American Renaissance magazine
Vol 4, No. 2	February 1993

 

CONTENTS

The Golden State Goes Brown, Part I
The Critics Find Much to Criticize
Life Along the Fault Line
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Golden State Goes Brown, Part I

Foolish and cowardly policies on immigration, welfare, and race are destroying what was once an American paradise.

by Marian Evans

Of all the states in the union, California has probably had a more durable and magical appeal for Americans than any other. Beginning with the gold rush in 1849, and for more than a century thereafter, California has been a beacon of promise and possibility. Blessed with a gentle climate, fertile soil, and breath-taking scenery, California has for generations seemed almost an earthly paradise.

California’s future will not be like its past. The last several decades have witnessed a tragic despoliation of the Californian paradise. Both federal and state governments have set what could have been a shining outpost of European civility on a sure course towards third-world squalor.

The Population Nightmare

The single greatest threat to California’s future is its burgeoning population. Thanks to waves of immigration and to high birth-rates among immigrants after they arrive, the state is growing almost as quickly as such developing countries as India and Brazil. Every year, there are about 700,000 more Californians, the vast majority of whom are non-white. Between 1920 and 1990 the state’s population increased ten fold and now stands at more than 31 million. At current rates of increase, there could be nearly ten million more Californians by the year 2000 and yet another ten million the decade after. The state is no longer the land of wide-open spaces; about 200,000 people who would like to camp in state parks are turned away every year because there is no room for them.

The population has not merely grown; it has changed. In the last 20 years, while the state’s population increased by half, the number of Californians on welfare doubled. During the same period the prison inmate population tripled.

Not coincidentally, the racial mix also changed dramatically. As recently as 1970, California was 77 percent “Anglo,” to use the currently fashionable term that reflects the Hispanic perspective. By 1990, the white percentage was down to 56 and dropping. In the same 20 years, the proportion of Hispanics more than doubled from 12 percent to 26 percent, Asians went from four percent to 10 percent, and blacks held steady at seven percent. By the year 2000 whites will be a minority, at 48 percent, and by 2010, just 17 years from now, their numbers may have dropped below 40 percent.

Of course, in many parts of the state, whites are already a minority. Los Angeles is only 40 percent white. Long Beach and San Jose are both about 35 percent white, and Oakland, which is 44 percent black and 15 percent Asian, is only 18 percent white. In towns like Huntington Park and Monterey Park, fewer than half the residents were even born in the United States, and a white face is a strange sight.

Immigration is just one of the reasons whites are becoming a minority. During the 1980s, California received more than 2,300,000 legal immigrants and unknown numbers of illegals, but once they arrive, non-whites have more babies than native-born whites. Hispanics have the highest life-time fertility figures of anyone, at nearly four children per woman. Blacks are next with 2.5, Asians have 2.4, and white women have only 1.7 children each. A fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman is necessary in order to maintain a population, so all of California’s non-white populations are growing naturally while the state’s whites are failing to maintain themselves. In 1992, 60 percent of the babies born in California were Hispanic, black, or Asian. One third of all babies were illegitimate.

Interestingly, over the past several years, Hispanic fertility rates in California have risen. According to some studies, Hispanics may have more children when they come to the United States than they would have had if they had stayed home. This reflects their improved circumstances; welfare and Medicaid are more conducive to child-bearing than is the hard-scrabble poverty of Mexico or El Salvador.

Non-white fertility rates are reflected in California’s student population. White children are already a minority of 45 percent in public schools. In southern California, many schools are overwhelmingly non-white. In Los Angeles County, two-thirds of all school children live in homes where English is not spoken. Massive immigration coupled with third-world fertility rates means that school enrollments will increase at more than two million every decade. Just to keep up, California would have to build one new 650-student school every day — for ever.

Diversity

The huge recent influx of non-whites means that California has the largest overseas population of many nationalities. More Mexicans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and Filipinos live in California than in any place outside their homelands. Fully ten percent of the population of El Salvador now lives in California. At the same time, California has the highest concentration of certain nationalities in the United States. Forty-three percent of America’s Chinese live there as do 52 percent of the Filipinos, 46 percent of the Vietnamese and 52 percent of the Hmong.

California is now such a babel of mutually uncomprehending peoples that some San Jose gas pumps have “Please pay attendant before pumping” written on them in five different languages. The application form for admission to San Francisco City College offers 27 different choices for “Ethnic Identity.” It takes a bit of hunting to track down “White Non-Hispanic.”

