May 1993

American Renaissance magazine
Vol 4, No. 5 May 1993

 

CONTENTS

Welfare: Who is on it and How it Works
The Big Payoff
Which Way, Western Man?
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Welfare: Who is on it and How it Works

Welfare encourages reckless procreation and is a massive transfer of wealth from whites to non-whites.

by Jared Taylor

Welfare State

Of the dozens of ways that the government has found to take money from people who work and give it to people who do not work, the best known is Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). Although there are other programs that actually spend more tax money on poor people, AFDC is what is generally thought of as “welfare.” A significant minority of recipients are white. However, since whites are considerably less likely than any other racial group to be on AFDC, welfare acts as a net transfer of billions of dollars from whites to non-whites.

Americans are suspicious of government handouts to able-bodied adults, so AFDC payments are supposed to be for the benefit of the children of the indigent rather than for the indigent themselves. Eligibility is therefore restricted to poor families with children under the age of 18. There is a certain looseness about the definition, so virtually all AFDC “families” are single women with children. In 5.2 percent of all welfare cases, the other parent is dead or incapacitated, and 33 percent of the time the other parent is absent because of divorce or separation. Fifty-six percent of the time, however, the mother did not bother to get married at all. Thus, in more than half of all welfare cases, money goes to women who started “families” when they had illegitimate children.

Variations by State

Welfare varies considerably from state to state and, theoretically, a state is free not to have AFDC at all. Currently, all 50 states and the District of Columbia, along with Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands have AFDC but, curiously, American Samoa does not. The enticement to the states and territories to take part in AFDC is that the federal government pays half of the local administration costs and, depending on how poor the state is, anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the benefit payments themselves.

The states set their own eligibility standards and benefit levels. The only restriction is that federal law prohibits payments to households with incomes that are more than 185 percent of the poverty standard set by the state. In some states, the standard is very simple. In West Virginia, for example, a family is eligible for AFDC if it “has insufficient income or other resources to provide subsistence compatible with decency and health.”

Many applicants, particularly unmarried mothers, have no income and no assets and glide effortlessly onto the rolls. However, for borderline cases, most states have complicated formulae for deciding eligibility and benefit levels. The formulae cover how valuable a car or burial plot (!) the applicant may own, whether the income of step-parents counts against eligibility, whether food stamps are counted as income, etc. Washington state even specifies that $33 a month can be set aside for guide-dog food.

The payment levels that result from these meditations have a vague relation to the local cost of living. The average monthly payment per family for the entire country is $388, but is as low as $119 in Alabama and $122 in Mississippi, and as high as $688 in Alaska, $624 in California, and $565 in Connecticut.

How many Americans are on the dole? In 1991, the average monthly AFDC case load was 4,628,000 families, or 13,712,000 individuals. That was 5.5 percent of the population and the average family size was 2.96. The period from 1988 to 1991 saw the biggest increase in recipients in the history of AFDC — the rolls grew by nearly two million.

Total spending on AFDC in 1991 was $20.3 billion in direct handouts and $2.5 billion in administration costs. Every year, about 90 million Americans pay federal income taxes, so this means that every six or seven taxpayers support a welfare recipient as well as themselves and their families.

If welfare payments were set by the federal government they would be linked to inflation, but most of the states have let the real value of welfare decline. In fact, the inflation-adjusted value of the average AFDC payment is only 57 percent of what it was in 1970. However, virtually all welfare recipients also get food stamps, and the federal government has tied their value to inflation. Thus, the average combined benefit of welfare and food stamps is still 73 percent of what it was in 1970.

Race of Recipients

Blacks are vastly overrepresented on the rolls. As the first chart on this page shows, 5.4 million — nearly 40 percent — of all recipients are black. The second chart compares actual numbers of recipients with numbers in the population to show the percentage of each racial group that lives on welfare. Only 2.9 percent of whites are on welfare whereas 18 percent of blacks are. This means that any given black is six times as likely as any given white to be on the dole. Although Asians have the lowest percentage on the dole after whites, they are still nearly twice as likely as whites to be recipients.

Given these disparities by race, it is no surprise to find that the states with the most non-whites generally have the most welfare. In the District of Columbia, which is 75 percent non-white, 9.3 percent of the population are on welfare. In 35 percent — black Mississippi, 6.8 percent are on welfare. In some notorious black ghettos, more people are on welfare than not. In Camden (NJ), two-thirds of the adults are on welfare and in East St. Louis (IL) 75 percent of the population gets AFDC.

AFDC by Race

In such overwhelmingly white states as New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Idaho, about two percent of the population is on welfare. Region and eligibility standards make a big difference, though. Although West Virginia is 96 percent white, 6.3 percent of its people are on the dole.

Share of Each Race on AFDC

The welfare rolls look very different from state to state. In the District of Columbia, 98 percent of recipients are black (and 82 percent have never been married). In Hawaii, which is 62 percent Asian, 70 percent of recipients are Asian. In California, 33 percent of recipients are white, 23 percent are black, 29 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are Asian.

How long do people stay, as the British would say, “on the suck”? Thirty percent of recipients are on for less than two years and 50 percent for less than four years. However, at any given time, 65 percent of all recipients have been getting welfare for more than eight years.

