American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 3 No.9	September 1992

 

CONTENTS

A Conversation with Arthur Jensen, Part II
As Long as it’s Black . . .
From Workhouse to Welfare
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

A Conversation With Arthur Jensen, Part II

Will changes in the American population destroy our culture?

In the first part of this interview, Prof. Jensen spoke of how his views on the heritability of intelligence and on racial differences in IQ have become widely accepted among specialists. In this concluding part, he speaks about group distributions of other traits and describes the dangers of ignoring the laws of genetics.

American Renaissance: What about traits other than intelligence being differently distributed from group to group?

Prof. Jensen: Well, I think that’s very likely, too. It just hasn’t been studied very intensively. I think it’s interesting, for example, that nearly any famous concert violinist in this century that you could name is Jewish. It’s partly cultural, because there are so many famous Jewish musicians that Jewish parents tend to give their children music lessons to see if they’ve got one of these talented kids, so there’s something in the selection process there, too, but I think there’s undoubtedly a genetic factor in being a [Jascha] Heifetz or a [Fritz] Kreisler, or something like that.

AR: I know that in their book, Crime and Human Behavior, Prof. [Richard] Hernnstein and Prof. [James Q.] Wilson talk about — they’re very tentative about this, but — a possible difference in levels of impulsiveness in groups. They see an unwillingness to defer gratification as a psychological predisposition, one of the predisposing factors to crime. They suspect that traits like that could be distributed differently from group to group.

Jensen: Right. Any personality trait of that nature you examine, of course, has a genetic component, which means that it’s conceivable that groups can differ on such a trait for genetic reasons. Again, like intelligence, there’s no good way of proving this with the present technology in genetics, but it’s a plausible hypothesis, certainly.

AR: To get back to the intelligence question again, if society were to recognize the genetic origin of intelligence to the extent that you think it should, can you sketch out for us some of the things that society would do differently?

Jensen: There has to be much more emphasis than there is now on a more highly differentiated educational system — an educational system that allows people to develop to the maximum in whatever way their own potentials and abilities allow. So you would have much more educational diversity. You wouldn’t expect the same goals for everyone. Another would be a difference in the timing of the introduction of educational materials. There’d be a greater recognition of something that used to be called educational readiness for learning. We know that children differ enormously in their readiness to learn to read, to deal with numbers, and so forth.

Nearly all children within the normal range — by that I mean IQs of 70 and up, who don’t have organic brain damage and aren’t severely retarded — they can learn to read, provided it’s introduced in the right way at the right age. If you introduce a child who is in the 80 or so IQ range to reading at the usual age of six, he’s much more likely to fail than children with IQs of 100 or higher, and much more likely to be given up on by the time he’s at an age at which he could read with the same level of facility as the average six-year-old — that is to say, when he’s nine or ten. The average black entering first grade is about a year behind in level of development. A year is a crucial difference when it comes to readiness for reading and arithmetic.

AR: It’s my view, and this is a somewhat radical one, that a sense of racial difference, even independent of actual measurable differences, is sufficiently great so that any society that attempts to build a multi-racial nation is setting up what may be an insuperable obstacle for its own development. I think that to an unfortunate degree the mere fact of racial differences is something that human beings are almost always conscious of. For that reason, a society such as the United States, that is deliberately and explicitly trying to build a society on the notion that race can be made not to matter — which is in fact the unspoken assumption in America today — is doomed to failure.

Jensen: Now what if you had different racial groups that are compatible in abilities, general values and standards of living, as the Asians here seem to be? I mean, they’ve been conspicuously successful in our society, and what problems they’ve had have largely stemmed from their success.

AR: Well, it seems to me that if there are two racial groups that can live side by side in harmony, it appears to be whites and Asians. But the way our immigration policies work today, 90% of legal immigrants are non-white, overwhelmingly Hispanic, and it seems to me that the U.S. is making a terrible mistake by continuing to mix people from all the corners of the world who are as disparate as people can possibly be. It seems to me that one doesn’t necessarily have to posit racial differences in intelligence or characteristics to nevertheless fear for the future, perhaps even the survival, of a nation that pretends that race doesn’t matter.

Jensen: That may be true. But again, I’m wondering about the degree to which differences in basic characteristics may be at the basis of that. Where the differences in basic characteristics are not conspicuous, as in the case of Asians and whites, and when persons can fit in and do the same kinds of jobs and do them as well as anyone else, it may work. See, there are blacks who fit in this way too — who do all right.

But the black population in this country is in a sense burdened by the large number of persons who are at a level of g that is no longer very relevant to a highly industrialized, technological society. Once you get below IQs of 80 or 75, which is the cut-off for mental retardation in the California School System, children are put into special classes. These persons are not really educable up to a level for which there’s any economic demand. The question is, what do you do about them? They have higher birth-rates than the other end of the distribution.

