recognized the thinking in the essay and alerted the police, who arrested Mr. Kaczynski. In May 1998, a California court sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

People have called The Manifesto everything from proof of insanity to the work of a genius. In fact, as the Atlantic author Alston Chase points out, it is essentially an elaboration on a leftist cliché that many people find attractive. “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” begins The Manifesto, which goes on to argue that technology poisons society because it forces men to conform to machines rather than the other way around. Increasing industrialization will eventually strangle every human freedom but it cannot be stopped — short of violence — because “while technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.” Mr. Kaczynski argued that since technology threatens mankind’s very survival, those who push it forward must be killed.

Mr. Chase reports that when The Manifesto was published, it met with much admiration on the left. Cynthia Ozick wrote in The New Yorker that the bomber was “a philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose, who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism.” Robert Wright wrote in Time that “there’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.” Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in the New York Times that the Unabomber’s views were “if hardly mainstream, entirely reasonable.”

Mr. Kaczynski’s defense lawyers tried to argue that their client was insane, and Mr. Chase writes that the media quickly seconded this view — but out of sympathy rather than horror. He suggests in his article that “the public wished to see Kaczynski as insane because his ideas are too extreme for us to contemplate without discomfort. He challenges our most cherished beliefs.”

The Unabomber, Mr. Chase concludes, was: “evil. But what kind of evil?” It is the search for what appears to be an understandable, perhaps even admirable sort of evil that takes up most of the article: stories from Mr. Kaczynski’s childhood and a lengthy account of how Harvard must have formed his thinking. The bomber emerges as a brilliant, sincere, slightly off-balance intellectual who jumped the tracks and took his essentially rational thinking too far.

What a contrast to the way America treats those who deviate from racial orthodoxy! Dissidence alone, without even a hint of violence, is enough to cast the likes of Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin, William Shockley, Samuel Francis, and Glayde Whitney into the outer darkness. They don’t have to throw bombs. They have only to express their views — certainly as eloquently as anything in The Manifesto — to be hectored, hounded, harassed, and even fired.

Needless to say, Atlantic will never devote a long article to trying to understand why they hold the views they do, despite the apparent fascination for a killer who “challenges our most cherished beliefs” and the admission that “there’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.” There is no praise of this kind for “racists,” even though they certainly challenge cherished beliefs and only make explicit the racial rules even liberals live by. When will an Atlantic author ever concede that, indeed, he doesn’t want to live in a Mexican neighborhood or have his children marry blacks, and that “there’s a little David Duke in most of us”? No, the prevailing structure of taboos permits a sympathetic understanding even of murderers if they kill for causes that conform to that structure, but reserves nothing but stony condemnation for those who dissent.

An enlightening contrast to the Atlantic piece appeared at about the same time in a review of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach in the June 9 issue of National Review.Brasillach was a French poet and novelist who was called up for military service in 1938, fought the Germans, and was captured in June, 1940. His captors discovered that he was a fascist sympathizer, and he became a journalist for the Vichy government. After the liberation of Paris, before the war was even over, De Gaulle’s men arrested Brasillach, gave him a six-hour trial, condemned him to death, and shot him. Brasillach, like Mr. Kaczynski, was an intellectual, a writer of manifestos, but he never murdered anyone or encouraged others to kill. Unlike Mr. Kaczynski he is not worthy of sympathetic understanding because, according to contemporary standards, he cannot be understood. As George Jochnowitz who wrote the review kindly explains, Robert Brasillach and those who think as he did “have amputated parts of their brains.”

BOOK REVIEW

Do Genetic Differences Justify Racism?

Science in the service of politics.

Genes, Peoples, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (trans. Mark Seielstad), North Point Press, 2000, 228 pp., $24.00.

reviewed by Glayde Whitney

In Genes, Peoples, and Languages, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, has given us a nontechnical overview of what he knows, or thinks he knows — or wants you to think he knows — about genetics and human evolution. Despite his repeated insistence that there is no such thing as race, his work greatly advances our understanding of how races, sub-races, and other populations differ from each other.

Mr. Cavalli-Sforza, born in 1922 and currently Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Stanford University, is one of the world’s most renowned population geneticists, so what he says carries a lot of weight. The six chapters of this little book began as a series of public lectures first delivered in 1981, and rewritten and updated many times. Previously-published versions in French and Italian have been melded into English that flows smoothly and is a pleasure to read. The well-informed specialist will be fascinated by a wealth of personal anecdotes, while the non-specialist will be variously informed and misinformed.

The book is strongest in its explanation of techniques and results from studies of genetic and linguistic diversity. It is weakest — often downright wrong — in its treatment of behavioral development and racial differences. Although the book has a bibliography it has no footnotes.

The book starts right out with what has become Luigi’s trademark: Deny the existence of the very thing he studies. For decades Professor Cavalli-Sforza has repeated the races-do-not-exist mantra while he goes on studying how they differ genetically.

Many people have suggested Professor Cavalli-Sforza denies race so that he can continue his favorite research, and there may be some truth to this. I know that many world-class researchers are terrified of the anti-racial thought police. When I mentioned race differences in a presidential address to the Behavior Genetics Association in 1995, some of my colleagues urged me to resign for the good of the science because they feared I had jeopardized funding for all behavior genetic research. Likewise, a widely-used textbook of behavior genetics claims that Arthur Jensen’s 1969 writing about race and intelligence was a grave threat to the field because it raised the issue of race. By denying race, Professor Cavalli-Sforza can remain on the side of the angels and get research funding; he studies the genetics of populations, not races.

But there may be more to his denial than a simple tactic to keep the money flowing. He seems to see no difference between race as a scientific concept and “racism” as a social phenomenon, and concludes: “It seems wise to me, therefore, to abandon any attempt at racial classification along the traditional lines.” He argues that since each group tends to believe it is the best in the world and to blame other groups for its troubles, it is best not to identify groups at all.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza is at his best when he describes what he does for a living: study genetic variation among groups of people. It was in 1951 that he first started thinking about building evolutionary family trees based on distributions of genes. In 1962 he worked with Anthony Edwards trying to base these trees on real genetic data. This involved advanced statistical methods such as principal-components analysis and multidimensional scaling. These different methods approach the data from different directions and on the basis of different assumptions, so if their results converge investigators are probably on the right track.

