March 1991
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol. 2, No. 3 | March 1991 |
| CONTENTS |
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The Great ‘White’ North
Calling All Refugees
The Folly of the Welfare State, Part II
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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The Great ‘White’ North
At its current rate, Canada will become a third-world nation even before the United States does.
by Marian Evans
Last June, the city council of Toronto voted 12-7 to change the words of the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada,” because they thought the words were offensive to immigrants. They voted to change “our home and native land,” to “our home and cherished land,” on the theory that this would please foreign-born Chinese, Haitians, and Sikhs. The Toronto city council cannot, on its own authority, change the words of the national anthem, so “O Canada” still has its “nativist” lyrics. All the same, this little incident is an edifying portrait in miniature of a nation that is losing its grip on its heritage.
For Americans who like to think of their northern neighbor as a solid anchor of European influence on the continent, it is a shock to discover that Canada could well have a third-world majority sooner than we do. Like the United States, Canada is promoting an immigration policy that is largely non-white. Like the United States, it has discarded the old standard of cultural assimilation and replaced it with a vision of multiculturalism. Unlike the United States, it actually has cabinet officers — Minister of Immigration and Minister of Multi-Cultural Affairs — whose jobs are to help throw off the nation’s ancient racial and cultural heritage.
Canada’s unity has, from the outset, been rent by fissures. Indians and Eskimos live almost entirely outside the European mainstream, and the gulf that separates the French-Canadians from the English-speakers threatens to tear the country in two. Why a nation already racked by disunity should wish to muddy the waters further with third-world immigrants is a question to mystify the historians of the future. In the meantime, Canada has encountered the obstacles that beset every experiment in multi-racialism.
Two Immigration Policies
Since the Province of Quebec governs so many of its own affairs, Canada has something close to two separate immigration policies. The Quebec policy, which was supposed to bolster the francophone, or French-speaking, character of the province has been a disaster.
In 1976, when the all-but-separatist Parti Québécois won provincial control, it appointed as its first immigration minister a priest and retired missionary to Africa, Jacques Couture. Mr. Couture was determined to do two things: bring more French-speakers to Quebec and open the province to the poor and suffering. In what could not have been a more disastrous choice, he decided on Haiti as the perfect source for new Quebeckers. Haiti was French-speaking, in a primitive way, and it was the most desperately poor, backward place in the hemisphere. Haitians would provide both a fresh dose of francophone vigor and an opportunity for white Quebeckers to open their hearts to the downtrodden.
Mr. Couture worked his “wretched refuse of your distant shores” policy with a vigor that would have astounded Emma Lazarus. Rather than take in the best Haitians he sought the worst. Full-blooded Africans were poorer than mulattoes, so his policy favored the blackest and the poorest. New Canadian citizens suddenly began to appear with legal first names like Pas-Besoin (not needed) or Assez-Filles (enough girls). These are names that Haitians give an unwanted child when they already have seven or eight they can’t feed.
The population of Montreal, where most of the Haitians ended up, is now 30 percent non-white. Thanks to Mr. Couture, it got an instant underclass that behaves almost exactly like its counterpart in the United States. Black neighborhoods have become violent, crime-ridden, drug-sodden slums. French newspapers have invented a new word to describe the transformation: se bronxifier, or to become like the Bronx. Without so much as a hint of the “400 years of slavery and oppression” that is supposed to account for black failure in the United States, Canadian blacks are in exactly the same social and economic position as their brothers to the south.
Other aspects of Mr. Couture’s experiment mirror the United States. Although Quebec could not possibly have recruited more poverty- and crime-prone immigrants, their failures are inevitably blamed on white racism. Whenever a white policeman shoots a black criminal, for example, there are shouts of “racism.”
Journalists and even the police have been so intimidated by charges of racism that it is nearly impossible to report on the extent of black crime in Quebec. In one notorious case last fall, police arrested hundreds of Haitians who had forced women into a huge prostitution business. The women invariably white — were treated abominably. Some were branded like cattle. Others were forced to eat their own menstrual tampons. Some of the Haitians liked to shove a gun barrel up a woman’s vagina and threaten to shoot her.
Police are normally eager to publicize big successes, but not in the charged, whites-are-always-to-blame racial atmosphere of Quebec. As the Montreal Gazette, which finally broke the whole sordid story explained (11/17/90), “police say they could hardly afford to call a news conference to say they had been arresting young Haitians by the hundreds.”
Even the arrest of men who force women into prostitution and make them eat tampons is a delicate, difficult thing if the men happen to be black. Canadians hardly take a back seat to Yanks when it comes to tying themselves into knots over race.
The Rest of the Country
Immigration policies in the rest of Canada have not been so catastrophic as in Quebec. Nevertheless, in proportion to its population of about 26 million — one tenth that of the United States — Canada is taking in several times more immigrants. In 1987, its 150,000 immigrants were, per capita, 2-1/2 times the United States’ 600,000. Whites were still nearly a quarter of the Canadian immigrant stream, as opposed to about one tenth for the United States. In 1987, the largest single group was Asians, at 44 percent. African and Caribbean blacks were 13 percent and Hispanics were 11 percent. Since 1980, only half of all immigrants to Canada have been able to speak English or French.