What is this mish-mash contributing to California? A Hispanic is 1.84 times more likely to be on welfare than a white, an Asian is 1.89 times more likely, and a black is 5.7 times more likely. Immigrants, no matter where they are from, are 1.85 times more likely to be on welfare than whites. The Hmong have been notably incapable of adapting their primitive tribal ways to 20th century America. Years after they came to California, more than half are still on welfare and few have bothered to learn English. Nearly half of the state’s 500,000 “refugees” are on welfare. Since 1970, state money spent on the indigent just for medical expenses increased 20-fold and is now greater than the gross national products of Nicaragua and Panama combined.

There is ample reason to be on the dole in California. A family of three gets $663 a month, tax-free, in addition to food stamps and subsidized housing. That same family would need to earn $1,300 a month in order to have the same after-tax income it gets for doing nothing. California now spends $14 billion a year on welfare and free medicine.

Like virtually all other states, California offers public education and welfare to illegal aliens. It would be interesting to know what goes through the mind of a Mexican who discovers that it is possible to walk across the border and become a permanent guest of the people of California.

Often, it is pregnant women who cross the border, since the children they bear on American soil automatically become U.S. citizens. This accounts for why 66 percent of the 44,000 births in Los Angeles County hospitals in 1991 were to mothers who were illegal aliens. The medical costs of delivery alone were more than $28 million, and since nearly all of these new American citizens were indigent at birth they immediately went on welfare. Of course, it is their mothers who receive the checks, and though they are themselves in the country illegally it is a delicate matter to deport the mother of an infant American. In Los Angeles County alone, over 200,000 citizen-children of illegal aliens are collecting welfare. Of the 2.8 million Californians on welfare — a figure equal to the population of Oregon — approximately one third are thought to be illegal aliens.

A slightly larger proportion of the people getting free medicine in California are probably illegals. Courts have forbidden hospitals to inquire about the legal status of patients, even for expensive, long-term treatments like kidney dialysis. Dialysis is virtually unobtainable in many Central American countries, so patients are especially eager to come to California.

Los Angeles County is slowly waking up to how expensive it is to play host to millions of illegals. The county alone spent $276 million on services for illegals in 1991 and the federal government kicked in another $140 million. Part of the expense is for criminal processing. Four hundred illegal aliens enter the California prison system every month. Illegals commit over half the murders in Orange County and one third of the rapes and murders in San Diego County.

The economic structure that supports this massive system of services and give-aways is breaking down. In 1990, there were 6.21 California taxpayers for every welfare recipient. Ten years later, the ratio was projected to be fewer than three to one. Part of the reason for this change is that in 1992 and 1993, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were granted amnesty under the 1986 immigration law became or were to become eligible for welfare payments. As part of their amnesty applications they were obliged to show that they were not public charges, but now that the processing period is over they are free to go back on the dole.

Welfare is only part of the burden that taxpayers must shoulder. The broader dependent population of California includes prisoners, non-working students, retired people, and consumers of state-funded medical care. Currently, California has only 1.2 taxpayers for every recipient of tax dollars. By the end of the 1990s, there are likely to be only 0.8 taxpayers for every recipient.

All this puts terrible pressure on the state’s finances. While the charity budget climbs, the traditional functions of government wither. Although travel on California’s highways has more than doubled since 1970, the number of miles of highway lanes have gone up only 15 percent. In the 1950s and 1960s, before “social” programs tore such a large hole in state spending, 20 cents out of every state dollar was spent on capital projects like roads and canals. By the 1980s, it was only five cents, and most of that money was borrowed. Now, in a state-by-state ranking of spending per person on highways, California is dead last. The once-fabled California freeways are a clogged morass of frustration and ill-temper.

By 1992, the state had an $11 billion deficit, and in July, Moody’s downgraded its bonds. This added $113 million to the year’s interest expenses. For part of the summer, while the legislature was trying to pass a budget, California ran out of money and started paying its employees in IOUs. The state was ready to consider nearly any proposal to save money, so long as it was not a “racist” measure that would deny benefits to illegals. It very nearly decided to raise the age at which children would be admitted to kindergarten, which would have saved $325 million.

California will soon go broke if it continues its prodigal policies of give-aways to all comers, and Governor Pete Wilson was once actually brave enough to suggest that immigration is part of the problem. This idea was hooted down by Hispanic groups and liberal editorialists, and in any case, immigration is a federal matter over which no single state has control. Even if immigration were to stop tomorrow, the state has become a volatile ethnic mix that could ignite at any time.

The concluding part of this article examines growing racial tensions in California and describes the solution that increasing numbers of whites have found.

