June 1994

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 5, No. 6 June 1994

 

CONTENTS

The Color of Crime
Race and the Law
Race, Crime, and Gun Control
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Color of Crime

How much violent crime is there in America and who commits it?

by Jared Taylor

It is no better than a cliché to point out that there is a great deal of violent crime in the United States. Americans commit more than 20,000 murders, 100,000 rapes, 650,000 robberies and 1,000,000 aggravated assaults every year. But what do those numbers mean? Are they going up — as everyone assumes — or are they declining? How much crime do blacks commit, and how much of their violence is directed against whites?

Every year, the U.S. Department of Justice issues two fat volumes of crime statistics that contain most of the information needed to answer these questions. The more useful of the two is the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, but the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports is also illuminating. As one would expect, these books do not always give racial data and they almost never make explicit racial comparisons. However, our government does collect enough information to allow a researcher to make most of the relevant racial comparisons for himself.

Some of the most important findings come from surveys of crime victims. Every year the Justice Department interviews the members of 40,000 to 50,000 households and asks detailed questions about all crimes of which they were victims. Since police departments often file reports only on people they have arrested, this survey gathers information about two other important crime categories: those that do not lead to an arrest and those not reported to the police. Survey participants are always asked the race of the perpetrator, so the results of this survey are an accurate assessment both of real crime levels in America and of who the criminals are, even if they are never caught.

The only really inexcusable failing in federal statistics is that they almost always include Hispanics in the “white” category rather than break them out separately. Hispanics, now about nine percent of the population, are not so violent as blacks but they are markedly more violent than whites. By calling them “white,” the Department of Justice exaggerates white crime rates.

Despite this, the contrast between black and “white” crime rates is staggering — and virtually unknown. Many of the figures in this article must be derived from Department of Justice statistics, and journalists almost never do this.

Murder and Robbery

In 1992, police reported 23,760 murders and non-negligent homicides. Although they are only 12 percent of the population, blacks committed about 55 percent of the murders. This means that murder rates, by race, were dramatically different. “Whites” (including Hispanics) killed at a rate of 5.1 per 100,000 while the rate for blacks was 43.3 per 100,000. Blacks are therefore 8.5 times more likely to commit murder than whites and, all by themselves, account for the fact that the United States has a higher murder rate than England or Italy (see story on page 6).

Most of the time, blacks killed other blacks, but about 13 percent of their victims were white. Whites also usually killed each other, but six percent of their victims were black. In all, there were 2.7 times as many whites killed by blacks as blacks killed by whites, which means that any given black is 17 times more likely to kill a white than vice versa.

Robbery, or “mugging,” is the street crime that people fear most, and in 1992, 672,478 robberies were reported to the police. Victimization studies show that only about 60 percent of the victims of a successful robbery report the crime to the police, so the real figure was well over one million — one for every 250 people every year. Robbery is very much a black specialty, and blacks committed over 60 percent of the year’s robberies. This means that blacks committed robbery at a rate of 1,343 per 100,000 while the white rate was 126 per 100,000 — less than one tenth the black rate. When it comes to gang robbery — perhaps the quintessentially black crime — blacks are 22 times more likely than whites to be offenders.

Unlike murder, robbery is not a crime that blacks mainly practice on each other. Over half of the robberies by blacks are of whites (including Hispanics). White muggers (including Hispanics) choose blacks as their victims only about four percent of the time and steal from other whites the rest of the time. Put differently, for every black robbed by a white, there are 24 whites robbed by a black.

Similar disproportions are found for the other crimes of violence — rape and aggravated assault (assault with the intent of inflicting severe injury, usually with a deadly weapon). When blacks commit violent crime they choose white victims just over half the time, whereas when whites commit violent crimes they target blacks about two percent of the time. Thus, any given black is 70 times more likely to commit criminal violence against a white than is any given white likely to commit criminal violence against a black.

For gang violence the odds are even steeper. Fifty-six percent of black gang robberies, rapes, and assaults are committed against whites, while only 4.5 percent of all white gang violence is committed against blacks. Any given black is therefore 83 times more likely to take part in gang violence against whites than vice versa. These disproportions are based on surveys of crime victims — not arrest records — so they reflect the most reliable information available on inter-racial violence. They are almost never reported.

These facts do not sit well with the currently fashionable notion that the victims of black crime are mostly other blacks. There is actually more “black-on-white” than “black-on-black” criminal violence, though one would search the mainstream press in vain for this fact. Black-on-black crime is the subject of conferences and earnest analysis; black-on-white crime has scarcely any official recognition.