People are shocked and disbelieving when you tell them that about one in four blacks in our population are in that category — below 75. Judge Peckham [in a case in which he ruled that black students in California could not be given IQ tests because the tests were biased against blacks] could not believe it when this was explained to him in a trial that lasted a year. He said, “Well, if there were twice as many blacks in classes for the retarded as whites, maybe that would seem not impossible, but since there are four times as many, there’s got to be something wrong with the tests. There’s got to be something wrong with the way you’re classifying them.”

AR: Well, what do you think should be done?

Jensen: Well, as Lloyd Humphreys said — he’s a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois who testified at the Larry P trial [about IQ tests for blacks in California] — the best thing the black community could do would be to limit the birth-rate among the least able members, which is of course a eugenic proposal. He was testifying on the side of the state; he knows the tests aren’t biased. The defendant in the case was, of course, Wilson Riles, State Superintendent of Public Instruction [on whose side Prof. Humphreys was testifying].

Riles denounced this testimony in no uncertain terms. He said he’d never heard anything so racist in his life. He made a public statement about it and denounced Lloyd Humphreys for making this reasonable statement. Humphreys pointed out that one doesn’t even have to talk about genetics. One only has to look at the raw correlation between parents and children. Whatever the cause, it would be better if these people did not have as many children because the children tend to turn out pretty much like the parents.

You see, the problem with relying entirely on education in these matters, is that these measures don’t get to the IQ group below 75. Even when it does get to them — maybe I shouldn’t mention his name, but a noted psychologist probably known to you — pointed out to me that somehow g also involves being able to act on what you know. He gave as an example the fact that everyone knows about AIDS today, yet there are many people who are taking no precautions against it and are behaving as though it didn’t exist, and you can’t say it’s because they haven’t heard about the danger.

AR: Although that’s what people continue to say. They seem to say the answer is more education, more targeted propaganda.

Jensen: Well this works for the above 90 IQ part of the population. It is probably effective for them. But it doesn’t get to this other group. The rate of AIDS in the black population of the United States is increasing much more rapidly than in any other segment of the population. In the homosexual population, which is not differentiated from the rest of the population in intelligence, the rate of AIDS is going down. I mean the message has gotten to them, apparently.

The message is really, probably, getting to just about everyone, but people in the lower part of the distribution don’t seem to be able to have enough g to put messages together in a way that influences their behavior. This is one of the reasons why all methods of birth control, except sterilization, are dysgenic, because the effectiveness with which they are used is related to g. There’s no getting around it.

AR: Do you think the state has any right to or role in stepping in in a forceful way?

Jensen:Well, that puts me into a political arena, if I make any pronouncements on that. My personal opinion is that I think society has to protect itself from dangers without and dangers within. I don’t think it can survive otherwise. I think the dysgenic effect that Shockley was worried about may become so evident one day, that when everything else has been tried and found not to be effective — importantly effective — people will realize that something has to be done at a political and governmental level. Because education will not do the job in a large segment of the population.

AR: Well, it seems to me what you describe as a possible future for the United States, namely one in which the dysgenic effects become so overwhelmingly obvious that we have to do something, is a terrifying prospect.

Jensen:It is. It absolutely is. I’ll send you a letter I received from someone who has to remain anonymous, that talks about these things. I’ve shown this letter to a number of other professors and they shake their heads and say they’re afraid it’s all too true. This person sort of predicted this thing going through stages, one stage being where the society becomes rather racially divided and lives in almost sort of enclaves that are protected one from another. You have a lot of that going on in countries like Brazil now.

I visited a professor in a large Eastern city last year, spent a couple of days with him, and found that he lives in a protected community like this. I mean it’s a community within the outskirts of the city that’s completely fenced in and has a guard. You have to go through a gate. If you’re a guest of someone they have to phone him to see if that person’s expecting you or knows you. It’s like a prison, and these people live that way. People are just moving into these kinds of places because it’s unsafe to be anywhere else.

AR: It’s the same in Miami. Miami has many of those enclaves. The curious thing to me is, if one were to take, say, someone of my grandfather’s generation — the expectations he had for society, the kind of life he led, the assumptions he made about the way human beings should behave — if he were to come here today he would probably say, “My gosh! The dysgenic effects are so obvious, we must act now!” In other words, because it happens slowly, we accommodate ourselves bit by bit.

Jensen: It’s like the story of the frog that’s put into a bucket of water that’s gradually heated up, it finally gets cooked, never jumps out. You throw him in some fairly warm water, he’ll jump right out instantly. I think our population is becoming habituated to conditions that would have been thought ghastly a generation ago.

AR: Yes, sir. I think so too.

Jensen: It’s clear to me, I mean I’m old enough to believe that the quality of life has deteriorated in the United States over the last thirty years.

AR: I wonder how far things must go before people decide that something must be done.

Jensen: There’s a possibility that they may go to the limit and nothing will ever happen. I mean look how far they’ve gone in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.

AR: At the same time, I think that there could very well be in countries — in Asia, Lee Kwan Yu [of Singapore] has suggested eugenic . . .

