O Tempora, O Mores! (July, 2003)
American Renaissance, July 2003
Reality of Race
For some time, Baton Rouge was terrorized by a rapist–serial killer. Police had DNA evidence to link the murders but did not know how to use DNA to determine the killer’s race. On the basis of a purported eyewitness description and a behavioral profile from the FBI, they were looking for a white man. A Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force formed in August 2002 collected more than 600 DNA samples from potential suspects — all white.
In February 2003, Tony Frudakis, CEO of DNAPrint Genomics contacted the task force, explaining that his company had a new DNA test that could determine the killer’s race with 99 percent accuracy. While his lab was analyzing the sample the killer struck again, murdering his fifth victim and fourth white. That same week, in early March, Mr. Frudakis told police the killer they were looking for was black — 85 percent African and 15 percent American Indian. The task force began collecting DNA from black suspects.
Detectives already had DNA from a different murder investigation for Derrick Lee, a 34-year-old black man, and on May 25, a police technician matched it to the samples recovered from the five victims. The next day, police issued a warrant for his arrest, and captured him a day later in Atlanta. [Rachael Bell, The Mystery of the Baton Rouge Serial Killer, CrimeLibrary.com. Josh Noel, Florida Lab Pointed to Race, The Advocate (Baton Rouge), June 4, 2003.]
It would be hard to think of a more dramatic demonstration that race is a biological fact and not a “social construct.”
Race Cannot be Wished Away
The New York Times has recently been quite bold in upholding the common sense view that race is not a mere sociological artifact but a biological reality. In a recent article, Nicholas Wade writes:
A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.
Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term ‘race.’ But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.
Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal [of Medicine (NEJM)] that declared that race was ‘biologically meaningless,’ Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.
The news peg for Mr. Wade’s article was the appearance in the NEJM of two articles that reopen the debate on race two years after a staff-written editorial dismissed its scientific validity. The debate is accompanied by a new editorial taking the view that it is “unwise to abandon the practice of recording race when we have barely begun to understand the architecture of the human genome.”
Mr. Wade goes on to point out that although the same genes are usually implicated in the same diseases worldwide, there are still important racial differences: “Inheriting two APOE4 genes, one from each parent, raises the risk of Alzheimer’s 33 times in Japanese populations, 15 times in Caucasians and only 6 times in Africans. This suggests that some unknown factor modifies the effect of the APOE4 gene in different races . . .” [Nicholas Wade, 2 Scholarly Articles Diverge on Role of Race in Medicine, New York Times, March 20, 2003.]
The notion that race is not based in biology has made significant inroads in popular thinking but appears to be in serious retreat among specialists.
His Keeper’s Brother
A new study by biologists at Wayne State University in Detroit has concluded that humans and chimpanzees are so closely related genetically that chimps should be included in the Homo genus, along with humans. A genus is the first-level grouping of closely-related species. The genus Canis, for example, includes dogs, foxes, wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc., and Equidae includes nine species of horses, donkeys and zebras. We are currently the only member of genus Homo, although we have a number of extinct relatives such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.
The authors of the Wayne State Study, which has just appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argue that although traditional zoologists decided chimps were more closely related to gorillas than to humans, DNA studies show otherwise: We are the chimps’ closest relative, having diverged from a common ancestor five or six million years ago. The authors point out that many species that diverged longer ago than that are included in the same genus, and they say it makes no biological sense to give humans special treatment with a genus all their own. DNA analysis gives varying figures for the extent of genetic similarity between chimps and humans depending on which part of the genome is studied, but the authors have found that for long stretches of important, functional DNA there is 99.4 percent similarity. They propose that chimpanzees, now called Pan troglodytes, be renamed Homo troglodytes and be welcomed into the family. [John Pickrell, Chimps Belong on Human Branch of Family Tree, Study Says, National Geographic News, May 20, 2003.]
If there is so little genetic difference between us and chimps we belong in the same family, it is clear that very small genetic differences can produce very significant physical differences.