One hundred fifty thousand newcomers every year aren’t enough for Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall. Despite a recent Gallup Poll that found only 17 percent of Canadians favoring more immigration, she has announced a five-year plan that will bring in 250,000 a year. In proportion to population, that is four times the rate in the United States, and the vast majority will continue to be non-whites. At a time when the Canadian government, like that of the United States, is sinking ever deeper into debt, it has earmarked more than half a billion dollars to spend on resettlement costs.
Outside of Quebec, where blacks have created terrible problems, Asians have attracted the most attention. Vancouver, on the British Columbia coast, is their favorite destination, and the metropolitan area of a little over one million now has more than 200,000 Asians. This figure includes Indians, Pakistanis, and Middle Easterners, as well as Chinese and Koreans. Some of these groups have large families; an astonishing 55 percent of Vancouver’s elementary school students list a language other than French or English as their native tongue. “Vancouver will be an Asian city very soon,” predicts Frank Ogden, a prominent Canadian thinker.
Canadian policy towards Hong Kong has been the very reverse of Quebec’s policy towards Haiti. For Hong Kong residents who fear the consequences of the Chinese take-over in 1997, Canadian citizenship has essentially been put up for sale to anyone with at least $150,000 to invest. If a nation is going to dilute its racial and cultural heritage through immigration, it might as well take in the rich and hard-working rather than the poor and idle. Nevertheless, this policy clearly shows that Canadian citizenship has ceased to be an organic bond that holds a people together and is nothing more than a bureaucratic detail.
Race Relations, Canadian Style
The Canadian attempt at multi-racialism has resulted in the same dispossession of whites and fanatical anti-racism as in the United States. Old-time Vancouver residents who do not wish to see their beautiful coastal city become a giant Chinatown, have derisively started calling their home Hong-Couver or Van-Kong. They have been dismissed as racists.
When parents point out that a school system swamped with children who don’t speak English cannot give a good education to children who do, they get lectures on the glories of “cultural enrichment.” When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently decreed that Sikh mounties could wear turbans instead of the famous broad-brimmed hat, anyone who opposed the new policy was called a Nazi and a bigot.
The Canadian government, through its minister of multi-cultural affairs, funds many non-white groups whose primary function seems to be criticism of whites. It is as if the NAACP lived off of American tax dollars. Carl Whittaker, head of the Black Community Council of Quebec (BCCQ), explains that 60 percent of young blacks are unemployed because of “a racist structure, which will not give them equal access to policy and jobs.” Clarence Bayne, president of Minority Arts and Culture, says, “Black youths are dysfunctional because the government is unwilling to help black organizations create a solid structure in the community.”
It is a drearily familiar tale. Blacks are not responsible for their own failures. The government must give more money to black organizations. Which black organizations? Why, the very ones headed by the people who thought up this remedy for the problems. To those who point out that the government is already spending huge sums on social services, the BCCQ’s Mr. Whittaker explains that existing services do not meet the “specific cultural needs” of blacks.
Partly as a result of this kind of propaganda, blacks have adopted a truculent, anti-white stance. In 1990, a black candidate, Noel Alexander, ran for the Montreal city council. When he failed to win he blamed white racism. He refused to consider the possibility that his leftist politics may have made a difference.
In Toronto, relations between blacks and the police are so bad that blacks may refuse to cooperate even to find the killer of a black man. A common form of entertainment among Toronto’s Jamaicans is to hold house parties that are open to the public for a fee. Several hundred blacks may crowd into a small house, and violence often breaks out. Recently, young men have started shooting each other at these parties, and though there may be dozens of witnesses, blacks refuse to testify against each other. Even black editorialists have been appalled at this trend.
‘Sensitivity’ and Thought Control
Canada has institutionalized racial “sensitivity” just as the United States has. Last year, the Zellers department store in Halifax was made to apologize for selling black-faced dolls named Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Moe. The furor from Nova Scotia blacks was so great that Zellers promised to spend large sums to sponsor black cultural events in the province.
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto recently put on an exhibit called Into the Heart of Africa, about 19th century missionary work. The exhibit was highly critical of the naive and reportedly patronizing attitudes of early missionaries, but even this reminder of a colonial past was intolerable to Toronto’s blacks. They mounted a weekly demonstration outside of the museum, and vandalized the home of Jeanne Cannizzo, curator of the exhibition.
Miss Cannizzo teaches African anthropology at the University of Toronto. Black activists disrupted her classes and followed her down the halls, taunting her. She was so distressed by this treatment that she has, at least temporarily, stopped teaching.
As in the United States, even the most rigorously academic investigation of racial differences is considered a thought crime. Prof. Philippe Rushton, of the University of Western Ontario, has concluded that North Asians have higher average IQs than whites who, in turn, have higher average IQs than blacks. His classes have been repeatedly disrupted, and the premier of Ontario Province as called for his dismissal in spite of academic tenure.