Jensen: Oh yes, he’s dealing with a very different thing. He’s got a small island community there and a small population, and it’s racially quite homogeneous. All they’ve got there are 80% Chinese, 15% Malaysian, and 5% Indian, and the Malaysians are still getting out. Those who can’t make it go to the mainland. So he’s had it easy that way. He’s certainly got one of the few spots in the world where you’d feel safe today walking in the streets.

AR: Japan is another. I think it’s not inconceivable that a country like Japan, if it started giving even relatively mild inducements to more intelligent people to have more children and less intelligent people to have fewer children, it wouldn’t be long before Japan would be just an utterly dominant power.

Jensen: Right, well when China starts doing this — of course China’s now controlling its population. If they start using eugenic means to improve the quality of the population in various ways, which is sort of the next step, think where they will be with that size population to work on. They don’t have the severe space problem that Japan has.

AR: It just seems to me that everyone talks about [international] competitiveness, but no one dares talk about the genetic component, the biological component of competitiveness.

Jensen: But you know, every great society in history so far has lasted a certain length of time, and then something has happened. Greek civilization, the Roman Empire, the British Empire — so when things finally go down, some other part of the world becomes predominant.

AR: But can you take such a philosophical attitude towards your own civilization?

Jensen: Well, I’m merely interested in the preservation of civilization, regardless of where it is. Some people are so afraid, of say, the Asians taking over in this country. Well if they can take over and do a better job than the rest of us, if they preserve the great things of both Western and Asian civilization, well I don’t think the world will be worse off. Race and color and national origin and that sort of thing, don’t really matter much to me at all. I’ve just never thought along those lines.

My fear would be a nation that devolved to the point where the great things of Western civilization would be lost. I’d hate to think that Beethoven would be lost to all except some small elite, and that these things could only be accessible on recordings and laser discs and so on. I like the idea of having an opera house where I can go and see Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini. I think that the Asians are capable of preserving that level of civilization, once introduced to it.

My fear is that if the population deteriorates to the point where there’s no demand for these things, then that part of our culture is lost, at least here. Maybe it will be preserved somewhere else in the world. The fruits of genius, wherever they’ve occurred in the world, have to be preserved for future generations. It’s conceivable you could have a country, or maybe even the world, in which these things become irrelevant because people are more concerned with creature comforts, overpopulation, and pure survival.

AR: That to me would be a catastrophe and a tragedy of unparalleled proportions.

Jensen: Oh, absolutely!

AR: I can think of nothing worse, really.

Jensen: Evolution itself doesn’t care. These things are a product of evolution, and they’ve just, by some kind of fluke, reached this point — I mean, unless one takes a religious view of this, which I don’t — they’ve reached this peak of having Beethovens and Wagners and Einsteins and Goethes and Shakespeares and so on. But then to move away from that to a population for which these things become meaningless, it would be just a tremendous tragedy. But it’s not an impossibility, because evolution doesn’t care what direction it goes in. It’s simply opportunistic.

This AIDS crisis is simply another opportunity for evolution, in a sense. That’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to divide the population into those who can avoid AIDS and those who, for whatever reasons, can’t.

Prof. Jensen is the author of the definitive work on the validity of mental tests, Bias in Mental Testing (1980), and a more popular condensation of this book called Straight Talk About Mental Tests (1981). Some of his more recent views are reflected in “Spearman’s g and the Problem of Educational Equality,” which appeared in the Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1991. He is the author of many other publications and is currently at work on a book for the layman about his latest findings.

This interview has been edited considerably. Copies of the typescript of the complete interview (37 single-spaced pages) are available for $10.00, postage paid.

ARTICLE

As Long as it’s Black . . .

Racial politics at the Ford Foundation.

by Marian Evans

Among the mighty foundations that set the cultural and philanthropic tone of the nation, none is mightier than the Ford Foundation. Ford has assets of more than $6 billion, employs nearly 600 people, has 17 offices around the world, and plans to give away $300 million this year. It is the wealthiest grant-making body in the world, and leads the way for the entire industry. It is also a relentless and officious advocate of “diversity.”

No grant proposal will be approved unless it includes a “diversity table,” showing how many non-whites and women will benefit from the project. Grant seekers learn very early that this is one of the most important parts of the application. One Ford recipient, who even describes himself as “a fairly strong proponent of affirmative action,” was reportedly taken aback by the emphasis on women and non-whites. “It’s all they ever talk about,” he said; “They don’t seem very much interested in the substance [of the project].”

Ford has been making race-conscious decisions for years. In 1971 it pledged $100 million ($336 million in today’s money) over six years in grants to black colleges and to fund minority fellowships at other colleges. This was one of the largest single projects the foundation has ever undertaken. Ford now makes smaller, more numerous grants, but the racial thrust is the same. In 1989, it committed $15 million to increase the number of non-white school teachers. Ford’s funding for the arts is explicitly third-world; it has essentially phased out support for European art forms.

