American Renaissance magazine
Vol 5, No. 9	September 1994

 

CONTENTS

Why Race Matters
What Race Were the Pharaohs?
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Why Race Matters

The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms.

by Samuel Francis

There is an old saying — supposedly an ancient Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Today the curse has come true. The interesting times are here. What is most interesting about them is that for perhaps the first time in history, certainly for one of the few times in history, we are witnessing the more or less peaceful transfer of power from one civilization and from the race that created and bore that civilization, to different races.

In South Africa, the transfer has already been completed, at least in a formal political sense, with the apparent support of most of the white population. In the remainder of what was once the common imperium of the European people in Africa and Asia, the transfer has long since taken place, occurring when the imperial powers withdrew or were chased out of the territories they had conquered.

In Europe the transfer has probably not quite yet begun on any major scale, and it probably will not begin until the immigration of non-whites is considerably further along than it is now. But in North America and more especially in the United States the transfer is well under way. It is in our own nation that the times are most interesting and therefore most cursed.

Culture and its Symbols

We see the transfer of power in almost every dimension of public and private life. Thus far, the transfer is more cultural than it is political or economic; it is clear in the rise of multiculturalism, Afro-centrism, and the other anti-white cults and movements in university curricula, and in the penetration of even daily private life by the anti-white ethic and behavior these cults impose. It is clear in the ever-quickening war against the traditional symbols of the old civilization and the elevation of the symbols of the new peoples who aim at their displacement.

The Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 was the first and most important instance of the trend but by no means the last; indeed, it can be argued that the King holiday was merely the legitimizing agent of the attacks on other symbols that have occurred since. Attacks on the display of the Confederate battle flag and on other Confederate and Southern white symbols are now commonplace, but the Alamo in San Antonio is another traditional white symbol that is also under attack — by Hispanics. The Custer battlefield in Montana now celebrates the Indian victory, although what is historically memorable about the battle of the Little Big Horn is not the victory of several thousand Indians over a small American cavalry detachment but rather the defeat of whites at the hands of non-whites.

The holidays, public anniversaries, flags, songs, statues, museums, symbols, and heroes that a people shares are fundamental to its identity and its existence as a people. What we are witnessing on the official level of public culture in the attacks on these traditional symbols and their displacement by the symbols of other races is the effective abolition of one people and the gradual creation of another.

Of course, this process is not limited to official culture, which is often merely the plaything of politicians. It is also true even more clearly on the level of popular culture, by which is meant today not the culture created by the people but rather the culture created by elites for consumption by the people. Western movies now routinely define the whites as the villains and the Indians and Mexicans — or, even more fantastically, blacks — as the heroes or martyrs. Almost all TV and cinematic depictions of the Civil War now unequivocally portray the South and Confederates as the villains; perhaps at best misguided but nonetheless on the wrong side of history.

It is routine also to display almost all criminals — rapists, murderers, robbers — as whites, though the statistical truth, of course, is that violent crime in the United States is largely the work of non-whites. A few years ago, political scientist Robert Lichter showed in a study that while during the last 30 years, whites were arrested for 40 percent of the murders committed in the United States, on television whites committed 90 percent of the murders.

Non-whites are frequently shown as not only heroic but also dominant over whites. It is a staple feature of police movies to portray blacks as the administrative superiors of the white protagonists, Mel Gibson’s Lethal Weapon series being perhaps the best-known. The second installment in the series even depicted white South Africans — today’s Hollywood version of Nazis, no doubt — as masterminding drug smuggling into the United States.

While the explicit racial hatred of whites expressed in black-directed films is well known, an increasingly common theme in mainstream television and film is that of the dangers represented by hordes of violent and vicious white supremacists, skinheads, neo-Nazis, paleo-Nazis, and racist terrorists who seem to lurk in every city, behind every storefront, in every small town throughout the country, everywhere, all the time. Recently, in the ABC-TV production of the eight-hour film of Stephen King’s The Stand, a tale of the final struggle at the end of the world between supernatural forces of good and evil, the personification of goodness and of God was an elderly black woman, while the devil was portrayed as a blue-eyed, blond-haired white man, whose evil followers waved the Confederate flag. Even at the end of the world, it seems, Hollywood cannot rid us of white racism.

Most of these examples, to be sure, are trivial enough. Euro-American civilization and the people who created it can survive the artistic contributions of Stephen King and Mel Gibson — maybe. But these examples are of interest precisely because they are so trivial and because for the most part they do not represent the main, explicit subject matter of popular culture today. In the 1960s, a film like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner explicitly explored the subject of interracial marriage and brought it up for discussion, but today anti-white themes more typically provide the background and the context of popular entertainment. As such they either sneak into the public consciousness unexamined or in many cases are already there.

The erasure and displacement of official cultural symbols and the similar process in elite-produced, mass-consumed popular culture represents the expropriation of cultural norms, the standards by which public and private behavior is legitimized or condemned and a culture defined. While the traditional norms that are being attacked and discarded were almost never explicitly racial, the new norms that are being constructed and imposed are, and they are not only explicitly racial but also explicitly and vociferously anti-white.

This is a calculated tactic aimed at seizing cultural legitimacy and cultural hegemony and ultimately coercive political power on behalf of non-whites at the expense of whites. At the most extreme, the anti-white racialist movement resembles the ideology of German National Socialism. It offers a conspiratorial interpretation of history in which whites are systematically demonized as the enemies of the black race, and a myth of black racial solidarity and supremacy. “Afro-racism” is the ideological and political apparatus by which an explicit race war is prepared against the white race and its civilization, not as part of “rage” nor as a response to “injustice” and “neglect” but, like any war, as part of a concerted strategy to acquire power. It is not confined to blacks but extends also to other non-whites who care to sign up.