These procedures are complex and require a great deal of computation. Professor Cavalli-Sforza writes that some had been known for years, but were almost never used before computers because of the “staggering amount of arithmetical work.” It is difficult to explain these methods to non-mathematicians, but like other outstanding people who really understand their material, Professor Cavalli-Sforza has a knack for simple explanations. For example, at the heart of all the math is the goal of determining genetic distances between populations — but what is genetic distance?

Consider an example using the well-known gene with different forms that represent the major blood groups, A, B, and O. The frequency for A is 25 percent (.25) for Englishmen, and about two percent (.02) for American Indians. Based on the distribution of this one gene form or allele, the genetic distance between Englishmen and Amerinds is the difference between the allele frequencies: .25 — .02 = .23. However, for the “B” allele, the English are at eight percent (.08), while Amerinds are point three percent (.003). So the genetic distance estimated from the distribution of the B allele is .08 — .003 = .077. Interestingly, the ratios of the results for these two examples are similar: .92 and .96 (.23/.25 = .92 and .077/.08 = .96).

So what is the overall, or average, genetic distance between Englishmen and Indians: 23 percent or 7.7 percent, or ninety-something percent, or what? Complex statistical methods use values for many alleles of many genes from many populations to calculate estimates of genetic distances.

For his monumental work The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994) Professor Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues collected data for about 100,000 gene frequencies from approximately 2,000 populations around the world. They worked with distributions of what genes produce — protein polymorphisms (blood antigens, enzymes, structural proteins, etc.) — rather than DNA from the genes themselves, but newer techniques will allow similar work to be done directly with genes.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza uses other approaches to understand human evolution — archeology, fossil remains, and the study of languages also help reconstruct the past. Today there are over 5,000 spoken languages and some, like English, are very widespread while others are spoken by fewer than a hundred people. Languages have interconnected histories, much as biological populations do. For example, the romance languages — Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian — derive from a common source, Latin. The Germanic language family includes Dutch, English, Flemish, German, and Swedish. People who speak related languages tend to be biologically related, and data on languages can be subjected to statistical analysis similar to that used with genes to find distances between them. We now know there are important similarities between the evolution of languages and genes. Each can be used to help understand and confirm the other.

The detailed results of Prof. Cavalli-Sforza’s fascinating work have been reported in The History and Geography of Human Genes (discussed in AR, March 1997; October 1999) and are summarized in his current book. One interesting and well-substantiated finding is that sub-Saharan Africans are the group that is most distant genetically from all other humans. This conclusion is consistent with Charles Darwin’s observation that the differences between African Blacks and Europeans are so great that any taxonomist would consider them separate species, were it not for their willingness to hybridize.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza is a great scientist and his work has done much to advance our knowledge of the genetics of evolution. It is therefore saddening to encounter so many errors when he approaches politically sensitive territory. Some of these errors are so egregious they suggest a desire to deceive.

For example, in making his there-are-no-races argument Professor Cavalli-Sforza energetically attacks the straw man of racial purity. It is true that some pre-genetic biologists and politicians have talked about pure races, but Professor Cavalli-Sforza writes as if they thought there were “pure” groups with no genetic variation. It has been well known for a long time that all naturally existing, sexually-reproducing groups harbor a great deal of genetic diversity. German Shepherds are consistently different from Irish Setters, but both breeds have lots of genetic variation within them. At the same time, “pure breeds” of dogs and “racially pure” stocks of humans can exist despite the extensive genetic variation within each group. After all, Professor Cavalli-Sforza acknowledges that it is “fairly easy to recognize a European, an African, and an Asian,” (in fact, a child of five can tell them apart unerringly). So, given that reliable race (oops, population) differences — pure groups — do exist, the fallback position is to claim that the differences are only skin deep.

“Each ethnic group has been genetically engineered under the influence of the environments where it settled,” writes Professor Cavalli-Sforza. The light skin of Europeans, for example, is useful in cloudy, overcast regions because the sun’s weak ultraviolet radiation can penetrate it and make vitamin D. It would be a handicap in a tropical climate where too much penetration of radiation can cause skin cancer. In hot, humid regions it helps to be tall and thin because the high surface-to-volume ratio of the body helps sweat evaporate. Smaller bodies use less energy and produce less heat. “Frizzy hair” allows sweat to remain on the scalp longer, which improves cooling. Pygmies are an extreme example of the rule that tropical forest people tend to be short, whereas “the face and body of the Mongols, on the other hand, result from adaptations to the bitter cold of Siberia.”

But after this promising beginning, Professor Cavalli-Sforza falls off the tracks with the allegation that “adaptations to climate primarily affect surface characteristics.” This unsupported but commonly-made claim arises from the fact that surface traits are easier to study then psychological tendencies or mental abilities. Historically, the surface traits were investigated first, and the lack of knowledge of more difficult traits has led, in the hands of ideologues, to the silly non sequitur that if races are very different in surface traits, it means they must be the same for traits below the surface. In fact, given what we know about the biological underpinnings of mental traits, it requires a colossally ideological effort to insist that the brain is the only human organ that does not vary from one group to another.

The discussion of intelligence in relation to genes and race is not only wrong, it is 180 degrees opposed to recent findings. Professor Cavalli-Sforza takes it as gospel that Sir Cyril Burt’s twin research on the heritability of intelligence was faked. In fact, the Marxist Professor Leon Kamin’s posthumous attack on Burt’s legacy has been largely disproven. Furthermore, new and totally independent research completely supports Burt’s findings of a heritability for intelligence of .7 or more, a figure Professor Cavalli-Sforza seems to think depends solely on Burt’s research.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza goes on to say that “the study of adopted children was decisive in showing that cultural transmission exerts a strong influence on the determination of IQ.” In fact, this very research has lead to the surprising conclusion that there is no evidence of a family effect (“cultural transmission”) on IQs of adopted children (AR, May, 1998). Sandra Scarr, emerita of the University of Virginia, has done the most thorough research of this kind. Of black babies adopted into upper-middle class white families, she writes:

The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [adopted children with two black parents] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake.