Militant, non-white advocacy groups feed regularly at the foundation’s trough. Though they pose as grass-roots organizations, Hispanic groups, such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and La Raza, count on Ford for most of their support. The foundation consistently backs the groups that call most loudly for open borders and more non-white immigration. Moreover, the significance of Ford Foundation grants goes well beyond the work they sponsor. Smaller charities frequently follow in Ford’s wake and support the same groups.

Public broadcasting, which is relentlessly liberal even by the standards of mainstream journalism, first gained a national audience because of Ford Foundation grants. Although even a few Congressmen have begun to complain about the consistent bias in public broadcasting, the tax-payer still pays for a quarter to a third of its budget.

In its own personnel policies, Ford practices what it requires of others. Franklin Thomas, the foundation’s president since 1979, is black. The second-in-command at Ford, who is the officer in charge of grant-making, is a white woman named Susan Berresford. She preaches to grant recipients the doctrine of “the connection between diversity and excellence,” and enforces affirmative action with missionary enthusiasm. The professional staff at Ford is now 27 percent non-white and 62 percent female — figures that surpass the numbers of non-whites and women in the population as a whole. Still, there are zealots at Ford who think anti-white bias does not go far enough: Asians do not get hiring and promotion preferences over whites.

It is a great irony that the Ford Foundation has become one of the most powerful forces in the assault on white America. Henry Ford, the man who founded Ford Motor Company and made the original millions, was a staunch nativist and, by today’s standards, an uncompromising white supremacist.

Until a few years ago, members of the Ford family sat on the foundation’s board of directors, and tried to rein in the worst excesses. One by one, they were eased out or gave up in frustration. Now the foundation is entirely in the hands of people who seem intent on doing away with the culture that gave rise to Henry Ford and to his fortune. The foundation’s racial politics are a contemporary version of Mr. Ford’s joke about the variety of paint jobs available for the original Model T: The customer could have his car in any color he liked, as long as it was black.

BOOK REVIEW

From Workhouse to Welfare

The generosity of Americans has been badly misdirected.

The Tragedy of American Compassion, Marvin Olasky, Regnery Gateway, 1992, 299 pp., $21.95.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

All too often the follies of the present merely repeat those of the past; what is foolish today was found to be equally foolish when it was tried 100 years ago. Although it is tempting to think that only our century could have spawned something so misguided as welfare payments, The Tragedy of American Compassion teaches otherwise. Marvin Olasky’s illuminating history of American charity shows that relief workers have always had to contend with the impulse to give indiscriminately to layabouts, and that even in the 19th century, Americans flirted with the dole.

Nevertheless, as Dr. Olasky explains, traditional American charity has been vastly different from today’s welfare — and far more successful. First, it has been private and voluntary; only since the 1920s has any federal money gone to relief, and local governments have been very wary of welfare. Second, private charities did their work sensibly: They screened out loafers, searched for family members who could help, and tried to find people work rather than give them money. Finally, charity was driven by the religious conviction that the vices that caused poverty could be cured only by moral regeneration.

Thus, until only a few decades ago, Americans had healthy suspicions about the poor: that many were responsible for their own indigence and would happily live on charity rather than work. If Dr. Olasky’s book demonstrates anything, it is that relief work must make these assumptions. Effective charity is as much the art of withholding as it is of giving.

The Workhouse

In colonial times, charity did not go much beyond help for victims of catastrophe, and neighbors helped each other. When there was fire or earthquake, people shared their homes with the victims. If a family’s breadwinner were killed or maimed and there were no relatives to depend on, neighbors informally adopted the children or took in the mother as a seamstress.

Even so, every society has a class of unregenerates who exhaust all patience and generosity. For these people there was the workhouse. Dr. Olasky explains that it was as good as its name; inmates got rough lodging and meager rations in exchange for work. Only cripples and idiots were exempted, and shirkers could be flogged. Our forebears took Second Thessalonians seriously: “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” The workhouse was run by the community, but it was supported by the labor of its inmates.

For the colonists, the workhouse was the end of the line. A person could sink no lower, but at least he would not starve. Moreover, the workhouse was the only “public” charity to which citizens were entitled. “Outdoor relief,” or alms given to people not under workhouse supervision, was thought to be a temptation to indolence.

When cities appeared, relief work required something more than neighbor-to-neighbor charity, and hundreds of private associations sprang up to fill the need. Although they did not require that recipients live in supervised housing, volunteers investigated applicants carefully to screen out chiselers and to see if there were no relatives who could be asked to give support. Three to five families were thought more than enough for a volunteer and each was to get to know the families well. This way, charity could be increased — or withheld — as appropriate, and it usually took the form of food, clothing, or fuel rather than money. Nor did the poor get something for nothing; they were expected to try to get back on their feet and any who did not could be cut off.