As noted above, the one crime that blacks generally do keep within the “community” is murder. This accounts for why blacks are seven times more likely to be murdered than whites. However, when it comes to the less serious but far more common crimes of robbery, rape, and assault, the racial gap in victimization rates is much narrower. Despite the fact that blacks are 800 to 2,000 percent more likely than whites to commit crimes of violence, they are only 50 percent more likely to be victims of violent crime. The difference is due to the fact that blacks vent so much of their violence upon people of other races.

One interesting statistic reported by the Department of Justice is the number of drug-related admissions to hospital emergency rooms. Blacks are three times more likely than whites to be involved in such admissions, and 12 times more likely to be admitted because of cocaine. Interestingly, blacks are under-represented in emergency-room admissions for use of tranquilizers and sedatives. These are often the result of overdose suicide attempts, and since whites are twice as likely as blacks to commit suicide, such admissions are overwhelmingly white.

The Prison Population

Prison statistics are virtually the only ones for which the federal government reports Hispanics as a separate category, and the results are revealing. Whites, who are still about 75 percent of the population (though this includes North Africans, Arabs and Persians), made up only 38.7 percent of the nation’s prison population in 1989, and the percentage has been decreasing. Forty one percent of all inmates were black, and 17.5 percent were Hispanic. This means that blacks were 6.7 times more likely than whites to be in jail and Hispanics were 3.4 times more likely.

Disproportions like these are often dismissed as the result of “racist” police work, but the most plausible explanation is that non-whites are more likely to be in jail because they commit more crime. In passing, it is worth noting that people are right to assume that most criminals are poorly educated: 54 percent are high school dropouts.

The assumption that all prisons are crowded is correct only for some states — generally those that have had rapidly increasing populations. California’s prisons operate at 135 percent of capacity and those in New Jersey are at 146 percent. However, only 15 states are running at over 100 percent. Alaska operates at 35 percent, Wyoming at 51 percent, Montana at 52 percent, and North Dakota at 38 percent.

The death sentence gets a great deal of attention because blacks are said to be more likely to get it than whites. That is not true. In April 1993, 50.6 percent of death row inmates were white, 39 percent were black, and seven percent Hispanic. Since 1977, when the death penalty was resumed after a 10-year break, the only crime for which it has been given is murder. Since blacks commit more than half the nation’s murders, they are considerably underrepresented on death row. The same is true for actual executions. Of the 147 people executed since 1977, 43 percent have been black.

Congress has been toying with laws that would require states to execute criminals by racial quota. If the quotas were based on the number of murderers, rather than on percentages of the population, executions of blacks would have to be stepped up. It is just as well no one is urging that the death penalty be given equally to men and women; for every woman on death row there are 70 men.

Historical Trends

Crime is a serious problem, and getting worse. However, not all crimes are increasing at the same rate. The murder rate has essentially been flat for 20 years (see first chart). Though preliminary reports indicate a slight upturn in 1993, there were actually almost 1,000 fewer murders in 1992 than in the previous year. It is true that the 1992 total of 23,760 is far higher than the 8,530 murders in 1962, but much of the rise is due to increases in population. The national murder rate — the number of killings per 100,000 Americans — has risen from 4.6 in 1962 to only 9.3 in 1992. Americans are therefore twice as likely to kill each other as they were 30 years ago, but this is a modest increase compared to the rise in other violent crimes.

For murder, 1962 was something like the end of an era. The rate per 100,000 had bobbed along between four and five during most of the 1940s and 1950s (it was an uncharacteristically high 5.8 in 1938), but first went above 9.0 in 1972. Since then, aside from a high of 10.2 in 1980, the rate has stayed between 7.9 and 9.8. The United States is not therefore, suffering from a shocking and unprecedented plague of murders. Murder rates nearly doubled from 1962 to 1972, but have held steady for the last 20 years.

Rape shows a very different pattern. In the 1930s, rape was considered a more serious offense than it is today, and could well get a man the death penalty. As sexual mores changed and rape ceased to merit execution, rape rates soared. The last execution for rape was in 1964, and the rate has increased about 450 percent since 1962.

In 1992, aggravated assault rates were at an all-time record of 441.8 per 100,000. This number has been climbing steadily since 1962, when the figure was 88.6, or about one fifth the current rate. Overall violent crime rates show a similar increase. It is important to bear in mind that these are crime rates, not raw numbers, and the upward slope of these lines reflects an increasingly crime-prone society, not a larger population.

It is commonly claimed by liberals that more prisons and longer prison terms do not prevent crime. The argument is based on the fact that although we have been putting more and more people in jail (see third chart), crime rates have not fallen. The obvious rejoinder is that rapists and muggers who are in jail cannot possibly rape and mug, and that if they were on the streets our crime rates would be even higher.