ARTICLE

The Critics Find Much to Criticize

Paved With Good Intentions, the bare-knuckles account of race relations by the editor of American Renaissance, has slowly been gaining critical attention. Some reviewers have clearly been baffled by the book-impressed by its careful research and relentless logic but unwilling to accept its conclusions.

For example, the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 30, 1992) called the book “easily the most comprehensive indictment of the race-conscious civil rights policies of the past three decades.” It then went on to complain that it “too easily dismisses the continuing impact of racism, which most blacks face every day of their lives,” and concluded that the book will do very little to “improve understanding.”

The Forward (Dec. 4, 1992), the national Jewish newspaper based in New York, appeared to be even more confused. On the one hand, it wrote that the book’s “straight talk suggests hope of an exhilarating breakthrough: a chance to move on finally toward a more accurate diagnosis.” The paper also called the book a “deep and powerfully damning indictment of the way that most Americans have come to think about race.”

Despite all this, the Forward concluded that “it’s hard to imagine that it will spur much rethinking,” because of such flaws as its “smug tone and blatantly sloppy arguments.” The reviewer offered no examples of either.

The Baltimore Sun (Nov. 23, 1992) had no mixed feelings about the book at all; it hated it. This is how its reviewer paraphrased the book’s thesis: “American race relations have gone to hell in a hand basket, and it’s all the fault of those horrible, horrible Negroes.” He accused the book of “indulging in racist statements” and “Dixie-bashing,” and called it “the most scurrilous work about American blacks since Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman was published in 1905.”

A black reviewer for the Detroit Free Press (Nov. 8, 1992) called the book a “mean-spirited tirade” and warns that its “relentlessly bitter tone . . . serves as a warning of troubles ahead” because so many whites are likely to agree with it. The Free Press did not dismiss it out of hand, however. It went on to say, “Some might denounce Taylor as a bigot — perhaps even a genocidal one — but it’s not that simple. For all the spite and anger in his arguments, there’s an uncomfortably large portion of truth.”

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Oct. 18, 1992) published what has been the most unemotionally factual review so far. It describes the book’s central arguments and discreetly applauds what it sees as an effort to open an honest discussion of racial questions. One Arkansas man read the review, bought the book, and then ordered 50 more copies.

So far, only one reviewer has really understood what the book sets out to do. Writing in the Jan. 18, 1993 issue of National Review, Peter Brimelow says this: “The single greatest strength of Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions is its massive and merciless crushing of this type of hysterical denial [of the facts], which currently paralyzes all discussion of race relations in America. Considered entirely by itself, this achievement makes his book the most important to be published on the subject for many years.” Mr. Brimelow also recounts the central arguments of the book and even includes a frank account of the horrors of anti-white crime committed by blacks. This is the only review so far that has been more than tepid — and it is openly enthusiastic.

William F. Buckley has not yet bothered to read the book, but he cribbed from National Review to write a recent column. Mr. Buckley called the book’s thesis “bizarre,” but then went on to repeat, word for word, some of the arguments that the National Review article found most convincing. Perhaps Mr. Buckley meant “startling” rather than “bizarre.”

Samuel Francis, who also mentioned the book in his syndicated column, has obviously read it. He called Paved With Good Intentions “a shattering new book,” and quoted from it at some length on anti-white crimes and on the decline in white racial consciousness that accounts for the media silence about such crimes.

In some respects, it is a small miracle for so heterodox a book to have been published and to get any critical notice at all. Of course, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and virtually every other paper have ignored it. The New York Times Book Review, which is probably the single most influential books publication in the country, has also ignored it. Presumably, these papers think the silent treatment is the most effective weapon against dangerous ideas.

Talk radio, which reflects the views of Americans far more closely than either television or newspapers, has been more receptive. A blizzard of talk shows — sometimes as many as six in one day — has informed listeners in some parts of the country about the book. Television, however, has kept at a safe distance.

A very gratifying number of AR readers have bought the book directly from us, and many have sent complimentary letters in return.

BOOK REVIEW

Life Along the Fault Line

An unblinking look at racial friction in an American city.

Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community, Elijah Anderson, University of Chicago Press, 1990, 279 pp., $11.95 (paperback)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Despite the official lip service that Americans pay to racial integration, most whites live far away from underclass blacks and are glad they do. However, in a multi-racial society, some whites will, inevitably, live along the racial fault lines. Even middle-class whites sometimes live close to the ghetto and share parks and sidewalks with underclass blacks. How does this change the texture of life?

