November 2006
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol. 17, No. 11 | November 2006 |
| CONTENTS |
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Black Racial Consciousness, Part III
The Perils of ‘Whiteness Studies’
Report From Sweden
The Most Gruesome Multi-cult of All?
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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Black Racial Consciousness, Part III
Many blacks do not feel they are part of America.
Parts I and II, in the two previous issues, described how closely blacks identify with their race, and take for granted that race and culture are inseparable. Part II concluded with examples of the intense hatred many blacks feel for whites.
Given this level of dislike for the majority population, it is not surprising that many blacks feel alienated from the United States as a whole. Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, black author Brian Gilmore wrote that blacks were not emotionally drawn into the events the way whites were, that they were “not feeling that deep sense of patriotism that most Americans feel.” Of his fellow blacks he wrote, “They were Americans, but not quite as American as white Americans.” He wrote about what was to him the most important consequence of the attacks: “[N]ot only was the black agenda taken off the table for the foreseeable future, the table itself was taken down.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, in which hundreds of New York City firemen died in rescue attempts, many fire departments started flying American flags on their trucks as a tribute to fallen comrades. On Sept. 15, two black members of the Miami-Dade department, Jim Moore and Terry Williams, refused to ride on a truck flying the flag. Thomas Steinfatt, a professor specializing in inter-cultural communications at the University of Miami, says their sentiments are common. “Black Americans perceive a lot of areas of discrimination that are not evident to whites,” he said. “To some, the flag represents white America, not all of America.”
Three months after the attacks, Rev. Al Sharpton spoke at the State of the Black World Conference, held in Atlanta. He celebrated the view that blacks are not really part of America, and taunted the American military for not being able to find Osama bin Laden. “This country can’t find a guy who comes out every two weeks to cut a video, and then you challenge us to stand under one flag?” he asked, to thunderous applause from 700 black delegates.
In 2000, state legislators in New Jersey tried to pass a bill to have school children recite this passage from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The bill would have also required schools to describe the historical context that explains why the passage refers only to men, and that it was written at a time when slavery was legal. Black legislators fought the bill because “all men are created equal” did not apply to blacks in 1776. State Senator Wayne Bryant led the opposition: “It’s another way of being exclusionary and insensitive . . . You have the nerve to ask my grandchildren to recite (the declaration). How dare you? You are now on notice that this is offensive to my community.” Every black state senator opposed the bill.
Likewise in 2000, Chicago alderman Bernard Stone thought it would be a patriotic gesture if every city council session began with the Pledge of Allegiance. “It seemed to me to be a no-brainer, something that would be passed almost without discussion,” he said. He was wrong. Black members of the council complained that the final phrase, “with liberty and justice for all” is hypocritical because it does not include blacks. The council finally did vote to open meetings with the pledge, but several black members abstained. When the council recited the pledge for the first time, at least one black member stayed outside the room.
In January 2002, the Virginia state legislature voted unanimously to begin each session by reciting the official state pledge to the Virginia flag: “I salute the flag of Virginia, with reverence and patriotic devotion to the ‘Mother of States and Statesmen,’ which it represents — the ‘Old Dominion,’ where liberty and independence were born.” A week later, black legislators tried to stop recitation of the pledge when they learned that it was written in 1946 by a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a club for women descended from Confederate soldiers. They had also learned that the state had adopted the pledge in 1954, at a time when segregation was still legal. “I don’t want to affirm a time when Virginia was exclusive and not inclusive,” said Delegate Dwight Jones of Richmond. “I feel like I’m affirming the past and the mood of the state at the time [when I recite the pledge].” By this logic, they should abolish the flag itself, which was adopted in 1861, when slavery was still practiced.
For many blacks, the history of the United States is an unbroken chain of racism and oppression, and can never be a source of pride or patriotism. As filmmaker Spike Lee has explained, “When talking about the history of this great country, one can never forget that America was built upon the genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of African people. To say otherwise is criminal.”
Equally deep alienation from the United States was reflected by a group of black congressmen who were convinced that the presidential elections of 2000, in which there was dispute about the vote count in Florida, reflected systematic racism and corruption in the American electoral system. The group, led by Texas Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, sent a letter to Secretary General Kofi Annan asking the United Nations to send election observers to monitor the US presidential election in 2004, in order to “ensure free and fair elections.”
A different but related form of alienation is reflected in the frequent unwillingness of blacks to cooperate with the police, even when they are investigating crimes committed against other blacks. In 2006, “Stop Snitching” T-shirts were something of a fashion craze. They featured a large red “stop” symbol with “stop snitching” in block letters inside, and showed up on people loitering around crime scenes when the police came to investigate.