During the 1960s, the very decade when crime rates began to soar, the rate of incarceration fell. Liberal social policies combined with lenient sentencing produced exactly what one would expect: a crime wave. America quickly got over its love affair with felons and, in the 1970s and 1980s, started locking up criminals at record rates.

Rape and Murder Rates

Violent Crime Rates

Incarceration Rates

Crimes Cleared by Arrest

This almost certainly explains why the increase in some crime rates has slowed. Immigration, both legal and illegal, brings in disproportionate numbers of criminals. Likewise, the number of welfare-bred degenerates continues to increase. Until this changes, there is no reason to expect crime rates to go down except through increased incarceration rates.

Of course, incarceration works only when criminals are caught, and American policemen are less able to catch them than before. The bar chart on this page compares the rates at which crimes were cleared by an arrest in 1953 with clearance rates in 1992. They have declined in all categories while, at the same time, increasing numbers of crimes do not even go reported. The chances of a crime going unpunished are thus very high.

Race and Crime

Crime rates have risen for all races, but has black violence grown more or less rapidly than white violence? It is not easy to find out, since the federal government has not always kept crime records in the same manner. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, the Department of Justice categorized criminals as White, Negro, [American] Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Other, which was considerably more realistic than the current categories of Black, White, and Other.

Also, until 1940, the government calculated arrest rates by race, though only for Native White, Foreign-Born White, and Negro. (Compared to native whites, foreign-born whites consistently had lower arrest rates — sometimes dramatically so. This may reflect the fact that young men commit most of the crime, and some foreign-born whites came to America after they had outgrown their most crime-prone years.) It would be interesting to know why the department stopped publishing these figures.

It is possible to compare differential arrest rates by race for 1940 and 1992, though the data may not have been collected the same way in both years and may not be equivalent. The table to the right shows how much more likely blacks were than whites to be arrested for crimes of violence. In 1940, a black was four times more likely than a white to be arrested for robbery, but in 1992, he was 11 times more likely. Multiples for robbery and rape have more than doubled, but the gap for assault has narrowed. Whether or not these data are strictly comparable, they show that blacks have been, and continue to be, much more violent than whites.

Although our nation is reluctant to admit it, crime is clearly a racial problem. The best single predictor of a city or neighborhood’s crime rate is its racial composition. Since blacks commit violent crimes at about ten times the white rate, if a city’s population changes from all-white to half-white/half-black, the violence rate can be expected to go up fivefold. All-black areas are likely to have about ten times as much violent crime as all-white ones.

Multiples of Black/White Arrest Rates for Violent Crime
1940 1992
Murder 6.9 9.8
Robbery 4.0 11.0
Assault 8.0 5.0
Rape 2.6 6.0

For this reason alone, whites are justified in avoiding black neighborhoods and in not wanting blacks to move into their neighborhoods. Of course, crime is not the only result when neighborhoods become black. Schools decline, housing decays, stores close, vandalism increases, and all the familiar signs of ghetto squalor begin to appear.

It is probably not possible to bring black crime rates down to the white level. So long as blacks and whites continue to live together, whites will pay the high price of sharing their society with an inveterately violent racial minority.

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ARTICLE

Race and the Law

by Marian Evans

There are signs that the law is slowly beginning to acknowledge that blacks are more violent and dangerous than whites. The most dramatic example of this was an unprecedented defense used in a murder trial in Fort Worth, Texas in April.

In most respects, the crime was perfectly ordinary. A 17-year-old black man, Daimion Osby, was rolling dice with some other young black men. Mr. Osby won a $400 pot and promptly left the game. This violated dicing etiquette, which requires that big winners stay in the game and give others a chance to win back their money.

One of the heavy losers, Marcus Brooks, vowed to “get” Mr. Osby. Some time afterwards, Mr. Brooks, with help form a cousin, attacked Mr. Osby at a basketball game, and the fight was broken up by police. On another occasion, when Mr. Osby was stopped at a traffic light, Mr. Brooks and his cousin pulled up beside him, waved a shotgun at him, and ordered him to pull over. Mr. Osby sped away and escaped.

Mr. Osby once again eluded his attackers after a meeting in a park, and decided that he should arm himself. He bought a .38 caliber revolver and three bullets, and started carrying the weapon in his pocket.

One evening, Mr. Osby was standing on the sidewalk talking to a woman. Mr. Brooks and his cousin were driving by, saw Mr. Osby, and drove up onto the sidewalk, bumping Mr. Osby. The two assailants got out of the car and attacked Mr. Osby, knocking him to the ground. Mr. Osby broke free and shot one of the men in the head. As the other made a dash for the car, where he kept a loaded handgun, Mr. Osby shot him, too, killing both men with single shots to the head.