Street Wise, a fascinating account of just how powerfully race affects city life, is the result of more than ten years of careful observation of how the races deal with each other. The author of this remarkable study, Professor Elijah Anderson of the University of Pennsylvania, is black. He moves freely among whites but can also study an underclass world that is off limits to whites. He holds a conventional, liberal view of American race relations, but he faithfully reports what he finds, even when it contradicts that view.

Prof. Anderson never mentions the name of the city he studied, but it is probably Philadelphia. He writes mainly about a part of town, which he calls the Village, that was rediscovered by whites in the 1960s and is slowly becoming gentrified. Along with the attractions of its gracious old houses and convenience to the city center, the Village has a serious drawback that keeps gentrification in check: It borders on a black slum, which Prof. Anderson calls Northton.

In the 1950s, Northton was a well-kept, black working-class neighborhood, in which illegitimacy and welfare were thought to be deeply shameful. However, when housing in the suburbs became available to successful blacks they fled Northton and it is now home to all the underclass failings of crime, poverty, illegitimacy, welfare, and drugs. The working-class blacks who still live in Northton despise the underclass, though they do not use that term; instead, they talk about “street niggers,” “lowlifes,” and “pipers” (people who smoke crack pipes).

Welfare and Illegitimacy

The underclass thrives amidst welfare and illegitimacy. As Prof. Anderson explains, the young men of Northton take pride in fathering babies by different mothers and in doing nothing to support them. Sexual conquest and the deceit it requires are central to their lives, and the more blatantly they can exploit women the higher their status among other men. Marriage is the ultimate defeat. As Prof. Anderson writes, “If he [a young black] admits paternity and ‘does right’ by the girl, his peer group likely will label him a chump, a square, or a fool.”

The young women long for marriage but console themselves with babies, and there is much rejoicing over a new-born child no matter how desperate the mother’s circumstances. Teenage girls treat their babies like dolls, to be clothed as expensively as possible and paraded around the community. Mothers gain status if they have good-looking, light-skinned babies that other girls admire.

However, once a child is no longer a cute toddler, the mother is likely to lose interest in it and have another doll-baby to clothe and exhibit.

Consequently, as soon as they can walk, many children in Northton grow up with virtually no adult supervision.

Occasionally, if a woman can prove paternity she will sue the father for support. This is called “getting papers” on a man, or “going downtown on him” and makes sense only if the man has a real job. A man may therefore avoid work because he knows how many women would “go downtown” on him and how little would be left of his pay check.

For both men and women in Northton, a baby and the welfare income it brings are economic staples. On “mother’s day,” when the checks arrive, fathers appear and try to share the temporary wealth. As Prof. Anderson explains, “In cold economic terms a baby can be an asset . . . [W]omen receive money from welfare for having babies, and men sometimes act as prostitutes to pry the money from them.” Welfare is what fuels this vicious cycle of reckless procreation, but Prof. Anderson refrains from criticizing it.

Crack cocaine has had an appalling effect on Northton. People lie about in filth on the floors of crack houses smoking pipes and jabbing themselves with needles. Neighbors line up with television sets, stereos, food stamps, and anything else drug dealers accept in exchange for drugs. Women may wear no underwear so they can have quick sex in exchange for money or crack. These emaciated, glassy-eyed “crack whores,” are universal objects of contempt, and drug dealers take pride in having dragged them down. They joke about stuck-up girls who refused them sex in high school but who are “now doing everything in the book.”

The Color of Crime

Along with the drugs has come a huge crime wave and crime has a distinctive face. Everyone in Northton and in the Village — black and white, young and old — is afraid of young black men. They are a hostile, unpredictable element and their presence in a public place always means potential danger. Even young blacks recognize the menace. This is how one describes how he acts in the street:

I watch my back. I observe everything, look in the bushes . . . I never cross the street when I see dudes [other black men] coming . . . When you cross the street, that means you’re scared or you can’t fight . . . If someone bump into me on purpose, I keep on rollin’.

Just as Arabs did in uninhabited deserts and Medieval men-at-arms did in periods of lawlessness, young blacks have developed a set of greetings that are used to gauge hostile intent. At night, there is something like the military’s “rules of engagement,” that govern chance encounters with unknown blacks. It is important not to approach too quickly or come too close, to appear to be following someone, etc. Even the author, much as he decries “racial stereotyping,” describes the elaborate avoidance procedure he used when he found himself alone in the street at 3:00 a.m. with an unknown black.

Black women in Northton structure their lives around fear of crime. If they buy a new appliance, they do it in secret. They may then cut up the cardboard box it came in and put it out with the garbage piece by piece. This way no one will see the box and think there is something worth stealing in the house.