Prof. Rushton’s university recently ordered him to teach his courses by video tape rather than in person, since a face-to-face class would invite disruption and possible violence. As Prof. Rushton points out, if right-wing extremists threatened to disrupt a communist professor’s classes, the university would put a stop to the problem immediately.
Since it has been established by fiat that Canadian blacks, like American blacks, are just as intelligent and hard-working as whites, inequalities in employment must be remedied by affirmative action. Both public and private employers set targets for non-white hiring and promotion. White Canadians have been even more passive than white Americans in the face of this form of official discrimination.
Where does all this leave The Great White North? In Canada, as in the United States, immigration policy and race relations are governed by rigid thinking that will eventually lead to the transformation of a Western, European nation into something else. This thinking leaves no room for those who love their European character and heritage, and wish to preserve them. A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen (6/4/90) perfectly conveyed the required point of view: “Polls over the past two years indicate bigotry is spreading among Canadians anxious about increasing ethnic diversity . . . Polls show those concerned about Canada’s changing ethnic makeup have increased from 24 per cent two years ago to 38 per cent today.” Precisely. Any white person who loves his people and his culture, who does not wish to see Canada become a third-world nation, is a bigot.
| ARTICLE |
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Calling All Refugees
Canada’s policy on accepting political refugees recently went from being one of the most liberal in the world to one of the most muddled. From 1976 to 1989, any illegal immigrant who showed up and claimed to be a refugee was automatically entitled to stay in Canada until he got an official hearing. Even people from peaceable but poor countries like Mexico or Senegal could claim “persecution” and get the full treatment. That often meant a wait of up to five years, during which the “refugee” could live wherever he liked, take a job, and try like the devil to find a Canadian to marry.
When word got out that anyone from any country in the world could claim to be a refugee, travel agents from Turkey to Panama started a land-office business in one-way tickets. By 1988, there was a backlog of more than 100,000 illegal immigrants, all claiming to be refugees and all living in Canada while they waited for a hearing. Many thousands more had gone through the procedure, been found to be phony refugees, but allowed to stay anyway.
Even Immigration Minister Barbara McDougall appears to have thought Canada was becoming too soft a touch for refugees. Beginning in 1989, immigration officials got the authority to turn back obviously bogus “refugees” at the border, and new procedures were established to speed up hearings.
Neither aspect of the new program seems to be working. Robert Blackwood, is a Jamaican who has been turfed out of both the United States and Britain for drugs and prostitution-related offenses. He entered Canada with forged documents. Last July, he was arrested in Toronto on drugs and weapons charges. The Toronto Star (7/8/90) reports that back home in Jamaica, he is “wanted on charges relating to an incident in which shots were fired at a police officer.” After his arrest in Toronto, he made a claim for refugee status and has been allowed to reside in Canada while he pursues that claim.
As for the procedure that was supposed to sort through the backlog of claimants, $179 million and a year and a half into the new program, there was not much progress to report. Of the 100,000 applicants, only a handful had been proven to be genuine refugees. A total of 608 had been rejected as phony refugees, but only 115 of these had been deported. Of the 608, about 200 had disappeared underground. More than 2,500 claimants had been found not to be refugees but had been allowed to stay in Canada anyway, for “humanitarian” reasons. The procedure was sputtering along at such a slow pace that for many applicants it was close to de facto amnesty.
Not surprisingly, the new procedures have not discouraged new claims for refugee status. In 1990, more than 30,000 people showed up in Canada hoping to pass as refugees or, failing that, to gain entry for “humanitarian” reasons.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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The Folly of the Welfare State, Part II
Raymond B. Cattell, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism, Pergamon Press, New York, 1972, 482 pp.
Reviewed by Thomas Jackson
The first part of this review described Professor Cattell’s wish to base morality on science rather than on the revealed dogma of religion. In his view, men will develop a truly scientific morality only after further evolution has heightened their powers and broadened their vision. In the meantime, moral behavior is that which promotes evolutionary improvement while immoral behavior impedes it.
Ethics based on evolution have profound implications, both for the ways in which societies govern themselves and the ways in which they conduct external affairs. In fact, whether deliberately or unconsciously, Western societies now violate the principles of evolutionary ethics at every turn, and intractable problems flow from these violations. Ultimately, a society that flouts the laws of evolution will destroy itself.
Professor Cattell proposes a substantial body of thought on which a society might base its larger moral choices. He has given it the awkward name of Beyondism, and though he insists that it should be a subject of constant study and improvement, he has sketched its general contours.
Beyondist morality is sharply different from the Christian ideal, which he describes thus:
We are asked to give all our consideration to “the publicans and sinners,’ the lost sheep, the prodigal sons and reprobates which Christianity so debatably cherishes. What would a rational sociology and psychology say of these? Today’s newspaper tells us with piously approved optimism that “poor and rich, patriotic and alienated, criminals and good citizens; we all need one another.’ To which a society with any sense of direction whatever must reasonably add the amendment “Some [are needed] more than others!’