Mr. Osby’s public defenders argued that this was a justified, self-defense killing. The problem was that Texas law permits defensive use of lethal force only if a man has reason to believe that his life is in imminent danger. The lawyers decided to argue that because the assailants were black, Mr. Osby had particularly compelling reason to think his life was in danger.

The prosecution tried to prevent this testimony, but the defense was allowed to call an expert witness to explain to the jury the grisly facts about differential murder rates. The witness made a very simple case. He pointed out that men are about nine times more likely to commit murder than women, and it is appropriate to adjust defensive behavior according to the sex of an assailant. Men are more dangerous than women, so it is more reasonable to shoot a male attacker than a female attacker. He also explained that young men are far more dangerous than old men, and therefore pose a threat that can be more justifiably met with lethal force.

Finally, he pointed out that blacks are more than eight times more likely to commit murder than whites. This means that blacks are almost as much more dangerous than whites as men are more dangerous than women. Just as it is legitimate to fear men more than women and young men more than old men, it is legitimate to fear blacks more than whites. Mr. Osby faced two men who fit perfectly the profile of the most dangerous, violent people in America, and was therefore justified in using deadly force.

The defense seems to have been partly successful. The jury voted eleven-to-one to convict, but the jury foreman — one of two blacks on the panel — held out for acquittal. As he explained to journalists, Mr. Osby was right to be afraid and to think his life in danger. A hung jury is neither a conviction nor an acquittal, and the prosecution promises to try Mr. Osby again, probably in the fall. The defense plans to present the same expert testimony at the second trial.

There was outrage among Fort Worth blacks over this defense strategy, as there always is when unpleasant racial facts are aired. A group of preachers thundered that this defense would mean it was “open season” on young black men. Of course, young men of any race are more dangerous than old women, but this does not make it “open season” on them.

It is fortunate that Mr. Osby is black. The blacks-are-more-dangerous defense would be just as valid for whites as for blacks, but in the current climate of racial hysteria, it would probably backfire on a white defendant. Nevertheless, it is an important milestone for a court officially to permit testimony explaining that blacks are a greater threat to society than whites.

In other, less direct ways, racial realities may begin shaping the law. There is support in some quarters for permitting police searches without warrants in certain housing projects. Residents would agree to the searches as a condition for living in subsidized apartments. The American Civil Liberties Union seems to have stopped this plan for the time being, but no one imagines warrantless searches of buildings full of whites or Asians.

Likewise, several months ago, the mayor of Washington, DC, Sharon Pratt Kelly, proposed that since crime had become such a problem in her city, the National Guard should be asked to help fight it. It is no coincidence that Washington is two-thirds black.

America is not a single society but several. Eventually the law may recognize this.

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ARTICLE

Race, Crime, and Gun Control

Advocates for gun control are probably more vociferous and better able to pass restrictive laws than ever before. Curiously, their increasing power does not come in the wake of any significant rise in murder rates. Also, their demands ignore racial differences in violence rates that have an important bearing on the legitimacy of gun control.

It is true that guns are sometimes put to shocking uses. In 1992, eleven infants under the age of one were shot to death. However, 15 times that number were killed by beating, strangulation, or asphyxiation — with no weapon at all.

Despite the current hysteria about guns, the United States is not suffering from an unprecedented plague of gun murders. As the chart on page four shows, after climbing steeply in the 1960s, the national murder rate has hardly changed in 20 years. Nor has there been an increase in the percentage of killings committed with firearms. In 1991, 66 percent of murderers used a gun — exactly the same percentage as in 1970.

The move to ban “assault” rifles is even further divorced from reality. In 1991, rifles of all kinds were used in only three percent of murders, or about half as often as Americans killed each other with their bare hands. Gun control advocates have many reasons for wanting to take guns out of the hands of citizens, but a sudden surge in firearms murders is not one of them.

In many cases, firearms play a useful role in American society. They are used by private citizens thousands of times a year to scare off criminals, and are by far the most common weapon for the legitimate killing of felons by police and the public. Police killed 415 criminals in 1992, and used a firearm 98 percent of the time. Private citizens dispatched 348 criminals, 88 percent of them with firearms. There is no telling how many innocent lives are saved by guns every year.

The most common argument for gun control is that nations that practice it have less violent crime than we do. As the chart on this page shows, it is true that the United States is more violent than the European countries to which we are most often compared. However, these national comparisons ignore race.

In 1992, murder rates for American blacks were 43.3 for every 100,000 blacks. Whites committed murder at about one eighth that rate, or 5.1 murders for every 100,000 whites. The murder rate for American whites was therefore lower than that of Britain or Italy, despite the wide availability in America of firearms.

Crime Rates in Europe and America (per 100,000 population)

Britain France Germany Italy U.S.A.
Murder 7.4 4.6 4.2 6.0 9.3
Robbery 62.6 90.4 47.3 68.6 263.0

(European data for 1990, American data for 1992.)

