O Tempora, O Mores! (July, 1993)

Civil Rights Backfire

The League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has sued the Houston office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because it claims that not enough Hispanic women have been properly promoted. Apparently Hispanic men have gotten the promotions they deserve and Hispanic women have been hired in sufficient numbers, but none of them yet makes more than $48,000 a year.

Harriet Ehrlich, a white woman who runs the office calls the charges “outrageous.” “You can lie with statistics, but these statistics speak for themselves,” she says; “The only imbalance is for whites or Anglos, which is OK . . .” [Jo Ann Zulus, Houston EEOC is accused of job bias in LULAC suit, Houston Chronicle, 2/18/93, p. 21A.]

Carjacking Conviction

An Orlando (FL) jury has been the first to return convictions under a new federal law against armed carjacking. The three defendants, all black, face mandatory life sentences, because they committed murder during the crime. They killed three white men, but the obvious racial element has received almost no attention.

The three whites were abducted at gun point along with a black woman who was the girlfriend of one of the whites. They were driven to an isolated field where the whites were made to strip naked and lie face down. Each was then shot in the back of the head. At the trial, the black woman explained that she had been spared because the carjackers did not want to “do a sister.”

Jack Pate, Osceola County sheriff’s commander says that race was not a factor in the crime, which has received almost no publicity. [Youth Found Guilty in Fatal Carjacking, Houston Chronicle, 2/26/93. Phil Long, Police: 4 suspects shot men for fear of being identified, Miami Herald, 12/3/92.]

Buffalo Chips

By now, nearly everyone in America has heard about the white student at the University of Pennsylvania who was put through a “hate crimes” inquisition because he called some noisy black women “water buffaloes.” The five women who brought the charges now say that because of derisive media coverage they cannot get justice. They have dropped the charges.

A few loose ends remain. This is the same school at which blacks recently stole the entire press run of the student newspaper because it ran an editorial critical of affirmative action and of Martin Luther King. The president of Penn, Sheldon Hackney, has taken no steps to punish the blacks.

Less well known is the fate of Donald Fitzgerald, head of security at the university’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Recently he saw three black women rush out of the museum carrying three large plastic bags. Since it is his job to guard the collection, he ordered them to stop. They fled and he arrested them. As it happens, they were students making off with copies of the offending issue of the student newspaper, which had been dropped off at the museum for distribution.

The next day, the blacks charged Mr. Fitzgerald with assault and the university immediately suspended him without so much as a hearing. By late May, a month after the incident, he was still suspended. [Hackney Watch, WSJ, 5/24/93, Michael deCourcy Hinds, Blacks at Penn Drop a charge of harassment, NYT, 5/25/93]

L.A. Legacy

The effects of last year’s riots in Los Angeles will not wear off any time soon. Although it has been more than a year since the violence and arson, fewer than half of the buildings that were heavily damaged or destroyed have been rebuilt. Banks and insurance companies are reluctant to take risks on businesses that have already been burnt down once, and reconstruction has been complicated by demands from militant blacks that they be hired to do the work. Roving bands have gone from one work site to another, demanding jobs and wreaking havoc if they do not get them. They have threatened many white and Hispanic workers and assaulted others.

In May, Peter Ueberroth resigned as the head of “Rebuild L.A.,” the public-private consortium that is supposed to be overseeing reconstruction. Mr. Ueberroth says that he has been the target of so much personal criticism that the group simply bogged down. “Maybe it had some racial overtones because I’m white,” he said. He also pointed out that politicians have started demanding that “Rebuild L.A.” solve all the underlying social problems of South-Central Los Angeles, and have been angry that they remain unsolved. The next head of the group is likely to be black.

Korean shopkeepers have found that their main problem — black criminality — also remains unsolved. Thieves know that the Los Angeles police do not bother to respond to shoplifting calls, so they brazenly take whatever they want (New York Post, April 17, 1993). [A besieged community arms itself, NY Post, 4/17/93, p. 10.] Shopkeepers rebuke them at their peril. In a recent 2-1/2 month period, five Koreans were shot and killed and another was beaten to death in front of his store. One man bled to death on the floor of his grocery while a black mob ransacked it. During the same period, another eleven Koreans were shot and wounded. [Angela Oh, For Koreans, Crisis Continues, NY Newsday, 4/20/93.]

As Mr. Ueberroth probably knows, Los Angeles is getting worse, not better. In a single weekend in May, 24 Angelenos were murdered in an orgy of homicide that set a record for the year so far. Even a police spokesman was moved to say, “This is crazy.” [24 killed in L.A.’s bloodiest weekend of ‘93, Chicago Tribune, 5/25/93.]

