Posted on October 1, 1999

O Tempora, O Mores! (October, 1999)

American Renaissance, October 1999

Pro-Immigrant Hatred

Craig Nelsen is a 39-year-old Nebraska native who has lived for some time in New York City. He taught English in China from 1995 to 1997 and saw overpopulation first-hand. He believes there is too much immigration to the United States, and established a non-profit organization called ProjectUSA to call for reductions. His innovative way of bringing the debate to the public has provoked a response that can only be described as hatred.

ProjectUSA has put up billboards around New York City that say such things as: “Tired of sitting in traffic? Every day 6,000 immigrants arrive. Every day!” Or: “Over 80 percent of Americans support very little or no more immigration. Is anyone listening?” This entirely reasonable attempt to get New Yorkers to talk about immigration has turned the city on its ear. Officials have been holding press conferences to denounce Mr. Nelsen’s “bigotry” and to link it to the recent shooting by a deranged anti-Semite at a Jewish community center in California. City Councilman Guillermo Linares said “this is the type of message that is divisive, that is destructive, that can create the type of atmosphere that we observed when children were shot at because of hate and divisiveness.” City Council Speaker Peter Vallone condemned “the kind of speech that leads to the unbridled violence and hatred and death that we see happening too often in our country.”

A commentary in the New York Daily News brushed aside Mr. Nelsen’s assurance that he is concerned with the number of immigrants, not race. Apparently able to read minds, Edward O’Donnell said that ProjectUSA “cloaks its bigotry in allegedly high-minded concern over population growth, environmental damage or urban sprawl.” Melanie Carroll, writing in the same paper, said Mr. Nelsen is preaching “thinly veiled hatred.”

The city government moved immediately to have the signs taken down. There are thousands of billboards in New York that technically violate zoning regulations, and the authorities suddenly found time to cite Mr. Nelsen’s. He has a web page, www.projectusa.org, through which he is raising money to put up more. (Julian Barnes, Anti-immigrant Ads Exiled, New York Times, Aug. 29, 1999. Melanie Carroll, The Signs of Hate Lead From L.A. to New York, NY Daily News, Aug. 15, 1999. Frank Lombardi, City Plans Curbs on Anti-immigrant Signs, NY Daily News, Aug. 12, 1999. Edward O’Donnell, A New Mask for Old Hatreds, NY Daily News, Aug. 12, 1999.)

It would be hard to think of a more vicious and crazed attempt to stifle debate on a vital question. When liberals insist that any opposition to immigration must really be racial are they perhaps only revealing their own secret convictions — that non-whites really cannot fit into America and that their presence in large numbers is dragging the country into the Third World?

The Hateful Shamrock

Officials of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) want white residents in housing developments to take shamrocks off their doors and windows because non-white residents say they are racially offensive. According to Lydia Argo of the BHA, “There are a number of symbols that have been identified by some of our residents as making them uncomfortable and unwelcome. In response to those concerns, we’re including shamrocks along with swastikas, Confederate flags and other symbols which may give offense.” “There is no written policy,” added Miss Argo. We’re simply asking our residents to avoid public displays of any bias indicators.”

James Kelly, president of the Boston City Council, thinks this reflects the fact that the BHA is run almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics and that whites are a declining minority in the projects. “There’s only a small number of Irish Americans left, mostly elderly on fixed income,” he says. “Having them take down their shamrocks is a hateful way of letting them know their time has passed.” (Jim Smith, Shamrock Under Fire, Irish Echo, July 28 — August 3, 1999, p. 8.)

Spacemen in Georgia

The Yammasee Native American Nuwaubians are building a utopian community on 476 acres in Putnam County, Georgia, near Eatonton. About 100 members live in trailers on the property and another three or four hundred live elsewhere in the county. They are a black group, which moved from New York to Georgia in 1993, after the FBI linked them to a number of crimes, including arson and extortion.

The founder is Dwight York, who now calls himself Malachi Z. York. In the 1960s he did time in New York for assault, resisting arrest, and weapons possession. He claims to be from a galaxy called Illyuwn, and says that in 2003 spaceships will come down from the sky and save 144,000 chosen people. Recently, he has started calling himself Chief Black Eagle, and says he is the reincarnation of a Yammassee Indian chief. Members of the group claim to be descended from the Egyptians and from the Yammassee, a Georgia Indian tribe.