Congo Cannibalism
There have been many atrocities in the civil war that has raged in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the past four years. In May, fighting between rival tribal militias in the eastern province of Ituri killed more than 300 people. According to church leaders in the area, one group of combatants, the Lendu tribesmen, cut open the people they killed and ate the hearts, lungs, and livers. “The sight of a corpse with a missing liver or heart is horrific, especially when you know those parts were eaten, and that the same thing could happen to you,” says Acquitto Kisembo, of the town of Bunia, where much of the fighting took place. Father Joseph Deneckere, a Belgian priest who has lived in the Congo since 1970, says tribesmen also cut off the genitals and fingers of enemies, and tie them to their weapons as charms.
Fighters have also been eating pygmies, 600,000 of whom live in the jungles of the Congo. Soldiers of both the government and various rebel factions think pygmies are sub-human, and believe their flesh confers magical powers when eaten. According to UN human rights officials, Congolese have cooked and eaten more than a dozen pygmies this year. Sinafari Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti pygmy tribe, wants the UN to try the cannibals before an international court. “In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, and genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted down as though they were game animals,” he told the UN’s Indigenous People’s Forum. [Michael Dynes, Pygmies Beg UN for Aid to Save Them from Congo Cannibals, Times (London), May 23, 2003.]
A Warning to Us All
C.G. Tracey was one of the first white farmers to welcome black rule in the former Rhodesia. He had a farm in what is called the Enterprise farming district, which includes some of the best land in Zimbabwe, and is only about 20 miles east of the capital, Harare. He was active in the handover of power to the Mugabe government, organizing some of the important conferences that made it possible. In the early days of black rule he served on a number of agricultural committees and was held in high regard.
This spring, the number two man on the Zimbabwe supreme court, Paddington Garwe, decided he liked Mr. Tracey’s farm and sent in some thugs to kick him out. Mr. Tracey, now in his 80s, is said to be “heartbroken and confused” by his eviction from the farm that has been his life’s work. No doubt he thought his cooperation with blacks would save his neck, but as a former neighbor who has moved to South Africa explains, “Now he is just another white man and they want him to go.”
Before Mr. Mugabe ordered the land grab three years ago, there were 66 white farmers in the Enterprise area. Now there are fewer than a dozen. The rest have not been distributed to “war veterans.” Instead, they are in the hands of cabinet ministers, generals, and other Zanu-PF bigwigs. [Peta Thornycroft, Zimbabwe Judge Secretly Grabs White-owned Farm, Electronic Telegraph, April 19, 2003.]
Blok Party
Despite the efforts of the Belgian political establishment to ban it, the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok party scored big gains in Belgium’s national elections on May 18, receiving 19.5 percent of the vote — its highest total ever — a significant increase over the 15 percent it won in 1999. The Blok favors independence for the northern Flanders region of Belgium, and campaigned on a platform calling for closing the border to further non-European immigration and deporting foreign criminals and illegal aliens. Its motto is “Our People First.”
Although the Blok is the largest party in the city of Antwerp, it does not have a majority, and other parties have banded together to form a majority and keep it out of city government. Even the “conservative” Christian Democrats refuse to work with the Blok, though their leader Stefan De Clerck admits that this “cordon sanitaire” has not checked the Blok’s increasing popularity. “They’re still growing and that’s a problem,” he says.
Mr. De Clerck should rethink his position. The Christian Democrats won 21.5 percent of the national vote in May. The combined vote totals of the Christian Democrats and the Vlaams Blok leave them within striking distance of the left-of-center Liberal-Socialist ruling coalition — 41 percent vs. 44.5 percent. If the Blok continues to gain votes while the Christian Democrats maintain theirs, a Blok-Christian Democrat coalition would have a good chance of governing Belgium after the next election.
According to Dyab Abou Jahjah, a failed parliamentary candidate and spokesman for the Belgian Muslim “Resist” movement, the Vlaams Blok is already influencing the government. “Vlaams Blok talks about security, so they start talking about security. Vlaams Blok talks about assimilation they speak about assimilation. That’s the power of the Vlaams Blok,” he says. “It is imposing itself on the governing parties without being in government.”
Mr. Abou Jahjah, 31, who gained Belgian citizenship through a brief marriage to a Belgian, doesn’t want Muslims to assimilate. He demands separate schools for Muslim children, and wants Arabic to be an official language in Belgium. Instead of trying to force Muslims to adopt to Belgian culture, Mr. Abou Jahjah thinks the prime minister should learn Arabic. [Raf Casert, Belgium’s Arab Nationalist Touches Nerve, AP, May 16, 2003.]