The political expression of a preoccupation with lost sheep and prodigal sons is the welfare state. It does not merely accept the notion that reprobates are just as valuable as virtuous, hard-working citizens; it treats them as more valuable, since it taxes the virtuous in order to support them.
Such a society must set aside healthy notions of blame and responsibility. It must assume that every person, no matter how degenerate, has natural rights that a society must meet. Rights to food, housing, “dignity,” and all the other “rights” on which a welfare state is based can only be met by assuming that the unproductive are somehow entitled to live off benefits that are forcibly exacted from the productive.
According to Professor Cattell, the attempt to give precedence to “moral” or “transcendental” rights over contractual rights can be traced back to the religious preoccupation with lost sheep. Nevertheless, as he reminds us, even so progressive and influential a thinker as Jeremy Bentham once wrote, “Natural rights is simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights . . . nonsense upon stilts.”
The modern form of nonsense upon stilts is the refusal to view failure as anything more than the consequence of “oppression” or “victimization.” Since the welfare state has abolished laziness and stupidity along with blame, individual failure is to be understood only as societal failure.
From a Beyondist point of view, it is not merely illogical and unfair to make the good pay for the failures of the bad; it is an evolutionary catastrophe, for along with blame, the welfare state has abolished genetics. Of all the bogus rights promoted by the welfare state, the most dangerous is the “right” of those who are unable to look after themselves to bring into the world yet more mouths that the productive members of society must feed. It is no accident that the children of the incompetent and irresponsible tend, themselves, to be incompetent and irresponsible. In the nearly 20 years since Professor Cattell published his book, research has only confirmed the extent to which intelligence and even personality traits are inherited.
Nevertheless, the welfare state willfully turns its back on the laws of heredity. The preoccupation with lost sheep means, for example, that society devotes ever-greater efforts to the impossible task of trying to prepare welfare-bred low achievers for life in a complex, industrial society. A much more productive and sensible approach would be to improve succeeding generations through attention to the laws of heredity.
Welfare payments permit the irresponsible and incompetent to rear, at public expense, as many children as they want. These are the very children who fill classes in remedial learning, and who are likely to quit school and become criminals. The competent and responsible, who are taxed to pay for welfare, remedial education, and prisons cannot afford to have many children of their own. Richard Herrnstein of Harvard concludes that as a result of these differential birth rates, every new generation brings a decline in the average American IQ.
One of the primary goals of a society is the transmission of its culture to succeeding generations. Professor Cattell describes this transmission as the forcible molding of an essentially animal nature into patterns of higher behavior. He recognizes that this is painful: “That the educational acquisition process in complex, modern culture stretches the genetic endowment in frustration tolerance of present day man close to its limits is shown by the temper tantrums and tears of childhood; the disorders and mental anguish of adolescence . . .”
The welfare state refuses to acknowledge that different individuals and different groups are unequally prepared, genetically, to acquire culture. Throughout the history of our species, progress has taken the form of ever-greater cultural demands made on a slowly improving genetic substrate. Degeneration is the reverse process, the reduction of cultural demands to meet the limited capacities of a declining genetic substrate. The genetic substrate of a nation can decline not just through differential birth rates but through migrations.
It is clear that in the United States, the direction of cultural movement has gone sharply into reverse. Proof of this is everywhere, but a few homely examples will serve to show what Professor Cattell may have had in mind. When the New York City subway was built, stations had public rest rooms, which patrons used for their intended purposes. As the city’s population changed, subway rest rooms became havens for muggers and rapists. They became a menace rather than a convenience, and the transit authority now keeps them locked. To the general inconvenience has been added the stink of urine in the hallways.
Another example of the reversal of culture in the face of genetic decline is the sinking standards of American education. School integration has not improved public education for non-whites. On the contrary, it has lowered standards for everyone. It is now not uncommon for high school “graduates” to be unable to read their own diplomas.
In Detroit, the major American city most clearly and completely governed by blacks, violent lawlessness is so common that shop keepers work behind bullet-proof glass, wear armored vests, and keep weapons behind the counter. The culture of Detroit is declining to meet the genetic substrate.
Burgeoning crime rates, growing illiteracy, failing international competition — these are all well-documented aspects of the current American decline, yet the welfare state resolutely refuses to recognize their biological component. And indeed, there is also a failure of the will even among the genetically gifted, some of whose children likewise sink into the mire of cultural decay. But even if the moral and cultural rigor of a nation does not go slack, a decline in the human raw material can only drag a society downward.
Because it denies both responsibility and heredity, the welfare state is both a societal and an evolutionary dead end. As Professor Cattell points out, if the cost of producing and educating the average citizen — as the average sinks lower and lower — ever becomes greater than his life-time contribution to society, the national order will collapse. At the same time, in an evolutionary environment in which welfare payments have removed any connection between genetic fitness and survival, each generation will be less fit than the last.
