O Tempora, O Mores! (April, 2010)
American Renaissance, April 2010
Modern Treasures
Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose arrest for disorderly conduct outside his home last year drew Barack Obama’s attention and led many whites to question his “post-racial” credentials, says he has donated the handcuffs put on him during his arrest to the Smithsonian Institution’s black history museum. Mr. Gates says the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, gave him the cuffs several months ago, when the two met at a cafe. [Gates Donates Cuffs Used on Him to Smithsonian, AP, Feb. 15, 2010.]
Accused killer O. J. Simpson recently offered one of his suits to the Smithsonian Institution. It was his “lucky suit,” the one he wore on the day in 1995 when he was acquitted of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman. The museum, often called America’s attic, contains a lot of notable clutter. The National Museum of American History has Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, the leather jacket Henry Winkler (the “Fonz”) wore on the ABC sitcom Happy Days, the hat Abraham Lincoln wore before he was assassinated, and a piece of a lunch counter from a North Carolina Woolworth’s that was the site of a civil rights sit-in. The Smithsonian doesn’t want Mr. Simpson’s suit. Spokesman Valeska Hilbig says the suit “doesn’t fit” the collection.
Mr. Simpson’s lawyer, Ronald Slates, is disappointed. He says the museum should take the good with the bad. “You don’t see the Smithsonian walking away from days of the Depression — which were certainly horrible days in our history — because it was so horrible,” he says. “So, I thought this would be the museum to house this, even as controversial as it is.” [Smithsonian: O.J.’s Acquittal Suit Doesn’t Fit With Its Collection, CNN, March 2, 2010.]
Still Stupid
The late Samuel Francis called the Republican Party the Stupid Party (the Democrats were the Evil Party), in part because they refused to see that non-white immigration dooms them. Another inveterate Republican stupidity is the belief that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” who will flock to the party if only GOP troglodytes stopped opposing amnesty.
Among the Republicans still mouthing this silliness is former Texas congressman Henry Bonilla, who lost his seat to a Hispanic Democrat in 2006 after seven terms. “If you don’t go out and bring more Hispanics to our party, the math isn’t there to win, no matter what the other side does,” says Mr. Bonilla. Republican strategists such as Whit Ayres cite the rapid increase in Hispanics and the impending displacement of whites as proof that Republicans must pander harder than ever. “If Republicans don’t do better among Hispanics,” he says, “we’re not going to be talking about how to get Florida back in the Republican column, we’re going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”
Dan Bartlett, an adviser to former president George W. Bush, says Republicans need “an authentic relationship” with Hispanics. “The Hispanics are going to be a dominant political force in the state of Texas and around the country for the next 100 years, and the Republican Party’s blowing it,” he says. “There’s a real dearth of smart thinking on the Republican side of the aisle.”
GOP chairmen are among the worst offenders. Current chairman Michael Steele says opposition to amnesty “harkens back, quite frankly, to the Southern strategy that the Republicans embraced in the 1960s, causing black Republicans to abandon the party,” and that immigration “hotheads” are alienating Hispanics.
Former chairman Ed Gillespie says Republicans need to “run inclusive campaigns” instead of “indulging in the anti-immigration rhetoric of the past.” He notes that George W. Bush won 54 percent of the white vote and ended up in a virtual tie with Al Gore, while John McCain got 55 percent of the white vote and lost to Barack Obama. “If the current voting percentages among white, black, Asian and Hispanic stay the same,” he says, “the Republican nominee will lose by 14 points in 2020.” [Peter Slevin, Republicans Look to Rebuild Their Traction With Hispanic Voters, Washington Post, Feb. 21, 2010.]
The Stupid Party misses three obvious points. First, the Hispanicization of America is not inevitable. Republicans could improve their prospects by slowing or reversing population trends. A moratorium on immigration and a crackdown on illegals would be a good start. Second, Hispanics will vote Democrat no matter what the Republicans do. Hispanics are poorer than whites and will always vote for the party that promises the most handouts. Third, the GOP could appeal to more whites. If John McCain had won 60 percent of the white vote, he would have coasted to victory.