These numbers sound contradictory, but they are not. Welfare is like a hospital in which most of the beds are filled with chronic cases. A large number of short-term patients can still be admitted one after another in the rest of the beds. In this way, at any given time, most patients are chronic, but of all the patients treated during the year, the majority may have been admitted for only a short time.

Just as blacks are more likely than whites to be on the rolls in the first place, they stay on longer. The average stay for a white is 5.95 years while for a black it is 8.14 years. Twenty percent of white recipients are on for 10 years or more, while 32 percent of blacks are on for that long.

Welfare combines with the tax system to give poor people perverse incentives. If a welfare recipient works, her AFDC payments and food stamp allotments are cut back. The effect in each state is different, but as a national average, a welfare mother keeps only 41 cents on the dollar from the first $5,000 she makes and only 52 cents on the dollar of the next $5,000. For her third $5,000, which would raise her annual earned income from $10,000 to $15,000, she pays income taxes as well, so is left with only 39 cents out of every dollar earned. This is the equivalent of a tax rate of 61 percent, and does not even take into consideration the loss of Medicaid, which can have a cash value greater than the value of AFDC payments.

Tax laws and welfare also combine to penalize welfare mothers who marry. In New York State, a woman on AFDC with two children has the equivalent of an after-tax income of $14,000 a year. If she marries a man who makes $20,000 a year, she loses her benefits, and the man’s tax deductions for having acquired three dependents are worth only about $1,400. Thus, after marriage, the couple has 42 percent less disposable income than they did together as single people.

Work and marriage are bulwarks against poverty. Welfare discourages both.

Childhood Poverty

Welfare, the different rates at which the races use it, and illegitimacy are all closely related to child poverty. Children of all races are more likely to be poor if they do not have fathers, and Hispanic children are more likely to be poor than black children. In female-headed households, 68.4 percent of Hispanic children are poor, while 64.7 percent of black children and 45.9 percent of white children are poor. In families in which a man is present, 26.7 percent of Hispanic children are poor, while 19.3 percent of black children and 9.5 percent of white children are poor.

Interestingly, a child’s chances of being poor are linked to how many brothers and sisters he has. The child poverty rate in one-child families is 12.4 percent, rises to 23.7 percent if there are three children, and reaches 50.6 percent if there are five or more.

The overall child poverty rate for the United States is 19.9 percent. This rate is rising as more and more children live with a single parent. From 1970 to 1990, the proportion of children living with just one parent doubled from one in eight to one in four. Having two parents through age ten is about the best insurance policy against poverty that a child can have. Eighty percent of such children can expect not to spend a single day in poverty. A child who spends his first ten years with only one parent has a better than 90 percent chance of being poor at least part of that time.

Marriage makes a huge difference even for the children of teen-aged mothers. About half of all unmarried adolescent mothers go on welfare for at least part of the year after the birth of their child, compared to only seven percent of those who were married when they gave birth. (It is worth noting that half of all teen-aged mothers manage not to go on welfare during the first year after their children are born. The racial breakdown for such mothers is not available.)

The family prospects for black and white children are vastly different. Although 80 percent of white children live with both parents only 38 percent of black children do. Fewer than six percent of black children can expect to live with both parents until age eighteen.

Soaring illegitimacy rates are closely linked to single parenthood and child poverty. In 1940, only 3.8 percent of all births were illegitimate, and this was before reliable contraception and legal abortion. Today 28 percent of American babies are illegitimate, and here too the races show great disparities. An astonishing 68 percent of black babies are illegitimate while the figures are 37 percent for Hispanics and 20 percent for whites. Heedless child-bearing is one of the defining characteristics of the underclass and it appears to be increasingly characteristic of blacks of all classes.

Illegitimacy is not merely a good indicator of a child’s chances of being poor or going on welfare. It is also one of the best signs of whether a child will die in the first year of life, drop out of school, be a criminal, have his own illegitimate children, or go on welfare.

Do bastardy and fatherlessness cause these things? To some degree they unquestionably do. A loving husband and wife together are vastly better equipped to rear children than is a single woman. On the other hand, people who have illegitimate children tend to be a shiftless lot who would give their children poor upbringings even if they were married.

At the same time, there can be little doubt that welfare, along with Food Stamps and Medicaid (see following story), have greatly eased the pain that used to discourage Americans from having babies they could not support. Removing the penalties for reckless procreation only makes it all the more likely or, as the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used to say, “the ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”

SIDEBAR

A Loosening of Laws and Morals

Although illegitimacy is now central to welfare, the original 1935 federal legislation that established the program did not offer benefits at all to unwed mothers. It specified that assistance was to be for “widowed, separated, or divorced mothers” in cases when “relatives, liable under the law for . . . support, are not able to provide adequate care . . .” Unmarried mothers were not thought to be fit beneficiaries and married mothers were eligible only after the resources of relatives had been exhausted.

ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), as it was then called, was the first federal welfare program, but some states had already established “mothers’ aid laws.” Like ADC, they did not countenance illegitimacy. A 1921 nation-wide survey of recipients of “mothers’ aid” found that of the 60,119 beneficiaries, 83.3 percent were widows, 6 percent had been deserted by their husbands, 8 percent had disabled husbands, 2.3 percent were divorced, and that only 0.09 percent (55 recipients out of 60,119) were unwed mothers. The 83.3 percent who were widows is a reproachful contrast to today’s figure of just 1.5 percent.