What can be done to reverse these trends? Professor Cattell is mainly concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of an evolutionary ethic and has little to say about how it would be practiced. He believes, for example, that in a healthy society, in which the parasitic and dysgenic character of irresponsible reproduction were widely understood, unfit citizens would voluntarily refrain from having children. This might eventually be true in a society that had completely thrown off the illusions that foster the welfare state, but any attempt to halt evolutionary decline in America will have to start with something more than exhortation. As Professor Cattell concedes, “any realistic ethical system must regard a man who begets eight children on public welfare as someone as socially dangerous as any criminal.”
For now, there is not even a hint of exhortation. Anyone who suggested publicly that welfare recipients merely be urged not to have children would be quickly silenced. In the United States, as in other white countries, the essentially religious view — that the superior must be sacrificed for the benefit of the inferior — prevails. Rather than establishing a genuinely scientific morality, Western societies prefer to ignore the science of genetics. Ignorance, especially willful ignorance, always has a price.
One of the attractions of redemptive religion is that it offers rewards after death. Beyondism strikes no such deals. In the proliferation of the incompetent at the expense of the competent it sees only injustice and folly. Professor Cattell warns of what may come: “Probably never in history has there been a period in which dysgenic trends could take effect so rapidly as in the welfare state . . . Two or three generations of disregard for genetic quality might lead to such a breakdown of the economic and cultural level of society as would be well nigh irremediable.”
Is this not the direction in which America is headed? What are the chances that the rest rooms in the New York City subway will ever again be opened to the public? When will thoughtful parents regain confidence in public schools? When will it become possible again to run a shop in Detroit without weapons and bullet-proof glass? It is far more likely that localized horrors will spread rather than that civility will return to the wastelands.
The welfare state has no means of reversing the declines it sponsors. It rewards failure with handouts and punishes success with taxes. “Compassion” requires that more and more effort go into succoring those at the bottom of society, while at the overburdened top, the march of culture grinds to a halt. Professor Cattell warns of “the cost of making the whole of society a hospital, or a producer of dependent adults . . . converting substantial fractions of society into stall-fed, domesticated animals.”
He reminds us that “”love,’ as pity, can err like any other emotion, and even create what it needs to feed upon.” The welfare industry, by making problems worse through misdirected largesse, only creates more clients for its “services” and more compelling reasons for its own existence. Beyondism would call for a genuine compassion that would solve the problems, not a perverted compassion that ensures their continuation.
Heretofore, evolution has worked by differential death rates. Nature cut down the unfit. Now that heredity is better understood, the species could be rapidly improved through differential birth rates. The great tragedy is that in an era in which this process has become understood, the social order promotes differential birth rates that are dysgenic rather than eugenic.
Professor Cattell is under no illusion that current social thinking will soon change. Nevertheless, he has followed the implications of an evolutionary ethics into the realm of intergroup relations — which will be the subject of the third, and concluding, part of this review.
They Saw it ComingThe man who first proposed to support the poor increased the number of the miserable. If you stop supporting the crowd, it will support itself. The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more the poverty will increase. The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. Three generations of morons are enough. |
| IN THE NEWS |
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O Tempora, O Mores!
The Yahweh Sect
Hulon Mitchell, known to his followers as Yahweh Ben Yaweh, is the leader of an anti-white “religious” group, known as the Yahweh sect. One of the practices of the Miami-based group has been for members to murder “white devils,” cut off their ears, and present them to Mr. Mitchell as proof of work well done.
In the last several years, there have been at least seven such murders that appear to have been done by the Yahweh sect, but Miami police have gotten convictions on only two. In one, the murderer testified under oath that he had been ordered by Mr. Mitchell to kill a white person at random and bring back his ear as proof. Besides the deaths of the seven whites, the sect appears to have been responsible for killing at least seven black “traitors.” Most of these murders are also unsolved.
Mr. Mitchell, who has been held without bail in connection with these and other killings since November 7, 1990, went before the court in January of this year to ask that he be allowed to post bail. The prosecution, arguing that he is a dangerous man, played a recording of one of Mr. Mitchell’s sermons, in which he talked about the killing of a “traitor” he would like to see done:
I want to see your head come off, personally. I want to see the blood seep from your veins. You know, the jugular vein . . . I can’t wait to see that. What pleasure. All my enemies killed with the sword. Boy, that’s great. You can live forever if you accept me as Yaweh Ben Yaweh.
Mr. Mitchell is being defended by Alcee Hastings, who was Florida’s first black federal judge. Judge Hastings was impeached for bribery charges and removed from the bench by the U.S. Senate in 1989. Black supporters claim to have detected nothing but racism in the proceedings.
Although Florida prosecutors have finally gotten around to making a case against Mr. Mitchell, the police have been hesitant to go after the Yahweh sect. They have not pursued the known accomplices in the killings on which they have already gotten convictions, and have shown little interest in the ones that are still unsolved. According to newspaper reports, they are afraid that vigorous prosecution would bring down charges of racial and religious persecution.