Robbery rates were similar. In 1992, the black rate was 1,343 per 100,000, while the white rate was 126. The figure for American whites, though higher than that of any European country, is not strikingly higher than the rate of 90.4 for France.

Crime rates for American whites are actually lower than these figures suggest. Since the FBI does not treat Hispanics as a separate category, if a Mexican immigrant kills someone, this raises the “white” crime total. Hispanics are more violent than whites, so “white” crime rates are artificially inflated.

The fact that white Americans are no more likely than Europeans to kill each other has profound implications. First, it suggests that the United States does not have a unique “culture of violence” or “wild west” mentality. It also suggests that guns are not the problem, at least for whites. America has a high violent crime rate because it has many violent black criminals. It is blacks — eight times more likely than whites to commit murder and ten times more likely to commit robbery — who put the nation’s violent crime rates well ahead of Europe’s. The white population appears to handle guns responsibly while the black population does not.

It may actually be that gun control has little effect on the rates at which people kill each other. Every Swiss man of military age keeps a fully automatic, government-issued rifle in his home, but Switzerland does not have a serious murder problem. Israelis go about heavily armed but rarely shoot each other.

In Britain and Italy, despite the fact that they have no guns, people find enough other ways to kill each other to have higher murder rates than American whites. In like manner, disarming blacks might not have much effect on the rate at which they commit murder. They might simply find other ways to do it.

All this is probably of no interest to gun control advocates, who seem to hate guns, whether in the hands of criminals or upright citizens. Nevertheless, would they have any influence at all if America’s murder rate were no higher than those of countries that are already disarmed? Whether they know it or not, gun control advocates are proposing laws that would take guns away from everyone — including whites — because of murders committed by blacks.

*** NOTE: SOME OF THE EUROPEAN STATISTICS ON WHICH THE ABOVE ARTICLE WERE MISTAKEN. THE MURDER RATE AMONG AMERICAN WHITES APPEARS TO BE SOMEWHAT HIGHER THAN THAT OF EUROPEANS. ***

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IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Beginning of the End

Nelson Mandela is now President of South Africa, and all liberals are rejoicing. No matter how much of a mess blacks make of the only properly functioning economy in Africa or how much cruelty they mete out to whites, the grisly gods of “democracy” have now been satisfied.

Old Map of South Africa

South Africa circa 1905

The incoherence of elite opinion was perhaps best summarized in an apparently innocuous headline in the New York Times: “Blacks Go to the Polls for the First Time in 300 Years.” Are we to believe that blacks were holding regular elections until the white man came along and made them stop?

In fact, the headline is not even true. South African blacks have been voting in municipal and local elections for years. They enjoyed far more democracy under white rule than do blacks just about anywhere else on the continent, where unapologetic dictatorship supported by occasional massacre is the rule.

Even the self-governance blacks had under whites is likely to end. What ordinarily happens when whites hand over power to blacks is “one man, one vote, one time.” Perhaps South Africa, with all the eyes of the world upon it, will actually stagger through another general election or two. It will not be long, though, before the ANC is entrenched in brutal, one-party rule and its leader is President for Life.

At this point even the Afrikaaners seem too demoralized by world-wide disapproval to put up the unified resistance necessary to build a homeland. Of course, the handover of the entire country to blacks has come about only because every white country in the world insisted on it. What could have been a prosperous, cohesive Afrikaaner nation is being strangled in its crib by Europeans and Americans.

Voice of Sanity

The Rothbard-Rockwell Report is a refreshingly sharp commentary on the forces of lunacy that are destroying our country. The April 1994 issue has an excellent cover story by Murray Rothbard entitled The Vital Importance of Separation. Professor Rothbard notes the ethnic and tribal tensions that are evident everywhere from the Middle East to what used to be Yugoslavia, and observes:

Beyond a small quantity, national heterogeneity simply does not work; the ‘nation’ disintegrates into more than one nation, and the need for separation becomes acute.

He explains that the obvious solution to South Africa’s agonies is Grand Apartheid, or the establishment of separate, sovereign nations based on race and ethnicity. He also points out that the desire for separation is perfectly legitimate. “Why,” asks Prof. Rothbard, “is it ‘racist’ to want to be left alone?”

Most remarkable of all, Prof. Rothbard follows his logic home to the United States:

We are now probably a lot more than two nations, and we had better start giving serious thought to national separation. To those who think that the main problem is restricting the number and types of immigration, the best answer is that such a policy is decades too late. We are already far more than one nation within the borders of the U.S.A., let alone worry about the immigrants. To greet the very raising of such questions with the mindless cry of ‘racism’ or ‘chauvinism’ misses the entire point.

