O Tempora, O Mores! (March, 1993)
American Renaissance, March 1993
Punished for Free Speech
Marge Schott, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team has been fined $25,000 and suspended from the sport for one year. After a two-month investigation, baseball’s ruling executive council decided that Mrs. Schott had brought “disrepute and embarrassment” upon the game because of her disrespectful remarks about blacks, Jews, and Japanese. Apparently, she has often referred to blacks as “niggers,” to Japanese as “Japs,” and has spoken of “Jew bastards” and “dirty Jews.” Of course, none of these things is a crime and ours is a nation in which free speech is thought to be guaranteed by the Constitution. Mrs. Schott could probably have been arraigned for murder without the baseball authorities concluding that she had brought “disrepute and embarrassment” upon the game.
Predictably, blacks have complained that the punishment is not severe enough. As Hank Aaron, a former player who is now a senior vice president for the Atlanta Braves put it, “She won this one. I am very much disappointed.” Mrs. Schott’s banishment from the game can end in eight months rather than one year if she completes a multicultural training program acceptable to the baseball council. [Baseball bans Reds’ Schott for one year, Louisville C-J, Feb. 4, 1993, p. A1.]
Song and Dance
A new Pepsi commercial has been designed for the singer, Michael Jackson. Mr. Jackson was to be shown performing the song I’ll Be There, but with shots interspersed of him singing the same song when he was a child performer with “The Jackson Five.” The idea was scrapped because the juxtaposition of Mr. Jackson then and now drew too much attention to his extensive plastic surgery and skin bleaching.
The commercial’s producers then decided to find someone else to play the young Mr. Jackson and after several months of auditions chose a light-skinned black child. Mr. Jackson was still not satisfied. He chose a white boy to play the part. [The Boy in the Mirror?, Houston Chronicle, p. 2A probably January 1993.]
Will Michael Jackson Buy Them?
Multiskins International of Stamford (CT) has started selling bandages in various shades of brown. As the company’s president, Mitchell Eisenberg, explains, “We saw a void in the marketplace. It made no sense that people with darker skin had to wear a bandage of someone else’s skin color.” [Leon Wynter, “Business and Race,” WSJ, late 1992, no date or page.]
Racism Spreads AIDS
The National Commission on AIDS has just released a report in which it concludes that racial discrimination contributes to the fact that AIDS is now a disproportionately non-white disease. Noting that in 1990 and 1991, the numbers of AIDS cases increased by more than 10 percent among blacks and Hispanics but dropped by 0.5 percent among whites, the Commission decided that racism must somehow be the cause. The 12-man group, which included one black and one Hispanic, warned that traditional public health initiatives were inadequate for non-whites because they have a legitimate distrust of government.
Blacks are now 3.6 times more likely than whites to have AIDS, and Hispanics are 2.7 times more likely to have the disease. The Commission is worried that once it appears that whites have learned how to avoid AIDS, the nation will lose interest in finding a cure for it. [Warren Leary, Commission says racism contributes to AIDS spread, NYT Jan. 16, 1993.]
Tolerance Reigns
For 77 years, the Kappa Alpha fraternity at Auburn University in Alabama has had an Old South parade, in which members of the fraternity dressed in Confederate uniforms and escorted ladies in ante-bellum dresses. The parade has naturally come under attack as “racist,” and last year it had to be rerouted to avoid gangs of hostile protesters. This year, under great pressure from activist student groups, the fraternity decided to end the tradition.
Carmella Davis, former president of the Auburn Black Student Union, unbosomed a particularly edifying comment on learning that the parade had been killed. “Maybe they’ve realized the need for tolerance and diversity,” she said.
The Little Rock he Leaves Behind
Little Rock (AR), the town that Mr. Clinton left behind on his way to Washington, has a population of only 177,000 but real big-city problems. In the past two years, Little Rock’s murder rate has soared, and its inhabitants have as good a chance of being killed as people living in New York or Los Angeles. A 20-block area that is poor, black, and full of drugs and weapons, is at the center of the crime wave. It has become known for “walk-by shootings,” which are drug-related killings by criminals too young to get a driver’s license. [no ref.]
Jackson (MS) has also seen a rash of newfangled crimes directed, for some reason, against a store called Super D Discount Drugs. People had been smashing the plate glass windows and making off with merchandise, so the store installed plexiglass. After the thieves started prying off the plexiglass with crowbars, store officials put steel bars over the windows. Thieves then crashed automobiles through the windows. Now there are steel posts embedded in the concrete in front of the windows, and weary merchants are wondering what will happen next. [Toni Lepeska, Crash and dash break-ins, Jackson Clarion-Ledger, no date or page.]