Digging Our Own Grave

Of course non-whites are by no means the only peddlers of anti-white racism. One of the most remarkable features of our interesting times is the degree to which whites themselves help dig their own racial and civilizational grave. I have in my hand here a relatively new magazine to which I am sure you will all want to subscribe at once, entitled Race Traitor: A Journal of the New Abolitionism, published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose motto is, “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” The editors quote Julius Lester as writing that “White is not in the color of the skin. It is a condition of the mind, a condition that will be destroyed.”

While Race Traitor does not seem to advocate physical genocide, it assumes that race is merely a social invention rather than a fact of nature and argues for the abolition of the concept of race as applied to whites. Racial identity is forbidden for whites but not for non-whites (or at least blacks). Of course the explicit goal is to destroy white civilization by doing away with the symbols and institutions of the collective consciousness that defines the race and is the foundation of the culture.

Yet the war against the white race and its civilization is not new. It is part of a world-historical movement that began in the late 19th century, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time of the battle of the Little Big Horn, and which the American racialist writer Lothrop Stoddard called, in the frank language of the 1920s, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” and which Oswald Spengler a few years later called the “Coloured World Revolution.”

It is easy to smile at such formulations today, but Martin Luther King himself explicitly and repeatedly linked the American civil rights movement with what in a 1960 address entitled “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness” he called a “worldwide struggle.” In his Playboy interview in 1965, King remarked, in a frank endorsement of racialist sentiment, that the American Negro “feels a deepening sense of identification with his black African brothers, and with his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean.”

We recently witnessed just such a display of racial solidarity at the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, when King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, arrived to stand by his side. Mrs. King, of course, does not travel thousands of miles to celebrate the victories of democracy in Eastern Europe, but only to countries where her racial comrades are being empowered.

It is true that Martin Luther King, Mrs. King, Mandela, and many other spokesmen for the “rising tide of [non-white] racial consciousness” espouse a liberal rhetoric that ostensibly promises racial equality rather than domination. But whether these spokesmen really believe in such a liberal vision or whether they merely wield it as a weapon against whites, there is little question that most blacks in the United States do not share liberal views about equality, freedom, and tolerance.

A recent Harris poll conducted for the National Conference released in March 1994 showed that non-white minorities (Hispanic as well as black) “are more likely than whites to apply harsh stereotypes to other minorities but are united in the view that whites are ‘bigoted, bossy and unwilling to share power,’”and the poll found that each minority believed it “is discriminated against by a white-controlled economy and educational system.” Regardless of the liberalism espoused in public by many non-whites, these are hardly the attitudes from which a genuinely liberal policy can be expected to develop.

Some who support racial revolution may be sincere in invoking liberty, equality, and fraternity, but historical evidence suggests that it cannot be so. Historian William H. McNeill argues in a set of lectures delivered in 1985 at the University of Toronto that what he calls “ethnic hierarchy” is “on the rise, everywhere,” and that it is indeed the normal condition of human civilizations. “Other civilized societies,” writes McNeill, “have almost always accepted and enforced inequality among the diverse ethnic groups of which they were composed.”

McNeill’s term “ethnic hierarchy,” of course, consists of words derived from Greek; if those words are loosely (but not too loosely) translated into their Latin equivalents, it is clear that McNeill is saying that racial domination, in one form or another, is the norm of human civilizations, that equality has little historical foundation, and that the illusion of such equality is about to be rudely dispelled.

The fraudulence of the liberalism espoused by the leaders of the racial revolution was clear to Spengler himself. “The hare,” he wrote in his last book, The Hour of Decision, “may perhaps deceive the fox, but human beings can not deceive each other. The coloured man sees through the white man when he talks about “humanity’ and everlasting peace. He scents the other’s unfitness and lack of will to defend himself. . . The coloured races are not pacifists. They do not cling to a life whose length is its sole value. They take up the sword when we lay it down. Once they feared the white man; now they despise him.”

What is happening in our interesting times, then, to summarize briefly, is this. A concerted and long-term attack against the civilization of white, European and North American man has been launched, and the attack is not confined to the political, social and cultural institutions that characterize the civilization but extends also to the race that created the civilization and continues to carry and transmit it today. The war against white civilization sometimes (indeed often) invokes liberal ideals as its justification and as its goal, but the likely reality is that the victory of the racial revolution will end merely in the domination or destruction of the white race and its civilization by the non-white peoples — if only for demographic reasons due to non-white immigration and the decline of white birth rates.

We know from the population projections by the U.S. Census Bureau last year that by the middle of the next century the present white majority of the United States will have dwindled to a minority in its own country, and given that fact and the increasing legitimization of anti-white racism in the United States, the situation in this country for whites is not going to get any better, to say the least.

Of course, the revolution could not have succeeded or gone as far as it has without the active assistance of whites. Some have supported the racial revolution against their own race and civilization and even larger numbers have acquiesced passively, their allegiance to their own people steadily subverted by the infusion of hidden assumptions hostile to them.

Self-Generated Poisons

Stoddard and Spengler as well as the late James Burnham in his Suicide of the West analyzed these self-generated poisons by which the Western people prepare their own destruction. The ideological poison has assumed several different names: Marxism, liberalism, globalism, egalitarianism, and indeed much of the conservatism now espoused by people like Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, and William Buckley, as well as a good part of Christianity, especially in its “Social Gospel” forms. But behind all of these ideologies and slogans lies the pervasive venom of universalism, the vision of mankind with a capital M, which now often extends to include “animal rights” so as not to offend our brothers of field and stream.

In the universalist world-view, there is neither history nor race nor even species, neither specific cultures nor particular peoples nor meaningful boundaries. Therefore there are no concrete duties to race, nation, community, family, friend or neighbor and indeed no distinctions to be drawn between neighbor and stranger, friend and foe, mine and thine, us and them.