We might not be able any longer to bring back the Old Republic across the entire land area of the 50 states. But we may be able to bring it back in a substantial part of that land area.

“We must dare to think the unthinkable . . .” concludes Prof. Rothbard, a man who practices what he preaches.

Information on subscriptions to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report is available from Box 4091, Burlingame, CA 94011.

The Cost of Set-Asides

One of today’s standard racial scams is set-asides — awarding public contracts to non-white companies at prices higher than the lowest bid. Naturally, this raises costs, sometimes by a great deal. A set-aside project to rebuild the King’s County Hospital in a blighted part of Brooklyn, New York is now 32 months behind schedule and virtually paralyzed.

Trouble began in 1991, when the project was taken away from the three original prime contractors and broken up into 110 smaller contracts so that inexperienced non-white companies could bid on them. The result has been a nightmare of botched, uncoordinated planning that has produced practically no construction. New York’s new mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, may decide to write off the entire effort and start over.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Clarence Norman’s involvement in the project has been particularly edifying. One of the most vocal proponents of reserving jobs for black companies, he turns out to have been a partner in a firm that was paid $2.5 million to locate them.

The ‘Crazy Check’ Game

The Social Security Administration runs a little-known program called Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is a government handout for disabled people. A 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it easier for children with various afflictions to qualify for SSI payments, which are made to their parents.

Many black parents now urge their children to act crazy or deliberately do as poorly as possible on evaluation tests, so that they will qualify for SSI payments. This has been particularly popular in the poorer counties of Arkansas, where “crazy checks” have been a windfall. The usual stipend is $464 a month, which is supposed to be spent on special needs for the children, but which is routinely spent by parents on whatever they want.

In its usual deranged way, the 1990 court ruling permits retroactive lump-sum payments of as much as $10,000 for newly eligible children, and a family with three or four “crazy” children can make a very nice living. Since the 1990 ruling, the number of disabled children in Arkansas has more than doubled, and in heavily black counties it has tripled.

The head of the Arkansas agency that distributes “crazy checks” resigned just as stories of abuses began to appear in the press. Cassandra F. Wilkins-Slater, who is black, plans to move to Washington to join her husband, who is Federal Highway Administrator. She is expected to take a job with the Social Security Administration.

Another Day in Harlem

William Washington is a bum who was being treated for tuberculosis at Harlem Hospital in New York City. On April 20th, he sneaked into the room of a 42-year-old female patient on a respirator and raped her. Mr. Washington has the AIDS virus, but has not given it to his victim. She was already infected.

West Heads North

Cornel West is one of those superstar black professors who writes his own ticket. He used to be director of the Afro-American studies department at Princeton, but will soon be leaving for Harvard. Princeton’s student newspaper, musing on the move, published the cartoon reproduced here. Blacks roared but the paper stood by its cartoonist.

More Money for King Day

Martin Luther King is the only American honored with a national holiday on his birthday. His is also the only national holiday supported by a government commission to make sure it is properly celebrated. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to extend the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission for another five years and to give it $2 million.

Miraculously, New Hampshire still does not recognize the day as a state holiday. This year, for the ninth time, a move to recognize King failed in the state house. New Hampshire is not entirely innocent of orthodoxy. On the same day that other states celebrate King’s birthday, it celebrates Civil Rights Day. King Day opponents, argue that since there were many people who fought for civil rights, no one man should be singled out for honor.

Cumulative Voting

Lani Guinier, Bill Clinton’s short-lived nominee to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has long been a proponent of what is called cumulative voting. The theory is that in jurisdictions with racial minorities, all voters should have not just one but several votes. If everyone has, say, five votes and there is one black candidate in a field of several candidates, blacks can pile all their votes onto the black while whites split their votes.

Such systems have already been ordered by judges in Chilton County, Alabama and Worcester County, Maryland. The next step will be to formalize representation by racial quota in all elected bodies.

Holy Cow

Hindus think cows are holy, and in India, laws generally forbid the slaughter of any cattle not diseased, disabled, or over the age of fifteen. Butchers in India are mostly Muslims, and do not worship cows. They practice a lucrative back door business of quietly delivering steaks to closet meat-eaters. It is common to falsify age certificates and even to slash the legs of healthy cows so they can be declared disabled and then butchered.

A new, much tougher cow-protection law has recently been passed by the city of New Delhi. It is now illegal not only to kill any cow but to possess beef. Police may raid shops and homes, and the accused must prove that what he was about to eat was not beef. Cow-killers will be held without bail.

The law also provides for the aged cattle that may no longer be slaughtered. The city will establish ten shelters, to which the old and infirm among Delhi’s estimated 150,000 cows can retire in peace rather than face the knacker’s knife.