The American system was much better than the government-funded “outdoor relief” that was common in Europe. Benjamin Franklin was only one of many Americans who were appalled by the results of government programs in Britain that gave money but asked no questions. “There is no country in the world,” he wrote, “in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken and insolent.” Dr. Olasky explains that the British themselves were struck by how differently the two systems worked. He quotes an approving Englishman who spent two years in the United States during the 1830s and who “saw but one beggar.” Alexis de Tocqueville also admired the American network of voluntary relief associations, which he found more effective than European state-run relief.

At the heart of American successes was hard-headed thinking. Dr. Olasky quotes a number of 19th century charity officials who, today, would be treated as ogres. One explained that the able-bodied poor “should be compelled to work or left to suffer the consequences of their misconduct.” Another wrote that the causes of pauperism included ignorance, idleness, intemperance, and “charities that gave away money too freely.” His organization tried to stop townsmen from giving money to beggars because it was impossible to tell the deserving from the undeserving. One official, in a rhetorical address to the indolent, wrote, “You will gossip and smoke, neglect your children and beg, live in filth and discomfort, drink and carouse, do almost anything rather than work, and expect, forsooth, to be supported by charity.” These charity workers were certainly “insensitive” by today’s standards, but they did an excellent job of caring for those in need.

Redistribution

Nevertheless, not everyone was satisfied. The Abolitionist newspaperman, Horace Greeley, was one of the first influential Americans to argue that the government should take from the rich and give to the poor. Although he later repented of his views — he came to believe that nine tenths of the beggars who held out their hands were “thriftless vagabonds” — his socialist editorials prepared the way for an unprecedented growth in “outdoor relief” in the 1860s and 1870s. Fortunately, this first attempt at a “great society” was quickly dismantled when local governments discovered that fighting poverty with tax money was a good way to swell the ranks of the poor.

Soon, America was back to discriminating between the needy and the greedy. Charities set up wood yards where they gave “work tests.” If a man were willing to chop wood for a few hours, he was worthy of help. When one Boston charity established a wood yard, the “needy” fell from 160 a day to fewer than 50. Dr. Olasky reports that by the turn of the century, charity wood yards were as common as liquor stores are today. The end of the century may have been one of the best periods in American charity. Relief workers had seen the failure of government welfare and had even noted the moral corruption of the people who administered it. An 1894 study of government-run relief concluded that “the degradation of character of the man on a salary set to the work of relieving the poor is one of the most discouraging things in connection with relief-work . . .” Charity, like the ministry, should be a calling, not a job.

Unfortunately, it soon became a job. Dr. Olasky explains that the optimism of the new century brought a different view of relief work. Ministers and politicians forgot that the poor often brought about their own poverty. The patient, individual efforts of volunteers were thought to be old-fashioned, and inferior to grander schemes. “Social change” became the goal rather than the moral regeneration of the poor. Religion was set aside.

Perhaps most dangerously, as soon as Americans began to think that society rather than individuals caused poverty, it was logical to think that only government had the means to remake society. Professional social workers appeared, and as charity became a profession, mere volunteers were no longer thought fit to deal with the indigent. Even before the Depression, the philosophical foundation for the welfare state was being laid.

It was not, however, a straight line from the New Deal to the Great Society. The programs of the 1930s were to offer temporary aid for rehabilitation, and President Franklin Roosevelt thought state aid was a “narcotic.” Even in the early 1960s, Dr. Olasky tells us, welfare workers in New York City were still being warned that it could be as important to withhold relief as to give it, and the bureaucracy was still trying to locate relatives who could help. It is only in the last few decades that the stigma of the dole has evaporated, welfare has become a “right,” and the incompetent and irresponsible get unconditional handouts.

Government charity also squeezed the life out of the private associations that had done so much good work. As Dr. Olasky explains, bad charity drives out good; relief efforts that put the able-bodied poor to work and seek to correct their moral deficiencies will lose their clientele to government clerks who issue checks and ask no questions.

Long as it is on fascinating detail, The Tragedy of American Compassion is short on analysis and mute on solutions. Though Dr. Olasky does not say so explicitly, he has described a radical change in the way Americans understand human nature. Suddenly to hold society responsible for the failures of individuals was to toss aside the accumulated wisdom of centuries. Why did Americans abandon the principles of charity that had guided them? Why do we permit the continuing horrors of the welfare state? Why, aside from a few people like Charles Murray (who wrote the preface for this book), does no one call for the abolition of the dole? There is a paralysis of thought on these subjects that Dr. Olasky does not acknowledge and therefore cannot explain.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

The Riots Rumble On

The four police officers who were acquitted (except for one unresolved count against one of them) in the Rodney King beating case have been indicted on federal civil rights charges. This was to be expected, since the jury’s refusal to return guilty verdicts in April was widely described as “racist.” This means that despite the Constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy, the officers are being tried twice for the same offense.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that repeated trials are Constitutional if different governments — state and federal — mount separate prosecutions. This technique for violating the Fifth Amendment was invented only a few decades ago, because Southern state courts were thought to be lackadaisical about prosecuting whites who committed crimes against blacks. Whites have been the almost exclusive targets of double prosecutions of this kind.

