O Tempora, O Mores! (December, 1993)

The Richness of Diversity

A federal judge, Sonia Sotomayor, has accepted for trial an unusual job discrimination case, in which the plaintiff claims she was harassed because she does not speak Tagalog, the native language of the Philippines. Juanita McNeil, a black woman, worked on the pediatric nursing ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City for six years until, she claims, she was forced from her job. She says that her Filipina supervisor withheld promotions, gave her undesirable assignments and “us[ed] the Tagalog language as a discriminatory weapon” by giving instructions to the largely Filipina staff in a language that Miss McNeil could not understand. [Deborah Pines, Job Bias Suit Over Language Declared Valid, New York Law Journal, 9/22/93, p. 1.]

Canadians See the Light

Canada accepts more immigrants, as a percentage of its current population, than does the United States, and whites are finally beginning to object. According to a recent poll conducted by the Immigration Department (yes, Canada has one), more than half of all citizens are “really worried that they may become a minority if immigration is unchecked.” The poll also found that it is people who live in cities — and who get their impressions of non-white immigrants first hand rather than from the press — who most object to Canada’s changing population. The government has been preaching the idea that to know immigrants is to love them, but has regretfully concluded that “familiarity breeds contempt.” [Kirk Lapointe, Government polls find Canadians less tolerant of immigrants, Montreal Gazette, 9/14/92.]

GM Sees the Light

General Motors has parted company with Ford and Chrysler and has told minority suppliers that they will have to start meeting the same price and quality standards as all other suppliers. There will be a grace period during which concessionary standards will be dismantled, and even after that period, GM will maintain a “mentor” program to guide non-whites through the corporate bureaucracy. Other than that, they are on their own.

We hope that GM stands firm despite the howling this change will provoke. At a time when non-white preferences are expanding everywhere, it is encouraging that a major company should be moving the other way. Ford and Chrysler are expanding their minority hand-holding efforts, and Ford is setting up a financial company to help non-whites start auto-parts companies. [Angelo Henderson, Life and Death, Detroit News, March 10, 1993, p. E1.]

Chicago Sees the Light

A study conducted by Loyola University’s Center for Ethics has found that racial and ethnic divisions are the most pressing problems on the minds of Chicago-area professionals. In an open-ended questionnaire, lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, and businessmen were asked “What are the most pressing ethical issues facing the Chicago community?” Racial division was the most frequently volunteered reply, followed by low education standards. [Ronald Yates, Racial, ethnic divisions top concerns of leaders, Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 1992.]

Peer Pressure

The trial is finally over for the thugs who started the Los Angeles riots by nearly killing Reginald Denny. The jury was so lenient that even the mainstream press has begun to wonder about the future of the American justice system. The tradition of jury trials did not evolve in a multi-racial society, and “diversity” may yet ring its death knell. No Anglo-Saxon chieftain ever dreamed that “twelve good men and true” could mean four blacks, four Hispanics, two Asians, and two whites.

However, for people already aware of the terrific strains that race puts on jury trials, this latest fiasco was hardly a surprise. Its only really original contribution to the national decline was the notion that mob fever can now be used as an excuse for crimes. As one of the witnesses [race not specified] explained to the New York Times, “They [the defendants] seemed just like anyone, just like you and I. I see them just as two human beings. They just got caught up in the riot. I guess maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” [Quoted in Mike Royko, Mob Fever: Catch it, and you may go free, Chicago Tribune, 10/28/93, Section 1.]

This means that if a black man catches sight of other black men hauling white people out of their cars and thrashing them, it would be too much to ask him to refrain from doing the same. He is in the wrong place at the wrong time and cannot help himself.

Reginald Denny, who had his skull smashed into more than 100 pieces, [Samuel Francis, “Black Civil rights, white civil rights,” Wash Times, 10/22/93.] thinks it was entirely proper to let his attackers off with a slap on the wrist. He went on to demonstrate his zeal for forgiveness by hugging the mothers of the two men who nearly killed him.

Onward and Upward

The Board of Education of Prince George’s County, Maryland, has voted unanimously to change the name of a county middle school from Roger Taney to Thurgood Marshall. Justice Taney, who succeeded John Marshall as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision denying that blacks were U.S. citizens. In its resolution, the board decried Taney as “representative of the United States at its ugliest historical moment” and praised Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice, as “the greatest legal mind ever produced by the state of Maryland.” The newly renamed school is 80 percent black.

At the same meeting, the board established a policy for punishing students who bring telephone pagers to school. Pagers are frequently used in drug deals. [Laura Litvan, “School board votes to strip Taney’s name from school, Washington Times, 3/5/93, B3]

Rising from the Ashes

The Detroit school district has established what is called the Phoenix Preparatory Center, a school for students who have been expelled from other Detroit schools for carrying guns. During the 1991-92 school year 194 Detroit students were caught with guns, up from just 54 the previous year.

