O Tempora, O Mores! (April, 1993)
American Renaissance, April 1993
Legal Lunacy
California is increasingly hostile to business (see cover stories of two previous issues). One recent act of hostility has been a change in workers’ compensation laws that lets employees file claims for work-related stress even if work accounted for only 10 percent of the problem. Workers can invent all sorts of stresses after they have been fired or laid off, so there is always a chance of retribution when an employee is dismissed.
When an employee files a stress claim, the employer must pay for medical tests that can cost thousands of dollars. Even if the claim is found to be frivolous, the employer is not reimbursed. An employee has absolutely nothing to lose by filing a claim, and always has the chance of being bought off or of striking it rich with a sympathetic jury.
The system is also a gold mine for the doctors who do the tests; they have started advertising for people to come in and file stress claims. “Workers’ comp’ mills” find that unemployed Hispanics are particularly willing to cooperate in frauds like this, so most of the advertising is in Spanish. People who will file complaints are so valuable to the doctors that they are willing to pay an introduction fee to anyone who brings in a fraud prospect. The going rate is said to be $320 a head, plus a cut of the medical billings.
The new regulations have caused claims to jump by 36 percent, state-wide, but the rise has been concentrated in Southern California. Eric Holomon, who owns 17 fried chicken restaurants in Los Angeles has seen his annual workers’ compensation insurance premiums go from $129,000 to $445,000 in just three years. Most of the increase is due to phony stress claims filed by former employees. He is so fearful of yet more expensive stress claims that he has decided not to fire an employee he knows is stealing from him.
Guy Starkman, who also owns restaurants in Los Angeles, fired a cook for fondling waitresses and dismissed two security guards after he caught them asleep on the job three nights in a row. The men promptly filed stress-related workers’ compensation claims. “All these fraudulent claims are making it impossible to run a business in California,” says Mr. Starkman; “you can’t fire anyone anymore.” His annual insurance premiums have gone from $50,000 to $600,000 in four years. [Don Nichols, Stress Claims Costing California Owners Plenty, Restaurant Business, Jan. 20, 1993, pp. 15ff.]
Tom Houston Gets Our Vote
Of the 50 or so candidates for mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Houston has caught our attention in a most favorable way. On a recent radio program, he suggested that the best way to deal with gang warfare was to deport illegal aliens. He pointed out that criminal aliens can be kicked out without the bother and expense of a trial and that since 80 percent of them are wanted for crimes in their own countries, they are not likely to come back any time soon if we hand them over to their own police. Mr. Houston thinks this is such an obvious solution that he cannot understand why we are not already doing it. He also points out that the massive influx of immigrants is swamping schools, hospitals, and all government services. We wish Mr. Houston every possible success. [Frank Clifford, “LA Mayoral Candidate calls for deportation of illegals in 2 gangs.” LA Times, Jan. 15, 1993, p. A17.]
Ordinarily, anti-white crimes committed by blacks get little notice in the media. Earlier this year, however, blacks committed a crime so cruel and sordid that it seemed impossible that the media would ignore it. The media proceeded to do the impossible, so we are obliged to report the details.
In January, Missy McLauchlin, a 25-year-old resident of Charleston (SC), found herself locked out of her apartment. As she crossed the street to a grocery store, she was forced into a car full of black men who took her to a mobile home complex. The men put out the word that they had “captured a white woman,” and invited all the black men in the complex to come rape her. No one knows how many men answered the call, but Miss McLauchlin may have been raped over a period of five hours. At least two black women came by to observe and encourage the men.
At one point in her ordeal, Miss McLauchlin was bathed in bleach and tortured by having bleach rubbed into her eyes. Finally, she was shot six times and dumped into a ditch. Unfortunately, she survived for several hours.
So far, five men and two women have been arrested. The man who is thought to have fired the murder weapon is reportedly still on the loose. According to the police, Miss McLauchlin was abducted, raped, tortured, and killed in “revenge” for oppression of blacks by whites.
AR does not ordinarily report routine anti-white crime, but this case deserves to be an exception. Nearly everyone in America has heard of Tawana Brawley, the black woman who was not raped by whites. Miss Brawley is very much alive and enjoys a reputation among blacks as something of a racial hero. Missy McLauchlin is dead, and practically no one knows her name. [Malcolm X Followers Attack White Woman, The Truth At Last, Issue No. 362, p. 4.]