Like most Southern cities, Augusta, Georgia has a monument dedicated to Confederate soldiers. The granite and marble structure stands 76-feet high. One inscription reads, “In honor of the men of Richmond County who died in the cause of the Confederate States” and another, “No Nation Rose So White and Fair; None Fell So Pure of Crime.” The monument is composed of statues of four Civil War generals: Thomas R. R. Cobb, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and William Henry Talbot. It was dedicated in 1878, before a crowd of 10,000 people.
Last fall, vandals defaced the monument with spray-painted anti-white graffiti reading, “Black Power,” “F*** White People,” “I Hate Whites,” and “Cracker Killers.” Police have no suspects. [Downtown Confederate Monument Defaced With Anti-White Messages, Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 29, 2010.]
The faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) includes many of the best scientists in the world. There is very little faculty “diversity,” however, which embarrasses the institute. A just-completed two-year “comprehensive” study found that blacks and Hispanics make up just 6 percent of the teaching staff. There are plenty of Asian professors and students, but they are “overrepresented minorities” and don’t count. MIT wants the faculty to reflect the nation, which is 30 percent “underrepresented minority.”
That will be tough. Some departments, such as chemistry, mathematics, nuclear science, and engineering haven’t hired a single black or Hispanic in the last 20 years, and the ones who are hired may not be happy. The report notes that in 2006, for example, a black biological-engineering professor who had been denied tenure charged MIT with racial discrimination and went on a hunger strike. “These issues become difficult to address because of a general discomfort in openly discussing matters of race in the academic setting of MIT,” moans the report, and notes ominously that many white profs don’t understand the importance of diversity.
Paula Hammond, a black chemical-engineering professor who led the project, is upbeat. “We believe that inclusiveness can lead to excellence, rather than impede it,” she insists. [Tracy Jan, MIT Lags in Hiring, Promoting Black, Hispanic Faculty, Internal Report Says, Boston Globe, Jan. 14, 2010.]
Flag Flap
Despite the best efforts of the NAACP, the Confederate Battle Flag continues to fly on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse, and people still travel to South Carolina and do business there. In January, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous addressed a South Carolina meeting honoring Martin Luther King and pledged to bring more publicity to the pressure group’s flagging economic boycott of the state.
In the 1960s, South Carolina began flying the battle flag over the statehouse dome — under the national and state flags. This was to commemorate South Carolina’s role in the War Between the States, but the NAACP and other liberal groups claim it was to protest the civil rights movement. In 2000, after a rally that brought 50,000 protesters to the statehouse grounds, the legislature voted to take the flag down from the dome and fly it in front of a monument to Confederate soldiers. That did nothing to mollify the NAACP.
“Dr. King knew it was put there as an act of intimidation and hatred. Moving it from right up top to smack in front doesn’t change things,” Mr. Jealous says. “In some ways it worsens the problem. You stand there and look at that flag and see how big it is to you and you look up at the American flag and see how small it is.” [Jeffrey Collins, NAACP Vows Stronger Confederate Flag Fight in SC, Sun News (Myrtle Beach), Jan. 18, 2010.]
Deep-Sixing 209
Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that banned racial preferences in university admissions, has survived many court challenges but opponents are trying again. In February, two left-wing pressure groups — the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights; and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) — sued in federal court in San Francisco, claiming that the proposition violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by creating “a racial caste system in which the state’s most prestigious schools train mostly white students and students from some Asian backgrounds.” The suit also claims UC admissions standards are “discriminatory” because they emphasize high school grades and test scores.
The US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Proposition 209 in 1997, but BAMN attorney George Washington thinks things have changed since then. He hopes the court will follow the reasoning in its 2003 decision in the University of Michigan law school case, which lets colleges consider race as a factor in admissions, so long as there are no firm quotas. [Larry Gordon, Federal Suit Planned Against UC Over Ban on Affirmative Action, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2010.]
Too Rich, Too White
The Education Trust, a non-profit foundation dedicated to closing the racial achievement gap, is lamenting the “whitening” of America’s flagship state universities. It claims the entering and graduating classes at many leading state schools are far less diverse than they should be. Director Kati Haycock says the nation’s top 50 state universities are wrong “to enroll students who are far richer and far whiter” than their state populations. [Mary Beth Marklein, Report: Public Universities Becoming ‘Far Richer, Far Whiter,’ USA Today, Jan. 13, 2010.]