One of the stars of the Vlaams Blok is Anke Van dermeersch, a lawyer and former Miss Belgium. She has no use for “Belgians” like Mr. Abou Jahjah. On the campaign trail on her way to a seat in the Belgian Senate, Miss Van dermeersch told the BBC, “We still are very much against the multicultural society. We need people who emigrate here to adapt. If they don’t adapt to our systems, to our laws, to our values, they should go back where they came from.” [Stephen Castle, Belgian Coalition Wins Polls as Far-Right Gains Ground, Independent (London), May 19, 2003. Shirin Wheeler, Belgian Far Right Poll Boosts Fears, BBC Online, May 20, 2003.]
In 1990, whites were the majority population in 70 of the nation’s 100 largest cities, making up more than 52 percent of their total populations. By 2000, whites were a majority in only 52 of the largest cities, and were just 44 percent of their total populations. It is mainly Hispanics who are reducing whites to urban minorities. During the 1990s, Hispanics living in the 100 largest cities increased by 3.8 million, or 43 percent. In the 20 fastest-growing cities, the number of Hispanics increased by 72 percent while the number of whites increased by just five percent.
Hispanics are not heading only for Sun Belt cities like Las Vegas. Chicago gained more than 200,000 Hispanics during the 1990s, reversing a decades-long population decline that saw the city drop from second- to third-largest in the US. Without an influx of Hispanics, Boston, Dallas and Los Angeles all would have lost population during the ‘90s.
So far, Hispanics have yet to turn their numbers into political power. While whites are now a minority in California, they were still nearly 75 percent of the voters in last fall’s statewide elections. But as their numbers in California continue to decrease (only 36 percent of the state’s public schoolchildren are white), their political power will fade. [Whites a Minority in US Cities, BBC Online, April 30, 2003.]
Tolerance, Leftist Style
As we reported last month, the British National Party (BNP) enjoyed its greatest electoral success to date in Britain’s May 1st local elections. In Burnley, scene of anti-white rioting in 2001, the BNP added five seats to the three it already held, making it the second-largest party on the town council — much to the dismay of the Bishop of Burnley, John Goddard, who said, “It is now seen as not impossible to vote for such a party. We have crossed a line, a line which is against everything that is best in our culture.”
On May 15, as the BNP councilors entered the hall for their first meeting, Anti-Nazi League protestors broke past police barricades and threw eggs and flour at them. During a brief skirmish with mounted policemen, at least seven people — most of them ANL protestors — were injured. Inside the council chamber, the Labour members, led by Stuart Caddy, refused to shake hands with their BNP counterparts, whom Mr. Caddy regards as fascists and racists, “whatever they say.” For their part, the BNP councilors, led by Len Starr, a former sergeant in the British army, calmly went to work on council business. [Nigel Bunyan, Violence as BNP Group Takes Seats on Council, Telegraph (London), May 16, 2003.]
Wallpapering the Privy
South Central Los Angeles has a reputation as a violent, poverty-stricken, gang- and drug-infested, crime-ridden horror. Its 16 square miles, which take their name from Central Avenue, were for decades LA’s main black neighborhood but, like most of the city, it is now increasingly Hispanic. Still, “South Central” is code in California for “black,” and when blacks move into adjacent areas south and west of downtown LA it is called “South Central creep.” South Central was the scene of the 1965 and 1992 riots, crack-inspired gang warfare of the 1980s and ‘90s, and has been the setting for several Hollywood films about life in “da ‘hood.”
On April 9, the LA City Council voted 14-0 to rename South Central “South Los Angeles.” Councilwoman Jan Perry, who sponsored the motion, says the name change will make residents feel better about their neighborhood and themselves. It’s “about empowering a community to lift itself up and about how we can help communities regain a sense of dignity and pride over their history and culture,” she says. Although he voted for the name change, Councilman Nate Holden says it won’t solve problems and won’t improve a bad reputation. [Gail Schiller, City Council Vote to Erase Notorious South Central Name, AP, April 10, 2003. Calvin Sims, South Central Los Angeles, Associated with Violence and Poverty, Will be South Los Angeles, New York Times, April 10, 2003.]