The Politics of Suicide
Several months ago, an 18-year-old black man named Andre Jones was found dead in the shower of the Simpson County Jail in Mississippi. Mr. Jones was hanging from a noose made of his own shoe laces, and the U.S. Justice Department ruled the death a suicide. Simpson County police speculated that the man must have killed himself because he had given police useful information about gangs and was afraid of retaliation.
Mr. Jones’ parents think the police murdered their son. “They did take his life, and he was not suicidal. We know this,” says his mother. She claims that Mr. Jones was killed because she is the head of the Jackson (MS) chapter of the NAACP and his stepfather is the leader of the Jackson branch of the Nation of Islam. These would both be excellent reasons to treat Mr. Jones with circumspection rather than to kill him, but no matter.
Mr. Jones’ mother and other black leaders have made much of the fact that 23 black men are said to have hanged themselves in their cells in Mississippi since 1987. They say these men were murdered and that the state has scarcely changed in decades. The only difference is that lynchings now go on inside the jails rather than in public.
Lost in the controversy is the fact that since 1987, 20 white men have hanged themselves in Mississippi jails. [Jim Yardley, “Was Jail Hanging a murder?” Atlanta Constitution, 2/12/93, p. 1.] There are considerably more blacks than whites in Mississippi jails, so whites are more likely to hang themselves than are blacks. No one seems to have noticed.
Kwame Kenyatta (who used to go by the name of Norman Tyrus) is a new member of the Detroit school board. He has been a black activist for many years, having been a founder of the Detroit Black Student Association when he was in high school. He was also expelled from Detroit’s Cooley High School for leading a take-over of the principal’s office.
Since his upset victory in an election to the school board, the 36-year-old Mr. Kenyatta has been working to put Afro-centrism at the center of the city’s education effort. Even some of the other black board members are disturbed by his goals. “We should not [!] continue to teach our children to get a good education so they can get a good job,” he says. Employment is scarcely a worthy goal, since, as he says, “there was full employment on the slave plantation.”
One of Mr. Kenyatta’s first formal proposals has been for the school board to stop recognizing the American flag. He says the flag is a symbol of hypocrisy and of exploitation of blacks.
In the long term, Mr. Kenyatta has grander schemes than Afro-centric education. He is the Detroit coordinator of the New Afrikan People’s Organization, which would like to establish an all-black homeland in North America. The group has its eye on Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
Riots to Come
According to a recent cover story in USA Today (Feb. 16, 1993), Los Angeles gangs are preparing for another riot. If the four police officers who beat Rodney King are acquitted in the second trial or if the black hoodlums who nearly killed the truck driver, Reginald Denny, are convicted, they promise to go on the war path. If anything, says USA Today, blacks are angrier than they were at the time of the first trial.
The new police chief, Willie Williams, is black and has vowed to respond with overwhelming force if there are more riots. Gang members refer to him contemptuously as “super slave,” and are planning ways to defeat him. Since so many gun stores were looted during the last riot, gangs are more heavily armed than ever.
They are planning a different riot this time. Stung by the observation that all they did before was burn down their own neighborhoods, they promise to streak out into white and Korean areas and burn them down. The plan will be to kill as many police, judges, and prosecutors as possible, but as one gang member puts it, “If they can find white people [to kill], that’s fine and dandy, too.” Los Angelenos certainly cannot claim that they were not warned. [Richard Price, “‘Sooner or later,’ justice will happen,” USA Today, Feb,. 16, 1993, p. 1.]
As it happens, the threat of massive violence may be more real than many think. According to a 1992 study by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, fully 47 percent of black men between the ages of 21 and 24 have some kind of gang affiliation. For Hispanics, the figure is 8.5 percent and for whites it is 0.5 percent. [Sheryl Stolberg, “Gang Study Has Startling Findings,” LA Times, May 22, 1992, p. A3.]
New Heroes for a New Era
In the meantime, Rodney King himself only grows in stature. Early this year he was invited to speak to the students at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana (CA). Although the press was not allowed to cover Mr. King’s remarks, they did interview students afterwards.
“People look at him as a hero,” said 17-year-old Tony Cannon.
“He can really say something about racism because of the beating,” said 14-year-old Princess Hollins; “I wasn’t able to see Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, but I was able to see him.”
Another black icon in the making?