That the police in any American city should be afraid to prosecute murderers for fear that their motives may be criticized is chilling evidence of how paralyzed America has become by distorted racial thinking. The silence the national media have kept on these killings is in spectacular contrast to the coast-to-coast trumpeting of the news whenever a white person kills a black for what may appear to be racial reasons.
AR has learned a few details about these killings only from local clippings that readers have kindly mailed to us. But even the Miami papers have written in great detail about the killings of black “traitors,” while they pass with squeamish brevity over the deaths of whites whose ears were carved off as trophies. It is not hard to imagine the frenzy of press coverage that would follow the discovery of a white sect that engaged in ritual murder of blacks.
Which ethnic group in New York City is most likely to have AIDS? If you guessed blacks, you’re wrong. Three hundred sixty-two Puerto Rican men out of every 100,000 have AIDS, while the number for blacks is 267 and the number for whites is 182.
The island that may soon be our 51st state is, in fact, something of an AIDS hotbed. It has a higher rate of new cases, at 47 per 100,000 population, than any state in the union. New York comes second with 39, and the national average is 15. The only city in America that gets new AIDS cases at a faster clip than San Juan is San Francisco. And only Washington, D.C. has a higher overall rate of infection (81 per 100,000 population, as opposed to 48 per 100,000). Puerto Rican blood donors are 27 times more likely to be carrying the AIDS virus than are donors in the rest of the country (Seattle Times, 6/21/90; New York Times, 6/15/90).
AIDS in Puerto Rico has some distinctive twists. Two out of every three Puerto Rican AIDS patients is said to be a needle user, but homosexuality is so despised among the islanders that the numbers could be off. Some homosexuals claim to be drug users rather than confess to anything other than the macho norm. Medical treatment is also skimpy in Puerto Rico, because there is a cap on federal Medicaid spending. A great many AIDS patients therefore take the plane to New York, where they get unlimited Medicaid.
There have always been excellent reasons to grant independence to Puerto Rico and send it on its way. Seventy percent of the population is on the equivalent of welfare, food stamps are a second currency, and no one pays federal income tax. Even so, per capita income is only 40 percent of that of our poorest state, Mississippi. If, as seems likely, we turn Puerto Rico into the 51st state, it appears that along with 5 million Hispanics we will be getting a tropical AIDS incubator.
Africans Seek Reparations
Ibrahim Babangida, the president of Nigeria, has called on the white nations of the world to compensate Africa for having enslaved blacks. He says that before Europeans came along and captured “young, virile Africans,” his continent was almost as developed as Europe.
Mr. Babangida got it wrong. Before contact with Europeans or Arabs, no African people domesticated an animal, built a two-story building or a mechanical device, invented the wheel, figured out the calendar, or even developed writing. One of the most ridiculous myths now circulating about Africa is that it was on the verge of discovering science and technology, but that Europeans somehow nipped the process in the bud.
Furthermore, Africans were enslaving each other long before white people showed up. In fact, virtually every African slave shipped overseas was first captured by other Africans and then sold to Europeans. Africans also continued to practice slavery long after it was abolished elsewhere. Between the two world wars, the League of Nations censured Liberia for slavery.
Finally, many Africans would not mind very much if their ancestors had been slaves, since it would mean that they might now be living in the United States. As any American consular officer in Lagos will tell you, a move to America is the dream of many a Nigerian.
Racial Killings That Don’t Make the News
Christopher Peterson is a black man who has been AWOL from the Marines since last July. He was recently picked up in connection with the shotgun killings of seven white people. He told police that he killed them because of “a deep-rooted hatred for white people.”
Perhaps you hadn’t heard of Christopher Peterson. The same media that go into a frenzy when whites mistreat blacks for racial reasons lapses into something close to silence when blacks commit openly racial crimes.
Hispanics Stick Together
Hialeah, a town near Miami, has an acting mayor named Julio Martinez and a police chief named Rolando Bolaos. Both are Cuban. Mayor Martinez has accused Police Chief Bolaos of abusing his power and wasting tax money by passing out overtime to cronies, but he promises not to fire him. “He’s the only Cuban chief of police in the United States that I know of,” says Mr. Martinez. “I respect my raza [race] too much to hurt him.”
Curious doings. It is impossible to imagine a white mayor publicly protecting a suspect white official with the explanation that he had too much respect for his race — not if the mayor wanted to keep his job. Perhaps that sort of fellow feeling will be permitted to whites only after they become a minority. Of course, since everyone in America will then be a “minority,” everyone will presumably be free to look out for his race rather than for the nation. Pity the nation.
Just for the record, there are at least three other Cuban-American police chiefs in southern Florida alone. And Mr. Bolaos denies the charges.
Black Murder Rate Up
In just four years, from 1984 to 1988, young black men have become 40 percent more likely to kill each other. During that period, the homicide rate for 15- to 24-year-olds leapt from 60.6 in 100,000 to 101.1 in 100,000. This is thought to be the highest rate for any population in the world. For whites of the same age group, homicide rates, per 100,000, edged up from 10.9 to 11.3. This means that young black men are almost ten times more likely to be killed than whites, and in 1987, homicide accounted for 42 percent of all deaths of young black men.