Why are Hindus so fond of cows? As one Delhi priest explains, “That which serves you with its milk is your mother . . . So would you kill your mother?” In 1921, Mahatma Gandhi observed that “Hindus will be judged . . . by their ability to protect the cow.”

Rather Sad

Dan Rather, television anchorman, is in the news business. An article he recently wrote for the loony left magazine, The Nation (April 11, 1994), suggests that he actually holds some of his biases in check when he is on camera. In a piece called “Away, Dixie,” he celebrated the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, and concluded with these words:

The list goes on and on: Vietnamese-Americans, Arab-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Americans from every corner of the globe are daily subjected to abuses of civil rights, to violence, hatred and inhumanity. Across the country.

Don’t try to tell me or any other New Southerner that civil rights was and is a ‘Southern problem.’ The Old South shared the worst of its legacy with all Americans.

Silence Reigns

This spring, there was a series of muggings of old people in the Glenwood Homes complex of Brooklyn, New York. Young thugs would lie in wait for grandmothers to come out of their homes, then knock them down and take their money. New York papers noted with some concern that there had been a dozen such attacks and that in the latest outrage, a woman had been thrown down with enough force to break her hip and shatter her skull.

In all the tut-tutting over violence, no one had the nerve to point out that all the attackers were black and all their victims white. The New York Post finally spilled the beans, quoting a detective who said he had been told by one of the young muggers: “Of course I knew they were white people. It was a pact we made — only white people.”

O Albion

A reader just back from a month-long stay in England reports that the white man’s disease is well advanced.

Apparently, there are not enough non-white lawyers in Britain. In his address to the latest class of recruits to the ranks of Queen’s Counsel, no less a person than Lord Mackay of Clashfern expressed his deep concern over the insufficient number of blacks and browns.

This has become such a worry that a blue-ribbon panel was recently appointed to learn why 45 percent of non-white candidates for the bar fail their examinations while only 16 percent of whites do. Try as it might, the group could find no “evidence of direct or indirect discrimination,” but it could scarcely declare the matter closed.

It concluded that the tradition of old-fashioned dinners, which aspiring barristers must attend, is unfriendly to non-whites. Good manners, grace before dinner, and claret are alien and intimidating. The panel also noted that a meal of red meat might offend non-whites. Likewise, the year-long Bar Vocational Course was found to be insufficiently structured, with non-whites more likely to sink than swim. The Society of Black Lawyers dismissed the report as a “white-wash.”

Elsewhere, a Hindu worker has filed racial discrimination charges be cause the dress code of Harrod’s department store forbids women to wear rings in their noses. Parliament is gearing up to pass a law that would add up to five additional years in jail for any crime that had a racial motivation and the Labor Party is wondering whether to create safe legislative seats for Muslims.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense is doling out money to women it dropped from the armed forces because they got pregnant. British regulations had required women to resign from certain positions if they became pregnant, but in 1990 this was found to violate a directive from the European Community that outlaws sex discrimination. Britannia, which once ruled the waves, duly truckled to Brussels bureaucrats and is now settling more than 4,000 cases of wrongful dismissal. Settlements are likely to cost the ministry about £50 million; in April, an ex-army major was sent home with £300,000.

Adrian Hicks, a former Grenadier Guard, thinks this is not quite cricket. He points out that all 4,000 current claimants knew the terms of service when they signed up, and thinks that a Brussels-ordered £300,000 for loss of a job is preposterous. Mr. Hicks lost both his legs in a training accident. After a long court battle, he received £ 105,000.

Bad Case of Nameism

Leslie Perez is running for Democratic Party chair in Texas’ Harris County. She was born a man, Leslie Ashley, but underwent a sex change operation several years ago, and took the name Perez from a man she met while serving a prison sentence for murder.

Hispanics in Harris County say she is falsely trading on her name — she is white — in the hope of winning Hispanic votes. Miss Perez does not actually claim to be Hispanic; she has merely declined to identify her race on candidate forms.

No Safe Haven

North Dallas is wealthy and overwhelmingly white. Mayor Steve Bartlett lives there, as does Ross Perot. This spring there has been a series of more than 20 driveway robberies, in which thugs followed motorists home and held them up at gun point. In two cases they shot and killed the drivers. All victims have been white; all perpetrators black.

A neighbor of one of the murdered men is a 33-year-old woman who was raped at gunpoint three years ago in a different neighborhood. She moved to North Dallas to escape crime.

School Days

It has been an unhappy spring in some of America’s public schools. In Harlem, a 14-year-old stormed into class with four accomplices and pistol-whipped a teacher while his students looked on. Edgar Valentino, whose nose was broken, is Hispanic, and his black assailant claimed Mr. Valentino was abusive.