Other women deliberately ingratiate themselves with teen-age neighbors by baking cakes for them or giving them candy. They wear their purses under their coats and wear no jewelry. If they are approached by a group of young blacks they will pretend to know some of them, and greet them with shouts of “Have you seen your sister?” or “How’s Bea?”

Ploys like this do not work for white women, who are helpless prey. Young blacks know very well how much fear they inspire and sometimes feign an assault only to laugh uproariously when whites cower in terror. Some whites carry “mugger’s money” so they will have at least a few dollars to give up; thugs who find no money on their victims have been known to thrash them.

When it comes to street encounters between whites and blacks, explains Prof. Anderson, “blacks have the upper hand.” They know that whites will run rather than fight. Blacks have the reputation of being willing to kill a man if provoked, so they can always make a white back down. As a result, says Prof. Anderson, “the white male is not taken seriously on the streets . . .”

Because whites are weak and despised, many young blacks taunt and insult then when they meet whites in public. One generalized insult to all whites is to walk down the sidewalk with a boom box blaring loud rap music. It is a way for blacks to claim the entire area within earshot as their turf. In the Village, impotent whites submit to this humiliation whereas if anyone walks though Northton making a noise, locals are likely to beat him up and break his radio. Whites are the best targets for robbery, since a black runs little risk of resistance or injury if he assaults one. Interestingly, the only thing that changes the balance of power between black and white is a dog. Almost all blacks are reportedly afraid of dogs and give a white with a dog the right-of-way. As Prof. Anderson says:

In the working-class black subculture, ‘dogs’ does not mean ‘dogs in the house,’ but usually connotes dogs tied up outside, guarding the backyard, biting trespassers bent on trouble . . . When they [working-class blacks] see a white adult on his knees kissing a dog, the sight may turn their stomachs — one more piece of evidence attesting to the peculiarities of their white neighbors.

In both the Village and in Northton, it is taken for granted that danger and hostility are one-way streets. As a black explains to Prof. Anderson, he could take an apartment in the Village and no white would trouble him, but a white who strays into Northton on a Saturday night is clearly in danger.

Prof. Anderson points out that many Northton blacks are ashamed of the reputation they have earned among whites. Some young men who understand why whites fear them, may go out of their ways to be polite to whites during chance encounters, and even explain that they are “not like that.”

“Blaming the Victim”

Working blacks, who still believe in honesty and diligence, are more openly contemptuous and unforgiving of underclass blacks than whites are. To Prof. Anderson’s chagrin, they are perfectly willing to “blame the victim”: “[T]here are a lot o’ guys out there who just don’t wanta work . . .” says one man; “There’s a different kind of black man today.” A retired black tells him, “I’m getting like some of the white folks do. I don’t want to be bothered with some of us neither.”

Whites in the village struggle against “racism” and recount their own muggings in earnestly race-neutral terms. Nevertheless, they learn to stay off the streets not just at night but also in the afternoon when the high school lets out. They learn elaborate evasion routines to avoid walking past young blacks. They put bars on their windows and buy expensive burglar alarms. Prof. Anderson finds that the new generation of yuppies is less forgiving, less “sensitive” about race, but older whites still talk about the benefits of diversity and wonder why they do not have more black friends.

Prof. Anderson concludes his book with a homily on how crime and racial hostility will get worse unless the government spends more money, but his heart does not seem to be in it. Elsewhere, he sums up the problem in the following house-that-Jack-built manner:

The yuppie who is mugged and the [black] kid who does it; the old head [hard-working, older black man] who loses the respect of the kid, who impregnates the teenage girl, who goes on welfare, which raises taxes, which drives out local companies, which causes unemployment, which causes homelessness, which causes crime, which depresses property values and drives out middle-class residents. . .

The whole dismal cycle begins with the young black who mugs the yuppie and makes the teenager pregnant. Government wrote the welfare check that helped bring the young black into the world in the first place. Government spending will not reform him.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Crossing the Bar

The bar association of the city of New York has officially recommended that the New York State bar exam be overhauled so that more non-whites can pass it. The association admits that it has no idea just what it might be about the exam that is biased against non-whites — it did not even bother to look over a copy of the exam — but it is convinced that test bias is a serious problem that must be corrected.

Ironically, the bar association does not even know what the disproportion in white and non-white pass rates is because the Board of Law Examiners, which administers the test, does not keep statistics by race. In fact the examiners do not even keep records by name of applicant; in order to eliminate any kind of bias in grading, each test paper is given a number so that the results are scored anonymously. The New York City bar association says all this is just a ruse by the examiners so they can avoid collecting statistics by race that would show how biased the test really is.