Menace II Society

A recently released black-produced movie called “Menace II Society” may inspire viewers to kill yet more Koreans. In the opening scenes, a Korean grocer mutters an insult to a young black who promptly shoots him in the head. He then runs to the back of the store, shoots the grocer’s wife and steals the video tape from the surveillance camera. Later in the film he boastfully plays — and replays — the tape for his friends, lingering lovingly over the moment when he blows out the grocer’s brains.

The New York Times (May 26, 1993) goes on to note the movie’s “endless litany of sullen profanities” and calls the frequent violence “some of the bloodiest and most unsettling ever shown in a commercial film.” Not even The Times could stomach some of the movie’s heavy-handed politics. When white police pull the heroes off the street and beat them up for absolutely no reason, the reviewer calls the scene “gratuitous.” Nevertheless, The Times calls the movie “a very flashy debut” for the two black brothers, Allen and Albert Hughes, who directed the movie. [Stephen Holden, “Teenagers Living Under the Gun,” NYT, 5/26/93, p. C13.]

Blacks have complained for years about “negative role models” and “stereotyping” in movies. Now that they are making movies of their own, it is edifying to note the uplifting fare they are offering young viewers.

The Dying City

Detroit is another American city that is dying as its people change. In the last 40 years the population dropped by half, as whites fled the rising tide. Now there are whole city blocks without a single occupied building. Others have only two or three.

Detroit’s ombudsman, Marie Farrell-Donaldson, has proposed an economy measure that would keep the city from having to offer street cleaning, police protection, sewers, electricity, and garbage collection to vacant blocks — bulldoze and decommission them. The few remaining inhabitants would be relocated, and great chunks of the city would simply cease to exist. They could be fenced off or revert to “nature.” In either case, the city would no longer be responsible for services. [Day of the Bulldozer, Economist, 5/8/93, p. 33.]

Miss Farrell-Donaldson’s economy measure has not yet been approved, but what more vivid image could one ask for of the march of barbarism? Blacks have not merely squeezed the life out of a bustling city built by whites; now they are considering flattening whole blocks of it.

How the Other Half Lives

Kayesean Blackledge was born in New York City four years ago to a 14 year old who has since had three more children. Since mother Blackledge was judged incompetent by the court, Kayesean was turned over to an older relative named Dana Blackledge-Poole. In 1981, “Miss” Blackledge-Poole had a sex change operation, so when the court made her the legal guardian of young Kayesean, she had previously been a man. She is known to some people as Kayesean’s “aunt,” to others as his “uncle.” Miss Blackledge-Poole is now “married” to Stephan Poole, a New York sanitation department worker, and was last heard of from the hospital where she was recovering after her “husband” stabbed her several times with a knife.

All of this came to public attention only because someone recently beat Kayesean, then strangled him, and dumped him down a garbage chute. It took police several days to discover his “parents” because neither had reported him missing. Mr. Poole appears to be the most likely murder suspect. [Kayesean and his ‘mommies’, New York Post, 5/25/93, p. 20.]

Is Secession the Answer?

Rio Grande Do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, is 85 percent white, which makes it more European than the United States. Its residents are increasingly angry about paying more and more taxes that disappear into the poverty-stricken North. Since 1990, half a dozen separatist movements have sprung up in the state and approximately one third of the population supports secession in some form.

There have already been strong measures to seal off the indigent North. About a dozen cities in the state have adopted immigration controls to keep out Northerners. Last year, the town of Novo Hamburgo turned back a convoy of trucks that were bringing jobless poor people to the South.

The separatists have, of course, been called Nazis and fascists, but Irton Marx, a secessionist leader is confident that his movement will eventually succeed. “There is no way the press or the government can hold us back,” he says. [James Brooke, White Flight in Brazil? Secessionist Caldron Boils,” NYT, 5/12/93.]

Make ’Em Pay

Benjamin Hooks, the former head of the NAACP, recently defended the fact that the organization not only has 50,000 white members but that much of its funding comes from large, white-owned corporations. “White people caused this problem, and why should they not pay to get rid of it?” he said. [Words of the Week, Jet, 5/3/93.]

Make Them Pay, Too

Every year, Americans default on about $3 billion in federal student loans. Ordinarily, if the students of a school have an average default rate of more than 25 percent over a period of three years, the school is no longer eligible for federal loans. The 107 “historically black colleges” have routinely been exempted from that rule, but the exemption is scheduled to end on July 1, 1994. Black colleges have very high default rates, and many would be knocked out of the program. Black activists plan to put pressure on President Bill Clinton to reinstate the exemption; what are the odds that he will crack?

