O Tempora, O Mores! (December 1990)

Minority Club in Manhattan

A group of black businessmen has set up a social and business club for minorities to be known as the New Yorker Club. Robert Samuels, a general partner, says that its purpose is to give minorities a base of operations independent from clubs whose memberships are mainly white.

Opium Poppies in Minnesota

The residents of St. Paul (MN) public housing are growing a curious crop: opium poppies. Public housing authorities have discovered dozens of plots, all tended by South East Asians.

Asians vs. Bears

The influx of Asians into California has had dangerous consequences for the animal that graces the state flag. Korean medicine men believe that a bear can eat anything without getting sick because its gall bladder purifies its blood. Tincture of bear gall is therefore a hot item among Koreans as an all-round pick-me-up. Demand for the stuff was so high that wildlife biologists began to notice a sharp drop in the average age of California black bears.

Last year, a big police operation snared 23 medicine men but did not put a stop to a different kind of poaching. Lately, park rangers have found bear carcasses with their paws cut off. Chinese have a special craving for bear paw soup.

More Citizens for the ‘new’ America

The United States grants automatic citizenship to anyone who was born here — even if the parents were just passing through. Now that Britain has agreed to give Hong Kong back to the Chinese, nervous colonials are flying here to have babies. No one knows how many pregnant Hong Kongers have made the trip, but certainly hundreds and possibly thousands have. When the children grow up, they can demand US passports, move to America, and sponsor other relatives who want to live here.

Mexicans, of course, have known about our laws for a long time. It is common for pregnant Mexicans to slip across the border and present themselves, well into labor, at hospital emergency rooms. An astounding 80% of all infants born in Los Angeles county public hospitals are children of illegal immigrants.

We think it’s crazy to grant people US citizenship just because they happen to be born here, and we are not alone. Virtually no other country in the world has such a policy.

Multi-Racial Drug Testing

Tony Strickland is a black doctor at the UCLA medical school who has studied the effects of drugs on patients of different races. He reports, for example, that black manic depressives metabolize the drug lithium differently from white patients and therefore need smaller doses. He has called for drugs to be tested on groups of blacks and Hispanics as well as on whites. He acknowledges that this would double or triple the cost of drug testing, but argues that America’s changing population makes this necessary.

New Consulting Opportunity

White Americans have, by now, been so thoroughly browbeaten on the subject of “stereotypes” that they bend over backwards to treat everyone identically. Now it appears that’s not good enough. A flock of consultants have sprung up to teach executives how to “manage for diversity” by treating different kinds of people differently.

They will teach you, for example, that when Asians refuse to look you in the eye it doesn’t mean they are shifty — just Asian. Consultants will explain that Cherokees love to be publicly praised but Navajos don’t like to be singled out for blame or praise. At last count there were more than 160 member nations at the UN. Will it become one of the responsibilities of “diversity managers” to memorize the cultural habits of all 160?

Objective Testing Wins a Round

Standardized tests have a bad name these days because some groups do better on them than others. That the very purpose of tests is to distinguish between those who do well from those who do poorly, has been lost in the noise over whether they are “culturally biased.”

Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard has taken the trouble to study whether a good score on an employment test is likely to translate into good performance on the job. To the surprise of no level-headed person, it is. Professor Herrnstein recently released his work on the New York City Police Department’s hiring class of 1940. They have been policemen long enough for anyone to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. As he explains,”Neither background, family status, nor the individual’s own educational history was as predictive of success as the score earned on a 3½ hour test taken over half a century ago.”

It was possible to give fair, accurate tests half a century ago because no one insisted that they produce the same results for every group — and New York City got the best police force possible.

New Federal Job Exam

For years, entry-level jobs in the federal government were filled by competitive examination. That is, they were until 1982, when the tests were thrown out because so few minorities could pass them. In the old days, only 0.07% (yes, that’s seven in ten thousand) of the blacks who took the Professional and Administrative Career Examination (PACE) scored high enough to be considered for a job.

In a capital city that is 70% black, this was politically unacceptable, so, for the last eight years, jobs in the government have been doled out on the basis of “softer” criteria, like job interviews, recommendations, and college grades. It was a procedure that one director of government personnel calls “intellectually confusing, procedurally nightmarish, inaccessible to students, and very difficult to explain.”