Family Affair
On May 3, Nicole Bilbo, a twenty-year-old white woman, broke up with her black boyfriend of two years, Kevin Townsend. She gave him the bad news in Martin Luther King Park in San Angelo, Texas, and he did not take it well. He told three girl cousins who were nearby — Catrina Miller, 30, Nina Miller, 21, and Joann Miller, 18 — to beat up Miss Bilbo. With a shout of, “We’re going to whoop this white bitch,” the Miller sisters pounded Miss Bilbo with their shoes, and Joann Miller broke a beer bottle and cut her with the jagged edge. On May 9, police arrested the sisters on aggravated assault and hate crime charges. At last report, Mr. Townsend had not been charged. [Erin Quinn, Arrests Made in Hate Crime Assault, San Angelo (Texas) Standard Times, May 11, 2003.]
Scout’s Dishonor
Since 1942, the Richmond-area Boy Scout council has called itself the Robert E. Lee Council, but in May, the executive board voted “overwhelmingly” to change the name, effective June 2004. It is now soliciting suggestions for a new name. Robert Tuggle, an executive board member, says there was no outside pressure. He claims the board is simply trying to be more inclusive — presumably by excluding a Confederate. King Salim Khalfani, director of the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, cheers the council’s decision. He says a name-change will encourage more non-whites to join the Scouts. [Patrick Badgley, Richmond Boy Scouts Drop General Lee’s Name, Washington Times (National Weekly Edition), May 19-25, 2003, p. 17.]
(African) America Online
This year, for the first time, America Online (AOL) had a net loss of subscribers. Of AOL’s 27 million US members, approximately 14 percent (4 million) are black. Since AOL expects the number of black Internet users to increase 8.4 percent from 2003-2007 — double the rate for whites — it wants to reverse its slide by designing content aimed at blacks. AOL Black Focus offers news, beauty and style tips, heartthrob chatrooms, and entertainment from a “black perspective.” AOL members can access Black Focus by typing in AOL keyword “black focus.”
Unfortunately for AOL, there are already several Internet services geared toward blacks, for example BET.com and BlackPlanet.com. Scott Mills, chief operating officer of BET.com thinks AOL cannot offer “black content” to rival BET. [Paul Davidson, AOL to Launch Area for African-Americans, USA Today, May 28, 2003.]
Rewarding Illegals
California, New York, Texas and Utah all let children of illegal immigrants pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. On July 1, Washington will join the club, with Oregon likely to follow soon. Washington’s new law applies to children of illegals who have lived in the state for at least three years and requires them to say they will take steps toward citizenship. The new law will save them a lot of money. Non-residents pay $15,267 a year to attend the University of Washington; residents pay $4,566.
The state Senate amended the original bill to apply only to the children of non-resident aliens here legally, but Washington Gov. Gary Locke vetoed the amendment. Now illegal immigrants enjoy benefits not granted to full, legal US citizens who live in other states. Jorge Padrazo, Mexico’s Consul General in Seattle, says the Mexican government, which lobbies states to adopt similar laws, is “very encouraged and happy with this piece of legislation.” [Illegal Workers’ Children Get Tuition Break, AP, May 8, 2003.]
DiversiTV
For years, non-white agitators have been complaining that network television is too white, and groups like the NAACP have threatened boycotts if the networks did not add more non-white faces. Judging from the line-up of new shows appearing on the TV schedule this fall, the networks appear to have gotten the message.
No fewer than 18 new programs featuring non-white stars will debut this fall, including eight new sitcoms. Among the new shows are an NBC comedy featuring black actress Whoopi Goldberg, and two comedies on Fox with Hispanic actors in lead roles. The WB network will launch “Like Family,” about a troubled poor white teenager sent to live with a affluent black suburban family.
The UPN network, which currently airs a block of black-oriented comedies on Monday nights, will adopt a “fade to white” strategy on Tuesdays, running shows that feature more white actors as the evening wears on. [David Bauder, TV Cranks Up Diversity Volume, AP, May 21, 2003.]