In the happyland of universalism, we owe as much to the children of Somalia — indeed, more — than we do to the hapless citizens of Los Angeles, and Marines who could not have been sent from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles during the riots of 1992 and who are not ordered to prevent violation of the Mexican border adjacent to their own installation in southern California are speedily dispatched to Somalia. Even to invoke “our” identity, our interests, our aspirations is to invite accusations of all the “isms” and “phobias” that are deployed to prevent further discussions and to paralyze the formation or the retention of a common consciousness that might at some point swell up into actual resistance to our dispossession. The principal white response to the incipient race war thus far, manifested in neoconservative critiques of “Political Correctness” and multiculturalism, is merely to regurgitate the formulas of universalism, to invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King, and to repeat the universalist ideals of equality, integration, and assimilation. The characteristic defense of Western civilization by most conservatives today is merely a variation of the liberal universalism that the enemies of the West and whites also invoke. It is to argue that non-whites and non-Westerners ought to value modern Western civilization as in their own best interests. It is to emphasize the liberal “progress” of the modern West through the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of non-whites, the retreat from imperialism, the achievement of higher living standards and political equality, etc.

Of course, if the liberalism espoused by non-whites is a thin veil for the assertion of their own racial solidarity against whites, then all such argumentation is vain. It accomplishes nothing to preach liberalism to those who despise liberalism along with everything else derived from the white West. The uselessness of doing so was pointed out by the 19th century French rightist Louis Veuillot in his ironic comment, “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.” Or, as Neitzsche put a similar thought even more succinctly, “The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as devices of leadership.”

Instead of invoking a suicidal liberalism and regurgitating the very universalism that has subverted our identity and our sense of solidarity, what we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The reassertion of our solidarity must be expressed in racial terms for two major reasons. In the first place, the attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites the dispersion and destruction of the foundations of our solidarity while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites.

Historian Isaiah Berlin noted in 1991 that “nationalism and racism are the most powerful movements in the world today,” and at a time when the self-declared enemies of the white race define themselves in racial terms, only our own definition of ourselves in those terms can meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda, they will do so not because we are “Westerners” or “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals” but because we are white.

Secondly, we need to assert a specifically racial identity because race is real — biological forces, including those that determine race, are important for social, cultural, and historical events. I do not suggest that race as a biological reality is by itself sufficient to explain the civilization of European man — if race were sufficient, there would be no problem — but race is necessary for it, and it is likely that biological science in the near future will show even more clearly how necessary racial, biological, and genetic explanations are to understanding social and historical events more fully.

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in.

Unwitting Identification

The fundamental problem of the American white population was unwittingly identified by Newsweek in its March 29, 1993 cover story on “White Male Paranoia.” In an effort to puncture any tendencies among white men to think of themselves as victims, endangered or exploited, Newsweek pointed out that “White males make up just 39.2 percent of the population, yet they account for 82.5 percent of the Forbes 400 (folks worth at least $265 million), 77 percent of Congress, 92 percent of daily-newspaper editors, 77 percent of TV news directors.” From this avalanche of numbers, Newsweek infers that it’s “still a statistical piece of cake being a white man, at least in comparison with being anything else.” Newsweek may be right in its numbers, but the numbers miss the point.

What the numbers tell us is that whites do not act cohesively or think of themselves as a unit, that whites have no racial consciousness; if they did, they would be using their persisting political, economic, and cultural power in their own interests, and the very perceptible “white male paranoia” that Newsweek was talking about — the very real sense of an incipient slippage from a position of control — would not exist.

In the United States today, whites exist objectively but do not exist subjectively, and that is in my view the fundamental racial problem they face, the basic reason they (I should say “we”) are losing the racial war against us, the very reason we are in a war at all. Newsweek’s numbers offer proof of the objective existence of whites and of white power as measured materially and quantitatively; the spineless abnegation of their own country and culture that is at the root of white male paranoia offers proof of the absence of a subjective existence. Whites do not exist subjectively because they do not think of themselves as whites, they do not act cohesively as whites, and they do not think being white is important or even meaningful.

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction. Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals for preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.

What Benjamin Franklin told his colleagues at the birth of the American Republic remains true today as the Republic, and the race and civilization that gave birth to the Republic, approach their death: If we do not hang together — not only as members of a common nation but also as part of a common race, a common people — then most assuredly we will all hang separately.

Mr. Francis is a syndicated columnist. This is an abbreviated version of a talk he gave at an AR conference in Atlanta. A collection of his most incisive writing about race, including this essay, is available here.

BOOK REVIEW

What Race Were the Pharaohs?

And what about the Hittites, Amorites, and Philistines?

Race in Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament, by A.A. Sayce & R. Peterson, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1993, 144 pp., $9.50 (soft cover)

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

A favorite Afro-centric fantasy is that the ancient Egyptians were black. In 1990, when news began to seep out that many black “academics” were making this claim, columnist John Leo of U.S. News & World Report telephoned seven prominent Egyptologists to get the expert view. To a man, they agreed that neither the pharaohs nor the common people of ancient Egypt were black or negroid, but not one was willing to be quoted. As one explained, the question was “politically too hot;” people can get in trouble for disagreeing with the most preposterous foolishness if it happens to be asserted by a large number of blacks.

Race in Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament is a scholarly and detailed account of the racial origins of the dozens of peoples who are mentioned in the Old Testament. The original text was written by A.A. Sayce, but R. Peterson has brought it up to date in light of recent findings. The book makes short work of the view that the Egyptians were black.