Well, yes, it is difficult to explain to white applicants that objective hiring criteria have been junked because the feds want to hire more non-whites. At the same time, after eight year’s worth of determined, non-white hiring, even the bureaucrats began to notice that some of the new recruits weren’t up to the job. Former Reserve Bank chairman, Paul Volcker, headed a commission reporting last spring that incompetent employees were creating a “quiet crisis” in government and that things had to change.

A new government test has been developed at great expense, and with an eye to eliminating “adverse impact” on minorities. Nevertheless, if it is a genuine test of professional aptitude, we suspect that blacks and Hispanics will score worse than whites. We hope this will not cause the Mandarins too much embarrassment.

SAT Scores Slump

In 1990, American children scored as well on the math SAT as they had in the previous year, but the average verbal score dropped by three points. It’s unusual for the average to drop by that much in a single year, and the last time it happened was ten years ago. It is common to see hand-wringing articles about the decline in average scores. It is less common to hear anything about one of the important reasons for it: More and more minorities are taking the test. In 1980, 17% of the test takers were minorities. In 1990, 27% were.

From the Vernacular Press

The Amsterdam News is one of New York City’s two leading black newspapers. Recently, it ran a story advising black parents to tell their children not to trust the white-dominated media. It went on to say that one of the main objectives of the American criminal justice system is “putting young black males in jails by any means necessary so that lower-class whites can exercise authority, supremacy, and make a nice living.”

The American criminal justice system has a hard enough time putting vicious, repeat criminals in jail, but let us assume that the News is right — that our jails are bursting with innocent men who were rounded up just because they are black. At a cost of about $20,000 a year per prisoner, this would be a crazy way to give lower-class whites a job.

It is sad to think that there are blacks who believe this nonsense, but it is even sadder to note who the author of the article is. He is not a celebrated crazy but a Roman Catholic priest named Lawrence E. Lucas, with a church in Harlem.

Black Bisexuality and AIDS

A recent San Francisco study of black homosexuals helps explain why AIDS is two to three times more prevalent among blacks than whites. Only 54% of the blacks claimed that they have safe sex almost all the time. Twenty percent said that they would have unsafe sex even if they knew they had the AIDS virus. This is an astonishing way to treat a “lover,” but if as many as 20% admitted to potentially homicidal behavior, the number who would actually engage in it is surely higher. Another 20% said they have ducked the issue entirely. They haven’t been tested because they don’t want to know the results.

Of particular concern to heterosexuals is the fact that black homosexuals are more likely than white homosexuals to sleep with women. There is more pressure among blacks to be “macho.” A third of the men in the survey said they had sex with women, not out of desire, but to conform to community expectations.

The Apple Continues to Rot

A recent issue of U.S. News & Word Report collected some of the more dour statistics about New York City and printed them all on one page. In 1952 the city had 8,757 robberies but last year it had 93,387, which means there is a stickup every six minutes. Chances are, there is one every three or four minutes, since so many New Yorkers don’t bother to report them anymore.

The public school system, which has one of the worst records in the nation, employs more bureaucrats than all of the school systems in all of Western Europe combined! The city has 830,000 people on welfare — if they all moved to the country and founded a new town to live in, it would be the eleventh largest city in the United States. Every day, 366 cars are stolen in the city; that’s 131,760 every year.

Every day, 20,000 people jump the turnstiles and ride the subway for free. We might add our own statistics and point out that fare-beaters cost the city $60 to $65 million dollars a year in lost revenue, which makes the transit system run an annual deficit of about $55 million a year. Most of the deficit is covered by grants from the federal Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which means that taxpayers in Kansas and Mississippi pick up the tab when New Yorkers jump a turnstile. We might also point out that fare-beating is highly localized. A spot check by the city in April found that less than two-thirds of the riders at one Harlem station paid the fare.