Pittsburgh prosecutor Lisa Pellegrini had seen the shirt before, but was furious when she found one of her own prosecution witnesses wearing one in court. This was a man she was counting on to testify against a murderer, but he walked out of the courthouse rather than turn the shirt inside out. With no witness for the prosecution, she had no case and the judge dismissed charges. Miss Pellegrini explained that refusal to cooperate is pervasive: “In almost every one of my homicides, this happens: ‘I don’t know nothin’ about nothing.’ There is that attitude, ‘Don’t be a snitch.’ And it’s condoned by the community.” In Massachusetts, the problem was so bad that the state banned “Stop Snitching” clothing from all courthouses. More ominously, it also banned cell phones with cameras, when friends of a defendant were caught using a cell phone to take pictures of witnesses and the prosecutor.
There are even magazines sold on newsstands that are devoted to contempt for the law. One called Felon appeals both to the real thing and to young blacks who think prison time is a glamorous rite of passage. In 2006 it published an entire “stop snitchin” issue. One letter to the editor closed with “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.” A similar magazine, Don Diva, was launched with the motto “For The Ghetto Fabulous Lifestyle.” It later rechristened itself as “The Original Street Bible,” and glamorizes outlaw life with articles about criminals, clothing, cars, and is illustrated with sultry, near-naked women. One fold-out cover depicted a staged street execution. “We speak for the streets — people doing time, doing life and doing death,” explained editor Tiffany Childs.
For many blacks, a highly visible refusal to respect the white man’s law is more important than justice. Busta Rhymes is a hip-hop star who, along with as many as 50 other blacks, probably saw someone shoot his bodyguard in 2006. No one was willing to talk to the police. This was also the case in the unsolved murders of other prominent rappers: Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G., and Jam Master Jay.
It is not only rappers and ghetto-dwellers who think blacks should put loyalty to race above loyalty to the law. Paul Butler is a former U.S. Attorney-turned-law-professor, who thinks that when black juries decide the fate of black defendants who are clearly guilty, they should first decide whether it is good for black people if the accused is sent to prison. If not, they should acquit. He openly promotes “jury nullification,” whereby jurors make decisions without regard for the evidence. “I do want to subvert the criminal justice system,” he said unapologetically.
Uncle Toms
Are there blacks who do not put race first, who oppose racial preferences, who want Americans of all colors to overcome the divisiveness of the past? In short, are there blacks who have the same ideals about race as most whites? Yes, and other blacks despise them.
The most hated black man in America is undoubtedly Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Rather than taking pride in his achievements, blacks heap scorn on him because he does not display a strong racial consciousness, and does not favor racial preferences for blacks. His name evokes contempt in churches, barber shops, gyms, or any other place blacks gather. Black commentator Julianne Malveaux once said of him, “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early, like many black men do, of heart disease.”
Donna Brazile, also black, who managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, explains that “there’s so much animosity and hatred toward Clarence Thomas as someone who has betrayed the race.” Abigail Johnson, a retired educator in Savannah, Georgia, once recognized Justice Thomas chatting with friends in a public library in Savannah. She approached them and announced, “I just wanted to see what a group of Uncle Toms looks like,” and walked away. Black essayist Debra Dickerson, who has some sympathy for Justice Thomas, says he “is the lowest of the low in sort of official blackdom.” Emerge, a black-oriented magazine that has since disappeared, put Justice Thomas on its cover twice — once as a lawn jockey and once in an Aunt Jemima-style head scarf. Ebony refuses to include Justice Thomas in its list of 100 most influential blacks.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii once considered inviting Justice Thomas to take part in a debate on racial preferences, but a black member of the local ACLU board, Eric Ferrer, complained it would be like “inviting Hitler to come speak on the rights of Jews.” Former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, denounced him in a speech to the Association of Black Sociologists, calling Justice Thomas “a shill and cover for the most insidious form of racism,” and said that inviting him to speak would be “legitimizing of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Five black law school professors boycotted a 2002 talk by Justice Thomas at the University of North Carolina. They had not protested a visit by the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, but explained in a letter that with Justice Thomas it was different: In a nation “in which African Americans are disproportionately poor, undereducated, imprisoned and politically compromised, identity — racial identity — very clearly matters.” Justice Thomas was, in their view, a traitor to his race. Leonard Small knew Clarence Thomas when both were teen-agers in Pin Point, Georgia. “He not only hates himself, he hates his history,” says Mr. Small. “He wishes almost socio-pathically to be white.”