The compound strikes an Egyptian architectural motif. The Nile River Road runs between two rows of statues of Egyptian royalty. Inside a 40-foot high gold pyramid there are shops selling books and clothes. A labyrinth leads to a black pyramid, which serves as a church. Pseudo-Egyptian chanting hums through speakers 24 hours a day.

The group does not get along very well with the county. There was a tense standoff when the sheriff tried to escort building inspectors onto the property. The Nuwaubians complained of “racism” and the Justice Department’s Community Dispute Resolution Unit has been called in to mediate. (Patricia J. Mays, Georgia Sect Alarms Neighbors, AP, July 27, 1999.)

Of Mice and Men

Disbelievers in the power of heredity took another blow in September when scientists reported that by adding a single gene to mouse embryos they could engineer a significantly more intelligent strain of mice, which is able to pass on high intelligence to its offspring. The gene, which is called NR2B, is present in all mammals, and is central to a brain process known as long-term potentiation. This underlies many mental abilities, such as recognizing patterns, remembering locations of things, and recognizing the links between different but related phenomena.

In all mammals, including humans, NR2B becomes less active with age, and this may help explain why mental abilities decline. The genetically engineered mice had an extra copy of the gene, which was programmed to keep working later in the mouse’s life. Drug companies will soon be investigating medications that could keep NR2B active in people as well, and there is no reason to think human embryos could not be improved just like mouse embryos. (Rick Weiss, Mighty Smart Mice, Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1999, p. A1.)

North-South Divide

Each year the United Nations releases a scorecard on living standards in 174 countries. The U.N. considers per capita income, life expectancy, school attendance, adult literacy, and poverty. For the sixth year in a row, Canada ranks first. The rest of the top twenty nations were, in the following order: Norway, United States, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Iceland, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Italy and Ireland.

The bottom ten (in ascending order) were Sierra Leone, Niger, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Mali and the Central African Republic. All are in Africa. (Leo Rennert, Globalization Widens the Gap in Living Standards, U.N. Says, Washington Times, July 12, 1999, p. A11.)

Ethnic Cleansing

Columnist Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote:

In effect, native-born U.S. citizens are being ‘ethnically cleansed,’ not by violence but by their own immigration policy. With the United States taking in 1.2 million immigrants annually, and with that number again entering illegally, cultural homogeneity has been the casualty . . .

One downside to the massive non-European immigration is that, thanks to the liberals’ civil rights policies, every one of these immigrants enters the United States as a ‘preferred minority,’ with legal privileges that native-born citizens of European-origin do not have . . .

People on whom legal privileges are conferred eventually feel like a privileged class and begin acting like one.

Does this lack of good will toward ‘white culture’ mean the portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will be removed from our currency and their historic homes, Mount Vernon and Monticello, closed? If mass immigration means the extinction of American culture, we had best rethink it. (Paul Craig Roberts, The Ethnic Cleansing of European-Americans, Washington Times Weekly Edition, Commentary, June 21-27, 1999.)

Another White Plot

Baffour Ankomah is a London-based Ghanaian who publishes a glossy magazine called New African. With a circulation of 32,000 in 40 countries it is one of Africa’s most respected publications, and articles from it are reprinted across the continent. One of the magazine’s missions is to convince Africans that “what we call AIDS is actually U.S. biological warfare gone wrong.”

“Africa is the target of the world AIDS cartel,” says Mr. Ankomah. “They want to pin it on us, to destroy us with it.” He says that AIDS is a money-making hoax carried out by the UN at Africa’s expense, and is only the latest outrage by the white man. He scoffs at the AIDS death tolls reported for Africa and claims that if people are dying it is from some kind of sinister Western plot invented to rid the world of Africans. New African editorials urge readers to ignore health warnings and not to use condoms. Medical workers say the magazine’s campaign is a big obstacle to controlling the disease on a continent that last year accounted for 83 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths.

El Hadj Sy, a Senegalese United Nations AIDS worker, explains the popularity of Mr. Ankomah’s theories: “People are desperate to find something to blame rather than their own behavior. They want to believe that something this evil must be inflicted upon our continent by outsiders.” But some white UN workers are so sensitive to African feelings that they temper their criticism. Lisa Jacobs, a spokeswoman for the UN AIDS program in Geneva says: “It’s important we don’t just dismiss these theories as rantings in Africa, because many of the problems they point out have valid roots.” (Neely Tucker, AIDS Denial Ravages Africa, Detroit News and Free Press, Aug. 14, 1999, p. 1A.)