Women generally have much lower homicide rates than men. However, in recent years, the homicide rate of black women has exceeded that of white men.
Race and the Gulf War
The war against Iraq has highlighted how divisive race can be, especially at a time of crisis. When, on January 12, Congress approved military action in the Gulf, a bloc of black congressmen was a solid chunk of the dissenting vote. War money, they said, should be given to the poor.
Blacks have also attributed to “racism” the fact that although they are 14 percent of the enlistment-age population, they are 28 percent of the army. In a Middle East ground war, they claim, they will take an unfair number of casualties. It is hard to take this complaint seriously. Ever since 1973, when the draft was abolished, every soldier has been a volunteer.
No one complained about the racial disproportions in the all-volunteer army until it looked as though there might be a fight. The logic of the “disproportion” argument is that a largely black army should never be sent into combat, since blacks might be killed in “unfair” numbers. Nevertheless, the media have been clucking sympathetically about the heavy burden that blacks are carrying for the nation.
The political costs of multi-racialism were again in evidence when a Hispanic congressman, Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio (TX), presented a resolution in Congress to impeach President Bush for his conduct of the war. The very first article in the resolution says this:
U.S. soldiers in the Middle East are overwhelmingly poor white, black, and Mexican-American, and their military service is based on the coercion of a system that has denied viable economic opportunities to these classes of citizens . . . [C]alling on the poor and minorities to fight a war for oil to preserve the lifestyles of the wealthy is a denial of the rights of these soldiers.
Whatever one may think about the advisability of war, a nation with a racially divided population will be dangerously divided when it most needs to be united.
Dog Eat Dog
Last year, Jackie Speier, a California state legislator, introduced a bill that would make it a crime to eat a dog. She didn’t care for the idea of Asian immigrants tucking into Bowser. Assemblywoman Speier didn’t quite get her bill right the first time. Chinese and Vietnamese yelled at her for “insensitivity” to their culinary habits. She managed to pull a fast one on them, though. She broadened the bill to forbid dining on any household pet, thus making the law seem less anti-Asian. It passed.
Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese columnist, who publicly denounced the bill as insulting to Asians. His column prompted a number of letters from readers, pointing out that when one is in Rome, it is customary to do as Romans do.
Mr. Lam’s reply to this, in an article in Mother Jones, was to say something that Americans of European descent would do well to ponder: There is no Rome. The melting pot days are over, says Mr. Lam, and anything goes in this country. White folks had better figure that out sooner rather than later.
It is refreshing to hear someone with enough cheek actually to say that. Is Mr. Lam possibly being “insensitive” to the cultural heritage of white folks? No chance of that. All the same, we would like to know what Mr. Lam would think if white immigrants swarmed into Vietnam and announced, “OK, Asians, the way you have been running things is finished. From now on, anything goes!” But no — everyone knows that Vietnamese are entitled to live in a land that is Vietnamese. Only Americans must be taught that it is a privilege to live in a land that is ceasing to be American.
The Border Patrol Game
Sometimes it’s hard not to think that the US border patrol, which is supposed to stop illegal immigrants from entering through Mexico, is playing some kind of game rather than protecting our borders.
There is a stretch of Interstate 5, just north of the Mexican border, that illegals often cross on their way north to San Diego. Many of them are peasants who have no idea how to judge the speed of freeway traffic and, since 1987, 127 have been hit and killed. Since it is well known where the illegals are crossing and where they are coming from, it would seem an easy job to stop them at the border. That is not how America plays the game.
Along one stretch of highway, signs have been posted saying “Caution. Watch for people crossing road.” Other signs show pedestrians hurrying across the freeway. Road crews have cut back bushes so that the illegals can get a better look at the traffic and vice versa. To keep the night-time casualties down, a $180,000 lighting system has gone up to help drivers swerve around sprinting Mexicans.
Another proposal is to lower the speed limit at places were illegals like to cross, so as to give them a better chance. The California Highway Patrol says that would be dangerous, because changing speed limits makes drivers put on the brakes and cause accidents. The current plan is to spend $10 million on a five-mile long, eight-foot high wall in the median strip.
The wall is scheduled to be finished in 1993, but it has drawn fire from immigrant advocates. Roberto Martinez of San Diego says that the wall would trap illegals on the median strip, and they would have to run back the way they came. He also says it would give the border police an unfair advantage, since it could round up people who were stuck in the median. The border police piously insist that the wall would be only a deterrent to crossing in the first place, and that they would not use it as a net to catch illegals.
We’d like to know why not. We’d also like to know why the state of California is spending money on signs, lights, and road crews to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get into the United States. We also think that a $10 million wall belongs on the border, not in the median strip of an American highway. Until the American government shows it really means to enforce the immigration laws of this country, aliens will continue to flout them.
Women and Children First
One of the reasons why illegal immigrants are being hit by motorists in increasing numbers is that more of the Mexicans dashing across the border are women and children. In the past, a large number of Mexican men would sneak across the border in the summer, get off-the-books jobs harvesting crops, and sneak back over the border in the fall. The winter was traditionally a slow time for the border patrol.