Barriers to Crime
Other cities are trying different methods to prevent crime. One that is gaining popularity is to block off city streets so that residential neighborhoods are accessible only at certain points. Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami have all set up barriers that make it hard for robbers to drive into an area, commit crimes, and zoom off. In South-Central Los Angeles, after barricades were set up to turn some neighborhoods into labyrinths of dead-ends, drive-by killings were down by 40 percent and all crime had decreased by 12 percent. [Isabel Wilkerson, Chicago Plans Barriers to hinder street crime, NYT 1/23/93.]
In Houston (TX), Mayor Bob Lanier is likely to allow citizens to block off streets and even to set up neighborhood security posts. The guards would not have the right to stop anyone, but they would take down the license numbers of suspicious-looking cars and call police if there were trouble. Most of the Houston neighborhoods asking for security posts are white, so there has been the usual huffing and puffing about “racism.” Judson Robinson, a black city council member, says that guards at the entrances of white neighborhoods are a bad idea and that they would not be “good press for the city.” [John Williams, Lanier pushes plan to let residents block streets to deter crime, Houston Chronicle, 1/20/93, p. 1A.]
On the contrary, they might make the city more appealing. Even so, that American cities should be turning themselves into labyrinths in an attempt to stop crime is an illuminating commentary on our times.
Fear of Blacks Found Legitimate
The American legal system never fails to astonish. Six years ago, a white Miami woman named Ruth Jandrucko was mugged by a black man while delivering a package for her employer, an Atlanta company called Fuqua Industries. She claims that the attack has left her with a paralyzing fear of black men. She has since sued Fuqua because the company refuses to give her a working environment that is free of blacks. Last December, a Florida compensation claims judge ruled that Miss Jandrucko suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and is therefore entitled to $500,000 as compensation for having to work with blacks. The NAACP has joined Fuqua Industries in appealing the decision. [Edward Felsenthal & Arthur Hayes, Race Phobia Case Settled, WSJ, 12/23/92.]
Hartford (CT) is locked in a battle that can have no satisfactory outcome because it ignores biology. In the city’s public schools, 90 percent of the students are non-white and half are on welfare. Their test scores are about what one would expect. A suit has been brought to force a merger with suburban schools, where the students are 80 to 90 percent white.
Significantly, Hartford’s schools are not claiming that money is the problem. Spending per student in Hartford is more than in some of the white suburbs and the average teacher’s salary, at $44,525, is more than $3,000 higher than the state average. The problem, which the merger plan recognizes in an oblique way, is that once the Hartford student population reached a critical mass of blacks and Puerto Ricans meaningful learning came to an end. As a bilingual education teacher explains, years after students have left her first-grade class, they have learned neither Spanish nor English and “cannot complete a single sentence in one language.” Presumably, if these children sit next to white children their problems will be solved.
Not so long ago, the city’s schools were white and prosperous. In just the last ten years, however, Hartford’s Hispanic population has grown by 59 percent and Puerto Rican children, at 49 percent, now outnumber all other groups. The differences in achievement between Hartford and the non-white suburbs are dramatic. Farmington spends $750 less per student every year in its 90 percent-white schools, but 93.4 percent of students are at or above grade level in reading as opposed to 39.3 percent in Hartford. More than 90 percent of Farmington students take the SAT and get combined scores, on average, that are about 300 points higher than the 57 percent of Hartford students who take the test. [George Judson, Data Portray School System in Crisis, NYT, 1/2/93, p. 23. George Judson, “Battle with poverty in Hartford Schools,” NYT, 12/26/92, p. 26.]
A recent New York Times (Jan. 18, 1993) article endorsed the amalgamation of Hartford and suburban schools in these words:
City children would attend suburban schools, suburban children would attend city ones, and the towering political, psychological and racial barriers dividing city from suburb would come tumbling down. [George Judson, “Vision of tumbling racial barriers is part of suit,” NYT, 1/18/93, p. B5.]
The city of Dallas is struggling with the same intractable facts of biology. It has been forcibly integrating its schools for years, but as whites fled to the suburbs the city stumbled upon a metaphysical problem: How do you integrate a school district that is now 85 percent non-white? School officials claim that they can do nothing about housing segregation and that they have done all they can both to integrate the schools and to improve the scores of black and Hispanic students.
Special Learning Centers have been set up in heavily non-white areas, with before- and after-school programs, specially chosen staff, longer school days, and twice the money to spend per pupil than in other schools. Test scores refuse to improve, and even the most ardent proponents of forced integration are beginning to concede that the achievement gap cannot forever be blamed on past segregation. Dallas may be nearing the point where it finally gives up on integration. [Joseph Garcia, DISD effort to integrate analyzed, Dallas Morning News, 1/21/93, p. 1A]
The Los Angeles Black-Korean Alliance was formed six years ago to bridge differences between blacks and Koreans. Late last year, it decided the job was impossible and disbanded.
Third World Press Going Strong
Publishers Weekly, the premier magazine of the publishing industry, devoted the cover of its Dec. 7, 1992 issue to congratulating a black-owned publisher called Third World Press. As PW noted, Third World can now boast of “twenty-five years of progressive Black publishing.”