There are a few other blacks who, like Clarence Thomas, sincerely believe racial preferences are unfair, even if they benefit blacks. One is Ward Connerly, who has been fighting affirmative action for years. After guiding an anti-discrimination ballot initiative to success in California, he established the American Civil Rights Institute to try to promote similar campaigns in other states. Many blacks were furious when Mr. Connerly picked the 68th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr. to announce formation of the group. “Dr. Martin Luther King died for Ward Connerly to even have a right to be here, to speak and to be listened to by the media,” said the Rev. Timothy Malone, a minister at the University of California at Davis. “It’s a bridge that Ward Connerly has walked across and is now trying to tear down so that others will not be able to walk across.” He added that Mr. Connerly was “spitting on the grave of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by announcing that he’s going to end the programs that (King) died for.” Mr. Connerly has drawn spite from blacks wherever he has campaigned against affirmative action.
Jesse Lee Peterson, who runs a Los Angeles boys’ home called the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND), has drawn some attention as a black man who does not accept racism as an excuse for the failings of blacks. He points out:
“You have cities run by blacks — the mayor, the police chief, the city council are black; everybody and his mama, black — and I’m afraid to go out at night. Yet these cities’ leaders are still able to blame white racism for their problems. Help me on this. Why don’t blacks say: ‘You’re in control; do something’? Why do black folks continue to accept [the racism excuse]?”
Michael Eric Dyson, a black, tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania has the typical, sneering reply: “If you’ve ever wondered what a self-hating black man who despises black culture and worships at the altar of whiteness looks like, take a gander at the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson.”
An ordinary black person minding his own business can get into trouble for not being “black enough.” Eric J. Moore, a black Milwaukee police officer, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2003, accusing his black supervisors of denying him promotions because he kept company with whites. “Upper management has made known their biases against me because of my race and association with non-blacks,” he said. He also noted that police chief and mayoral candidate Arthur L. Jones called him a “shuffling-okey-dokey-for-the-white-man type of brother,” and that his former supervisor Leslie Barber told him he would not be promoted because he “runs around here talking to those damn white people.”
Gary Franks of Connecticut was one of a very small number of black Republicans in Congress, and did not join the Black Caucus or support racial preferences. When his six years of service ended with a defeat in 1996, a black Democratic congressman from Missouri, Bill Clay, wrote a six-page letter of celebration. He called Mr. Franks “a Negro Dr. Kevorkian, a pariah who gleefully assists in suicidal conduct to destroy his own race.” Of Mr. Franks and Clarence Thomas he wrote: “The goal of this group of Negro wanderers is to maim and kill other blacks for the gratification and entertainment of — for lack of a more accurately descriptive word — ultraconservative white racists.”
What Future for Whites?
What we find among many blacks — no doubt the majority — is a view of race completely at odds with what the civil rights movement was presumably working for: the elimination of race as a relevant category in American life. White racism is commonly alleged to be the great obstacle to harmonious race relations in the United States, but whites are the only group that actually subscribes to the goal of eliminating race consciousness and that actively polices its members for signs of backsliding. If whites were the great obstacle to harmony, it would be they who unapologetically put their interests first, who fantasized about killing blacks, who vied with each other to prove they were “white enough,” and ostracized and spat upon those who were not. Instead, any white person who spoke or acted in ways blacks take for granted would be hounded out of public life and scorned in private. To understand how differently blacks and whites think about race, it is sufficient to reread any of the preceding passages and imagine the same events but with the races reversed.
Anyone who looks closely at black racial thinking and behavior cannot but conclude that 50 years after the legislated revolution of the civil rights movement, blacks are as far as ever from adopting the race-blindness that whites assume all Americans must achieve for multi-racialism to work. That is why virtually no one does look closely. Scholars and journalists alike avert their eyes from the intolerable fact that the racial group for which equality was sought so earnestly and so hopefully has not kept its end of the bargain.
There is intense, combative racial consciousness in the United States because blacks nourish it, take pride in it, find meaning in it, and despise other blacks who do not. The persistence of black racial consciousness in the face of sincere white efforts to practice race-blindness and even preferential treatment for minorities is the single greatest failure of racial liberalism, and the most certain sign that those who have promoted it do not understand human nature or the world in which we live. It is only a matter of time: Black racial consciousness — together with Hispanic and, to a lesser extent Asian consciousness — is reawakening white racial consciousness.