Racial Politics

President Clinton has issued an executive order creating a government-wide commission and a White House initiative to “improve the quality of life of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders through increased participation in federal programs where they may be underserved.” Translation: more big government and racial preferences. The White House will look for problems in “health, human services, education, housing, labor, transportation, and economic and community development.” Do Asians really have a transportation problem?

By many measures Asians are better off than any other racial group. They have the highest percentage of adults with bachelors degrees (42 percent), their divorce rate is half the white rate, their health is the best of any group, and aside from recent immigrants from South East Asia they have higher incomes than whites. “Clinton is just trying to buy off Asian political support by setting up something,” said John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley.

Other minority groups will probably want the same treatment. Lisa Navarette of the National Council of La Raza said Hispanics could well ask for a commission, and the NAACP is thinking about it, too. But Asian activist Angela Oh, who took part in the President’s fizzled race initiative, doesn’t want anyone else clamoring for special treatment. “I think it would be very unhealthy for all these different ethnic groups to start demanding a commission like this. I think this one is unique.” She says the government needs more information about Asians and that her community felt “stereotyped” by Chinese espionage and Clinton campaign-money scandals. (Josh Gerstein, Clinton Courts Asian-Americans, ABCNews.com, August, 16, 1999.)

Hard Time

In the heavily Hispanic prisons of San Antonio, Texas, Latino gang warfare seems to cause as much bloodshed as racial violence. In just one week, Hispanics attacked each other twice and blacks once. The first riot was at the Dominguez prison, where 21 members of the “Mexican Mafia” attacked six members of a gang called “Raza Unida.” Several apparently coordinated assaults took place just a few minutes apart in five separate housing units. No one was seriously hurt, but guards ordered an indefinite system-wide lockdown.

Just three days later — during the lockdown — several dozen Hispanics used everything from steel-toed boots to trash cans to attack a smaller number of blacks. “Everybody was just swinging,” said Antonio Vega, a 19-year-old Hispanic. “The blacks were in another corner. They were boxed in. They couldn’t go nowhere . . . At that time, all I could think about was hurting (the blacks) as best I could.” Guards threw chemical agents into two dormitories to quiet 108 rioters.

Two days later, there was another Mexican Mafia-Raza Unida rumble at a different lockup called the Torres prison. Eight inmates were hospitalized with stab wounds — three had to be airlifted — after guards used pepper spray to stop the mayhem.

Prison officials say they will not segregate prisoners by race or gang affiliation. “They’re going to have to learn to live together,” said Capt. Don Dalton of the Dominguez jail. (Lisa Sandberg and Bill Hendricks, Jail Officials Expecting More Inmate Flare-ups, San Antonio Express News, August 11, 1999.)

Good Sense Among the Young

Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the NAACP recently commissioned a poll to learn what “generation X” thinks about race. The most prominently reported finding is that about half of 18- to 29-year-olds agree with the statement that “it’s OK if the races are basically separate from one another as long as everyone has equal opportunity.” The figure for whites was 52.4 percent and that for blacks was 40.1 percent. An even larger number, 74.6 percent, say blacks should work their way up “without any special favors” just as others have. The figures for whites and blacks were 76.2 percent and 66.3 percent. Fully a third of “gen-Xers” think the government should not concern itself with how private employers treat blacks and an equal number think it is not the government’s job to ensure blacks and whites go to the same schools.

As for overall race relations in America, 2.8 percent say they are “excellent,” 18.7 percent say “good,” 57.9 percent say “fair,” and 19.4 percent say “poor.” Blacks are slightly less happy about race relations than whites. Just under half of both groups thought race relations were getting better, with a small majority saying they are getting worse or staying the same. Thirty-eight percent of blacks think white cops will treat them unfairly, but only 8.9 percent of whites think a black cop will be unfair. (Hamilton College & Zogby International & NAACP, Confronting the Color Line in the 21st Century: Racial Attitudes of Young Americans, 1999.)

The media have been wringing their hands over the insufficient liberalism of the answers, especially the view that there is nothing wrong with racial separation. It is encouraging to see common sense persist in the face of years of indoctrination.