Several Third World books are shown on the cover. We cannot claim to have read any, but the titles tell us all we wish to know. One is The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D., which appears to be prophecy as well as history. The cover drawing shows a mounted European man-at-arms swinging a sword at a black man armed with shield and assegai.
Another book is somewhat enigmatically called Chosen People from the Caucusus, but the subtitle is clearer: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deception and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization.Another book, called Why L.A. Happened, claims to be “Implications of the ‘92 Los Angeles Rebellion.” No doubt the word “rebellion” was deliberately chosen instead of “riots.”
Inside PW, Third World Press assures us that it is moving into its second quarter century “with a renewed commitment to Black literature as a weapon for liberation and development.”
No Official English
Puerto Rico has a sense of national identity that appears to be stronger than that of the United States. When Puerto Rican legislators introduced a bill to make English, along with Spanish, an official language of the island, an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people poured into the streets in protest. Puerto Ricans are not happy about “Americanization” of their island and see official English as a threat to Puerto Rican nationality. No bilingual education or bilingual ballots for them.
Will There Always Be An England?
Now that South Africa has taken irrevocable steps towards black rule, it has been readmitted to the world of international sports. Last year, England and South Africa resumed their rugby rivalry with a game in Twickenham. The national anthems of the two teams are played at such international games, but Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress sent word that the South African anthem, Die Stem must not be played. It contains no words that could remotely be considered racial, but the ANC said the anthem was symbolic of apartheid. The English Rugby Football Union agreed to obey.
The Union considered playing no national anthems at all, but began to wonder if English fans might be miffed not to hear “God Save The Queen.” It then asked the South African Rugby Union and the ANC for permission to play the British national anthem. The ANC graciously said yes, so the British were allowed to play “The Queen” while the South Africans were made to do without Die Stem. [Insulting Our Guests, Spearhead, p. 3, Jan. 1993.]
FBI Plays the Numbers Game
In January, the FBI released its national report on hate crimes. There are more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies in the country, but only 2,771 participated in the hate crimes study. Of those 2,771 agencies, 73 percent reported no hate crimes at all. Not a single hate crime was found in the entire states of Kentucky, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Indiana; Tennessee and Mississippi had only one each. New York state had the most, at 943, and New Jersey was second with 895.
All this is good reason to think that the FBI report may be meaningless. There is no uniformity across the country on how hate crimes are defined, only a minority of law enforcement agencies participated, and the state-to-state variation in numbers is implausible. Nevertheless, the FBI says that of the 4,755 hate crimes reported in the country during 1991, anti-black crime, at 1,689 cases was the most common, followed by anti-white (888 cases) and anti-Jewish (792). The FBI also found 421 anti-homosexual, three anti-heterosexual, and four anti-atheist hate crimes.
Virtually every news account of the report clucked over the large number of anti-black crimes and said nothing more. However, the FBI also included data on the race of the perpetrators of hate crimes. Though the agency breaks out anti-Hispanic crimes as a separate category, it inexcusably lumps Hispanics in with whites in the perpetrator category. “Whites,” so defined, therefore committed 65 percent of all hate crimes in which the race of the perpetrator was known, while blacks committed 30 percent. Since whites are 75 percent of the population and blacks are 12 percent, even if all those “whites” were really white, it would mean that blacks were 2.87 times more likely than whites to commit hate crimes. Needless to say, we know of no other publication that thought to analyze the data in this way.
Pre-Columbian Cuisine
Those who lament Columbus’ discovery of America can get a taste of what life was like under the Aztecs at a Mexico City restaurant called Don Chon. “Our most popular plates by far are insects,” says the proprietor, who bills his restaurant as “the cathedral of pre-Hispanic food.” The most sought after dishes are chapulines tostaditos (toasted crickets), guasanos de maguey (maguey plant worms) and escamoles a la mantequilla (sauteed ant eggs).
Diners who do not fancy insects, can try rata de campo (field rat). “We cut their little legs, the and the tail,” says the proprietor; “It ends up looking like a rabbit dish.” [Andres Oppenheimer, Insect dishes popular at Mexico City eatery,” Miami Herald, 12/26/92, p. 1A.]
AIDS Carrier Goes to Jail
Twenty-eight-year-old Alberto Gonzalez has been sent to prison for 9 and a half years for having unprotected sex with women despite the fact that he knew he had AIDS. Two of the man’s former sex partners have tested positive for the AIDS virus and one has died of the disease.
Because Mr. Gonzalez is Hispanic, he insists that his conviction was a “racial vendetta.” His defense lawyer, Karolyn March thinks so, too. She described the prosecution as having a “lynch mob mentality.” [HIV carrier sent to prison for having unprotected sex, Louisville C-J, 1/1/93, p. A4.]