Teachers at the Phoenix Center will all be social workers, counselors, or psychologists. The school will have coat racks rather than lockers, so students will not be able to hide things. Erlene Flowers, director of the school district’s Interagency Program for Youth, and chief proponent of the Phoenix Center points out that these are not children who have actually shot anyone; they have simply brought weapons to school. “They are normal kids with tremendous potential,” she explains. [Ron Russell, New School targets teen gun-toters, Detroit News, 12/15/92, p. 1A.]

Wise Beyond Their Years

Gary Colley was on holiday in Florida from Britain when he was shot dead at a highway rest stop. In October, police arrested four blacks who are likely to have taken part in the killing. Three have particularly interesting resumes. One is only 13 years old but has already been arrested 15 times — on more than 50 charges. A 16-year-old boasted 30 arrests and a 14-year-old had twenty-six. The fourth suspect, another 16-year-old, had only one arrest. Many, many crimes are committed for every arrest, so between them these youngsters have accounted for hundreds of crimes.

Why were they still at large when Mr. Colley flew in from Britain? Under Florida law, a juvenile cannot be put in jail for more than six months, even if he is convicted of murder. [Juvenile Justice in Janet Reno’s State, NY Post,10/19/93.] Only under the most unusual circumstances can a juvenile be tried as an adult and be put away for years at a time. Thirty arrests is apparently not reason enough to do so, which perhaps helps explain why Florida — former home of Attorney General Janet Reno — has the highest crime rate of any state in the Union.

Tennessee Waltz

As everyone knows — but refuses to say — when cities go black they cease to be governable. Memphis, Tennessee is teetering on the edge. During the 1980s, it lost six percent of its population, as whites escaped to the suburbs, and is now 55 percent black. The surrounding county — not counting Memphis — is only 12 percent black, and the two areas are vastly different in education, income, and ambiance.

Memphis’ black mayor, W.W. Herenton, has proposed to annex the rest of the county so as to prevent the city from sliding permanently into chaos. “I have an obligation to look down the road and see that we don’t end up like other cities have,” he explains, with an eye to such failures as Detroit, Newark, and Cleveland.

White suburbanites do not want to be swallowed up by Memphis. They did not escape the city only to see it metastasize to the suburbs. Most Memphis blacks are unhappy about the idea, too, because the new, expanded city would be only 44 percent black, and would probably elect a white mayor.

Who in Memphis, besides the realistic Mr. Herenton, is in favor of the plan? White business owners who do not want to see their taxes rise, and middle-class whites who think that the suburbs should get a taste of diversity, too. [Ronald Smothers, City Seeks to Grow by Disappearing, NYT, 10/18/93.]

Rangers Stand Firm

The Texas Rangers baseball team is building a $165 million stadium in Arlington, Texas. Practically no contracts have been awarded to black builders, so the NAACP is demanding set-asides. The team refuses to budge, despite threats of a boycott. “To the low bidder goes the contract,” explains one of the owners. [Steven Reed, Is it fair or foul?, Houston Chronicle, Aug. 1, 1993, p. 1D.]

Feeding the Monster

The New Jersey Department of Higher Education pays for the publication of a semi-annual magazine called Transformations, which relentlessly promotes all the causes that are wrecking American education. Here is a complete list of the contents of a recent issue:

• Principals’ Gender and the Work Orientation of Male and Female Teachers
• The Feminization of Jewish Education
• Writing Word Problems that Reflect Cultural Diversity [how to bring subjects like race and lesbianism into statistics exam problems]
• Recent African-American Women’s Fiction: Teaching and Finding Voices
• Politics and Pedagogy: The Creation of a Gender Studies Minor at a Jesuit College
• From Experience to Analysis: Using Student Discomfort in the Feminist Classroom
• Towards a Model for Facilitating Curriculum Transformation
• Long-Lived and Invisible: Old Women and Gender Integration in the Curriculum
• The Inclusive Curriculum: Setting Our Own Agenda

At least in New Jersey, the wrecking crew is officially in charge of the construction site.

Calling the Future

Sprint, the long-distance telephone company, has started selling telephones with Spanish rather than English lettering. “Automatic redial,” for example, has been replaced with discado automatico. For now, the telephones are available only in South Florida, but if they are a success, they will go on sale in other heavily-Hispanic areas.

In September, Sprint became the first long-distance company to offer billing in Spanish. AT&T and MCI are considering doing the same.

It’s Official

Racism and Sexism, An Integrated Study, by Paula Rothenberg, is one of the standard texts used in “multi-cultural” and “sensitivity” training. On page six, Miss Rothenberg lays her cards on the table with the following definition of racism:

Racism involves the subordination of people of color by white people [emphasis in the original. While an individual person of color may discriminate against white people or even hate them, his or her behavior or attitude cannot be called “racist.’ He or she may be considered prejudiced against whites and we may all agree that the person acts unfairly and unjustly, but racism requires something more than anger, hatred, or prejudice; at the very least, it requires prejudice plus power. The history of the world provides us with a long record of white people holding power and using it to maintain that power and privilege over people of color, not the reverse.