The behavior of non-whites not just in the United States but everywhere in the world shows that intense racial consciousness and the impulse to advance one’s own group even at the expense of others is the human norm. Whites are the only people who believe it is virtuous to sacrifice their group interests for the advantage of others. Indeed, for many whites, racial altruism has become the highest of all virtues.
This is nevertheless a very recent conviction. From the earliest contacts with non-whites until only 50 or 60 years ago, whites had a vivid sense of identity, and most could hardly imagine a world in which whites would cheerfully adopt policies that would, if left unchanged, consign their race and culture to oblivion.
Like the Communists, who initially may have truly believed that selfishness could be abolished and that humans really could live “from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” today’s white liberals are betting the future of their civilization on a mistaken view of man. Racial and group identity can no more be extirpated from the human spirit than can selfishness.
Communism staggered on for 70 years, blighting the lives of millions, before it finally collapsed. Sixty years after its official victory in the United States, racial egalitarianism is now the secular religion of whites everywhere — although not even its most fervent promoters practice in private the “diversity” they claim to love. Racial orthodoxy is like Communism under Khrushchev; practically no one really believes in it any more, but everyone must pretend to.
No one believes in it for two reasons. First, blacks and now Hispanics continue to fail in disproportionate numbers despite years of uplift that has cost billions of dollars. Second, nothing could be clearer than the fact that non-whites have not joined whites in the campaign to dismantle racial consciousness. Indeed, racial loyalty is so strong, so natural, so inevitable for them that they refuse to believe whites do not feel a race loyalty that is equally strong. Because they see the world in such vividly racial terms they cannot imagine whites could see it differently.
The endless charges of white racism and oppression that lard the speech of non-whites therefore reflect their own compulsions, not those of whites. They are attributing to whites the racial chauvinism they feel and cannot imagine we do not feel. They are accusing us of the very things they would do to us if they had the power to do it.
This is the real crisis whites face. They believed, during the “civil rights era,” that equal rights would satisfy blacks. They were wrong. Blacks were never satisfied. The most foolish whites even thought blacks would be grateful. They were never grateful. Blacks have gloried in their grievances, burnished their resentments, never moderated their demands. It should be clear to even the dullest liberal that nothing whites ever do will satisfy blacks, and that Hispanics are quickly learning to recite the same litany of constant and infinite grievance. The compulsion to take and to humiliate only grows stronger the more they take and humiliate.
Nothing suggests that the grievances of blacks and Hispanics will subside as they gain in numbers and power. They will always see whites as exploiters and criminals, even if whites are reduced to a small and powerless minority. In their view, whites will therefore always deserve whatever retribution it is within their power to exact.
In 100 years, will American whites be living as their cousins now live in Zimbabwe and South Africa? Will they be at the mercy of majorities that hate them, and tolerate them only to the extent they find them useful? Today, Robert Mugabe and Thabo Mbeki are restrained by the existence of powerful, white-majority countries. Africans, no less than American blacks and Hispanics, do not realize that whites really have lost racial consciousness, that Europe and America will not save the white tribe if the black tribes decide to ring down the curtain.
If our descendants ever face the same threat, there will be no powers to restrain an angry majority. And if our descendants ever face that threat it will be because we failed to forestall it.
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The Perils of ‘Whiteness Studies’
Researching the evil white mind.
Paul R. Croll, Douglas Hartmann, Joseph Gerteis, Putting Whiteness Theory to the Test: An Empirical Assessment of Core Theoretical Propositions, Dept. of Sociology, University of Minnesota, 2006, 52 pp.
Critical whiteness studies, or just plain whiteness studies, is a new academic specialty that is supposed to advance the study of American “racism.” The main idea is that there has been enough research on the bad things whites have done to and thought about non-whites, but the question of what whites think about themselves has been neglected.
Whites, goes the argument, have had the unfair advantage of thinking of themselves as normal, or without race. Blacks, and now Hispanics, have to contend with being “other,” or different from the majority. Racial equality and harmony will come only when whites confront their own whiteness, and begin to struggle with race as manfully as everyone else.
The point of the struggle is to recognize and root out “white privilege,” which is the central problem of race relations today. Many whites don’t even believe there is such a thing, which makes it particularly hard to root out. Whiteness studies tells us that even whites who sincerely believe they are “non-racist” or “race-blind” are in fact reaping huge benefits from “white skin privilege,” because every aspect of American society is geared to funneling them to the top and everyone else to the bottom. Whites may think they deserve their rewards because of brains or hard work but this is a delusion. What really matters is white privilege.