Black Empowerment

What was supposed to be a shining example of black empowerment in South Africa has come to a humiliating end. New Africa Investments, Ltd., which was established as a major black-owned insurer in 1993, has responded to an investor revolt and will restructure in a way that ends black ownership.

The company was founded just before the 1994 elections that brought the ANC to power. The South Africa Life Insurance company decided it would curry favor with the new rulers-to-be by spinning off 30 percent of Metropolitan Life, its subsidiary that wrote policies for blacks, and turning it over to black control. It larded the board of directors with ANC favorites and appointed as chairman Nthato Motlana, an old friend and personal doctor of Nelson Mandela. Although the directors owned a minority of the stock, theirs were the only voting shares, while white-owned companies and investors held the far larger number of non-voting shares — a dual control system rather like apartheid in reverse.

The company has gone downhill, with its stock losing half its value since early 1998. Nothing daunted, the black directors decided to vote themselves $20 million worth of stock options and to dilute the non-voting shareholders further by increasing the number of that class of stock by 50 percent. In April, outraged non-voting stockholders finally forced the directors to reorganize the company along conventional lines and let all investors vote their shares. Dr. Motlana has resigned as chairman, and whites will pick up the pieces.

This is only the latest “black empowerment” scheme to go south. The 100-year-old mining house JCI, Ltd. was broken up after its black chairman, Mzilikazi Khumalo, was booted for insider-trading. Another conglomerate is still headed by Cyril Ramaphosa, a former General Secretary of the ANC, but it no longer tries to run anything; it just holds shares in other companies. (Donald G. McNeil, Major Black Empowerment Company Restructures, Returning Control to Whites, New York Times, Aug. 6, 1999.)

One wonders what white businessmen now think about the misguided faith they put in blacks to run companies. This was the commercial version of the same faith with which they turned the country itself over to Africans, who will no doubt behave exactly as their business counterparts did, voting themselves fat benefits even as they run South Africa into the ground. Of course, the republic cannot be broken up and liquidated when it hits bottom, nor is it ever likely to be handed back to people who can actually run it.

Oops

Roger Russel of South African started out on a marathon walk from Cape Town to Johannesburg and back to call attention to his country’s frightening crime rates. Just 12 miles into his walk he was robbed at gunpoint of everything except the clothes he was wearing. (Reuters, Crime Awareness Activist Gets Mugged, Aug. 25, 1999.)

Give Us Your Poor

The Center for Immigration Studies has released a report that describes how immigration is swelling the ranks of the poor. Between 1979 and 1997 the number of poor people living in immigrant-headed families tripled from 2.7 million to 7.7 million. During that time the number of immigrant households increased 68 percent but the number of immigrant households in poverty increased 123 percent. Two decades ago 15.5 percent of immigrants were poor but now 21.8 percent are. The percentage of poor natives has held steady at about 12 percent. Twenty years ago, fewer than ten percent of America’s poor were immigrants; now more than 20 percent are immigrants.

The report, called “Importing Poverty,” notes that if current trends continue, another 10 million immigrants will come during the next decade. They will continue to be poorly educated, have large families, and swell the ranks of the poor. The full report is available here. (Michael Fletcher, Immigrants’ Growing Role in U.S. Poverty Cited, Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1999, p. A2. AP, More Immigrants Are Staying Poor, Sept. 2, 1999.)

Hispanics, in particular, do not pull themselves out of poverty the way European immigrants did. A study released last month by the California Senate found that Hispanic workers in that state lag far behind all other groups in wages and education, even through the third generation. At that point there is still a $5,400 gap between the median wage of Hispanics and everyone else. In 1998, only about ten percent of California’s third-generation Hispanics had a college education, compared to 30 percent for other groups. About 17 percent of third-generation Hispanics were high school dropouts, whereas only 6.7 percent of non-Hispanics were dropouts. (Nancy Cleeland, Latinos’ Economic Gap Persists Over Time, LA Times, Aug. 19, 1999.)