Three point four million Puerto Ricans live in the United States, and 3.8 million live on the island. Nearly 81 percent of the ones on the island tell the census bureau they are “white,” while only 46 percent of the ones in the United States say they are white. The 81 percent figure would make Puerto Rico “whiter” than the United States, where only about 73 percent of the overall population describes itself as white. There are other examples of the bleaching effect of geography. In Texas, 61 percent of the Hispanics from Mexico say they are white, whereas in California only 40 percent do. In Florida, 92 percent of Cubans say they are white, whereas in California only 68 percent do. [Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, For Millions of Latinos, Race Is a Flexible Concept, Los Angeles, Times, March 11, 2003.]
Racism Unmasked
Last August, a black woman named Laguana Perry leaving the drug treatment clinic at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, got into an argument with a white security officer, Mary Russello. She drove up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to run Miss Russello over, and knocked over a street sign that struck the security guard in the head, injuring her severely. Miss Perry then tried to hit Miss Russello again, and smashed into five people — injuring two seriously — who were trying to help Miss Russello. She then fled the scene. When police caught up with her, Miss Perry at first said her foot slipped off the brake, but then admitted she tried to hit Miss Russello, who deserved what she got.
Miss Perry was facing up to 25 years in prison and copped a plea, but the plea saved her only five years: On March 17, Monroe County Court Judge Patricia Marks sentenced her to 20 years. “I didn’t kill anybody,” Miss Perry complained. “It was an accident.”
“You were intent on causing some harm,” replied the judge. “And didn’t care.”
“That’s [expletive],” said Miss Perry, who added: “I feel this is all about prejudice because of the color of my skin and because of who those people are [at least three of her victims were white] . . . what is it, because you’re taking another black person off the street? That’s prejudice. Straight prejudice.” Miss Perry will be eligible for parole in 2020. [Greg Livadas, Reckless Driver Gets 20 Years, Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester), March 18, 2003.]
Bad Bouncers
The authorities in Madrid, Spain, estimate that on a typical Saturday night, as many as 700,000 people are carousing in the city’s 1,000 bars and nightclubs. The 2,000 bouncers who control access and keep the peace sometimes must use force. Last year two people died in fights between bouncers and patrons. The National Association of Nightclubs and Concert Halls is now offering bouncers voluntary classes in customer service, anger management — and civil rights. SOS Racism, a Spanish human rights group, says many doormen are under orders to keep blacks, North Africans, Gypsies and Latin Americans out of trendy nightspots. The classes will include lessons on the Spanish Constitution, and teach bouncers they cannot keep people out for ethnic reasons. [Daniel Woolls, Classes Aim to Take the Bully Out of Spain’s Club Bouncers, AP, March 23, 2003.]
Historians in St. Louis, Missouri, have recently uncovered records of hundreds of suits brought by black slaves seeking freedom. The hand-written documents, which date form 1806 to 1865, were locked away in a court house for more than a century and were recently exhumed with the help of a federal grant. Slaves in Missouri had three grounds to sue for freedom: that they were free blacks who had been kidnapped, that they had been freed by their masters but were still in bondage, or that they had spent time in a free state and should therefore be considered free. The third argument, “once free always free” was the most common.
Like a number of other slave states, Missouri had well-established procedures for protecting the legal rights of slaves. It set aside taxpayer money to hire lawyers for slaves. Top lawyers sometimes traveled hundreds of miles at state expense to get witness statements, and some cases included hundreds of pages of testimony and legal briefs. Slave-owning defendants were required to put up a substantial bond — as much as $2,000 — which they would forfeit if they did not show up in court or sold their slaves before trial. In order to protect slaves from retaliation, judges sometimes took custody of plaintiffs and housed them in jails. They were rented out as day laborers, and could collect their wages if they won their freedom. Trials were heard before all-white juries but of the 283 “freedom cases” for which records have been found, many were victories for the plaintiffs. Some slaves won substantial damages from their former masters.
Until this find of documents, it was generally thought the Dred Scott case was an anomaly. Scott claimed that because he had lived for years in free, northern states with his army surgeon master, he should be free even if he moved back to a slave state. Scott brought the case in 1846 and won in circuit court. His master appealed, and the US Supreme Court finally ruled in 1857 against the “once free always free” doctrine. This undercut most freedom suits, though a few Missouri slaves continued to sue on other grounds. [Stephanie Simon, Cries For Freedom Still Ring, Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2003.]