Professor Cavalli-Sforza also gets it backwards when he writes: “Theories about the role IQ plays in social stratification have also been disproved. Some researchers have claimed, without real evidence, that the difference in IQ observed between high and low social classes was genetic.”

Professor Cavalli-Sforza also writes regretfully that with regard to the low IQ of black Americans, “the majority is likely to be still convinced that it is the result of a real genetic difference . . . that cannot be reversed in a short time.” Indeed, despite a half-century of brainwashing many of us can still think for ourselves.

Despite his obvious determination to toe the egalitarian line, Professor Cavalli-Sforza occasionally does follow scientific conclusions dangerously close to political incorrectness. To his credit, he writes that “a race is a group of individuals that we can recognize as biologically different from others.” Then he goes on to concede that if “genetic differences were found to be genuinely important and could support the sense of superiority that one people can have over another, then racism is justified — at least formally.” He has therefore staked his entire case against “racism” on the absurd conviction that genes for different abilities are distributed precisely evenly through all racial groups. Current research has already proven him wrong, and further progress in the Human Genome Project is likely to make it scientifically impossible to maintain the egalitarian position. If differences justify “racism,” Professor Cavalli-Sforza had better be preparing for a great deal of it.

Glayde Whitney is professor of psychology and neuroscience at Florida State University.

SPECIAL REPORT

The Galton Report

A sampling of recent scientific literature.

by Glayde Whitney

Whither the Human Genome?

What we’ve shown is the concept of race has no scientific basis. — J. Craig Venter, June 26, 2000

People are probably tired of hearing about the human genome by now. First there was the special press conference on June 26 by J. Craig Venter of the Celera Genomics Group and Francis Collins, head of the gov-ernment’s Human Genome Project, to report that the sequencing of the genome was essentially complete. Both President Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair horned in on the joint announcement to try to bask in reflected glory.

That was followed by intensive news coverage, including a special issue of Time Magazine and the science journal Nature. All the attention is justified: Pundits and scientists have been saying that this is the most important scientific achievement ever — bigger than agriculture, understanding the solar system, gravity, the atom, and maybe even evolution. This is because, for the first time, instead of acquiring knowledge about the universe around us, we are acquiring fundamental knowledge about ourselves — about how to build a human. With that knowledge we will soon be able to build one to order. In the midst of all the publicity there is a fair amount of fashionable misrepresentation, such as the above quote from Mr. Venter. So what does the project really mean?

Much of its scientific significance has been outlined in “Diversity in the Human Genome” (AR, March 1997), but it has also presented us with a classic demonstration of the inefficiency of government planning versus free enterprise. Planned since 1986, the U.S. Human Genome Program formally began on October 1, 1990. It was to be a $3 billion government-funded 15-year effort. It was plodding along (in all fairness, a bit ahead of schedule and under budget) when a maverick scientist, J. Craig Venter, applied for government support to do it his way. His application was rejected; the peer-review experts explained that his way would never work.

So without government support, Mr. Venter established Celera Genomics Group in June, 1998, and sequenced the human genome in nine months, ending last June. Along the way the government effort changed its approach, essentially following along after Celera in order to not be left in the dust and finish at about the same time.

Various people, especially in Britain, are screaming that the genome should be in the public domain and that none of it should be patentable. Others are pointing out that turning genetic information into products useful to people — like medicine — will be much quicker and more efficient in the profit-motive private sector.

Under intense pressure from the scientists of the government project, as well as from socialist functionaries all the way up to the top — including President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair — Celera has agreed to join the government in putting its copy of the genome in the public domain. Published on the Inter-net, the sequence will be freely available to anyone who cares to take a look. So how can Celera make money? By interpreting the genome, and by offering information on other organisms, as well as other humans. Celera says it is an “informatics” company.

Celera offers paid subscriptions to four of its databases — there will be more to come — only one of which is the public-domain genome. This is the sequence of the entire 3.1 billion base pairs of a single person. The second database contains information about all the human genes that have been linked to a disease. The third is the genetic sequence of the fruit fly, a major genetic research subject that shares some genes with humans. Fourth is the under-construction mouse genome. The mouse is a mammal, shares many genes with humans, and is also widely used in genetic research.

These latter three databases are not public information; you pay to use them. Last year, three-year subscriptions were going for $25 million. This year, a five-year subscription costs $50 million. And there are customers. Academic institutions get special discounts and the first one to sign up was Vanderbilt University.

Why do we care about other species, like the fruit fly and the mouse? Because research starts with them. Genes of potential importance to human health can be inserted, enhanced, blocked, or mutated in research animals. Drugs and actual proteins produced by the genes can then be tested for effectiveness before going to the trouble and expense of clinical trials in humans. Celera has said it is thinking of sequencing the genomes of other important research animals: rat, dog, and chimpanzee.

What is probably the most important Celera database is still under construction. What is called the SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) database will reveal variations among people. It has started with the sequencing of the genotypes of six men and women from different “ethnic backgrounds.”

The data are not likely to support Mr. Venter’s views on race. Current results suggest that on average about one out of every thousand base pairs are different from one person to the next. That is one in a thousand out of a set of about 3.1 billion, or an average of 3.1 million genetic differences between any two random people. It is estimated that there are about 30 million genetic differences within the human species. If humans have about 60 thousand functional genes (estimates vary widely), then 30 million variations across 60 thousand genes obviously leaves a lot of room for differences — many of which will be clustered differently in different ethnic groups. The Human Genome Project will be the final nail in the coffin of the myth that there are no important genetic differences between the races (see the book review in this issue, p. 8).

Share the Facts Affordably

A problem for anyone who wants to pass along good information about race is that the relevant books tend to be expensive. The economics of publishing require large print runs to get low prices. Given the taboos and fetishes of the mass media, racially informative books tend to die the death of silence — they are seldom reviewed, cause little controversy, and soon go out of print. As a result, single copies cost a lot. Michael Levin’s excellent Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean will set you back $65.00, and Arthur Jensen’s The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability sells for $45.00. These are not books many of us can afford to hand out to acquaintances.