Blacks are reported to be pleased by the new indictments. Representative Maxine Waters, of South Central Los Angeles, is “absolutely delighted.” State Senator Diane Watson adds that “the high visibility and public interest should bring different results [from those of the last trial].” Indeed, they may. Jurors are likely to think twice about returning another verdict of the kind that touched off the worst riots in America this century.

Interestingly, the reasons for the first verdict are slowly being acknowledged. The June 8 issue of Legal Times carried a long article on the evidence in the case; after much hand-wringing, the author concluded that he probably would have voted exactly as the jury did.

As it happens, civil rights cases are more difficult to prove than assault cases. The prosecution in the new trial will have to show that the four officers intended to deprive Mr. King of his rights, not simply that they beat him excessively. Brave jurors may once again refuse to convict.

Meanwhile, the trial of the three blacks who nearly killed truck driver Reginald Denny has begun. This savage attack, caught on video tape, was one of the acts of violence that ignited the riots. A fourth man, who stole Mr. Denny’s wallet after he was beaten senseless, is being tried separately.

To many Los Angeles blacks, these men are heroes. T-shirts have gone on sale demanding the release of “the L.A. Four.” Something called Communities United to Free the L.A. Four manages to field 50 demonstrators a day to protest outside the court house

Perhaps similar thinking explains recent unusual trial results in the federal Northern District of Georgia. Lawyers have noticed an increase in hung juries split along racial lines. In all cases the defendants have been black, with white jurors voting to convict and blacks voting to acquit. Many attribute the rise in racial divisions to black resentment against the verdicts in the Rodney King case. One black man who was the foreman of a jury that split on racial lines says that the verdict and the rioting have inspired black jurors. “I think a lot of people are starting to realize . . . we have some type of power to use and we’re going to learn how to use it.”

The riots have inspired Hispanics, too, including Eric Vega, head of the Sacramento (CA) Human Rights and Fair Housing Commission. In July he presented a study called “Budgets as a Civil Rights Issue,” in which he argued that no matter how strapped the state may be, it had better not cut handout programs. He pointed out that many of the state’s poor are non-white and might bestir themselves if their benefits were not up to expectations. As the Sacramento Bee of July 10 put it, Vega argued that budget cuts “could result in the type of negligence and civil unrest that crippled Los Angeles during the recent riots.”

Multilingual Medicine

The Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services has ordered clinics in Harris County (TX) to supply full medical services in foreign languages. It gave the health authorities 30 days to hire interpreters and to print materials in foreign languages; the county will lose $2.6 million a year in federal funds if it does not do so. The investigation of Harris County clinics was prompted by complaints from W.R. Morris, a Hispanic activist who works for the mayor of Houston. The Department of Health and Human Services decided that patients have the right to be addressed in their own languages and that the county was guilty of discrimination against people who do not speak English.

Immigrant Entrepreneurs

As the apologists for immigration keep telling us, new arrivals create jobs. In Los Angeles, immigrants have devised a novel way to stage highway accidents and sue for damages. The trick is to drive a car on the freeway in front of a 16-wheeler truck, with an accomplice in a car in the lane next to the truck. The driver in front of the truck then slams on the brakes. Since the truck is boxed in by the accomplice’s car and big rigs cannot stop quickly, the trucker crashes into the first car. Poor Latino immigrants are recruited at $25 to $100 a head to ride in the car, claim injuries, and sue the trucking company. Truckers often carry as much as $1 million in liability insurance, so the payoff can be worth the inconvenience.

In the past year, California authorities have investigated more than 340 such incidents, more than half of which took place in Los Angeles County. The “accidents” do not always go according to plan. One driver who deliberately swerved in front of a tractor trailer in the San Fernando Valley caused a wreck in which one passenger was killed and several others badly injured. The driver and three other people have been charged with murder.

Raising Black Scores to New Lows

Blacks are increasingly inventive in devising new ways to accuse whites of racism. Recently, the black assistant principal of Galileo High School in San Francisco decided to help three black students pass an important examination. He handed back their test papers, with the right and wrong answers indicated, and left them alone to compare answers and fix mistakes. The mischief was discovered when a different school official noticed that the test papers had a suspicious number of corrections on them, all from wrong to right answers.

The incident itself was less noteworthy than the reaction to it. The assistant principal was put on paid leave — hardly a cruel fate — but blacks united behind him, claiming that the punishment was “racist” and that he had done nothing wrong. As Lulann McGriff, president of the San Francisco NAACP, put it, “The point is to get them to pass the test, isn’t it?”

Pat Womak, president of the San Francisco Alliance of Black School Educators took a similarly absurd position. “It’s an example of the racism in the schools,” she said; “If these children had been white, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Hair Brained

According to the Wall Street Journal of July 29, there is an upper-level history seminar at Stanford University called “Black Hair as Culture and History.” The course teaches how black people’s hair “has interacted with the black presence in this country — how it has played a role in the evolution of black society.” No, this is not a parody of multiculturalism; this is the real thing.