Rites of Passage

Hispanic girls in San Antonio have started forming gangs. A frequent initiation ritual is for prospective members to submit to round-robin sex with male gang members. The Houston Chronicle (April 27, 1993) has discovered that five 14- and 15-year-old girls report that as part of their gang initiation they had sex with a man they knew to be infected with AIDS. [Scary gang sex story: true or false?, Houston Chronicle, 4/27/93.]

And They Were Not Black

Until 1990, when the leg of a horse went through the roof of a tomb, no one had ever found the graves of workers who built the pyramids. Exhumation of the bodies and study of inscriptions has shed light on the lives of these unsung workers. Judging from the manner in which they are buried, they were free men and not slaves. Tomb inscriptions indicate that they ate bread, garlic, some meat, and could brew five different kinds of beer.

By now the Egyptians have heard about some of the goofy ideas promoted in the United States to the effect that the ancient Egyptians were black. Zahi Hawass, who is in charge of the site, is at pains to explain that a study of the well-preserved bodies shows that they were the same race as the Pharaohs and were certainly not black. [Stephen Strauss, A profile of pyramid builders: free Egyptians who liked beer, Houston Chronicle, 4/24/93.]

Tex-Mex

Paul Moreno is a Texas state legislator who is very concerned about gun control legislation. However, some things in life are more important, and he missed a crucial vote. As one of his Democratic colleagues explained, he could not be on the floor because “He had to pick up the tamales for the Cinco de Mayo celebration.” [Austin Notebook, Houston Chronicle, 5/9/93.]

Bred to Violence

Lawyers assigned to defend some of the indefensible things underclass blacks commonly do have started to devise new strategies. One is to argue that their clients suffer from “urban psychosis” brought on by life among other underclass blacks.

The first attempt at the “urban psychosis” defense was tried last October in the case of a black Milwaukee girl who shot another girl in order to steal her leather trench coat. The defense argued that Felicia Morgan’s upbringing had been so violent that she was predisposed to mayhem and therefore could not be held to ordinary legal standards.

Several times as a child, Miss Morgan, now 18, was beaten nearly to death. Her parents frequently pulled guns on each other. Her mother actually shot her father once and her father killed the family dog for target practice. Many friends and relatives were shot and some killed, including a favorite uncle. Also, Miss Morgan was raped when she was 12 years old.

The girl’s lawyer, Robin Shellow, points out that two of the 12 jurors were convinced by her argument. She claims that it also probably affected the judge’s decision to make Miss Morgan eligible for parole after 13 years and four months in prison rather than 60 years. [Junda Woo, Urban Trauma Mitigates Guilt, Defenders Say, WSJ, 4/27/93.]

What Are Taxes For?

In the state of Illinois, welfare benefits rise by nearly $100 a month when a mother has a second child. The state is considering putting an end to this automatic raise, which encourages paupers to have more children. The Chicago Tribune (April 15, 1993) asked a few welfare mothers what they thought about this. Denise Love, mother of two, said it was wrong not to increase payments. “Isn’t that what taxes are for?” she asked; “Why not help single parents pay for their children?” Miss Love has a sister, also on welfare, who is pregnant with her 11th child.

Tabatha McGee, mother of two, conceded that the taxpayer might have some interest in limiting the welfare burden but did not see much reason for hope. “Some people like big families,” she explained; “Some women are natural breeders. They’re allergic to birth control.” [Sharman Stein, Plan to limit moms’ welfare has its foes, Chicago Tribune, 4/15/93.]

It’s a Boys’ World

Blacks spend $270 billion a year on consumer goods. Though the average black family spends about 35 percent less than the average white family, there are some products on which black households spend considerably more than whites — in real dollars, and not just in proportion to income.

The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 19, 1993) reports the following without comment: Black households spend three times as much as white households on boys’ pants and pajamas, twice as much on boys’ underwear, socks, and shoes, and 80 percent more on boys’ suits and sports coats. In proportion to total spending, the disparities are even greater. For example, blacks spend five times as much as whites on boys’ pants and pajamas.

Blacks have more children than whites, but not enough to account for these differences. And curiously, blacks do not spend more money than whites on girls’ clothes. [Carolyn Phillips, Data Gap, WSJ, 2/19/93, p. R18.] Here lie fertile research opportunities for many an aspiring PhD.