Into the void has stepped J. Philippe Rushton with the second special abridged edition of his Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. Transaction Publishers, who brought out the first edition, disavowed the book and destroyed many thousands of copies when lefty academics complained it was “racist.” Why the fuss? As Prof. Rushton writes:

[T]here is no stronger taboo today than talking about race. In many cases just being accused of ‘racism’ can get you fired. Yet, teachers in America know the races differ in school achievement; policemen know the races differ in crime rates; social workers know the races differ in rates of welfare dependency or getting infected with AIDS . . . When it comes to race, do you really dare to say what you think? Racial groups differ much more widely than many people realize. Yet vocal groups in academia and the media simply forbid letting the public in on an open discussion . . . This book presents the scientific evidence that race is a biological reality that has both scientific and everyday meaning.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

‘Elections’ in Zimbabwe

Zimbabweans voted over the weekend of June 24-26, giving the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) 57 of 120 contested seats in parliament. This knocked no fewer than seven of President Robert Mugabe’s cabinet ministers out of office, but the MDC thinks it is entitled to even more seats. It is considering lodging formal fraud charges in the case of 28 of the seats won by the ruling ZANU-PF Party. Since President Mugabe had the right to appoint 30 MPs of his choice to the 150-member house, the ZANU-PF’s majority remains intact.

The final run-up to the elections was not quite as violent as previous months, and blacks killed no more whites: the death total remains at an estimated 26 black MDC supporters and five white farmers. Under some international scrutiny — at least by Britain if not the United States — and with hundreds of election monitors keeping watch for obvious election-rigging, the polling went off with only scattered reports of violence.

ZANU activists blocked access to voting booths in some areas and chased away suspected MDC supporters. In a few cases, Mr. Mugabe’s men pulled whites out of line at polling stations and prevented them from voting. One MDC candidate in the province of Mashona-land West escaped from a ZANU mob and spent seven hours hiding in a police station before 100 of his own supporters armed themselves with ax handles and rescued him. To the surprise of no one, Pierre Schori, who headed the 150-member European Union monitoring team, concluded that “the term ‘free and fair elections’ is not applicable in the elections.” Election policing was not as extensive as planned because the government refused entry to 40 monitors from the United States and hundreds of others from Britain, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Since well before the election, Mr. Mugabe had made his views clear. He supported invasions by blacks of more than 1,000 white farms, and threatened to take over white-owned mines as well. He put whites on notice that they are second-class citizens. “Zimbabwe is a black man’s land, and a black man will determine who gets it,” he said, adding that “whites can be citizens in our country, or residents, but not our cousins. They are the greatest racists in the world.”

After the elections, it was dangerous to celebrate MDC victories. Some 30 policemen in two armored cars arrived at a victory party for newly-elected MP, Edwin Mushoriwa, and beat him up along with his supporters. Police and soldiers scoured the bars of Harare, the capital city, beating up people who appeared to be celebrating.

Still, there are signs that some of the anti-MDC chaos is being reined in. On June 30, Big Chitoro became the first ZANU militant to be charged with murder in connection with attacks on MDC supporters. Mr. Chitoro is said to have kidnapped two opposition campaign workers and held them for three days while they were beaten and burned with cigarettes. One died of his injuries and the other was hospitalized.

The MDC sometimes went African, too. At a number of big election rallies its supporters rounded up alleged ZANU partisans and beat them bloody. Also, after the election, a newly-minted MDC MP turned himself in to the police to face charges of attempted murder for having attacked ZANU supporters during the campaign.

Of course, for whites the situation remains extremely dangerous. ZANU’s electoral setbacks have not put an end to the farm invasions, and beatings, thefts, and intimidation are worsening. Some of the squatters, for example, have demanded that farmers pay them rent for the use of their own farms. Others insist that whites sign over title to the farms. The farmers’ union officially advises its members not to submit to these demands and not to vacate their houses. “If you get out of your house, you have lost it,” says the union’s deputy director Jerry Grant, but he acknowledges that following this advice could be dangerous: “What do you say when a widow tells you later it’s your fault for giving that advice?”

Mr. Mugabe vows that all farms will eventually end up in the hands of blacks. In the meantime, farming has been so badly disrupted that Zimbabwe, which normally exports agricultural products, could need food aid in several months.

The U.S. reaction has been nearly inaudible. Late on June 19, with fewer than five minutes of debate and no roll call, the House passed a non-binding resolution condemning violence in Zimbabwe and calling for the rule of law. The Senate has done nothing. The Black Congressional Caucus, usually so quick to find racism, has detected none in Zimbabwe. Jesse Jackson, Jr. explains that if things have gone wrong in Africa it is our fault: “We provided them no Marshall Plan at the end of the Cold war. We provided them no means for basically providing education for their people, providing health care for the people, or ensuring the quality of life in sub-Saharan Africa would grow.”

Austria Loses Patience

Austria is heading for a showdown with the European Union over the sanctions the EU imposed after Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party entered the government in February. Claiming that the party is xenophobic because it opposes immigration, Austria’s 14 EU partners have maintained necessary contacts but refuse to deal bilaterally with Austrian ministers. This has offered many opportunities for all manner of snubbing and self-righteousness.

After more than four months of this, the Austrians have had enough. Mr. Haider, who has resigned as leader of the Freedom Patty but continues to wield great influence within it, has suggested Austria should consider leaving the EU if sanctions are not lifted. Wolfgang Schuessel, leader of the People’s Party and chancellor of the coalition government with the Freedom Party, has hinted Austria might withhold payments to the EU or block other initiatives that require unanimous consent. The EU, which is showing signs of embarrassment at having sanctioned a democratically-elected government, suggested that the European Court of Human Rights appoint a committee of “wise men” to study the current situation in Austria and propose lifting sanctions if it finds no violations of democratic and human rights. Chancellor Schuessel refused the offer, saying that any conditional lifting of sanctions is an insult.