Prof. Kennell Jackson, the instructor, is delighted by the enlightenment that is sweeping the campus. “I couldn’t have taught this class ten years ago,” he says. In one class session, Prof. Jackson asked students for a recent “black hair event.” When a student mentioned “Juliette Lewis’ cornrow hair at the Oscars,” Prof. Jackson agreed: “That’s a good one.” He then produced a picture of the actress. Besides studying the 1960s musical, “Hair,” students will have a week of discussion with local beauticians and will learn that blacks were prominent wig makers during the colonial period.

There are reported to be people at Stanford who think a course in black hair is lunacy, but the pressure to be “tolerant” and “open-minded” keeps them closed-mouthed.

Wretched Refuse

Last year, more people immigrated to the United States than in any previous year. A total of 1.8 million foreigners became legal residents, a figure that surpassed the previous record of more than 1.5 million, set in 1990. More than half of all legal immigrants came from Mexico, while the next most common countries of origin were the Philippines, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Haiti, and El Salvador. No one knows how many illegal immigrants came to the United States last year, but the number is thought to lie somewhere between 2 and 5 million.

In July, 53 percent of blacks and 69 percent of “nonblacks” told Business Week that they thought further immigration was bad for the country. Fifty-nine percent of blacks and 62 percent of “nonblacks” said they thought immigrants consume more than their fair share of welfare, medicaid, and food stamps. Why does Congress continue to ignore the will of the people and pass laws that permit ever greater numbers of immigrants?

Uncle Sam Plays Daddy

Every year, more than one million American teenagers get pregnant. Half of these girls give birth, and four out of five of those babies are unwanted. Eighty percent of American women who have had children without getting married receive a government check of some kind, and the United States spends $21 billion every year to support teen-age mothers and their children.

Plague and Pestilence

Thanks to immigrants and people weakened by AIDS, tuberculosis has reestablished itself so firmly in the United States that the federal Centers for Disease Control say it is “out of control.” TB can usually be cured, but patients must stick to a six-month regimen of medication. Many feel healthy after only a month or two of treatment, stop taking their medicine, and get sick again. Aborted treatments are not just ineffective; they can cause the TB bacillus to mutate into new forms that cannot be treated. Medical workers thus worry about treatment “completion rates,” and have calculated them for various countries.

New York City, home to more than one in six American TB carriers, has one of the most abysmal completion rates in the world. According to the World Bank, even Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania have completion rates of nearly 80 percent. In East Harlem, which is the most tuberculosis-infested place in America, the completion rate is 11 percent. The United States therefore has a good chance of giving the world new strains of lethal TB.

The state of Michigan has noted a similar, race-related trend in the rates at which people tested for AIDS return to clinics to learn the results. The Department of Public Health found that in 1991, 73 percent of whites took the trouble to find out if they have the disease, but only 32 percent of blacks did. Of the people — of all races — who were found to have the AIDS virus, 34 percent never bothered to learn the results.

Height Makes Right

Airlines have minimum height requirements for flight attendants because they must store bags in overhead bins and operate safety equipment. On July 16, Northwest Airlines was served with a suit charging that its requirement that attendants be at least 5 feet 2 inches tall discriminates against Asians, Hispanics, and women. The class-action suit was filed by a U.S. citizen of Sri Lankan origin who is five feet tall.

No Mercy for Racists

Ron Chattler is the owner of a Chicago company that makes buttons. Recently he fired one of his black employees because she was rude to customers, rude to him, and careless at work. The woman claimed she was a victim of racism, and the Illinois Department of Human Rights promptly called Mr. Chattler on the carpet.

Mr. Chattler pointed out that 63 of his 83 employees are black, Puerto Rican, or Mexican and that the person he hired to replace the fired woman was also black. The bureaucrats were unimpressed. They asked Mr. Chattler to prove that he hadn’t hired so many minorities just to make it look as though he didn’t discriminate.

This was too much for Mr. Chattler, who then made an angry telephone call to the Governor’s office. He told one of the Governor’s staff that if the bureaucrats didn’t get off his back, he would take his business to a different state. “OK, leave,” said the staffer, though she now denies this. Mr. Chattler has learned that several neighboring states would be delighted to get a new business with 83 employees. He plans to move.

Self Segregation

Cornell University in Ithaca (NY) is upset because its students tend to segregate themselves by race. The school’s two main residential areas are North Campus and West Campus; the former has become largely non-white while the latter is mostly white. This spring Cornell proposed a plan whereby incoming freshmen would not be allowed to choose their residences and would be assigned so as to integrate the two campuses. The school withdrew the plan in the face of stiff opposition from students and faculty. The most vocal opponents of integration were blacks.