We could help out US News & World Report with a few more statistics about New York City: 1,500 felonies are committed every month in the subways alone; 85% of the people arrested for crimes test positive for drugs; more black women of child-bearing age die of AIDS than of any other cause. Sixty percent of New Yorkers worry about crime all or most of the time, and an equal number would move away if they could. There’s no end to statistics about New York. We think that there is one that explains all the rest, but which US News coyly refrained from mentioning: Whites are now only 45% of the population.

The African Bead Game

Double standards crop up in peculiar places. Black students at Steinert High School in Hamilton (NJ) have taken to wearing “African peace beads,” as a sign of opposition to apartheid in South Africa. No one has complained. But in November, when a few whites started wearing them, the principal, who is white, threatened them with suspension. As one of the white students explained, “I guess they think that when white people wear [them] then black people think, “They’re trying to make fun of us,’ and start a riot or something.”

Emergency in Encinitas

Encinatas (CA), 35 miles from the Mexican border, has become the first town in America to declare a state of emergency because it is overrun with illegal immigrants. There may be as many as 1,500 illegals camped out around the town, harassing passersby and defecating wherever they please. The local Wendy’s stopped opening for breakfast because so many Mexicans were washing up in the rest rooms. During the day, illegals hang around street corners offering to work for $15 to $25 a day.

The city council voted 5 to 0 to declare a state of emergency, and sent a request for help to the California state Office of Emergency Services. A spokesman for the state would not speculate on the chances of granting aid. “We’ve never dealt with something like this,” he said.

Illegals Pay Full Fare

A California superior court has handed down one of those rulings that never should have been necessary: illegal aliens are not eligible for reduced, in-state tuition at California universities. But even more astonishing is the reason the case was tried in the first place. David Bradford, a tuition claims processor at UCLA, was forced by the university to resign because he wouldn’t approve in-state rates for illegals. Even in these crazy times that was more than judge David Yaffe could stomach. Mr. Bradford is now free to sue UCLA for asking him to commit illegal acts as a condition for employment. In the meantime, the worst that has happened to the real lawbreakers — the ones who stole into the country — is that they have to pay full tuition.

When Does He Move to the Women’s Unit?

A Michigan judge has ordered a state prison to give one of its prisoners daily shots of sex hormones. Marty Phillips, a former female impersonator who is in the slammer for first-degree murder, had been taking estrogen since he was 17, and hopes to have a sex change operation some day. The prison doctor did not think this was the state’s business, so he refused to prescribe estrogen or issue Mr. Phillips a bra. In finding for the prisoner, Judge Richard Enslen of Kalamazoo berated the doctor for his lack of “empathy.” Mr. Phillips now plans to sue the state for “cruel and unusual punishment,” on the grounds that it withheld medical treatment (and underwear?).

No More Top Wops

Ethnic “sensitivity” has reached the point where people can’t even make jokes about themselves, much less anyone else. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has been persuaded to recall all the vanity license plates with the word “Wop” or “Dago” on them. There are now 350 Italians driving around the state with plates like IMAWOP or IDAGO. Just plain DAGO is so popular that imitators have run the numbers up sequentially to around DAGO 42. Some stereotypes just won’t die. The man who claims to be TOPWOP has reportedly threatened to “put a hit” on anyone who tries to take away his plates.

Fly Benighted

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently passed a new regulation on who may sit next to emergency exits on airplanes. The FAA thinks that people sitting by the doors should be able to understand instructions from the flight crew and help with an evacuation. That rules out the obese, the blind, the deaf, the feebleminded, and people who don’t speak English. Predictably, Hispanic groups have complained that the new ruling is linguistic chauvinism that discriminates against them. The FAA is sticking to its guns.

What? Civil Rights for Whites?

Our government, which generally acts as if equality means treating whites unequally, occasionally reverses itself. In 1983, the Maryland state lottery set aside several top positions to be filled only by women and minorities. In 1985, a chain of miracles began when 10 white men, who had been summarily denied jobs, complained to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC sat on the case for three years but eventually referred it to the Justice Department. This fall, the department actually brought suit against the Maryland lottery, charging that it had violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

So far as we can tell, the lottery had done exactly what thousands of universities and employers do all the time. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which has been used to justify all sorts of discrimination so long as it’s against whites, clearly bans any kind of racial discrimination in hiring. Someone in the Justice Department must have actually read the law for a change.