The bar association has several reasons for thinking that non-whites are more likely to fail. First of all, California keeps racial statistics on pass rates and has found that first-time test-takers fail at the following rates: blacks — 69 percent, Hispanics — 60 percent, Asians — 43 percent, whites — 27 percent. New York State law schools informally reported to the bar association that their graduates were failing the bar exam at about these rates.

What to do? The bar association considered recommending that the bar exam be abolished. Short of that, it wants the exam systematically vetted for “bias” and wants the Board of Law Examiners to hold training sessions for applicants. But what it most wants are accurate racial statistics on pass rates so it can monitor how “unfair” the examination is. [The Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Vol. 47, No. 5, June 1992, pp. 464ff.]

Of course, these statistics will only show that even after college and law school, most blacks and Hispanics do not learn enough to pass the exam. The next step would be to use racial statistics for a kind of “race-norming,” so that a certain proportion of blacks is always given a passing grade despite inadequate performance on the test.

Spurning Harvard

Although 171 blacks were admitted to this year’s freshman class at Harvard, only 95 chose to attend. The admissions department decided to find out why the other 76 went elsewhere. The most common reason was that Harvard does not give all blacks full scholarships. Blacks from rich families have to pay their own way just like white people. Other universities pick up the tab for all blacks no matter how rich their parents, so those schools are more attractive. Several of the blacks who turned down Harvard to get full scholarships elsewhere came from families with incomes of more than $100,000. [Affirmative Action Queens, Heterodoxy, Oct. 1992.]

First Things First

Somalia is reportedly unable either to feed itself or let foreigners distribute food. This explains our current forced-feeding mission to that country. Something Somalia does manage to do is import $100 million a year worth of a plant called khat. Chewing khat leaves releases an amphetamine stimulant favored by bandits and Somali war lords. People are restless and irrational when they chew khat, and there is always more shooting when the supply is good.

The best khat comes from Kenya, and must be flown in daily while it is still fresh. A khat chewer may go through $6.00-worth in a day, which could buy enough grain to feed six people for a week. At that rate, the $100 million a year the country spends on khat could feed the estimated 3.6 million people of Somalia for about seven months.

Here They Come

One of the inevitable consequences of our military venture in Somalia will be that large numbers of Somali “refugees” will end up in the United States. The city of Chicago has gotten its first taste. A Lutheran group spent more than $30,000 on air fare to fly in Hussein Hassan Mohamed, along with one of his two wives, and 22 of his children (ages 4 to 36). The Lutherans also bought clothes, food, and household goods for the Hassans, and rented three apartments for them.

The Hassans speak little English and need a great deal of medical attention, but appear to like their new home. “We’d like to stay here,” Mr. Hassan told a reporter. What about ever returning to Somalia? “I might go see it and visit it,” he says.

Here Come Some More

Anyone who doubts that the operations in Somalia will result in a flood of “refugees” need only consider the case of Iraq. Twelve thousand of the Iraqi soldiers captured during the Gulf War refused to be repatriated, and another 17,000 fled the country in the aftermath of the war. Saudi Arabia has built comfortable camps for these people but refuses to grant them asylum and does not let them outside the camps. Ever the easy touch, the United States has agreed to take 3,000 Iraqis under a resettlement program that is expected to cost $21 million. Since tens of thousands are still stuck in Saudi Arabia we can be sure that many more will eventually come to America. If we end up with thousands of people with whom we were at war, how many more will we take in of a people we are presumably trying to rescue from starvation?

Up From the Projects

Readers may be interested in a new book called Up From the Projects: Noteworthy African Americans Who Once Lived in Public Housing. Included in this group are Ohio congressman Louis Stokes and his brother Carl Stokes, who is a municipal court judge in Cleveland. Football player Leonard Lyles, producer Keenen Ivory Wayans, and Milwaukee School Superintendent Howard Fuller are also reported to have once lived in public housing. [Betty Winston Baye, When we leave our children behind, Louisville C-J, no date or page.]

Death to the White Man

The Pan African Congress (PAC) of South Africa has a simple way of seeking “justice” for the past practices of apartheid: Kill all white people. George Mpaya, head of the PAC youth movement explains that the strategy of elimination will be “one settler, one bullet.”

“They are not being attacked as whites per se,” he explains; “They are attacked as defenders of the apartheid system.” The reasoning is that every white over the age of six or seven has benefited unjustly from apartheid and must therefore die. Mr. Mpaya concedes that some white South Africans have opposed apartheid, but they are too few to worry about. “There is no way we can punish ourselves by trying to search for one innocent person out of a million people.”