Mummies and Murals

For anyone who wants to circulate fables about the racial makeup of an ancient people, the Egyptians are perhaps the worst choice. The most obvious inconvenience is the existence of mummies; it is hard to dispute the race of a corpse that is so well preserved its eyelashes can be counted. As this book shows, visual inspection, anthropometric measurement, and DNA analysis leave no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were Mediterranean Caucasoids — as are the majority of modern Egyptians. Ramses II, the pharaoh who persecuted the children of Israel, still has the sharp features of his people and the thin, straight hair typical of whites. He was probably a red head.

The authors explain that modern Egyptians are, in fact, somewhat darker than the ancients. Under the more recent universalistic influence of Islam, Egyptians intermarried with other populations more readily than when they followed the more exclusionist teachings of Egyptian religion. Today, the people most representative of the racial type of the pyramid builders are Coptic Christians. They have been considerably more traditionalist than Muslims, retaining aspects of the ancient Egyptian language in their rituals and refraining from marriage with outsiders.

Well-preserved corpses are not always the best source of information about the races of Old Testament peoples. The authors explain that the artists of ancient Egypt made thousands of bas relief carvings, wall paintings, and decorative objects that leave an accurate visual record of the races with which they had contact.

From Greeks to Gergashites, Egyptian artists drew their subjects from life and carefully noted racial differences, in both skin color and facial features. The only exception is the depiction of the eyes which, for unknown reasons, Egyptians always drew in the same stylized fashion no matter what the subject’s race. This book contains many illustrations that demonstrate clear racial distinctions in art.

As the authors explain, Egyptian artists were so careful about depicting race that their work sometimes appears to be as much taxonomy as art:

The oldest surviving attempt to construct what we may call an ethnographic chart — that made in the tomb of the Theban prince Rekhm-Ra about a century before the birth of Moses — distinguishes the Egyptians and their neighbors by portraying the black-skinned Negro, the olive-colored Syrians, the red-skinned Egyptian, and the white-skinned Libyan (then unmixed with the Arab hordes) . . .

Early Whites

It may come as a surprise to some readers to learn that many of the early inhabitants of the Middle East may have had typically North European coloration. The authors speculate that before the arrival of the Egyptians — probably from the Arabian peninsula — the Nile delta was settled by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed people very similar to the Kabyles, who still inhabit the hill country of Morocco and Algeria. The authors suspect that they were descended from the Cro-Magnons whose remains have been found in southern France. These “Libyans” were driven west of the Nile by the more powerful Egyptians, and are depicted as having white skin.

To the East, Egyptians were also in contact with Amorites and Hittites, who also are likely to have originated in Europe. They appear in Egyptian art with the same light hair and blue eyes as Libyans, Greeks and the inhabitants of Asia Minor.

Like many peoples throughout history, Egyptians were often ruled by kings of lighter-skinned stock than themselves. Nefertiti, whose famous bust depicts a virtually European face, was probably of Hittite birth.

The Philistines, who so harried the Israelites in the Old Testament, were probably related to Spartiate Greeks. They were from Asia Minor and established a small but vigorous kingdom in Gaza.

Egyptian artists who recorded battles between Egyptians and Philistines depict the enemy as lighter-skinned and taller than themselves. The giant Goliath, whom David killed with his sling, was following the Greek tradition in calling for single combat between champions.

As this book makes clear, Egyptian artists depict the Israelites themselves as a clearly Semitic people. Like the Egyptians, their origin was probably in the Arabian peninsula, though they appear to have emerged from it much later. In Abraham’s time they were still nomadic tent-dwellers, and the Egyptians among whom they sought permission to settle were much more culturally advanced than they.

The Israelites had a strong tribal sense, bolstered by their belief that they were God’s chosen people. They were fiercely racialist, and were constantly urged by their prophets to disdain intermarriage. Nevertheless, they mixed to some degree with the more European Hittities and Amorites whom they displaced in their conquest of Canaan. King David is likely to have been fair-skinned, and one of his most trusted lieutenants was the Hittite, Uriah. King Solomon’s harem was one of the largest and most racially varied in all of ancient history.

As the authors explain, black Africans are frequently represented in ancient Egyptian art, but their role is almost always that of captive or slave. Sesostrus I, a XIIth dynasty king of the 20th century B.C., conquered parts of Nubia and established a barrier at the border to ensure that no black would enter Egypt except as a slave. Egyptians regarded blacks as indolent and superstitious but nevertheless favored them as slaves because they were affectionate and faithful. They found blacks to have a very good sense of rhythm but wrote derisively of their constant dancing.

The authors believe that one reason why the creativity of ancient Egypt continued for 3,000 years while that of Islamicized Egypt lasted only a few centuries may be due, in part, to different views on intermarriage; miscegenation was much more common within the universalist embrace of Islam. The authors also note that although blacks to the south were in contact for thousands of years with the technology and learning of Egypt, they appear to have absorbed almost nothing into their own societies.

Although this book is primarily concerned with establishing racial identities of peoples it does not shrink from evaluating group accomplishments in explicitly racial terms. A willingness to consider the cultural implications of race makes this an invaluable and welcome volume.

On the debit side, the book assumes a more detailed knowledge of geography and physical anthropology than some readers may have attained, though laymen will still find it rewarding. The book’s greatest defect is its almost complete lack of references — a surprising omission for a work that defends positions many would find controversial. On balance, though, Race in Ancient Egypt & the Old Testament is a thoroughly informative addition to the Scott-Townsend catalogue.