Eligibility requirements for welfare were loosened slowly during the 1940s and 1950s and quickly in the 1960s. When illegitimacy rates began to soar, fathers and husbands became irrelevant to AFDC. It is now fashionable to bemoan the breakup of the American family, but in many of today’s “families,” Uncle Sam is the man of the house. The more readily government steps in as father and husband, the rarer the real thing becomes.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

ARTICLE

The Big Payoff

Welfare is just one car in the government gravy train.

by Marian Evans

Costly though it is, AFDC is not America’s most expensive handout program for the poor. Medicaid is vastly more expensive and is growing much more rapidly. Costs have gone from $1.6 billion (in nominal dollars) in 1966 to $127 billion in 1992. In the last two years, Medicaid costs have risen more than 30 percent each year!

AFDC recipients are automatically eligible for Medicaid. Besides them, there are another 12 million Medicaid recipients — mostly old people — whose medical expenses are paid for by the taxpayer. This makes for a grand total of 25 million Medicaid recipients, or just over ten percent of the population. There are only 3.6 federal taxpayers for every Medicaid recipient.

Although more than half of the people who get Medicaid are on AFDC, they consume only about 27 percent of the $127 billion. This is because young poor people are less expensive to treat than old poor people. Even so, in 1992, welfare recipients cost the taxpayer $34.5 billion in Medicaid payments, or half again as much as the cost of the entire AFDC program. As it does with AFDC, the federal government pays half the administration cost of Medicaid, and depending on how poor a state is, from 50 percent to 80 percent of the cost of benefits.

The other big program for poor people is food stamps. Nine percent of the population, or 22.6 million people were getting them in 1991, at a total cost to the taxpayer of $21 billion. This program is paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is run by some of its 122,594 employees, though the states share administration costs.

Benefits are supposed to be based on what the Department calls its Thrifty Food Plan, which is what the bureaucrats think grateful, nutrition-conscious poor people will be using their stamps for. A family of three gets a maximum of $292 a month for Thrifty Food.

Stores are forbidden to accept food stamps as payment for alcohol, tobacco, or hot food for immediate consumption. Food stamps can, however, be spent on seeds and plants that are to be cultivated for food. In parts of Alaska, they can be used for things like fish hooks, knives, and fishing poles that are supposed to be used for catching food.

Eligibility requirements are set by the federal government, and they may not be the same as state requirements for welfare. However, eligibility standards for food stamps are looser — there are nearly 10 million more people on food stamps than on AFDC — and the vast majority of people on welfare also get food stamps.

Ever since our legislators started taking money away from people who have it, they have never rested from their task of thinking of new ways to give it to people who don’t. Some of their brain children are Pell grants, Federal Housing Assistance ($20.4 billion a year), WIC (Women, Infants and Children) food ($2.1 billion), Trade Adjustment Assistance ($136 million), Supplemental Security Income ($21 billion), Title XX Social Services Block Grants ($2.8 billion), Title IV Child Welfare Services ($3.5 billion), National School Lunch Program ($4 billion), National School Breakfast Program ($677 million), Job Training Partnership ($1.8 billion), Summer Youth Employment Program ($704 million), Job Corps (yes, it is still around, $862 million), Head Start ($2.2 billion), and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance ($1.5 billion).

None of these programs even pretends, as Social Security or Unemployment Compensation do, to have been funded by the beneficiaries themselves. Like welfare payments, they are outright handouts. If it ever occurred to you to wonder what occupies the small minds of the 123,959 employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it is just one thing: spending your money. Other government schemes, like the Railroad Unemployment Compensation System, the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, and the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund have the telltale stink of give-aways too, but it is hard to find out just what they involve.

All this means that an enormous amount of money must be yanked out of the pockets of those poor, long-suffering 90 million taxpayers so that it can be splashed out to people the government has decided are more deserving of it. Non-whites are disproportionately more deserving than whites. Only 33 percent of the children enrolled in Head Start, for example, are white.

However, when it comes to growing fat on government handouts, Puerto Ricans take top honors. Although only 2.9 percent of white people are on welfare, 23 percent of the population of Puerto Rico is on the dole. Although ten percent of Americans are on Medicaid (a racial breakdown is not available), 36 percent of Puerto Ricans are on it. Finally, though nine percent of the country gets food stamps, 42 percent of Puerto Ricans do. There are so many food stamps floating around the island that they are practically a second currency. Even prostitutes accept them.

White people are, indeed, a rum lot. Not only are they being displaced by non-whites, their freely-elected government hastens the process by raising their taxes so that yet more non-whites can have illegitimate children who will eat free school lunches and live on food stamps. The end may not yet be in sight, but it is not hard to imagine how it will look.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

BOOK REVIEW

Which Way, Western Man?

A new form of political organization may be needed to save Western Civilization.

The Ethnostate, Wilmot Robertson, Howard Allen Enterprises, 1992, 233 pp., $12.00 (paperback)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

First National Confederate Flag

It is widely recognized that America is in decline but very few authors recognize the extent to which the loss of will among whites is central to that decline. Massive non-white immigration, schools that teach minority ethnic pride rather than facts, the refusal to recognize racial differences, constant attacks on Western civilization, racial hiring quotas — all are enormously damaging to our country and all continue only because whites let them continue.