The only good white is a dead white. Five people were killed and 40 injured in the first two “operations,” carried out in November and December. Many more are promised. [Jerelyn Eddings, Enemies of the People, Louisville C-J, Dec. 13, 1992, A21.]

’Twas the Season

In Chicago, employees of Montgomery Ward, readers of the Chicago Sun-Times, and listeners to WBBM radio joined a campaign to buy and donate hundreds of Christmas gifts to be given to poor children. Some of the gifts were taken to a virtually all-black school in the Cabrini-Green housing project, where 30 parents volunteered to sort and arrange them for presentation to the children. During the sorting session, parents unwrapped presents and took whatever they wanted, in a scene that the school’s principal, Marshall Taylor, described as “complete chaos.”

Within 24 hours, Montgomery Ward found replacements for the 300 stolen gifts. [New batch of gifts given school after looting by parents, Houston Chronicle, 12/25/92.]

Guarding the Border

Mexico has halted the import of second-hand clothing from the United States because it claims that much of it is infected with herpes, syphilis, and AIDS. It was news to American health officials that clothing could catch herpes, but Mexican customs officials said they were barring entry to tons of clothing as a health measure. Customs officials also conceded that halting imports would help Mexican clothing manufacturers. [Reuters, Mexico stops U.S. used clothes imports, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1992.]

Low Tide for the Ocean of Soul

It has been widely reported that the Texas Southern University (TSU) marching band was disbanded after some of its members went on a $22,000 shoplifting spree during a trip to Japan. It was considerably less widely reported that TSU is “historically black” and that the band, known as the Ocean of Soul, is all black.

Tokyo shopkeepers, who scarcely ever suffer from shoplifting, take few precautions against theft and sometimes even display merchandise on shelves set up on the sidewalk. Even so, they were amazed at the brazenness of band members who made off with VCRs, cordless telephones, and CD players.

Police held up the band’s bus on the way to the airport and threatened to detain it indefinitely if the stolen merchandise were not returned. All but $3,200 of it then materialized. The police said they did not make any arrests because the thieves could not be positively identified. Shopkeepers said the bandsmen were dressed in matching outfits and all looked alike.

In a Dec. 17 editorial, the Houston Chronicle clucked over the damage the band had done to the overseas image of blacks: “Their actions only serve to confirm in the Japanese mind what they already think of black people — that they are a troublesome lot of inferiors given to anti-social behavior.” Indeed, as one young Japanese woman told reporters, “I was surprised to hear about the incident, but then I heard it was blacks . . .” The Japanese press also reported disapprovingly that the thieves showed no remorse for what they had done.

Back in Texas, there was more huffing and puffing when an investigation revealed that more than half of the 120 bandsmen who went to Japan were not even TSU students. Nevertheless, one TSU alumna who is an activist in Houston’s Fourth Ward, could not understand what the fuss was about. “No one was hurt; no one was lynched or burned,” pointed out Gladys House; “I just don’t understand why a big issue is made out of this incident.” She blamed the furor on racism. [Houston Chronicle, Dec. 17 through Dec. 21. Best single source, Ken Marantz, Lure of ‘better bargain’ caught TSU band, Houston Chronicle, Dec. 20, 1992, p. 1C.]

Progress in Baltimore

AR has long urged obligatory use of Norplant, the recently-approved implantable contraceptive, for welfare recipients. It has also urged that Norplant be made widely available at inner-city high schools. The city of Baltimore is making encouraging moves in that direction. In January it offered free implants to students at a special high school for students who are pregnant or who have already had children. The plan is to extend the program to other schools where there are many pregnancies.

For the last two years, other kinds of contraceptives have been available free to all Baltimore high school students and to some junior high school students. However, many girls forgot or didn’t bother to use contraceptives and got pregnant anyway. [Tamar Lewin, Baltimore school clinics to offer birth control by surgical implant, NYT, 12/4/92, p. A1.] Once Norplant is inserted under the skin, a woman is sterile for up to five years or until the implant is removed.

Now that free, absolutely reliable contraception is available to poor blacks, it will be revealing to see how many still have babies and go on welfare. If many still go on welfare, there will be more calls either for the elimination of welfare or for obligatory use of Norplant.

Census Report

In December, the U.S. Census Bureau revised its population predictions for the next century. Americans are having babies at a higher rate than expected, and more immigrants are pouring in. Just three years ago, the Bureau thought the U.S. population would take 41 years to gain another 50 million. Now, they figure it will take only 17 years, and we will be at the 300 million mark by the year 2010. Since only 10 percent of immigrants are white, and since whites have the lowest fertility rate of all races, the Census Bureau calmly predicts whites will be a minority in a little over 50 years.