Hiring the Handicapped

The Americans With Disabilities Act, which went into effect on July 26, forbids employers to discriminate against just about anyone. People who are blind, have trouble breathing, or who are psychotic must not be denied employment, if they are otherwise capable of doing the job. Just what sort of jobs the blind and the psychotic are likely to think they are capable of remains unclear. It will be up to the courts to decide whether an employer is entitled to insist that all his receptionists, for example, be able to see.

According to the law, AIDS is a disability. This means that employers must hire AIDS carriers and must not deny them health benefits. Two thirds of the people who have been diagnosed as having AIDS have already died. The average cost of treatment from the time an AIDS patient is diagnosed until the time he dies is $80,000. Although AIDS can be easily detected by means of a blood test, employers may not protect themselves against the inevitable expense of hiring people who have the disease.

Oprah Winfrey to Write Memoirs

Oprah Winfrey, the black entertainer, has signed a contract with Alfred A. Knopf to write her memoirs. The publisher reportedly paid $3 million for world-wide rights. Knopf is best known for literary fiction and serious non-fiction rather than celebrity confidences, but Miss Winfrey is thought to have chosen Knopf because she would be able to work with a black editor, Erroll McDonald.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Congratulations on your good sense in moving to Charleston. As did Richmond, the grand old city of Charleston and her people tried to defend the principles on which our country was originally founded. Many of those ideas and principles, of course, were developed by Southerners whose descendants still live in and around Charleston. I hope your fine publication will be enriched by your presence there.

Name Withheld, Richmond (VA)

Sir — Your move to South Carolina will undermine your credibility. Many people, particularly liberals, trust nothing written about race that originates in the South. Reaction from them will be, “That is nothing but fundamentalist, red-neck nonsense.” However, when you were in Menlo Park, CA — practically the center of liberalism — the perception was that the information would be at least reasonable.

I think you made a tactical error, and will suffer because of it. I hope I am wrong, and will continue to support you as long as the information is accurate and reasonable as it has been so far.

Donald Taylor, Barstow (CA)

The joke is on all of us; AR is now located in Louisville, Ky. No we are not being hounded by opponents, nor are we trying to outrun the law. Our planning just wasn’t as good as it might have been. — Ed.

Sir — I recently learned that the Pizza Hut restaurant chain will henceforth restrict its new franchises to minority applicants. If any of your readers share my indignation at this they may write to the CEO of Pizza Hut, Alan Huston, at the following address: Box 428, Wichita, Kan. 67201.

John Mele, Basking Ridge (NJ)

Sir —  AR has published many brave and insightful articles on current “dysgenic trends,” and I would like to pass along some related information on a timely and relevant topic: abortion.

According to National Public Radio, Minnesota recently passed a law requiring parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion. As a result, in the (largely rural) state as a whole, teenage births decreased by 10 percent. In urban Minneapolis, they rose by 38 percent. NPR gave no racial breakdown on the statistics, but the implications are clear.

The decisions of competent women will not be greatly affected by parental notification, a 24-hour waiting period, and anti-abortion counseling. The decisions of incompetent women will be. Thus, the new restrictions on abortion will lead to more births to women who are poor, stupid, and often non-white. Many of these babies will be unadoptable and unwanted even by their own mothers. Restricting abortion has a high social cost.

Evelyn Hill, Santa Clara (CA)

Please note Professors Jensen’s observation on page 4 of this issue that all forms of contraception (and abortion is a form of contraception) are dysgenic. Restricting the availability of abortion increases its dysgenic effect. — Editor

Sir — I very much enjoyed your August review of The Philosophy of Nationalism. You called the book “an appeal to white solidarity when such an appeal was still respectable.” Your readers may not know that in a conversation with Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, the Soviet party boss Leonid Brezhnev, made just such an appeal. He told her through an interpreter, that the cold war was a dangerous distraction from the struggle that really mattered: that of the white nations to avoid long-term submergence by non-whites. Brezhnev thought that Mrs. Thatcher’s look of astonishment meant that she had not heard him properly and repeated the idea. Mrs. Thatcher ignored him.

No doubt racial consciousness persists in the East because it was so well isolated from the corruptions of the West. Although East German skinheads who burn refugee shelters and attack brown-skinned immigrants are doubtless repugnant creatures, I cannot help sympathizing with them. They are acting, albeit crudely, on the entirely natural instinct for racial and cultural self-preservation — an instinct that virtually all white leaders have managed to suppress.

Name Withheld, Schenectady (NY)

Sir — Your review of Brain Sex in the March issue reports that the tissue joining the two hemispheres of the brain is thicker in women than in men. Your reviewer also pointed out that the brains of homosexual men are in some ways more like those of women than of men.

A new study from the University of California at Los Angeles has found that the connective tissue is even thicker in homosexual men than in women. The “anterior commissures” of a sample of female brains were 13 percent thicker than those of male brains, and those of homosexuals were 18 percent thicker than those of females. Although very little is known about how brain physiology affects behavior, some homosexuals do seem to act even more “female” than women.

Gordon McCray, Knoxville (TN)