Wilmot Robertson once believed that these corrosive forces could be brought under control and that the United States could regain the racial and cultural coherence that made it great. No longer. In The Ethnostate, he outlines a new form of statecraft that might emerge from the wreckage of 21st-century America. He argues that huge, multi-racial conglomerates are probably doomed, and that just as the Soviet empire has broken up along ethnic lines, so could Canada and the United States. In Mr. Robertson’s view, small, streamlined, homogeneous “ethnostates” are not only the last hope for keeping Western civilization alive in an increasingly non-white, anti-white world, they are also the best proving grounds for evolutionary improvement.

For Mr. Robertson, the goal of mankind should be not only the preservation of cultural variety but continual evolutionary advance. As he points out, there is a span of only 50,000 years between Neanderthal man and Isaac Newton. If the sun continues to burn for millions of years, there is no reason why our distant descendants should not be as different from us as we are from apes. Evolution requires genetic diversity and true diversity arises only in isolation. Therefore, any open-borders or one-world scheme will eventually lead to cultural and genetic uniformity, which would be both an esthetic and an evolutionary disaster.

If homogeneous ethnostates come into existence, their first duty would be to guard their unique genetic heritages against dilution and to improve upon them in every possible way. Such states would have the firmest possible foundations because they would “rest on the hard rock of genes and culture instead of the quicksands of proletarian myths, egalitarian fantasies and retouched history.”

15 Million People

The maximum size of Mr. Robertson’s ethnostate would be perhaps the size of Portugal, with a population no larger than about 15 million people. Scores of ethnostates could be scattered not only across America and Europe but around the globe. In the United States, where cities have become very mixed, neighborhoods could have firm boundaries and as much local autonomy as possible.

Political entities on such a small scale could be exceedingly homogeneous, and many strong arguments can be made for homogeneity. The most obvious is that race, religion, language, and culture are the natural fault lines along which peoples divide. Just as Japan benefits immeasurably because its people are similar to each other, ethnostates everywhere would enjoy a unity of purpose that is impossible in a pluralistic state.

Many of the advantages of the ethnostate are nothing more than the absence of the terrible conflicts that weaken the United States. A mono-racial society would have no need for the tremendous apparatus of race relations officials who make up one of our few remaining growth industries. It would not have to cope with the frustrations that result when differently endowed groups face the daily consequences of those differences. Its citizens would not have conflicting foreign loyalties that hamstring its foreign policy. It would have an authentic history rather than the formless mush or ethnic cheer leading that now pass for American history. It could honestly discuss eugenics without raising racial animosity. It would not have a justice system riven by racial loyalties or standards of physical beauty that inevitably value one race over another.

As Mr. Robertson points out, ethnostates could also be seed beds for a blossoming of culture. Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and Weimar at the time of Goethe were exceedingly homogeneous, as were Japan and China in their periods of greatest cultural creativity. When it need not please every taste, art can be free and strong. Without morality art can degenerate into pornography, but in a coherent society without competing religions and moralities, the sense of duty or honor can likewise be strong.

Mr. Robertson points out that Government and the laws could be minimal in an ethnostate. People of the same stock and of similar expectations turn to custom and good manners to regulate their affairs. It is only in a society of competing customs and decaying manners that laws must intrude into every corner of life. A piling up of laws is a kind of moral prosthesis, and a sure sign that a society has lost its moral center.

For racial minorities as well, there would be great advantages in having their own ethnostates. They would no longer have to live by the standards of others, and could concentrate on their own progress rather than blame their failures on “racism.” Although some clear-thinking non-whites might realistically fear that their groups were incapable of maintaining civilized societies, others would prefer to be masters in their own homes rather than servants in the mansions of others.

All of these advantages of homogeneity are easily understood by anyone who has observed the United States. Mr. Robertson’s economic prescriptions for the ethnostate are more unfamiliar. It is true that just as different peoples build different cultures, they would build different economies. No model of central planning or free enterprise should be universal. However, Mr. Robertson suggests that for ethnostates to preserve their uniqueness, they should have as little foreign trade as possible. Striving for self sufficiency makes a people well rounded.

However, if the world were to split up into ethnostates no larger than Holland, autarky would impoverish them. As Mr. Robertson points out, cultural coherence and genetic diversity are more important than material wealth, but Holland’s domestic market would not support an automobile industry or even a basic electronics industry. Without foreign trade, most ethnostates would be very poor.

The Road to Dispossession

For the time being, however, what are the forces that keep whites in the United States and, to a lesser degree, those in Western Europe on the road to dispossession? One of the most obvious is widespread refusal to recognize that the races of man are not equivalent. Different races make cultures in their own images as much as they are made by their cultures. As long as whites are browbeaten into believing that race does not matter, they will continue to cooperate in their own marginalization.

Another potent factor is the widespread belief that homogeneous states would inevitably make war on each other. It is commonly thought that internal frictions are preferable to the immensely greater frictions of war and that the more nations resemble each other the less likely they are to fight. Mr. Robertson counters this view by saying that if any ethnically pure state made war on another it would be tantamount to genocide and that genocide is so terrible a crime no national leader would dare be charged with it.