In March, the championship game for the New York City high school basketball league ended in a brawl, as hundreds of spectators poured onto the court and brained each other with folding chairs. All students had been checked for weapons so there were no deaths. Mob violence at New York high school sporting events is so common that games are often played in locked, all-but-empty gymnasiums.

In Detroit, where high schools have metal detectors, young gang members slipped past security and settled a score with a student by pistol-whipping him in front of his teacher and classmates. On the way out, they fired a few shots for dramatic effect.

In Washington, DC, one high school student brushed against another at a water fountain. The second student took offense, drew a weapon, and shot the first one four times.

Some people still claim it is racist for whites to send their children to private schools.

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LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — In an “O Tempora” item in the May issue, you write about Newark, New Jersey’s decision to destroy four 13-story apartment buildings that had become crime-ridden pest holes. Just one of the problems with government housing is a law passed in 1987 that forbids states and cities to tear down public housing unless it is replaced, unit for unit. This means that even if non-white occupants render apartments uninhabitable the buildings cannot be demolished. The result? Huge sums are spent to “maintain” abandoned buildings that serve no purpose.

In Philadelphia, it has cost $7.9 million to maintain a complex of eight public housing buildings that have virtually no occupants. The controversy over what to do with two other vacant buildings in Philadelphia (containing 448 units) has raged for 18 years. In Cleveland, over the past seven years, the federal government has spent $47 million maintaining empty apartments. New Orleans, like many black-majority cities, is losing population; it has 37,000 vacant public housing units that cannot be destroyed and must be maintained.

Collin Peterson is a congressman from Minnesota and chairman of a subcommittee on housing. He has held a hearing on a bill to repeal the 1987 replacement requirement. “We invited four or five directors of troubled public housing authorities to testify at the hearing,” he says, “but we couldn’t get any of them because they’re all being fired or replaced.”

Andrew Canty, Winchester, Va.

Sir — I am writing in reply to Arthur Hinckle who disagrees with me in the May issue. In an earlier letter I defended activists who are actually doing something about our racial plight. Mr. Hinckle writes, “‘Doing something’ may be cathartic but is often unhelpful.”

This is partly true. However, for AR readers tired of just “wringing their hands,” I recommend joining the Populist Party. This party is not an outgrowth of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. It was started some years ago in Pennsylvania and supports all phases of the racialist movement. Its address is Box 15499, Pittsburgh, PA 15237.

Robert Briggs, Punta Gorda, Fla.

Sir — As a new reader I am thrilled and inspired to find a tough, lean magazine that deals with the most important race-related issues: crime, immigration, dysgenics, and cultural decay. You avoid crudity and esoteric ideologies and I feel free to share AR with other people. I devoutly hope that your work ignites some sparks of courage among capable but cautious people.

One of the ironies about some people who try to raise white consciousness is that despite their warnings about dysgenics they often appeal to the most degenerate elements of the race. Liberals have not failed to capitalize on this.

Best of success with the conference.

Paul Neff, Cambridge, Mass.

Sir — Despite all the bad news that I read in AR, I think the country is beginning to turn. Evidence of this is the near-hysterical effort by the media to paint non-whites in benign colors. The deceptions are so transparent that hardly anyone can believe them, probably not even the people who promote them.

What we have today is a kind of silent racism — an avoidance of any criticism of blacks but also an avoidance of blacks themselves and of any place where they might be found. Teachers keep reporting these stubbornly “racist” tendencies in the their students despite all the propaganda. It’s a weird situation, which cannot last long. Others will soon begin to speak up. We must be patient but we may yet find that we are not so far in front of the curve, as the saying goes, as some may think.

Name Withheld

Sir — I subscribe to Prodigy, which is the largest of the computer bulletin boards, with about 2 million members. Yesterday, the results of a poll on South Africa caught my eye. When I checked, 7,941 people had replied to the following questions:

1. What are the chances that a stable democracy will develop under Mandela? The answers were “Poor”: 45 percent, “Fair”: 25 percent, “Good”: 21 percent, “Excellent”: 7 percent.

2. Will blacks and whites work together to build a democracy? Answers were “Disagree”: 46 percent, “Agree”: 41 percent, “Not Sure”: 14 percent.

The answers were further broken down by age, sex, and region. Women are much more starry-eyed about South Africa’s prospects than men, and young people are more so than old. People in the Mid-West and on the West Coast are more optimistic than people in the South or East. What does this tell us? Men, people who have lived for a while, and people who live where there are many blacks have fewer illusions.

Prodigy subscribers are likely to be white, well educated, and reasonably well off. They fit the profile of the perfect liberal. It is significant that so many have “illiberal” expectations for South Africa.

Y.R. Enger, Chicago, Ill

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