This book is available from the publisher for $11.00, including postage. The address is Box 34070, Washington, DC 20043.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Human Nature

An experimental program that was supposed to persuade welfare mothers not to have more children has been a complete failure. Participants in the New Chance program had to be 16 to 22 years old, and to have given birth as teenagers. Most were high school dropouts. Two thousand three hundred women in ten different states were stuffed with education, training, counseling, and advice on birth-control. Eighteen months later, half were pregnant again — about the same rate as similar women who did not get the uplift treatment. [Virginia Ellis, Welfare mother plan fails to halt pregnancy trend, LA Times, 6/22/94, A3.]

‘Kids to Feed’

The extended family of a Boston woman named Eulalia Rodriquez and her descendants receive nearly one million dollars each year in government assistance payments. She has been on welfare for 26 years; 14 children, 74 grandchildren, and 15 great-[+]grandchildren are also on welfare. “I’m sick of people acting like I’m some crook,” says Miss Rodriguez. “We’ve got a lot of kids to feed.” [source is February 1994 Boston Globe.]

Living the Black Life

Khalid Abdul Muhammad is the Nation of Islam (NOI) spokesman who gained sudden notoriety for recommending that all white South Africans be exterminated. Should NOI decide to implement a similar policy in the United States, Mr. Muhammad could start with his own neighbors. He lives in a luxury apartment building in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, in which he is perhaps the only black. Of Cliffside Park’s more than 22,500 residents, only 370 are black.

Mr. Muhammad’s building has an olympic-sized swimming pool, tennis courts, and a lobby filled with mirrors and leather sofas. The least expensive apartment rents for $994 a month and the most expensive for $2,000. According to his neighbors, Mr. Muhammad drives a Rolls-Royce. [Chrisena Coleman, Khalid’s fancy digs, NY Daily News, 6/27/94, p. 3.]

Burnishing the Image

Congress established the Martin Luther King holiday in 1984, and set up a federal commission to help organize the celebration. Although several government employees were “loaned” to the commission, no tax money was appropriated for it, and it was supposed to shut down within 20 months.

In 1986, Congress voted to extend the life of the King Commission for another three years so it could “finish its work,” and supporters once again promised never to ask for federal money. However, in 1989, Congress appropriated $1.5 million to help the commission badger the states into observing the King holiday. That mission was accomplished in 1993, when New Hampshire became the last state to enact a King holiday.

By then, devotees had come up with a new reason to spend tax money: They were dissatisfied with the way people spend the King holiday. As Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania explained, “Nothing would have [angered] Martin more than people supposedly honoring him by sitting on their duffs watching the tube or sleeping late.” It is therefore necessary to spend another $2 million tutoring the American people on the proper way to remember King.

We are to spend our day “doing the hard work of citizenship,” that is to say, feeding bums, picking up trash, and tutoring illiterates. The House of Representatives passed this bill without even debating it. The Senate, after some debate, approved it 94 to four. [William Grigg, Honoring “St. Martin,” New American, July 11, 1994, p. 35. Lott angers black leaders with vote on MLK holiday, Commonwealth (Greenwood, Miss) 5/25/94.]

No other federal holiday has ever had a commission to help with its celebration.

Black History All Year Long

Florida Governor Lawton Chiles recently signed a bill requiring that all Florida public schools teach black history, with specific emphasis on slavery, the transport of slaves to America, abolition, and the contributions of blacks. “Knowledge is the antidote to the poison of prejudice,” said the governor, adding that black history must not be confined to a particular month. [New Florida law requires teaching of black history, Jet, June 13, 1994, p. 29.]

More Multi-Culti

In July, a family of Puerto Ricans went swimming in a river near Bloomfield, Connecticut. A 14-year-old girl, Lydia Benitez, was caught in the current, swept away, and drowned. A white man who was fishing nearby, drove into town to get help from the Bloomfield police, who sent divers to the scene. On three separate days, they tried to find the body but could not. Miss Benitez’ family then consulted a priestess of Santeria, a Cuban voodoo-like cult, who advised them to float a candle in the water. Several hours later, the body floated to the surface.

A crowd of more than 100 family members and friends then decided to take the body to a hospital, insisting that it be examined by a doctor. One hospital turned them away, but at another, they forced their way into the emergency room. There the Puerto Ricans started shouting, shoving, and punching hospital personnel. Police eventually broke up the melee, arresting nine people.

What brought this on? “Everyone was going crazy because we believed they [the police] didn’t do enough to find her [the dead girl],” explained family friend Johnny Maldonaldo. “They didn’t try hard enough because she’s a Puerto Rican,” said another friend; “If that were a white person, they would have found her the first day.” The girl’s mother also accused the police of neglecting their duties out of racism. [James Barron, “Relatives of Drowned Girl Charged in Fight at Hospital, NYT, 7/13/94, p. B5.]

Boston Resegregates

1994 is the 20th anniversary of Judge Arthur Garrity’s famous order forcibly to integrate Boston’s public schools by busing. So many whites have either left the city or given their children private educations that Boston’s schools are more segregated than before the order. In 1974, the school system served 85,000 children, 49 percent of whom were white. Today it serves 64,000 children, 19 percent of whom are white.

Judge Garrity has no regrets. “I never have thought of what I would do differently,” he said in a recent interview. [Schools more segregated after 20 years, Commonwealth (Greenwood, Miss), 6/19/94.]

IRS Disciplines Blacks

Bureaucrats are wringing their hands over a study showing that black employees of the Internal Revenue Service are three times more likely to be disciplined than white employees. Regional commissioners will now be evaluated quarterly on whether they have done enough “to address and lessen the potential adverse impact of discipline on minority employees.” Translation: They will be more reluctant than ever to discipline incompetent blacks. The same study finds that Asian employees are disciplined less often than whites, [Frank Greve, IRS finds racial gap in disciplining workers, Sacramento Bee, 6/18/94, p. A11.] but this appears to be of no interest to anyone.