Mr. Robertson’s more convincing argument is the one that justified the independent French nuclear force: A small nation can deter aggression from much more powerful nations as long as it can destroy the aggressor’s major cities with a few nuclear missiles. Whatever the merits of either of these arguments, if ethnostates were all that stood between whites and extinction of their culture, any but the most demoralized whites would choose the ethnostate even if it did increase the chances of war.

Another force that is pushing whites aside is their own altruism. No other race welcomes impoverished, diseased aliens into its midst or sends its soldiers around the world to feed people who cannot feed themselves. In Mr. Robertson’s view, this is partly the result of the excesses of Christianity, a religion, he says, which “can easily become an altruistic Trojan Horse.” Although altruism is a noble thing, he argues that it should remain within the ethnostate: “It should not be extended to fishing the muddy waters of other people’s problems.”

Another reason why the dismemberment of the United States seems farfetched is that political doctrine always lags behind reality. As Mr. Roberston points out, the Constitution and Bill or Rights were written by Englishmen for Englishmen in a sparsely populated nation of farmers. It was the product not only of its times but of the race and culture of its authors. How can we pretend that such a document still applies to a disorderly urban mix like New York City? Doctrine eventually catches up with reality, but if it lags too far, the adjustment may be violent, as the French kings, the Russian Czar, and the Shah of Iran all discovered. Mr. Robertson calls the veneration of dead ideas a kind of ideological necrophilia.

Though it is not yet the ally of Western civilization, the environmental movement soon could be. Anyone who is passionately concerned about the Snail Darter or the Spotted Owl should surely be concerned about the survival of the different races of his own kind. Eventually, it should dawn on environmentalists how disproportionate it is to do battle in the name of the human habitat but to say nothing about who will live in it. The Ethnostate is in many ways an extension of “green” thinking in that it proposes to allot to the different tribes of men an environment appropriate to each, so that each may prosper and none may interfere with his neighbors.

Although events in the former Soviet Union should be a lesson to us all, Mr. Robertson has no illusions that Europe or North America will divide neatly into ethnostates. He does not rule out the possibility that when non-whites become majorities in the United States they could do what the black Haitians did after their rebellion against the French: hunt down and exterminate all the whites who were left alive. The Ethnostate is remarkable and thought provoking, but it is an essay on what would be desirable, not necessarily what is probable.

It may be that whites do not have the will to save themselves. It may be that both in America and in Europe, they will let a flood of aliens push them aside and let their homelands be transformed into northern colonies of the third world. For Mr. Robertson, what may happen is less important than what we believe in and what we fight for. This is the frame of mind he proposes for whites who see the dangers that lie ahead: “I’m right, so I will go ahead, come what may. If no one listens, so what? . . . Yes, my ship of state, my West, may be going down, but if she goes, I’m going to make sure that at least one member of the crew is still hoisting sail as she sinks.”

The Ethnostate is available from Howard Allen Enterprises, Box 76, Cape Canaveral, FL 32920. The price is $12.00 plus $1.50 for postage and handling.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Language of Learning

One out of every eight students in New York City public schools either gets bilingual instruction or is taught English as a foreign language. Ever since 1974, when orders went out to teach all subjects — including math and physics — in foreign students’ native tongues, New York has been desperate for “bilingual” teachers. Since these teachers are hired under special order, they need not meet the same qualifications as other teachers, and are hired under a program that is not subject to ordinary budgetary constraints.

Among the different ethnic groups there are sharply different levels of enthusiasm for instruction in languages other than English. Hispanic and Haitian parents, for example, show little interest in integrating into American society and are pleased that their children are taught in Spanish or Haitian Creole. Those most adamantly opposed to “bilingual” education are Russians and Chinese, who insist on instruction in English. At Public School 247 in the Bronx, Chinese and Russian parents were so unalterably opposed to “bilingual” education for their children that the school’s principal finally disbanded classes that school regulations had required that he establish. [Joseph Berger, School Programs Assailed as Bilingual Bureaucracy, NYT, 1/4/93, p. A1.]

One group of New York City school children fall into a sort of language limbo. They are from the “English-speaking Caribbean,” which includes such places as Jamaica, St. Vincent, and Grenada. These children think they speak English but they do not. There is no “bilingual” education for them, and most do not take English as a foreign language. They go to ordinary classes, where they stumble around with constructions like “I tell she,” or “Him say this.” The Caribbean is a little unclear on plurals, and children are likely to talk about “two house” or “de house-dem.”

Many Caribbean phrases are well-nigh unintelligible. Here are some sample sentences in Jamaican creole with English translations:

Jien mada ben sik wan mont abak.
Jane’s mother fell ill last month.

Di daangki hiez kech de haas anda him nuoz.
The ears of the donkey are larger than those of the horse.Hag a mash up me yam grong.
Pigs are destroying my yam field.

Mi lib rait a di kraas ruod.
I live at the cross roads.

The school district is likely to solve this problem in its usual way. It is considering establishing a program to be called “American Language for Speakers of Other Englishes.” [Deborah Sontag, Caribbean Pupils’ English Seems Barrier, not Bridge, NYT, 11/28/92, p. A1.]

De Gustibus . . .

When West African slaves came to America they brought with them their habit of eating dirt. In the southern United States, dirt eating is still surprisingly common. A survey taken in 1971 in Holmes County (MS) found that one in four adult women sometimes ate dirt, and the practice is known throughout the South. For unknown reasons, in the United States it is only black women who seem to eat dirt, though in West Africa both men and women buy the dirt pellets on sale in markets.