No longer. Last November, border police in the San Diego area were making 1,000 arrests a day, 22 percent more than the year before. Agricultural laborers now account for only 15 percent of illegal crossings, and the number of women and children has shot up. They don’t work the harvests and then go back to Mexico. They come to America to stay.
It is clear that many Mexicans expect another amnesty, like the one that was granted in 1986 to 1.3 million illegals. It is also clear that employer sanctions — which were supposed to make it hard to hire illegals and thereby discourage them from coming — are a flop. After the initial publicity there was a dip in the flow of illegals, but it was soon back up to record levels.
Ironically, the war against Iraq has put a temporary damper on illegal immigration because of rumors among Mexicans that they will be rounded up and set to fight in the Middle East. One of the most comical fears is that the American government plans to shut down the border and “trap” Mexicans inside the United States. The illegals will then be hustled off to the front with no training.
Many Mexicans believe that the United States could seal off the border at a moment’s notice. They must think that since we don’t do that, the government is not serious about immigration control. They’re right.
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — I was fascinated to read in “Clinging to Stereotypes” that more that half of all white people are willing to tell a pollster, face to face, that they think blacks and Hispanics are less intelligent than whites. My newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News carried an Associated Press report on the same survey, in which it mentioned that whites think blacks and Hispanics are lazier than whites and more likely to be on welfare, but it didn’t report the findings on intelligence! I suppose in this town, newspaper editors are so afraid of the intelligence question, that they don’t even dare report what white people think.
Michael Halloran, San Jose (CA)
Sir — Your report on what whites are prepared to say about minorities almost had an air of relief about it. You seem to be saying that if 56 percent of whites are able to look around and conclude that blacks are more prone to violence than whites, then the triumph of egalitarian propaganda is far from complete. Is this reason to rejoice?
In fact, the rates of violence among blacks, not only in the United States but in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, England, etc. are so high that we should probably be more concerned about the other 44 percent who have been persuaded that black mayhem is some kind of environmental accident. Yes, it may be that some of those in the 44 percent really do think that blacks are more violent, but are afraid to say so to an interviewer. But which is bet-ter? Either they have been persuaded to believe something for which there is practically no evidence, or they have been intimidated into pretending to believe it.
Name withheld, New York (NY)
We have now seen several press accounts of this survey. Respondents were asked not only about blacks and Hispanics, but about Jews and Southern whites. Newspapers have not seen fit to report the attitudes towards these last two groups. Some non-whites were asked about their attitudes toward different racial groups as well, but the sample was so small the results are considered “statistically insignificant.” AR has written for a copy of the original survey, and will publish a more complete account of its contents. — Ed.
Sir — I enjoyed Mr. Edwards’ essay, “America at the Crossroads.” It is true that Americans at least pretend to believe that it is possible — even desirable — to build a nation without regard to what Mr. Edward’s calls “the age-old ingredients of nation”: language, culture, religion,race, etc.
This is only one example of the willful ignorance of the past of which Americans are guilty. Of all nations, none is probably more intent on constantly “reinventing” itself than the United States. There is even a major grant-making foundation that proudly bills itself as “a catalyst for change.” In what other country do people talk so glibly of “families in transition,” “the new face of corporate America,” “social change” and, worst of all, “liberation” and “empowerment”?
All of this stems from arrogance and ignorance. It takes a great deal of both to dismiss history, to assume that one’s own generation has finally discovered the truth, that the experience of millions of people and thousands of years can be tossed out as “racist” or “sexist” or “elitist” or simply “old-fashioned.”
Mr. Edwards, we are told, is a historian. I suspect that his appreciation for the past is an essential part of his understanding of the American present. I hope to see more of his work.
Jonathan Rattner, Bowling Green (KY)
Sir — What was the point of African Adventures (AR, Jan. 1991)? You tell us that riots have been set off in Nigeria because people think there are witches on the loose who can steal genitals with a hand shake. You say that in Zimbabwe, the followers of a witch doctor thought he could live under water for two days and were disappointed when he drowned. Fine.
Everyone knows that there is plenty of stupidity all around the world. Many people are even open to the idea that there is a particularly exotic form of African stupidity, traces of which we can detect in the United States. Even so, your story was a cheap shot.
Isn’t your magazine about America, rather than some kind of below-the-belt travel guide?
Susan Pope, Sacramento (CA)
Sir — In her article on how the French look at the United States, Marian Evans seems surprised that French journalists can discuss America’s racial problems so dispassionately, and yet seem blind to the fact that non-white immigration to France is creating the very same problems for them. But aren’t French journalists doing exactly what ours do? The New York Times will tell you all about ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, tribal massacres in Zimbabwe, or religious warfare in Sri Lanka and the Punjab. But does it ever draw conclusions from this about where “diversity” is likely to lead the United States? The same blindness is found on both sides of the Atlantic.
W.J. Reid, Springfield (MO)