Miss Rothenberg goes on to define “sexism” as a crime that only men can commit.

New Yorkers Oppose Immigration

An October poll shows that more than 63 percent of people living in New York City think that there has been too much immigration to the city in the past few years. Sixty percent say that all this immigration has made New York a worse place to live, as opposed to 30 percent who think immigrants are good for the city. Among the newcomers themselves, 51 percent think immigration has hurt New York, while only 37 percent think it has helped. New Yorkers who were born in America think, by a margin of 66 to 25 percent, that immigration hurts the city. Sixty-eight percent of immigrants and 82 percent of native-born New Yorkers think the February World Trade Center bombing would not have happened if there were tighter immigration controls. Twenty-eight percent of the population of New York City is foreign-born.

A similar poll was conducted in Houston, both of “community leaders” and of ordinary people. Seventy and a half percent of white “leaders” thought immigration was a good thing; only 44 percent of ordinary whites did. As usual, it is the people who are not immediately affected by immigration who can claim to approve of it.

The Wages of Truth

Gen. Carl Mundy, commandant of the Marine Corps, was recently explaining to an interviewer for 60 Minutes why so few non-whites make it to the top levels in the corps: “Minority officers do not shoot as well as the non-minorities. They don’t swim as well. And when you give them a compass and send them across the terrain at night in a land navigation exercise, they don’t do as well at that sort of thing.”

Needless to say, Gen. Mundy was attacked, most notably by then — mayor Dinkins of New York, and by Ben Chavis of the NAACP. So far, there are no plans to discipline him, but Navy Secretary John Dalton has ordered “a complete review on the recruitment, retention and promotion of minorities.”

New York Gets a New Mayor

Calvin Butts, a prominent black preacher in New York City, used to tell his congregations that New York must not be like other American cities, which once had black mayors but are now governed by whites. “We lost Los Angeles. We lost Philadelphia. We lost Chicago . . . We’re not going to lose New York,” he liked to say.

In November’s ballot, blacks did their best not to “lose” New York; 96 percent voted for their co-racialist. Mr. Dinkins also won about 25 percent of the white vote, but that was not enough. New York now has a Republican mayor for the first time in decades, but it would be a mistake to expect much from former Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani. The squalor, crime, and barbarity of New York City are neither caused nor cured by city government. As long as the city continues to hemorrhage whites (their numbers have dipped below the 50 percent mark), life will get worse.

The Cost of not Paying for Abortions

Abortion opponents in various states have succeeded in preventing Medicaid from paying for abortions for indigent women. Naturally, this means that some of these women have children and go on welfare rather than pay for an abortion. In Ohio, it is estimated that since Medicaid funding for abortions was stopped in 1978, 23 percent of eligible women have had babies rather than abortions. In Texas, the figure is said to be about 35 percent. What are the increased long-term costs of bringing these children into the world? The October 1993 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology has published a study of what has happened in Michigan.

The people of the state voted in 1988, by a margin of 57 to 43, to stop government financing of abortions for poor women. The authors of the study have a low estimate of 2,100 and a high estimate of 5,800 for the number of indigent children who are born every year who would otherwise have been aborted. The public cost of the abortions would have been $6 to $8 million dollars. The direct cost of keeping these children on welfare for five years — and many are likely to be on much longer — is $50 million for the lower estimate and $137 million for the higher estimate.

The study considers welfare costs only. It makes no attempt to estimate what these children will cost the state in terms of school disruption, special education, or costs to the legal system.

Closing Ranks

Gary Bledsoe is an assistant Texas district attorney — and is also the president of the Texas NAACP. It was recently found that at least 14 percent of the long-distance telephone calls he made on his office telephones, during office hours, were for the NAACP. The state put Mr. Bledsoe on paid leave while it investigated whether he had violated laws prohibiting personal or political work on state time.

The NAACP, of course, erupted with the predictable frenzy. The national organization immediately detected racism in the investigation, and a spokesman says Mr. Bledsoe was targeted “because he is a black person standing up for the rights of the poor, the dispossessed.”

NAACP Executive Director Ben Chavis says Mr. Bledsoe is the victim of racial “character assassination,” and says that “the vicious attacks on Gary Bledsoe are clearly illegal and immoral.” Mr. Bledsoe is reportedly “overwhelmed” by the support he has received from blacks.

This sort of wildness makes even the most mulish liberals begin to wonder. The Houston Chronicle says the NAACP is “crying wolf.”

Lights Out

Several cities across the country, including Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Shreveport, have been struggling to put down a gang-related rumor that is simply too plausible to dismiss. Young blacks who want to join gangs are said to go driving at night with their lights off. Another motorist will eventually blink his lights as a warning. The aspirant will then try to shoot the friendly motorist on the spot or pursue him to his destination and then kill him.

There have been no reported cases of gangs using this as an initiation exercise. However, the rumor has been spreading by telephone and facsimile, and at least one police department — Houston’s — has been gulled into promoting the rumor. Now police are worried that gangs may think it sounds like fun and will start driving with their lights off.