In Mississippi, dirt for eating must be a particular kind — what is technically known as red — yellow podsolic soil. It is a crunchy, clay soil found in many parts of the South. Gourmet soil is found about two miles south of Lexington (MS) on Highway 17. A hill side has been scooped out by dirt-eaters, some of whom send shoe boxfuls to relatives who cannot find the right soil “up North.”

In Georgia, the fashion seems to be for a kind of white clay known as kaolin. Attractive packages of it are on sale in Atlanta grocery stores. One supplier to the trade is Georgia Down Home White Dirt Inc. of Griffin (GA). An Atlanta man who sells kaolin for 25 cents a bag reports that most of his customers are pregnant women. [David Beasley, Trying to stop a dirty habit, Atlanta Journal, Jan. 9, 1993, p. B2.]

At one time it was thought that African women felt a craving for dirt during pregnancy, when their bodies require certain minerals. Studies have since shown that women who eat dirt show no differences in nutritional balance from those who do not. Also, dirt-eaters often crave dirt when they are not pregnant. Dr. Dennis Frate is the director of the University of Mississippi’s Rural Health Research Program and is an authority on dirt-eating. “It’s analogous to eating potato chips,” says Dr. Frate; “A snack food is what it is.” [AP, “Dirt-Eating Custom Fading Out in the South,” Grand Rapids Press, Nov. 24, 1993, p. D1.]

All the News That’s Fit to Slant

The March issue of Esquire has published a long article about the New York Times that includes some things we already knew. “The Times is basically guided by the principles of political correctness,” says a senior reporter; “It’s terrified to offend any of the ‘victimized’ groups.”

Executive Editor Max Frankel has encouraged writers to work “a subtle point of view” into what are supposed to be news stories. Or, as another reporter says, “You’d be given an assignment to do a piece on a conservative personality and [the desk] would tell you, up front, ‘Don’t make it too nice.’” The only surprise is that anyone at the Times ever had to be explicit about it.

The article also describes how the “principles of political correctness” have not saved the newspaper from the agonies that come from trying to “celebrate diversity.” The harder the paper tries to recruit non-whites and the more it does for them the more dissatisfied they get. [Robert Anson, The best of Times, the Worst of times, Esquire, March 1993, pp. 103ff.]

Voting with Their Wallets

Congressional districts, which have been redrawn in accordance with the 1990 census, must now be reshaped to create as many districts as possible in which non-whites are the majority. As a consequence there are now 32 districts with black majorities and 20 with Hispanic majorities. This is 26 more non-white majority districts than ten years ago. One side effect of the racial gerrymander has been to create the poorest congressional districts in the country. In more than half of the districts in which blacks or Hispanics are the majority more than 25 percent of the inhabitants are poor. The poorest district of all is New York’s 16th district where, by federal standards, 42 percent of the inhabitants live below the poverty line. [Poverty upshot of some redistricting, Clarion-Ledger, march 24, 1993, p. 4A.]

White Fright

In many city school districts, whites are a slim and dwindling minority. In Richmond (VA) only ten percent of the students are white, and one of the concessions that some principals had quietly made to them was to keep them together in the same classes rather than scatter them throughout the school. This process, known as “clustering,” has only recently come to light and has been trumpeted as a despicable vestige of segregation. The NAACP and other black groups have ordered the school board to stop this racist practice, and the board has complied.

There seems to be no objection when public schools across the country institute Afro-centric curricula or even when entire schools are set up to teach black pride, as has been done in Detroit. Nevertheless, the idea that white children might be better off in classes with other whites unleashes roars of disapproval. One black principal of an elementary school explained that she “clustered” whites because she thought it “met the social and emotional needs of the white children.” [Erich Harrison, Richmond Will Stop ‘Clustering’ White Students,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 25, 1993, p. A1.] She should have known better than to worry about the needs of white children.

To the Last Man

Ever since 1905, when they saved it from the wrecker’s ball, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas have maintained the Alamo and run it as a museum. This is a boon to the state of Texas, which is so short on money that it has proposed closing down 11 parks and historic sites that it cannot afford to operate.

Ron Wilson, a black state legislator from Houston has proposed a bill that would take the Alamo away from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and give it to the state to operate. Why would anyone want to do this? “They [the Daughters] have chosen not to highlight a number of Hispanics who helped defend the Alamo,” explains Representative Wilson. “They also have not given the correct historical perspective of the Mexican government,” he adds; “They were opposed to slavery while the Texans endorsed it.” [Alamo II, Houston Chronicle, march 3, 1993; “That’s Foolish, Ron,” Houston Post, 3/3/93.]

Obstreperous Whites

The union that represents the employees of New York City’s Human Resources Administration has filed a suit against the city claiming that whites have suffered discrimination in promotions. Civil service rules clearly state that the most qualified people must be promoted, but blacks and Hispanics have been moved up over the heads of dozens of more qualified whites. Though she now denies it, the agency’s Commissioner, a black woman named Barbara Sabol, once complained that the people on the list of employees most qualified for promotion were “too white and too male.” Her underlings reportedly corrected the problem. [James Bennet, “Union Plans Bias Lawsuit Over Agency Promotions,” NYT, 3/15/93, p. B3.]