Farrakhan Speaks
Twenty thousand people filled the United Center in Chicago for the Nation of Islam’s annual convention on February 28. In a four-hour speech worthy of Fidel Castro or Nikita Khrushchev, NOI’s 76-year-old leader Louis Farrakhan told the crowd that the “white right” was conspiring to ensure President Obama served only one term, and was trying to force him into a disastrous war with Iran. He urged Mr. Obama to “use your bully pulpit” to speak for the poor and the weak.
Mostly, though, Rev. Farrakhan talked about himself. He went on about a vision he had in Mexico in 1985, in which he went aboard a UFO and met the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. He says Muhammad showed him glimpses of the future, including the US bombing of Libya in 1986, and gave him the power to discern the “warning signs” in natural disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Chile. Such events, Rev. Farrakhan helpfully explained, mean trouble ahead. “The word ‘prophet’ is too cheap a word,” he concluded about himself. “I am a light in the midst of darkness.” The crowd replied with shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”). [‘White Right’ Wants Obama to Be One-Term President, Farrakhan Says, AP, Feb. 28, 2010.]
O’Connor Speaks
In her 2003 opinion in the University of Michigan racial preferences case, Grutter v. Bollinger, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Many people criticized the decision for kicking the affirmative action can down the road for a future Court to rule on. But the decision did suggest that in a generation or so whites might no longer face official racial discrimination. In 2007, Justice O’Connor encouraged this view in a speech in which she said the Court majority in Grutter “had tried to be careful in stressing that affirmative action should be a temporary bandage rather than a permanent cure.”
The retired justice has now changed direction in an essay she co-authored with Stewart J. Schwab, one of her former clerks who is now dean of Cornell Law School, and that appears in a new book, The Next 25 Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa. She now sees the time limit differently: “That 25-year expectation is, of course, far from binding on any justices who may be responsible for entertaining a challenge to an affirmative-action program in 2028. . . . When the time comes to reassess the constitutionality of considering race in higher-education admissions we will need social scientists to clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.” This sounds like a permanent cure.
Terence J. Pell is president of the Center for Individual Rights, which represented Jennifer Grutter, the plaintiff in the original case. “What I found surprising,” he says, “was the extent to which the authors confirmed everyone’s worst fears about this 25-year limit — namely, that it is not a limit at all, but rather an opening bid in an effort to justify the use of race preferences in perpetuity.” Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, says simply: “I am glad she is no longer on the Supreme Court.” [Peter Schmidt, Sandra Day O’Connor Revisits and Revives Affirmative-Action Controversy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 14, 2010.]
The Bloom is Off
During the 2008 election campaign, and especially after Barack Obama took office, liberal media commentators assured us that the nation’s first black president would heal America’s racial divisions. A recent poll found just 41 percent of Americans believe Mr. Obama has helped race relations, down from 58 percent a year ago on the eve of his inauguration. The decline is sharpest among blacks, with a drop of 75 percent to 51 percent. [Tabassum Zakaria, Fewer See Obama Advancing Racial Ties, Reuters, Jan. 19, 2010.]
Sauce for the Gander
Blacks and other non-whites have complained for years about how they are portrayed on television and in films, which is why most TV judges, surgeons, and other authority figures are now black. Whites never complain, which is why crooks are always white and white fathers and husbands are buffoons. Whites are also about the only people Hollywood dares stereotype: WASPs are greedy and emotionally inhibited, the Irish are drunkards, and Italians are gangsters and thugs.
The Italians, at least, have had enough. UNICO National is an Italian-American service organization established in 1922 to “engage in charitable works, support higher education, and perform patriotic deeds.” It is blasting a new MTV “reality show” called “Jersey Shore,” which highlights the antics of Italian-American beachgoers living in a rented beach house. Promos for the show call the participants the “hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos” who “keep their hair high, their muscles juiced and their fists pumping all summer long!” UNICO says “Jersey Shore” fosters crude stereotypes, highlighting cursing, bad behavior and violence, and wants MTV to dump the program. [Italian Group Asks MTV to Cancel ‘Jersey Shore,’ AP, Nov. 24, 2009.]
Sacrilege!
Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School in South Los Angeles is 93 percent Hispanic and seven percent black, but students still celebrate Black History Month. One way they do that is to parade around holding pictures of famous black “role models.” This year, students held up pictures of O.J. Simpson, tattooed NBA thug Dennis Rodman, and celebrity drag queen RuPaul. Someone in the audience was offended and complained to the local NAACP, which complained to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which put the three teachers on administrative leave while it investigates. The head of the local NAACP wants the teachers fired, but many parents, say the incident isn’t a big deal. “I kind of laughed at it,” says Sharon Tinson, race unspecified, who has two daughters at the school. [Christina Hoag, 3 LA Teachers Removed Over Choice of Black Heroes, AP, March 3, 2010.]
The suspended teachers are said to be white men, but we are skeptical. How many white men teach at elementary schools that are 90 percent Hispanic? On March 8, when this issue was going to press, the web page for Wadsworth Elementary was not working. When we telephoned to ask if the suspended teachers were Hispanic, the woman who answered the phone refused to talk about the incident at all.
“Hate” at UCSD
The University of California at San Diego (USCD) is in turmoil over a series of “racist” incidents. The first was on February 15, when a white fraternity reportedly held a “Compton Cookout.” Invitations suggested that men wear a “white T (size XXXL smallest acceptable).” Women were asked to come as “ghetto chicks” who “don’t speak well, have short, nappy hair” and “usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes.” Guests reportedly “ate watermelon and fried chicken, drank malt liquor, and listened to rap music.”
Campus blacks, lefties, race hustlers, and grievance-mongers all shrieked. They held emergency meetings and issued proclamations and demanded more giveaways for blacks. The reaction was so hysterical that a USCD student-run humor publication The Koala, mocked the party: “The Koala would like to condemn the organizers of the Compton Cookout. If history has shown us anything, you need more black people at your party to have enough black-on-black violence to actually justify the name ‘Compton.’ Shame on you. SHAME.” Student body president Utsav Gupta was so shocked by this that he shut down 33 student-run groups.
On February 25, someone hung a noose inside the campus library. Outraged students marched on Chancellor Marye Anne Fox’s office and occupied it for six hours. At UC Berkeley, students set trash cans on fire and broke into a library, where they smashed windows and sprayed graffiti.
UCSD Chancellor Fox launched a “Battle Against Hate” website, where she fumed about “these horrific and repugnant acts.” She promised to meet with blacks and lather more favoritism on them.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, nothing was as it seemed. The “Compton Cookout” was not held by a white fraternity, but by a black comedian named Nipsey Washington, who uses the stage name Jiggaboo Jones. He says he’s been throwing similar parties across the country for years. Some of them he calls “Nigga Nights.” Mr. Washington pestered the university and the local media with the truth, but they ignored him. They were not about to let the facts ruin a juicy story about “racism.”
Likewise, it turns out the student who hung the noose is “a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent issues on campus.” No matter. UCSD is still seething with racism and blacks will get more coddling.
The saga continues. On March 1, someone put a white pillowcase over the head of a campus statue of Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Doctor Seuss. There is no evidence that this had anything to do with “racism” but university police say it looks like a Klan hood and are trying to get DNA and fingerprint evidence from the pillowcase to bring the perpetrator to justice. [Ellison Lodge, Diversity is Strength! It’s Also . . . The Incredible UCSD Hate Crime Hoax, VDARE.com, March 3, 2010.]
Felony Littering
The University of Missouri at Columbia is in uproar because two white students scattered cotton balls outside the campus black culture center during Black History Month. The students, 21-year-old senior Zachary Tucker and 19-year-old freshman Sean Fitzgerald, were arrested in early March and charged with one count each of “tampering” in the second degree (whatever that is), with hate crime enhancements — which makes it a Class D felony.
Blacks say the cotton balls were an overt act of racism intended to intimidate them by invoking slavery. The two suspects say it was an innocent prank, for which they have apologized. University chancellor Brady Deaton has temporarily suspended the students, but the black cultural center’s director wants them expelled.
On March 1, there was a forum for people who wanted to worry about race relations, which are said to be poor on the 30,0000-student campus. Three hundred people turned up, which means only one percent were worried enough to attend. [Janese Heavin, Two Students Arrested After Cotton Display, Columbia Daily Tribune, March 3, 2010.]