On February 9th, the city of Dallas celebrated its football team’s Super Bowl victory with a parade down city streets. Although the parade was held during school hours on a weekday, thousands of teenagers skipped school to watch it, and in some largely black schools, the absentee rate was over 60 percent. When the parade ended, young blacks went on a 90-minute rampage of robbery and assault, deliberately targeting whites and Hispanics. Not even the newspapers could bring themselves to overlook the racial character of the attacks, after television footage of the parade was widely broadcast.
The next day, one Dallas newspaper interviewed some young blacks who had participated in the mayhem. They laughed as they remembered what they had seen, and called the racial attacks justified. “They [whites] deserved what they got,” said one student at Sunset High School; “If it was thousands of whites and a few blacks they would have kicked the [obscenity] out of us.” Of course, blacks pass unmolested through crowds of whites every day, but these young blacks are essentially saying that any white so foolish as to find himself outnumbered by blacks deserved to be attacked.
What did the whites who were attacked by blacks think about it all? Those whom the newspapers chose to quote had such vigorous reactions as:
Things like this happen nowadays. It makes you street smart. There wasn’t enough help there; not enough police officers.
I feel like there’s a lot of racial tension right now that needs to be looked at.
[Steve Scott, “Some Try to explain attacks to kids,” Dallas Morning News, 2/11/93, p. 8a. Melanie Lewis, “Some teen-agers condone, others decry assaults,” Dallas Morning News, 2/11/93, p. 1. Bill Sullivan, Houston Chronicle, “Violence Mars Cowboys Celebration,” Feb. 10, 1993, p. 1A.]
Afro-Jesus
Spare Rib is a British feminist magazine. In its issue of January 1993, it published an interview with Novette Thompson, a British black who has completed her training as a Methodist minister and who expects to be ordained next year. Some excerpts:
Spare Rib: Who was Jesus?
Novette: . . . We’re not too sure about the actual details, but there is no doubt that Jesus was Black. Put it this way, with immigration laws the way they are in Europe today, Jesus would not be allowed in.
Spare Rib: So Jesus has been Europeanised, like everything else.
Novette: Yes, and because of that a lot of the essence has been lost . . . For example, the Greeks took the whole concept of African Gods and Goddesses, and adapted and distorted it all to fit their own culture and society, which was a patriarchal slave society. And while there is nothing wrong with learning from other cultures, the problem arises when you don’t acknowledge that that’s what you’re doing, when you are dishonest, and you distort other people’s ideas.
[A Holy Revolution, Spare Rib, Jan., 1993, p. 30.]
Quite so.
The New Journalism
Jocelyn Walters is, a black, second-year journalism student at the University of Georgia, who has been unbosoming her views on America. In the February 15 issue of a campus-related paper called The Red & Black, she has written an article called “Blacks Should Revolt Against White, Male America.” Here are some of her choicest thoughts:
I’m talking to you, white America. You’re wrong. You’re evil. . . Your greed is overwhelming. Your lust for power disgusting. The blood on your hands signifies what a demon you are. . .
You have always thrived off of the blood and sweat of others. You drink them. It is your sustenance . . . You make me sick! Sick with anger. Sick with disgust. Sick with the desire to ruin you like you have ruined so many others . . .
On the day of the revolution, the minorities are going to rise up and take all of your power. What will you do then? I suggest you fall down on your knees and pray, but this time to God.
[Jocelyn Walters, “Blacks Should revolt against white, male America,” The Red and Black, 2/15/93.]
This little essay is unlikely to spoil her chances for a job when she receives her journalism degree.
Rewriting the Past
Jap Lane is in Orange County, Texas. Jap Road is in Jefferson County. Both were named after Japanese farmers who first developed the land early in this century, and old-timers say the names never meant disrespect. Hal Wingate still owns some of the land his grandfather bought from a Japanese settler in 1924. Mr. Wingate, who is 83, remembers the Japanese very well and recalls that they were well respected. “They knew they were Japs,” he says; “They’d tell you they were Japs. They were proud of it.”
Sandra Nakata is a young Japanese-American woman who moved into the area in 1985. She is trying to get the names changed because she claims they are insulting. However, local residents have put up considerable resistance to the idea of an outsider telling them what to do, and local officials are treading warily. Miss Nakata, who teaches second grade, says her pupils came up with a new name for Jap Road. “We should call it ‘American Road,’” she says, “because we’re all Americans now.” [Richard Stewart, “Wrong Ways?” Houston Chronicle, Jan 31, 1993, p. 1E.]