Detroit Diary

Detroit, which is 74 percent black, is now the poorest big city in the United States. One third of its residents live below the federal poverty line, whereas as one fifth did in 1979. The next poorest cities are New Orleans (62 percent black and 32 percent poor), Cleveland (48 percent black and 29 percent poor), and El Paso (3 percent black, 69 percent Hispanic, and 25 percent poor). [James Tobin, Detroit poorest big city in US, Detroit News, Feb. 9, 1993, p. 1A.]

Despite its poverty, Detroit finds it must spend its dwindling dollars in unfortunate ways. Students in Detroit schools are killing and maiming each other so frequently that the city has started phasing in a program on violence prevention. This includes “peer mentors, crisis counselling and student teams to mediate disputes.” The program will eventually be extended to all of Detroit’s schools from kindergarten on up, and will cost at least $1 million a year. [Ron Russell, “Schools Draft Plan to fight violence,” Detroit News, Feb. 11, 1993, p. B1.]

The city certainly needs something. After 18-year-old Karlos Rhodes shot and killed 16-year-old Darnell Byrd and stole his leather jacket, the killer blamed the victim for the trouble. “He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,” explained Mr. Rhodes, saying that Mr. Byrd had turned to run rather than give up the coat. [Ann Sweeney, “Victim’s to blame for his death alleged gunman says,” Detroit News, Feb. 11, 1993.]

Hey, Big Spender

A few Californians are beginning to discover that illegal aliens are an expensive habit. Governor Pete Wilson has once more braved public obloquy by pointing out that 11 percent of the state’s prison inmates are illegals (at a cost of $250 million a year to house them), that 300,000 illegals get state health care benefits ($900 million a year), and that in Los Angeles County alone, 250,000 children of illegals go to public schools ($1.2 billion a year). The state as a whole spends $3.6 billion a year on students who are either illegals or who are U.S.-born children of illegals. If Gov. Wilson thinks the border should be better patrolled he is soft-pedaling the idea. He thinks the federal government should reimburse the state for the money it spends on illegals. [31.3 million call California home, Santa Barbara New Press, Feb. 16, 1993.] He has, however, announced that if the state legislature would pass a law forbidding public education for illegals he would sign it. [No state school funds for illegals? Orange County Register, Feb. 6, 1993, p. A3.]

San Diego County has recently been counting up how much money it splashes out on illegals. Over the past 11 years it has spent about two thirds of its budget for indigent health care on illegal aliens and citizens of foreign countries. Over the years, that has added up to $43.3 million. In the first six months of 1992, 36 percent of the poor people who got free medical care were illegal aliens, and 24 percent were citizens of foreign countries. County officials are also asking the feds to help pay. [Rex Dalton, “Most health funds go to migrants,” San Diego Union Tribune, Feb. 6, 1993.]

All this is helpful. When Congressmen from Idaho and West Virginia are presented with the bill for services for illegals, they may begin to wonder how those illegals might be prevented from coming here in the first place.

Can’t Win Either Way

At a recent conference on AIDS in Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela said that apartheid helped spread the disease among South African blacks. Forgetting, apparently, that South African blacks have the highest standard of living of all blacks in Africa, he said that whites were responsible for unemployment, disintegrating family life, insufficient health services, and the lack of recreation facilities. He also said that the white government’s campaign to get people to wear condoms as a precaution against AIDS was “viewed with suspicion as a ploy to control the population.” [“Mandela on AIDS and Apartheid,” Populi, Nov. 1992.]

Portrait of the Artist

Maya Angelou, the black woman who recited a poem at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, is perhaps not the ideal role model. In 1982, she was appointed “Professor for Life” at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and she receives a salary of more than $100,000 a year. However, she does not teach. Although her photograph graces many university publications, no one knows when she is likely to offer a course. She has no office, and her telephone number is connected to an answering machine. No one returns calls. She has given a few courses in the past, and says that she likes to teach “whatever comes to mind.” Although she is supposed to teach “American Studies,” Wake Forest has no department or courses of that name.

Miss Angelou describes herself as a former madam, prostitute, burlesque stripper, and advisor to Malcolm X. She likes to talk about how she traveled to Ghana to “teach African dance and music” to the Africans. During Mr. Clinton’s inauguration, Wake Forest’s president had a big-screen television set up in the student center so that all could see her participation in the ceremony. One student observed that this was one of the few times Miss Angelou had even been seen at Wake Forest. [John Meroney, “Angelou a symbol of Clinton’s apathy,” Detroit News, Feb. 20, 1993, p. 6C.]

Rappin’ with the Home Boys

The word “nigger” divides blacks. Older, middle-class blacks hate the sound of the word, but younger, ghetto blacks use it not only for blacks in general, but also as a term of endearment, humor, or solidarity. Ghetto blacks see the word as a sign of their complete alienation from white society, and calling each other “nigger” gives them a sense of camaraderie. According to some blacks, the word should be “nigga” rather than “nigger.” Some even claim that this stands for Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished.

All blacks agree, however, that no matter how much blacks may use the word it is off limits to whites. A Los Angeles rap “singer” who is tired of being asked about the word says this:

People need to stop f***ing with little words . . . Bottom line: If I’m making a million dollars, I’m a million-dollar nigger to black people. To everybody else, I’m a black man. Now, let’s move on.