Now Austria has upped the ante by scheduling a referendum. If sanctions have not been ended by mid-October, Austrians will answer six questions, the most important of which is: “Should the government, as part of the impending reform of the EU Treaty, ensure with all suitable means that the sanctions unjustly imposed on Austria by the other member states of the European Union are immediately lifted?” The phrase “all suitable means” is widely interpreted to mean using Austria’s veto power to block EU expansion and other important business.

France and Belgium, who have led the sanctions campaign, claim this is blackmail. Even some of Austria’s foreign supporters — conservative politicians in Germany, for example — are worried that Austria has made it harder for the EU to find a face-saving way to lift sanctions. The Austrians are holding firm. Vice-Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer, Jörg Haider’s successor as head of the Freedom Party, says the sanctions were wrong from the start and probably violate EU treaties. As for submitting to an investigation in order for the sanctions to be lifted, she says “We will not accept any conditions.”

More Fakery in the UK

Britain is making the same racial mistakes as the United States and some people have learned there is so much mileage in being a victim of a “hate crime” that they can’t be bothered to wait for the “racists” to strike.

In Birmingham, a 24-year-old black man claimed he was attacked by white racists and set on fire. Ashley Cane did, indeed, have serious burns to his face and arms, and the incident became so notorious it came up during debate in the House of Commons. Now it appears Mr. Cane burned himself while setting fire to a stolen car. Police have charged him and two accomplices with wasting police time and conspiracy to defraud. News that the “racist” attack was a hoax appears not to have been debated in Parliament. (Maurice Weaver, Race Hate Victim ‘Made Up Attack,’ Daily Telegraph (London), May 18, 2000.)

Chris Cotter, a white man also from Birmingham, is the ex-boyfriend of black female track star Ashia Hansen. In March he was allegedly stabbed in the back and slashed across the forehead by white thugs who told him, “We warned you not to mix with niggers.” Miss Hansen got hate mail and went into hiding, while the country wailed about racism. Police warned other black athletes to look out for thugs. Now it turns out Mr. Cotter and two accomplices staged the knife attack and mailed the hate letters themselves. In Britain it is common to charge large sums to grant exclusive interviews, and Mr. Cotter hoped to make a bundle telling his story to the papers. Miss Hansen, the black athlete, is now worried there could be “a danger of distracting attention from the legitimate racist issues we have in society.” (Nick Hopkins, Black Athlete’s Partner Attacked, London Guardian, March 25, 2000. Richard Ellis, Race Hate in Britain is Rife — Just Ask My Wife, London Guardian, March 26, 2000. Paul Kelso, Ex-Lover of Black Athlete Charged, London Guardian, May 23, 2000.)

In London, non-white police officers started getting messages saying, “Not wanted. Keep the police force white. Leave now or else.” After the usual hand-wringing the sender turned out to be Gurpal Virdi, a Sikh police sergeant who had been denied a promotion. Mr. Virdi has been dropped from the force. (Sikh Seeks Sneaky Solution, London Guardian, March 4, 2000.)

In Byker, near Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Asian shopkeeper Mohammed Bashir made headlines when he complained of harassment and intimidation at the hands of whites. Soon afterwards someone bombed his shop, and Mr. Bashir immediately blamed racists. A police investigation found that Mr. Bashir, his two sons and a neighbor planted the bomb and set fire to the shop. According to Chief Inspector Gary Shaw, “the motive for this crime was money. Mohammed Bashir had taken out an insurance policy on the shop shortly before it was destroyed.” (Paul Wilkinson, ‘Racist’ Attack Set Up to Claim Insurance, The Times (London), June 13, 2000.)

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

European MPs have approved new regulations that will force employers to prove their innocence in court when accused of racial discrimination. This reverses the burden of proof, which used to be placed on plaintiffs. Third party lobbies and “victims” organizations can file suit on behalf of claimants. The European Commission justified the legislation on the grounds that it is often difficult for plaintiffs to obtain the sort of evidence required to prove “racism” in court, so it will be up to employers to prove their “non-racism.” The new law requires complaints to be handled by an independent body rather than the courts. In England, this will probably mean the far-left Commission for Racial Equality. Labor MP Richard Hewitt welcomed the law, saying: “This is the biggest breakthrough in British race relations for a quarter of a century. Right-wing extremism is on the rise, not just in Austria but throughout Europe. This sends the signal to Jörg Haider, David Irving and every thug who commits a racist crime on Britain’s streets.” (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Firms Forced to Prove They Are Not Racist, The Daily Telegraph (London), May 19, 2000, p. 1.)

Supreme Error

Things are not quite so bad in the United States, but they are getting worse. On June 12, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that someone accusing his employer of discrimination, racial or otherwise, need no longer prove discrimination. It is enough to show that the employer’s stated reasons for a job rejection or firing were false. A jury can then decide whether the real reason was discrimination. Although the burden of proof will still be on employees to prove the employer’s explanation false, it will become more difficult for employers to win dismissals. This is a reversal for the Fourth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals, which had required employees to prove that the real reason for an employ-er’s adverse action was discrimination. Job discrimination lawyers are delighted with the new ruling. (Edward Walsh, Court Lowers Bar for Job Bias Suits, Washington Post, June 13, 2000, p. A26.)

Poverty Crimes?

According to a new study released by the University of Hawaii, Hispanic gangs are the main perpetrators of hate crimes in Los Angeles County. One hundred sixty-four Hispanics committed hate crimes in 1997 compared to 119 whites, and most of the victims were blacks. Hispanics don’t like to think of themselves as hate criminals and are casting about for excuses. Roberto Lovato, president of the county Human Relations Commission, points out that rich whites are rarely accused of hate crimes and adds: “Maybe we should stop calling them hate crimes and start calling them class crimes or poverty crimes. It’s have-nots attacking have-nots.” (Gangs Commit Many of L.A.’s Crimes of Hate, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 8, 2000.)