Quota-Crazy Californians

California Democrats have established quotas for their delegation to the year 2000 national convention where the presidential candidate will be chosen. Of the 432 delegates, 26 percent are to be Hispanic, 16 percent black, 10 percent disabled, nine percent Asian-Pacific Islander, five percent male homosexual, five percent lesbian and one percent Indian. Half are to be men, and half women. Even if all the homosexuals and disabled people are white, whites will still be a minority in the delegation. (AP, Calif. Democrats Set Delegate Goals, Aug. 11, 1999.)

Is Secession Next?

The Texas town of El Cenizo has made Spanish its official language and has declared itself a safe haven for illegal immigrants. Mayor Rafael Rodriguez says that he and most of the 7,800 townspeople speak only Spanish, so it makes no sense to conduct city business in English. He is a former illegal alien who became an amnestied US citizen, and the safe haven ordinance means city employees will not cooperate with the INS. An estimated 1,000 residents of the border town, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, are illegals. As Roberto Heredia, professor of linguistic psychology at Texas A&M International University in Laredo explains, the people of El Cenizo “do not feel like they are part of this country.” (Reuters, Texas Town Adopts Spanish as Official Language, Aug. 13, 1999. Dane Schiller, War of Words Over Spanish Rule, Express-News, Aug. 13, 1999.)

Self Improvement

Many of Jamaica’s poor and some of its wealthy are risking permanent skin damage by using steroid creams to lighten their dark skin and become “brownin’s.” Over the last three years demand for skin-lighteners has risen to record levels and even men are using them. Women claim the effect is immediate. “When I walk on the streets you can hear people say ‘Hey, check out the brownin’,’ explains 17-year-old Latoya Reid. “When you are lighter people pay more attention to you. It makes you more important.” Sheri Roth, 22, understands the dangers but plans to become a brownin’ too: “I am poor and bored and being whiter would make me happier . . . I want to walk into dance halls and feel like a movie star, a white one.”

The creams are made in Europe for treating certain skin conditions but it is illegal to import them into Jamaica. Health officials warn about consequences like severe acne, stretch marks, and increased risk of skin cancer. Still, demand has prompted a thriving smuggling business and the creams are so widely available it is not uncommon to see women with slathered faces passing time in the streets or doing chores. Government officials denounce this fascination with whiteness but cannot stop it. (Serge Kovaleski, Lure of Lighter Skin Creates Identity Crisis in Jamaica, Plain Dealer (Kansas City), Aug. 7, 1999, p. 7A.)

Free to Choose

The Supreme Court of Norway has ruled that it is legal to use phrases like “foreigners not wanted,” “whites only,” or “only for Norwegians with regular jobs” in real estate advertising. The court ruled unanimously that although Norway has an anti-discrimination law it does not apply to real estate transactions. (AP, Court Oks Real Estate Discrimination, Aug. 27, 1999.) Norwegians therefore continue to enjoy freedoms denied to Americans.

Rising Tide of Color

A new survey by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., shows that world population will pass the 6 billion mark this year. It was less than 2 billion in 1900, and most of the growth comes from the Third World. “No matter what happens, Europe’s population looks set to remain at best perfectly flat while there will be heavy population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Political power could very well shift,” says Carl Haub, co-author of the study.

Fertility rates in most white countries are about 1.5 children per woman, which is below replacement level. By contrast, most of the Third World averages around 3.8 children, with sub-Saharan African women averaging 5.8 children.

Ten of the eleven countries with the highest birth rates are in Africa. In descending order the countries are Niger, Oman, Ethiopia, Uganda, Angola, Somalia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Yemen, Chad and the Congo.

These are some of the poorest, most miserable places on earth. The countries with the lowest birthrates are all European: Bulgaria, Latvia, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The United States has a fertility rate of 2.03 which is inflated by immigrants. The white birthrate is below replacement level. (Middle American News, Global Political Power Shift Seen as World Population Grows, August 1999, p. 7.)

Carefree School Days

The family of a white 12-year-old, Mark Connelly, moved to the south side of Chicago this year, so Mark became a student at mostly-black Sherman Elementary School. After just a few days, he got into an argument with one of the black students, who was later heard saying he would “beat that white boy.” After school let out, a group of blacks knocked him to the ground and kicked him unconscious. Three black students, aged 10, 13, and 14, have been suspended for 10 days and face juvenile petitions for battery and a hate crime. Mark continues to attend Sherman Elementary. (Monica Davey and Bradley Keoun, City Schools Begin Probe Into Beating of Pupil, 12, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 3, 1999.)