The Race Marches On

National Council of La Raza is one of the nation’s largest Hispanic organizations. Its efforts are unabashedly devoted to “la raza” or “the race.” In July, 8,000 participants attended its annual conference in Miami Beach. President Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker, and other cabinet members who addressed the group included Donna Shalala (Health and Human Services) and Henry Cisneros (Housing). Even the Commissioner of the IRS, Doris Meissner, addressed “the race.” [Alfonso Chardy, La Raza convention seeks unity, Miami Herald, 7/17/94, p. 1B.]

At the other end of the country, in Sacramento, California, Hispanics were holding the 13th annual Chicano-Latino Youth Leadership Project. In between workshops and seminars, the participants were frequently roused with calls of “Who are you?” to which they were taught to reply, shouting in unison, “California’s future leaders.” [Jeanine DeFao, Latino youth learn value of uniting for better life, Sacramento Bee, 7/28/94, p. B1.]

Tucked away in the back pages of the Miami Herald was a small article that explains what all this Hispanic whooping means. Jorge Mas Canosa is a Miami big-wig and chairman of the influential Cuban American National Foundation. He was recently interviewed for El Pais, one of Spain’s leading newspapers, about post-Castro Cuba. When questioned whether the United States might once again dominate Cuba, he replied:

“That’s bull****. They haven’t even been able to take over Miami! If we have kicked them out of here, how could they possibly take over our own country?” [Alfonso Chardy, Mas Canosa: U.S. won’t be able to run Cuba, Miami Herald, 1994.]

American Malaria

The New England Journal of Medicine reports in its July 7 issue that two New Jersey residents have contracted malaria without leaving the country. In both cases, recent immigrants from malaria-ridden countries were found to be living within short distances of the American sufferers. The authors write that Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes, which are native to New Jersey, are fully capable of transmitting the disease.

There have been a number of confirmed transmissions of malaria in the United States within the last ten years. In each previous case, illegal Mexican immigrants were found to be the source. The recent New Jersey cases are the first reported in that state in 30 years. [John H. Brook, Et. Al., Brief Report: Malaria Probably Locally Acquired in New jersey, New England Journal of Medicine, July 7, 1994, p. 22.]

More Handouts for Non-whites

Many cities and states write non-white set-asides into their finances. Whenever California, for example, issues bonds, it requires that minority-owned firms get 15 percent of the fees. Woman-owned firms get five percent and those run by disabled veterans [!] get three percent. There are so few firms of these kinds capable of doing the work that white-owned companies may simply find people in the favored categories whom they pay for work not done. “The minority firms will literally get checks in the mail for trades they weren’t aware occurred,” explains one non-white securities executive.

Last December, Merrill Lynch underwrote a $409 million bond issue for Dade County in Florida, which sets aside a certain portion of its underwriting business for non-whites. A co-manager of the deal was AIBC Investment Services, which had six employees and $65,000 in capital. Unlike most co-managers, AIBC did not sell a single bond; it “coordinated” the transaction with nine other non-white firms, and received $350,000 in fees.

Similar schemes are common for the management of public pensions. Many states and cities require that non-whites handle a certain portion of their business, which is sometimes handed off to minority-owned fronts for real companies or to “companies” that simply collect fees. [Affirmative, yes — but is it Fair?, Business Week, July 4, 1994, p. 74.]

Yet More Handouts

The Federal Communications Commission has quietly launched what may be the biggest affirmative action program in the nation’s history. It has set aside radio frequencies for mobile communications purposes to be bid for only by non-whites, women, and small businesses. Approximately half of the 2,000 licenses available in cities will be off limits to most white men. One communications executive calls the program “without a doubt the biggest affirmative action program in history,” and estimates that the frequencies are worth well over half a billion dollars. “This is band-width, you know,” says one astonished securities analyst; “You can’t ever make any more of it.”

The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to tilt the bidding against white men, [Edmund Andrews, FCC to reserve licenses in affirmative action move, NYT, 6/30/94, p. D1.] and the decision appears not to have caused the slightest ripple of complaint.

More White Crime

Cecil Calimee is a black man who used to work behind a ticket window in the Chicago subway. Ticket takers are protected from customers by steel bars, and although Mr. Calimee had been held up at gun point three times, he had never been injured. In July, three Hispanics approached his window and asked directions, which Mr. Calimee gave them. The Hispanics started speaking among themselves in Spanish, then doused Mr. Calimee with a flammable fluid and set him on fire. He managed to get out of the ticket booth and rolled on the ground, trying to put out the flames. The Hispanics laughed while he screamed in pain.

Mr. Calimee suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns and will be in the hospital for a long time. No arrests have yet been reported in this case. Mr. Calimee was not robbed, so the motive for the attack appears to have been pure sadism. [Bonita Brodt, He can still see his attackers — smiling, Chicago Tribune, 7/29/94, p. 1.] Because Hispanics are a victim category but not a perpetrator category, this crime will enter official statistics as one committed by whites against a black.

Chavis Chagrined

The executive director of the NAACP, Ben Chavis, is in trouble. It was recently revealed that he authorized a considerable payment to a former co-worker as an out-of-court settlement in a sexual harassment case. Without seeking approval of the NAACP’s board of directors, he authorized two payments to Mary Stansel of $50,000 each, as well as six monthly installments of $5,400. This much, or $132,400, has already been paid.

Mr. Chavis also agreed to find Miss Stansel a job outside the NAACP that paid at least $80,000 a year and promised to pay her another $250,000 if he was unable to do so. It appears he was unable to do so because, he says, she overstated her qualifications. Since the NAACP did not then come through with the promised $250,000, Miss Stansel has sued for it.