Hispanics vs. Armenians

There is much racial tension between Hispanics and Armenians at Hoover High School in Glendale, California. In a recent fight just outside the school, 17-year-old Raul Aguirre came to the aid of a fellow Hispanic when two Armenians attacked him. The Armenians stabbed Mr. Aguirre twice in the heart, twice in the head and beat his head in with a tire iron. Two Armenian boys, aged 17 and 15, and a 14-year-old Armenian girl have been booked in connection with the killing. (Glendale Killing Highlights Racial Tension, www. channel2000.com (CBS), May 7, 2000.)

Hispanics got revenge a few days later. Just minutes after a community meeting held to promote ethnic harmony, three Hispanics in a car shot at a group of Armenians standing on a street corner. An 18-year-old Armenian went to the hospital with a bullet in his knee. (John Francis, Armenian Teen Injured in Drive-by Shooting, Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2000.)

In an unrelated attack, three Hispanic gang members approached Armen Petrosyan, an Armenian, outside a Hollywood restaurant. They asked him “Where you from?” then shot him repeatedly, killing him. (Peter Hong, Latino Gang Killed Armenian Man, Police Say, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2000.)

Hispanics vs. Blacks

Harbor Gateway is a Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles. For the last year or so, blacks have been moving into the neighborhood despite open opposition from residents. In the most recent incident, Federico Estrada saw Danny Dwayne Warren walking past his house, came up with some friends behind Mr. Warren, and shot him several times, killing him. Homicide Detective Sam Snyder says, “It’s going to be a hate crime. They are Hispanic and they shot a black. He was just walking down the street coming from the liquor store. No words or anything were exchanged.”

In nearby San Pedro, the day before the attack, black and Hispanic gangs traded gunfire. When the smoke cleared one black man lay brain dead and another was shot in the abdomen. (Larry Altman, Area Race Killing Suspect Sought, Daily Breeze (Torrance, Cal.) June 5, 2000.) Readers will recall that when Hispanics — or Armenians — commit “hate” or any other kinds of crime they are classified as whites.

Liberal Hypocrites

Peter Brown of the Orlando Sentinel decided to survey the zip codes of 3,400 journalists to see where they lived. Not surprisingly, he found that most cluster in upscale neighborhoods, far from inner cities. More than one-third of Washington Post reporters live in just four fancy D.C. suburbs.

Paul Sperry, Washington Bureau Chief of WorldNetDaily.com, looked up two of the biggest journalistic promoters of racial diversity, Chris Matthews and Ted Koppel. Mr. Matthews, who recently intoned that segregation still exists because the country is “run by white guys,” lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is five percent black.

Mr. Koppel has completed a series on Nightline called “America in Black and White.” He started off by hectoring some whites who live in a mostly-white area in Philadelphia. When they said they have some blacks in the neighborhood he responded, “Six or seven out of 6,000. I mean, it’s a 99-percent white neighborhood.” Mr. Koppel would probably feel at home there, since his own neighborhood in Potomac, Maryland, is five percent black. (Paul Sperry, Desegregate the Media Elite, Frontpage Magazine (online), March 31, 2000.)

Campus Life

Students at the University of Albany, New York, planned a picnic in April to celebrate the anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball, and they distributed fliers throughout the campus to advertise it. Within days, the affirmative action director stopped further distribution of the fliers after getting 40 complaints from students about the word “picnic.” They seem to think it originated in the South, where whites would pick (pic) a Negro (nic) to lynch. The word actually comes from the 17th century French, pique-nique. No matter. The university reissued the fliers minus the offending word. (This Week, National Review, May 22, 2000, p. 14.)

The End of White Russia?

Whites around the world are failing to have enough children to replace themselves, and Russia is no exception. In March, the Russian State Statistics Committee reported that in January 2000, there were 195,000 deaths and 93,900 births. In January 1999, there were 178,200 deaths and 94,500 births. This was an 11 percent growth in mortality in just one year and a six percent decrease in births. The number of marriages declined by five percent and the number of divorces grew by 23 percent. Life expectancy for Russian men has dipped below 60, and alcoholism and drug abuse are widespread. The army is having problems filling units, and casualties are mounting in Chechnya.

Russian observer Dennis Petrov writes, “Russia, to make a long story short, looks like an exhausted, aging, sick country, a country which borders both the Muslim world (where birthrates are much higher) and a China of over a billion people, which is just beginning to flex its economic, political, and military muscles. Demographically speaking, Russia is a country in decline, and it appears unlikely, if not impossible, that any leader can hope to man Russian industry (or the Russian army) and realize the “rebirth” of a country whose people are not reproducing themselves. Meanwhile, Russia’s porous borders are being violated daily by Islamic holy warriors in the south and Chinese migrants in Siberia, as well as hosts of Third World migrants who use Russia as a transit point to the West. All have brought more crime, disease, and instability with them. Without a spiritual and moral reawakening . . . to renew Russian confidence, there will not be any kind of social, much less economic or military, rebirth in Russia. The decadent West, troubled by many of the same problems, should take note.” (Dennis Petrov, Cultural Revolutions, Chronicles, June 2000, p. 7.)

Tolerance Training

Rashard Casey was the star quarterback of the Penn State football team. In May, he and another black visited a Hoboken, New Jersey, nightclub and were disappointed to see a black woman with a white man. “What are you doing with him?” they asked her. “You should be with us; you’re one of us.” When the white man, Patrick Fitzsimmons, left the bar, the two blacks knocked him down and nearly kicked him to death. A security camera mounted across the street recorded the crime. Mr. Fitzsimmons, it appears, had professional reasons for escorting a black lady. He is a tolerance training instructor for the Hoboken Police Department. (John Rock-er’s Latest Punishment, The Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000, p. 2. David Steele, San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 2000, p.13. Rashard Casey Pleads Innocent to Assault, ESPN.com, May 15, 2000.)