Standards are ‘Racist’
Like many states, Florida has adopted a standardized high school graduation test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. Students started taking the test in 1998, but this is the first year they will be denied diplomas if they flunk. Nearly 13,000 or nine percent of seniors have, in fact, flunked and will not graduate. Some school boards have decided to let them walk around in a cap and gown on graduation day, but they won’t get diplomas.
Needless to say, blacks and immigrants are the ones most likely to fail, and the word is out that the “racist” test must be abolished or at least ignored. Blacks are threatening to boycott Florida’s theme parks, stop drinking Florida orange juice, and stop playing the lottery, if they don’t get their way.
At Miami Senior High, nearly 90 percent of the student body are not native speakers of English, and 100 out of 500 seniors failed the test. On May 8, 200 students demonstrated outside the school, waving signs and chanting “No FCAT.” Their big beef is that they had to take the test in English. “We are a Hispanic-based society,” says Gerrter Martin, who failed twice. “My dreams are [over],” says Jessica Duran. “I want to be a doctor and because of that I can’t do it.” State Rep. Ralph Arza, who is also a Miami High teacher, says he will introduce legislation to offer the FCAT in other languages.
This year’s Florida seniors have had at least five chances to pass the test, once as sophomores, and twice each as juniors and seniors. If they want to, they can retake the text every year for the rest of their lives until they pass. [HS Graduation Crisis in Florida, CBS.com, May 20, 2003. Students: English-Only Test Unfair, WorldNetDaily.com, May 9, 2003.]
Whites Clearing Out
The Los Angeles Unified School District has a system of “charter schools,” under which a school can petition the district for the right to set its own curriculum and run its own finances. The system was set up mainly as a last resort to try to save the worst schools that are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic.
Now, the whole district is more than 90 percent non-white, and many of the few schools with more than a token number of whites have decided to play the charter game and go their own way, too. Granada Hills (43 percent white), Palisades (43.7 percent white), and El Camino Real (50.6 percent white) high schools all want to kick over the traces, but LA Superintendent Roy Romer is having none of it. At a recent public meeting to consider charter petitions, Mr. Romer explained why he didn’t want them to break away: “Let me tell you, they represent a large proportion of white students in the district.” He added that they are also “the upper economic groups of the district.” He could have pointed out that the schools that still have whites are the only ones with good academic programs. [Helen Gao, Romer Warns Charter Highs Will Harm District, Los Angeles Daily News, April 22, 2003.]
It is fine for whites to stick around and help pay the bill when non-white students go independent and try something new. They just better not try the same thing themselves. One of the reasons whites do not attend Los Angeles public schools and why campuses with whites want to leave is that the district is full of awful schools. This spring has seen the usual spree of race riots, with as many as 300 students battling it out in one day at Alain Leroy Locke High School, and Washington Preparatory High School is working its way through a succession of principals who cannot maintain standards.
On April 11, blacks and Hispanics at Locke High School swung pipes and bats at each other after a lunchtime fight erupted into a riot that went on for an hour before police restored calm. Police arrested six students on charges ranging from weapons possession to assault on a peace officer, but school administrators were relieved to find that no one was killed or had to be hospitalized.
In just the previous week, on March 28, a similar riot broke out at Washington Prep, and the school district announced it was firing the principal, James Noble. Mr. Noble, who replaced Margueritte LaMotte because she could do nothing to raise the school’s rock-bottom test scores, had lasted less than a year. [Solomon Moore and Jose Cardenas, Melee Erupts at High School, Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2003.]
20 Acres and a Mercedes
Every tax season, a certain number of blacks claim some kind of imaginary tax exemption as reparations for slavery, and 2003 was no exception. This year, Robert Foster of Richmond, Virginia helped people file for bogus refunds of between $8,000 and $500,000 each.
The amazing thing is that these scams sometimes work. In 2000, Mr. Foster arranged a $504,490 refund for his daughter Crystal, which the government actually paid. She claimed she had overpaid $500,000 in capital gains taxes on a non-existent “Black Capital Investments” fund at the US Treasury. The IRS has recovered $266,000 and a Mercedes Benz.
Mr. Foster, who has been happily helping people file false returns ever since, says his dispute is not with the IRS but with “racist white rule.” [Indictment: Father, Daughter Claimed Slavery Reparations, Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 20, 2003.]