The sexual harassment charges came to light only because of the suit. NAACP board members are displeased that Mr. Chavis authorized six-figure payments without their knowledge or approval, and some believe that he tried to keep them from learning about the suit. Mr. Chavis denies the harassment charges and says that he authorized payments only to avoid public embarrassment. [Director used NAACP funds to settle sex harassment case, Chicago Tribune,July 29, 1994, p. 12.]

Tales of Hoodoo

Two Louisiana women have gouged out their sister’s eyes because they thought she was possessed by a demon. Dorothea Crawford and Beverly Johnson are practitioners of hoodoo, which is a combination of voodoo and Catholicism. They beat their sister and gouged out her eyes with their fingers during a prayer session that was meant to cast out demons. [Women accused of eye-gouging, Sault Ste. Marie Evening News, 7/15/94, p. 3.]

Slavery on the Rise

In the East African nation of Sudan, slavery is increasingly common. It is one of the consequences of a 12-year war waged by Muslim northerners against black, animist southerners. Arab militiamen often raid a village of the Dinka tribe, kill all the men, and enslave the women and children. The price of a woman or child varies with the supply. In 1989, the going rate was about $90, but now that raids are more common the price has fallen to $15.

In Mauritania, to the West, slavery never really ended. It was not even legally abolished until 1980, but the law has little meaning. An estimated 90,000 blacks are still the property of Arabs, and perhaps another 300,000 “freed” slaves continue in servitude because they have nowhere to go. [Charles Jacobs and Mohamed Athie, bought and Sold, NYT, 7/13/94.] So far, neither the NAACP nor the Congressional Black Caucus seems to have taken an interest in this.

Summer Savagery

From coast to coast, beaches and public swimming pools are devising new plans to cope with waves of savage young non-whites. This year, Huntington Beach, California began to enforce a 10:00 p.m. curfew because bathers cannot be trusted to behave themselves at night. In Orange County, Laguna Beach is the only town that does not shut down the beach at night. Some lifeguards now carry guns and wear bullet-proof vests. [Sara Rimer, Beach Curfews Are Clouding California’s Endless Summer, NYT, 7/12/94, p. A1.]

Venice Beach, one of California’s most famously carnavalesque, has been particularly hard hit by feuding black and Hispanic gangs. In the past 14 months there have been 55 drive-by shootings and 17 murders. Blacks recently distributed fliers in the Oakwood neighborhood that read:

STOP SNITCHING. Stop calling the police on our young people . . . When you see black men carrying guns through your yard, support him — Give him a hand full of bullets! Our youths are out there risking their lives to protect you older folks from Mexican bullets.

At a recent community meeting, a black woman explained the killings: “They are using violence, gangs and drugs to get rid of minorities.” [Karen Brandon, Sun, sand and now violence at famous L.A. beachfront, Chi. Tribune, 7/27/94, p. 1.]

In the Watts area of Los Angeles, six lifeguards in Will Rogers Park were beaten up in a period of three days. One was beaten to within an inch of his life. These lifeguards do not yet wear guns and bullet-proof vests.

In New York City, so many girls at public swimming pools have had their bathing suits ripped off them by rampaging boys that the city is considering segregating the pools by sex. Many girls wear oversized T-shirts over their bathing suits to discourage molestation. Whites have long since been driven from the city’s pools, which are used almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

The usual dreamers say that the solution is to give lifeguards “sensitivity training.” The administration of David Dinkins mounted a campaign with the theme “Don’t Dis[respect] Your Sis[ter],” which appears to have had no effect. [Douglas Martin, Segregating by sex at public pools considered, NYT, 7/7/94, p. B1.]

Pit Bulls in the City

Although pit bulls are no longer the big news they were in the late 1980s, in some places they are more of a problem than ever. They are popular in the black areas of Connecticut cities, where back-yard breeders have produced wildly aggressive strains. Pit bulls are used as watch dogs and in dog fights, but many escape from their owners and roam the streets. In Bridgeport, citizens frequently call the police to report wild pit bulls in their neighborhoods, and the majority of dog bite cases handled by authorities involved pit bulls.

Blacks have also changed the rules of dog fighting. There used to be strict procedures that at least ensured the survival of the looser, but the typical ghetto fight is different. A courtyard or alley is blocked off and the dogs fight to the death. “A lot of the dogs are so torn up that they’re practically unrecognizable as dogs,” says a woman who operates an animal shelter. Gamblers love dogfights and as much as $30,000 may change hands in a single fight. [New horror Tale: Invasion of the discarded pit bulls, NYT, 7/18/94.]

Chickens and Ducks

Most people want to live with people like themselves. A study done by the University of California at Los Angeles found that, on average, white Angelenos tell a poll-taker they want neighborhoods that are 76 percent white and 24 percent black, or 79 percent white and 21 percent Hispanic.

Hispanics want a neighborhood that is 88 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black or 62 percent Hispanic and 38 percent white — a clear preference for white neighbors over black. Blacks show the same preference for whites. On average, they want a 50-50 mix if the other race is white, but they want a 62-38 majority if the other race is Hispanic. [AP, People prefer neighbors of the same race, Orange County Register, 11/29/92, p. B8.]

Abandoned at Birth

Every year, about 22,000 mothers abandon their infants in hospitals after they give birth. They show up in labor, give false names and family contacts, and leave as soon as they can. Seventy-four percent of the abandoned infants are black, 12 percent are white, and eight percent are Hispanic. It costs about $600 a day to keep an infant in the hospital, and about a quarter stay for at least three weeks. [John Ritter, “Babies will keep coming,’ USA Today, 12/2/93, p. 1.]

AIDS in Prison

From 1992 to 1993, the number of Illinois prison inmates with AIDS increased seven-fold, from 25 to 177. That year, 23 inmates died of AIDS, putting the disease ahead of cancer and heart attacks as the leading cause of inmate death.