Go to the Ant, Thou Liberal

The Linepithema humile species of ants may have lessons for humans. The tiny creatures originated in Argentina and lost much of their genetic diversity as they traveled to America. Contrary to expectations, this loss of diversity has resulted in unprecedented success in the ants’ competition with native American species. They are much more competitive than they were in Argentina, where their populations were diverse, and tended to quarrel. In America, the ants have a high level of amity within their homogeneous communities, and cooperate well with each other, building nests quickly and linking them together to overwhelm competitors. “In the war against invasive species, introducing genetic diversity might sow discord and slow supercolonies,” researchers from the University of California at San Diego conclude in the May 23 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Science News, Biology, Vol. 157, p. 346)

Missing the Obvious

The 11th annual U.N. Development Program report recently ranked 174 countries according to their levels of “basic human development.” The top 21 were all white, with the exception of Japan at number nine. The bottom 24 countries are all black. The UN somehow seems to have missed this pattern. Noting that the top countries are democratic, it concludes that democracy is the key to advancement and prosperity. (Betsy Pisik, Study Ties Affluence, Quality of Life, Washington Times, July 3, 2000, p. A12.)

What Blacks Think

Robert C. Smith and Richard Seltzer have written a book, Contemporary Controversies and the American Racial Divide, which describes how black and white opinions differ. The differences on many issues dwarf sex differences between respondents of the same race, which tend to range from 10 to 15 percent. For example, when asked if they believe the CIA imported cocaine to distribute in black neighborhoods, only 16 percent of whites said yes, compared to 73 percent of blacks. In another study, 62 percent of blacks said they believe AIDS is part of a plot to kill them. Surprisingly, 21 percent of whites believed this, too. Other big differences:

. . . believe O.J. Simpson was ‘probably guilty.’ Blacks: 13 percent, Whites: 65 percent . . . voted for William Clinton in 1996. Blacks: 84 percent, Whites: 43 percent.

. . . believe it’s the government’s responsibility to ‘assure the availability of jobs.’ Blacks: 74 percent, Whites: 33 percent. (America: The Biggest Contrasts in Black and White, Washington Post, June 25, 2000, p. B5.)

Racism Everywhere

On June 22, a black man named Frederick Finley went to a Lord & Taylor store in Dearborn, Michigan, with his family. His 11-year-old daughter took a $4.00 bracelet from a counter and left the store without paying. Five security guards followed the Finleys to the parking lot, where Mr. Finley got frisky. One of the security guards, Dennis Richardson, restrained Mr. Finley with a choke hold, causing his death. Mr. Richardson has been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Al Sharpton responded by staging a rally against institutional racism, and an estimated 5-10 thousand protesters showed up at the store, waving signs that said things like, “Racism is alive and well. We kill for $4 in Michigan.” Mr. Sharpton and his protesters are undaunted by the fact that Mr. Richardson is black, as are three of the other four guards. They say Lord & Taylor hires black security guards to harass minority shoppers to avoid accusations of racial profiling. (Guard Charged in Death at Store, Washington Post, July 7, 2000, p. A3.)

Another Racist Lynching

Gary Graham, the murderer who cost taxpayers millions of dollars while his case was reviewed 20 times, was finally put to death on June 22. Mr. Graham was convicted of killing 53-year-old Bobby Lambert in a Houston parking lot 19 years ago. He proclaimed innocence to the end, saying he was the victim of a racist “lynching,” which “must be avenged . . . by any means necessary.” Indeed, in his final statement, Graham encouraged blacks to “continue this revolution . . . We will prevail. Keep marching black power, keep marching black power . . . I was chosen for this genocide. This is part of the genocide we as black people have endured in America.” (Hugh Aynesworth and Steve Miller, Texas Executes Man After Top Court Rejects Appeal, Washington Times, June 23, 2000, p. A1.)

Domestic Tranquility

During the last 20 years there have been interesting changes in the rates at which Americans kill their spouses and live-ins. Killings of black men by their “partners” have fallen 74 percent from 1976 to 1998, while killings of black women have fallen 45 percent. White men are 44 percent less likely to be killed, but white women are three percent more likely to be murdered by a spouse or live-in boyfriend. Even so, black women are still more than twice as likely as white women to be killed by “partners,” with rates of 4.5 per 100,000 as opposed to 1.75 per 100,000.

The experts are trying to figure out what accounts for these changes. One reason for the decline in blacks killing each other is undoubtedly the fact that the black incarceration rate is four times higher than it was 20 years ago. With fewer violent blacks on the loose there is less domestic murder. Women of all races are probably less likely to be killing “partners” because of the new, well-publicized legal services for battered women. They now have other ways to get out of a bad situation and don’t have to kill the man. (Fox Butterfield, Study Shows a Racial Divide in Domestic Violence Cases, New York Times, May 18, 2000.)

Experts are baffled as to why there has been no decline in the number of white women killed by partners, but several unfashionable explanations spring to mind. First, “white” here includes Hispanics and the number of Hispanics in the population has grown greatly over the last 20 years. Hispanics are about three times more violent than whites, and a good number of the dead “white” women are probably Hispanic. Second, white women are increasingly more likely to marry or live with blacks and other non-whites, meaning they are more likely to be murdered.

More Test Bias

You have to pass a civil service test in order to be a school janitor in New York City. Whites have an awkward habit of outscoring blacks and Hispanics, so in 1996 the U.S. Department of Justice said the test was racially biased. The Giuliani administration and the Board of Education want to solve the problem by dropping the passing grade from 70 percent to 60 percent, and treating everyone who passes as equally qualified rather than hiring the top scorers.

Tough luck for white man Michael Reilly. He got 95 on the test and was originally ranked 34th out of 544. According to the new scheme he was bumped to 345th on the hiring list. “What’s the sense of studying for the exam?” he wants to know, especially at a time when the city pretends to be wracking its brains for ways to improve student performance in school. As usual, some judge will decide what’s fair and what’s not. (Carl Campanile, Bias Flap Over City Custodian Test, New York Post, April 18, 2000, p. 17.)

A Race Killing After All

On April 19th, in an attack that shocked a quiet, residential neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, a black man walked up to an 8-year-old white boy, Kevin Shifflett, and slit his throat. He also stabbed two whites who tried to come to the boy’s rescue, and a witness heard him say he hated white people. Police at the time downplayed the racial angle, but they mounted an extensive search for the killer. Now it appears that the murderer — whose name has not been released because he is not yet an official suspect — may well be a parolee who was let out of jail just 12 days before the killing. The man was serving time on a malicious wounding charge for attacking a white man without provocation, calling him “whitey,” and beating him with a hammer.