Insanity
Laith Alani is an Iraqi who immigrated to Britain as a child more than 20 years ago. In 1990, Mr. Alani sought to have a tattoo — a picture of an eagle above the words “Republic of Iraq” — removed from his arm because he suddenly discovered that such adornment was against his religion. The British health service referred Mr. Alani to two plastic surgeons, Michael Masser and Kenneth Paton. During the consultation, Mr. Alani attacked the surgeons, stabbing them to death. After his arrest, Mr. Alani told police, “It was a command from Allah. I have had visions from Allah and you can’t be more right than Allah.”
At trial, Mr. Alani pleaded guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility — he has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic — and was confined indefinitely to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Doctors began treating Mr. Alani with the anti-psychotic drug clozapine ten years ago, and say he has improved. He was transferred to a less secure facility in 2005, and in 2008, moved to a 12-bed residential care home in preparation for release.
At that point, the British Home Office said it would send Mr. Alani back to Iraq, in keeping with Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pledge to deport criminal aliens after they complete their sentences. Mr. Alani appealed the deportation order to Britain’s Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, where a panel led by immigration judge Lance Waumsley ruled that deporting Mr. Alani would violate his human rights and also endanger the people of Iraq. The panel argued that in Iraq he would probably not get his clozapine and could go crazy and attack people. The ruling adds that deporting Mr. Alani would violate his right to a private and family life because he moved to the UK with his parents as a child. Dorothy Paton, Dr. Paton’s widow, is appalled. “I think he should be deported,” she says. “I argued that at the time of the trial. I think he is going to be a danger to people in Britain. He is a dangerous man.”
The Asylum Immigration Tribunal routinely overturns attempts by the Home Office to deport foreign criminals. Even murderers and child molesters have used similar arguments to stay in Britain. [David Barrett, Killer Can’t Be Deported Because He Might Kill Again, Telegraph (London), Jan. 23, 2010.]
Too White
Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of Canada’s most diverse cities; non-whites, called “visible minorities” in Canada, make up 51 percent of the population. The city transformed itself into a majority non-white city virtually overnight; as recently as 1981, it was 93 percent white. A third of the population is Chinese, which has given rise to nicknames like Hongcouver and Vankong.
Non-whites are beefing that February’s Winter Olympics 2½ hour opening ceremony did not showcase them. “Out of 13 people [who carried the Olympic flag or acted as torch bearers] there isn’t one outstanding visible minority that you could think of?” asks Sukhi Sandhu, a Canadian-born South Asian. “Our nation is a cultural mosaic, and our diversity is our strength and frankly I am surprised in 2010 we need to continue educating our leaders on this Canadian value.” Peter Kwok, who leads an immigrant support agency for “Chinese Canadians” agrees. He says his Chinese friends “wish that they had a bit more portrayal of the multiculturalism in Canada.” Even the government was upset: “There should have been more French,” complained Federal Heritage Minister James Moore. [More Visible Minorities at Closing, VANOC Hints, CBC, Feb. 18, 2010.]
DeparDon’t
L’Autre Dumas is a new French film that tells a fictionalized story of 19th century French author Alexandre Dumas’s relationship with his assistant, Auguste Maquet. Maquet worked out the plots for some of Dumas’s most famous works, such as the Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers, and Dumas filled in the dialogue and other details. The movie is being criticized by non-whites, some Dumas experts, and black organizations for casting legendary French actor Gérard Depardieu in the title role. Dumas, the grandson of a former Haitian slave, was one-quarter black. He was mocked for his African features and he called himself un nègre. Mr. Depardieu appears in the film with wooly hair and darkened skin, but he is a blond, blue-eyed white man.
“In 150 years time could the role of Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig? Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?” asks Patrick Lozès, the president of the Council of Black Associations of France. His group says the producers missed a chance to celebrate ethnic diversity and remind the world of the Dumas’s Haitian origins. It also says the film gives Maquet too much credit and takes away from the quadroon’s achievements: “Possibly for commercial reasons they are whitewashing Dumas in order to blacken him further,” the group says, somewhat incoherently.
Both the producer and director defend the choice of Mr. Depardieu. “The vividness of Depardieu is the perfect embodiment of Dumas,” says producer Frank Le Wita. Director Safy Nebbou, who is multiracial himself, says, “It would have been an historic error to have chosen a mixed-blood actor . . . [Dumas] had blue eyes like Depardieu.” [Charles Brenner, Gérard Depardieu Sparks Racism Row Over Role as Mixed-Race Dumas, Times (London), Feb. 15, 2010.]