Something else that lowers the percentage of whites is the fact that most non-whites live longer than whites. Asians have a life expectancy of 83 years. American Indians and Hispanics, who are essentially the same race, live to be 78. The white life expectancy is 76 and that of blacks is 70. [Ramon McLeod, U.S. Population in 2050 will be half minorities, Dec. 4, 1992, p. 1.] For years, the difference in black and white life expectancy has been attributed to “racism.” The fact that Asians and Hispanics outlive whites doesn’t fit well with the “racism” theory, and is scarcely ever talked about.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Congratulations on having written the best book on race relations to be published in the past thirty years. Given today’s political climate, I suspect the book was received in most quarters with hostility, if not outright neglect. A discussion of the publication, promotion, and reviews of the book would make a very interesting article. In my opinion, the reception and fate of this book are important auguries for the future of race relations.

Frederick Pereira, Great Neck, N. Y.

Please see the article on page 4.

Sir — I recently purchased Paved With Good Intentions, and greatly admired its cogent summation of America’s seemingly never-ending racial crisis. However, I must express one complaint: you obediently label Orientals as “Asians.” Asia includes the Indian sub-continent; surely you were not talking about Pakistanis.

This is particularly annoying in light of your chapter on “Double Standards,” in which you effectively spotlight the guilty white scramble to relabel blacks in order to placate them. If AR can call the “physically challenged” what they are — crippled — then surely Mongolians can be called Orientals.

Jeffrey Holmes, Arlington, Mass.

Sir — With reference to his letter of Jan. 1993, I share Mr. Mabrito’s concern over the burgeoning population of non-whites vis A vis whites. However, I strongly disagree with his solution [of encouraging whites to have more children]. The last thing this country and the world needs is more people. We certainly cannot outbreed the non-whites and any attempt to do so would only exacerbate the problem.

We must control our borders. All immigration, illegal and legal, must be stopped. Also, we must change our welfare, housing, and tax laws so as to stop subsidizing and encouraging indiscriminate breeding among the most non-productive members of society.

I am not optimistic.

Bailey W. Norfleet, Woodlawn, Tenn.

Sir — I’m sorry to report a bad boo boo in your article about Prof. Philippe Rushton’s research on race and head size in the January AR. You say that “the prestigious British journal, Science,” reiected his research. Science is American; Nature is British. Which was it? Your opponents do not forget such errors!

Name Withheld, Santa Barbara, Cal.

Nostra culpa. It was the British journal, Nature that turned down Prof. Rushton’s study. — Ed

Sir — It seems to me that the January issue of American Renaissance pushed further than ever into forbidden territory. The cover story seemed to suggest that racial integration can never be expected to work, and the book review was nothing short of a defense of eugenics and of William Shockley. In just one issue you took on what are probably the two holiest cows in America: the doctrine that “diversity” and integration are inevitable and therefore wonderful; and the doctrine that all races are equally intelligent. I believe I’ve already gotten a year’s worth of excitement in the January issue alone. What’s next?

Paul Hardman, Bremerton, Wash.

Sir — I read with interest your Dec. 1992 account of Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles and the difficulties blacks and Hispanics face when there are no more whites left to pay the price for affirmative action. You can’t very well give non-whites special treatment when they are the only people applying for jobs.

This reminds me of busing. The theory was that black children were suddenly going to start doing first-rate work if they attended the same schools as whites. Of course, when blacks showed up, many whites left. This made busing advocates all the more desperate to send black children ever further in pursuit of whites. One Los Angeles judge even ordered a school district to get on with busing so as to “make the most efficient use of increasingly scarce white students as possible.” The idea seemed to be that if there were enough white faces in the room everyone would get good grades.

Of course, it didn’t work. The black-white gap in school performance stayed the same, whether classrooms were integrated or not.

Affirmative action will run the same course. Just as they were pushed out of public schools, whites are being pushed out by the employers — usually local governments — that are the most fanatical proponents of affirmative action. Try to find a white face in a Washington DC city government office or at a Department of Motor Vehicles office in southern California. Eventually, whites stop even applying for those jobs, and move away from the area. All the jobs are then held by non-whites and government services, just like the public schools, become abysmally bad.

This brings us back to Los Angeles. What person — of any race — would go to a hospital with an all-black and Hispanic staff if he had any choice in the matter?

Alex Coombs, Stockton, Cal.