Just two days before the murder, this man was staying in a hotel near Alexandria, where he left a burning cigarette on the bed and set the room on fire. He was in the shower when firemen came, and shouted obscenities rather than evacuate. Police discovered drugs in the room, hauled him off, and the hotel locked up his belongings. He was released for a court date on the drugs charge and for refusing to evacuate. Now that he has been linked by DNA evidence to the Shifflett murder, police have gone through his things at the hotel and found a note that says, among other things, “Kill them raceess whiate kidd’s anyway.” Police are finally conceding they may have a racial killing on their hands after all. (Josh White, Racial Note Found in Suspect’s Hotel Room, Washington Post, July 7, 2000, p. A1.)

Freedom of Association

Rose Hills Cemetery in Whittier, California, is believed to be the largest in the country. Lots are expensive, and Rev. Daniel Williams of the nearby black congregation, Baptist Church of the New Covenant, wanted something cheaper for his flock. He persuaded Rose Hills to develop four acres of what is now weeds and wildflowers into an inexpensive section that would, as he put it, “honor the presence of blacks who have uplifted the community.” Rev. Williams printed up brochures to publicize Ebony Land, but his idea did not meet with the approval he expected. After much whooping about the evils of “segregation” — mainly from whites, it seems — the name was quickly changed to Glory Lawn. Lots will still be bargain priced, but Brother Williams and the cemetery are now emphasizing that people of any race may be buried there. (Cadonna Peyton, Black Cemetery Section Sparks Debate, AP, May 25, 2000.)

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — “I can think of no strategy that would make our movement appealing to [liberals],” reads a sentence in a letter in the June AR, expressing a commonly-held view among the racially conscious. What we need to understand is that liberals are not ignorant; they are delusional. The difference is that ignorant people can be educated, while delusional people must be treated.

I once worked as an aide in the psychiatric unit of a V.A. hospital. One of our patients believed there were little invisible machines on his body, which ran the universe. He told me that on certain evenings, after the other patients were asleep, he would fly to Venus to deliver scientific lectures. These were delusions, rigidly-held beliefs that persisted despite compelling evidence to the contrary. If you were to show that man irrefutable evidence that he couldn’t fly, for example, he wouldn’t thank you for setting him straight. He would ignore you, and if you persisted he might become hostile or even violent. That is the disease: not the belief he can fly, but the fierce need to protect his error against the intrusion of reason.

Liberals are the same way. It’s not enough to prove them wrong. Shown irrefutable evidence (of which there is plenty) that blacks and whites are not equivalent and interchangeable, liberals ignore the evidence and attack those who present it. It is impossible to have an honest discussion about immigration without first having an honest discussion about race. It is impossible to discuss education or crime or guns or welfare without discussing race, and liberals are pathologically incapable of doing so.

What to do? First, we recognize that the effort will be a long one. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time, immigration and non-white birth-rates being what they are. Nevertheless we must recognize we are dealing not with ignorance but illness. Second, we push for as much open discussion about race as possible. Over time, such discussion can cure even liberalism.

Arthur White, Ga.

Sir — As a subscriber to American Renaissance I was pleasantly surprised on the evening of May 18th to hear Jared Taylor’s interview on KSTP AM in St. Paul. I can’t tell you how encouraging it was to hear your common-sense approach broadcast over the air. It was a breath of fresh air, presented in a matter-of-fact way, and most effective.

R.C. Hanning, Minnetonka, Minn.

Sir — I have noticed several references in AR to the high IQs and low crime rates of Asians. I would point out that most of the Asian populations referred to seem to be North Asian — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — rather than South Asian. There seems to be no evidence of particularly high IQ scores in the Philippines, Malaysia or Indonesia.

As for economic success, I am not familiar with the situation in America but figures based on the 1996 Australian census showed that in Sydney most migrants from China, Hong Kong and Indo-China were earning below the median income, though those from India and Malaysia tended to better. I would note also that when relatively small numbers of people migrate to Western countries they tend to be superior in intelligence than those left behind. In this country, apart from the Vietnamese, Asians are not noted for high crime rates. However, international comparisons seem to indicate a lower homicide rate in Ireland and some other European countries compared to most Asian countries. If a recall correctly, the homicide rate in the Philippines is considerably higher than in the United States. I suspect that as America’s Asian minority grows it will be less successful economically and its crime rates will rise.

R. Hughes, Strathfield, Australia

Sir — When I received the June issue of AR I read the article by Jared Taylor twice because its tone suggested that Elian Gonzalez should be sent back to Fidel Castro. This is the first time I have found myself in disagreement with Mr. Taylor, whom I respect and admire. This time he has allied himself with some strange bed-fellows. Any time you find yourself agreeing with William Clinton, Janet Reno, Mr. Castro, 92 percent of blacks, and the INS you may want to reconsider your views.

I despise Communism so my position may be a little subjective, but as soon as Mr. Castro decided to make a political issue out of Elian I would never have allowed the boy to be sent back to Cuba. He will be paraded through the streets of Havana and used as a poster-boy for the Communist agenda. Never do anything to further the Communist agenda.

Benjamin Dover, Pleasant View, Tenn.

Sir — In his article “Blacking the Profession” in the July issue, William J. Blasi writes he could find no reference to alleged black heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams. In his 1980 booklet IQ and Racial Differences Henry E. Garrett writes, “A Negro physician, Daniel Williams, has been called the first successful heart surgeon. Dr. Williams sewed up a stab wound in an artery a fraction of an inch from the heart. This was in 1893. Through some miracle the patient lived. But Williams’ feat did not advance the state of the surgical art and contributed nothing to the development of the elaborately planned heart operation of the present day.”

Dr. Garrett gives as his source: R.B. Kuttner, A Brief Account of Negro History.

S.E. Parker, London, England