In a study done in 1988 and 1989, a group of 2,392 new inmates in Joliet Prison were tested for AIDS and 95 were found to have the virus. A year later, the same prisoners were tested and seven more were HIV positive, suggesting that they caught the disease in prison. [Jerry Thomas, AIDS is top killer in state prisons, Chi Tribune, 5/2/94.]

Speech Police

Anything the government touches becomes an anti-discrimination nightmare. Fair housing laws were supposed to prevent whites from keeping blacks out of their neighborhoods, but have been hijacked by every conceivable interest group. Realtors now police their ad copy for fear than an offending word might launch a law suit. So far, most speech codes are voluntary and defensive, but formal censorship may not be far behind.

“Master bedrooms” are now off limits since they might remind blacks of slavery. “Spectacular views” might offend the blind. “Quiet neighborhoods” might suggest a prejudice against children. Anything that is “executive” hints of excessive whiteness. One fair-housing official browbeat a company into withdrawing an ad for a Chester, Pennsylvania house described as a “rare find.” Chester is mostly black, and it was reprehensible to suggest that a nice house in a black town might be unusual. [Dale Russakoff, Housing-Ad suits leave agents at a loss for words, Chicago Sun-Times, 6/7/94, p. 22.]

Healthy Instincts

It has now been 30 years since pollsters started asking Americans if they trusted Washington to do what is right all or most of the time. Government got the best review the first year, 1964, with 75 percent of respondents saying “yes.” That number declined steadily to about 25 percent in 1980 but rebounded to about 40 percent from 1982 to 1988 (during Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office). In 1994 the figure hit an all-time low of about 18 percent. [Do We Trust Government?, Readers Digest, May 1994, p. 141.] Actually, it’s astonishing to think that only 30 years ago 75 percent of Americans thought the federal government could be counted on to do what was right all or most of the time.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I have to take issue with reader Joseph Bishop’s dismay over the four Jewish speakers at the AR conference. I agree that as a group, Jews may have much to answer for — but so does the apparently suicidal or catatonic majority, whose acquiescence is absolutely necessary for their dispossession. Is it not healthiest if perceptive Jews join the discussion?

Not all Jews are Ben Wattenberg or Stephen Jay Gould. For example, Lawrence Auster’s brilliant lecture, published in the August issue of AR, is the most cogent argument against multiculturalism I have ever seen. In fact, I’m sending copies of that lecture to everyone I know.

Paul Neff, Cambridge, Mass.

Sir — Mr. Auster’s lecture and the review of Dr. Nelson’s book compliment each other nicely. However, like so much of what appears in AR, these two excellent articles raise — but do not answer — what I take to be the fundamental question: Why are whites committing suicide? Mr. Auster points out that the trustees of an exclusive white school hire a black woman who says she intends to intimidate white children and make them feel guilty. Dr. Nelson quotes Mexican newspapers boasting that immigration will reconquer the southwestern United States for Mexico. Neither author explains why whites permit such blatant attacks on their interests.

I suspect that AR is silent about the causes of white suicide because no one really knows what they are. It is so wholly unnatural for a people to march cheerfully into oblivion that those of us who do not suffer from the prevailing insanity are baffled by it. Racialists and non-racialists are as incomprehensible to each other as separate species.

Perhaps suicide is not the right term. Whites are not literally killing themselves; they struggle as hard as anyone to advance their careers and provide for their children. What has vanished is any sense of group identity, without which the group must inevitably perish.

Why is it that a sense of the group, which is so obvious and natural to all others and was once obvious and natural to us, has disappeared? Surely, this is the great unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question of our time. We can point out this fatal absence to our sleepwalking brethren and hope they will awake, but it is impossible to save a man (or, more correctly, a group) that refuses to save itself.

There are no social mechanisms to force group instincts to function because there is ordinarily no need for such mechanisms. Perhaps we can only hope that through persuasion and example we can bring back to life the dormant instincts of our people.

Thomas Shorter, Denver, Colo.

Sir — The California Civil Rights Initiative (reported in the August 1994 issue) would outlaw racial preferences of all kinds in public employment in the state of California. The intent of the initiative, however, is not to protect whites. Its intent is to protect everyone from discrimination in the public sector. As such the initiative is a strong assertion of the basic principles of individual rights. Among our supporters are both blacks and whites as well as people with different political affiliations.

Glynn Custred, California Civil Rights Initiative, Berkeley, Calif.

Sir — I was glad to see the “O Tempora” item about the increasing frankness with which whites are expressing their feelings about non-whites. Your report parallels my own observations: More and more whites have quietly given up on the idea that integration and multi-racialism are desirable, and many are willing to say so, at least privately.

I believe that what we may soon have in this country is a state of mind similar to that of the waning decades of the Soviet Union. From the 1970s on, it was commonly observed that although no one really believed in Communism, all but a few brave souls pretended to believe in it. At least in the United States, there is no tradition of locking people up simply for expressing themselves. The attempt to pass laws that would punish “racist” speech is, I believe, one of the dying gasps of a multi-racialist ideology that knows itself to be seriously threatened.

Amanda Pope, Paducah, Ky.

Sir — I shook my head in disbelief as I read the item in the August issue about the Agency for International Development. Federal bureaucrats have finally decided that the techniques developed for illiterate thirdworld peasants are probably appropriate for use in our illiterate thirdworld ghettos. I suppose it is a step forward to recognize that inner-city Baltimore has a lot in common with Upper Volta. But haven’t they noticed that none of these techniques has worked in Upper Volta either?!

There is something about the liberal mind that seems to make it incapable of even the most basic forms of perception, if what is perceived is likely to conflict with a pre-conceived view of the world.

Name Withheld, Fairfield, Conn.