[Darrell Dawsey, “A Word of Caution,” Detroit News, Jan. 22, 1993, p. 1C.]

SATisfied?

After 67 years of being called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the SAT has changed its name to Scholastic Assessment Test. Too many people complained that the old name sounded as though the test measured something inherent, and this the test’s administrators could not bear. [SAT gets new name, Atlanta Constitution, march 27, 1993, p. A12.]

Gringo Dollars

There are at least 50 Hispanic-Americans with net worths of more than $20 million. Four are worth more than $100 million. At the top of the heap is Joseph A. Unanue who, together with his family, is worth $330 million. He made his money from Goya Foods of Seacaucus (NJ), which supplies the Hispanic market. [Hispanic Business, March 1993, p. 40.]

Gifts for All

Schools in Jacksonville (FL), like schools everywhere, do not have enough blacks in classes for gifted children. The problem, it appears, is that in order to be admitted to such classes, a child must have an IQ of 130 or higher, which would put him in the top three percent. A state task force has been set up to figure out how to get more blacks into gifted programs and has hit on the obvious solution: dispense with the IQ test. If the task force has its way, black who score in the top 20 percent on tests of math and reading will be considered “gifted” and will join whites in special classes. [Joan Hennessy, “School Board’s Plan makes more minorities gifted,” Florida Times-Union, Feb. 16, 1993, p. A1.]

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •


LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I have done some catch-up reading of American Renaissance on my recent return to Europe and have found some outstanding articles. How disconcerting to read in the February issue of the fate of California, where I spent some 60 years of my life. I lived scarcely a mile from Monterey Park where, I learn, fewer than one half of the current residents were born in the United States.

And what about Europe; more particularly Germany? Here the view seems to be widely held that what the U.S. does must be good. Partly as a result, in pour hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers every year-most masquerading. Liberals act pretty much the same everywhere, don’t they?

Noel Merrihew, Wacken, Germany

Sir — Your article on how whites are leaving southern California and moving to the whiter north reminded me of my parents. They moved to the Gold Country, saying of their former suburb, “the parts that don’t look like a ghetto in Saigon look like a ghetto in Tijuana.” Now, less than five years later, they have virtually forgotten the unpleasantness they left behind. They can’t remember the things they used to say, and ask me, “How did you become such a racist?”

Evelyn Hill, Santa Clara, Cal.

Sir — One of your readers, writing in the April issue, wonders what can be done to keep California from becoming an outpost of the third world. Crude violence and overt intimidation work against us, but there are things we can do.

We can promote our own culture and boycott manifestations of alien culture. We can attend our own music concerts and pointedly ignore Cinco de Mayo celebrations. Politically, we can work to reduce state give-away programs that attract immigrants. Mainstream conservatism, weak as it is, can serve our cause in this instance. Measures making English the official language will put additional barriers in the way of at least some minorities. Personally, we can socialize with our own kind and support each other in the marketplace.

California is a wonderful place, and I am not willing to give it up to third worlders. There is still a lot we can do. We can’t run forever. We must fight.

Lars Peterson, Nevada City, Cal.

Sir — Located in the heart of Los Angeles, is a 56 square-mile area with a population of more than one million. Sixty-three percent of the adults are not U.S. citizens. A larger percentage of the children are citizens, since they were born in America.

Between 1980 and 1990, the number of foreign-born residents in this area — which one might call Nuevo Los Angeles — grew by nearly 51 percent. The number of people who don’t speak English increased by 45 percent. Most are native Spanish speakers, although about 25,000 speak neither English nor Spanish.

Tuberculosis rates are 75 percent higher than in the rest of Los Angeles County and 216 percent higher than the national average. Sixty-two percent of the new cases occurred in people not born in the U.S. Of those 62 percent, about half of the cases involve people who have been in America for two years or less.

The police report that in Nuevo Los Angeles the homicide rate is nearly 77 percent higher than in the rest of the city. Property crime rates are lower because there is so little to steal. Nuevo Los Angeles is demanding the right to vote, using the argument “no taxation without representation.”

Bette Hammond, S.T.O.P.I.T., Box 5026, Novato, CA 94948

Sir — A few weeks ago, the national media were full of accounts of a “Nigger Night” held by an all-white fraternity at a New Jersey college. Pledges were made to paint Xs on their foreheads, wear silly clothing, and imitate the behavior attributed to lower class blacks. The same networks and newspapers that found this story so fascinating had nothing to say about the fate of Missy McLauchlin.

You say that “AR does not usually report on routine anti-white crime.” I thank you for deviating from your standard practice. Fairy tales about spacemen and poltergeists are more common fare in our mass media than are accurate reports about urban atrocities. I commend you for defying the virtual gag order that has been put on the discussion of black-on-white crime.

James Macri, Boston, Mass.

Sir — In his February letter, Bailey Norfleet writes that since the world is already overpopulated, whites should restrict their families even if others do not. In my opinion, children are our only real wealth. My wife and I have a big family — our next child will be our eighth. Yes, it means sacrifices and hard work, especially since we also home school. But have you ever had anything valuable that was not worth working for? So many whites say they cannot afford to have more than two children — or any children at all. I would like to ask them how much enjoyment, satisfaction, and protection they are really likely to get from a new stereo, television, or car.

Robert Lee Taylor, Fisher, Tex.

• • • BACK TO TOP • • •