The gurus of whiteness studies are vague about how white privilege actually gives us better grades and lower crime rates. They tell us we have the advantage of seeing people who look like us in positions of power, and that we can buy Band Aids that are more or less the color of our own skin. They tell us policemen can look at us without automatically assuming we are crooks. It is none too clear how this translates into high SAT scores, but they assure us it does. It seems to have something to do with simply having non-whites around. Their mere presence generates the “white privilege” on which we have grown fat.
This theory has painful flaws. Why, for example, in a world of “white skin privilege” do Asians do better in school, have lower crime rates, and earn more than whites? At the same time, how did white countries that until recently had no non-whites to kick around manage to get rich without “white skin privilege?” The theory suggests that the people of Iceland would benefit tremendously from a stiff dose of Africans or Hmong.
There is also the question of degree: as the United States goes increasingly non-white, do we enjoy more or less “white skin privilege?” Will the last white man in America be the most privileged man in history or are there diminishing returns? Would just a handful of non-whites do the job for us?
Clearly, “whiteness studies” is another example of the idiotic things people profess to believe when they deliberately close their eyes to racial differences. Perhaps it was inevitable that when huge group differences in achievement persisted despite a ruthless and largely victorious war on “racism,” goofy white people would come up with goofy new explanations for why there are so many black drug addicts and so few black CEOs. Old favorites like segregation, Jim Crow, and lynching no longer sufficed. There had to be more up-to-date ways to blame the white man, and that is how we got mumbo-jumbo like “institutional racism,” “unconscious racism,” and now, “white skin privilege.”
To their credit, however, the “whiteness” experts have begun to realize that what they are doing is pure speculation. The field has no facts, no empirical studies, no falsifiable hypotheses. Into this breach have stepped Paul R. Croll, Douglas Hartmann, and Joseph Gerteis, all firm believers in “white skin privilege,” and all in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.
In 2003, they conducted a telephone survey on a nationally representative sample of whites, blacks, and Hispanics, to try to confirm their theories, namely, that whites have no consciousness of race whereas non-whites do, and that whites are unconscious of “white-skin privilege” whereas non-whites see it clearly. The results, published in a recently-released paper called “Putting Whiteness Theory to the Test: An Empirical Assessment of Core Theoretical Propositions,” were not entirely what the authors expected.
The most interesting findings are in the following three tables. In the first table below, It is encouraging to the rest of us — and dismaying to the “whiteness” experts — that no fewer than 74 percent of whites say racial identity is “very important” or “somewhat important” to them. The figures for non-whites are higher, of course, but it is remarkable that so many whites actually opened their mouths and told a pollster race is important to them.
| Whites | Non-Whites | ||
| Importance of Racial Identity — Current | |||
| Very important | 37% | 72% | |
| Somewhat important | 37% | 18% | |
| Not very important | 17% | 5% | |
| Not important at all | 9% | 5% | |
| Importance of Racial Identity Growing up | |||
| Very important | 26% | 57% | |
| Somewhat important | 27% | 19% | |
| Not very important | 31% | 13% | |
| Not important at all | 17% | 11% | |
| Feel own racial group has a culture that should be preserved? | |||
| Yes | 77% | 91% | |
| No | 23% | 9% | |
| Involved in any organization based on racial or ethnic identity? | |||
| Yes | 4% | 14% | |
| No | 96% | 86% | |
The second set of answers on this page shows that race becomes more important as whites (and non-whites) grow older. The everybody’s-beautiful propaganda works on children but not adults. And what are we to make of the fact that 77 percent of whites told a pollster they thought whites have a culture worth preserving?! Let us hope they get to work and start preserving it.
| Which factors are Important or Very Important in explaining white advantage and African-American disadvantage? | White Advantage | African-American Disadvantage | ||||
| Whites | Non-Whites | Total | Whites | Non-Whites | Total | |
| Prejudice and discrimination | 62% | 79% | 66% | 75% | 88% | 79% |
| Laws and institutions | 46% | 81% | 54% | 38% | 68% | 45% |
| Access to schools and social connections | 83% | 91% | 85% | 82% | 88% | 83% |
| Effort and hard work | 89% | 81% | 87% | 62% | 77% | 66% |
| Differences in family upbringing | 79% | 75% | 78% | 83% | 88% | 84% |
It is in the next set of answers, above, that whites show the effects of liberal brainwashing, with substantial percentages agreeing that “prejudice and discrimination” and “laws and institutions” account for their own successes. However, “effort and hard work,” get the most white votes, and even 81 percent of non-whites think that is an important reason for white success.
When it comes to black failure, non-whites are more realistic than whites, with 77 percent agreeing that backs don’t try hard enough, and 88 percent saying they don’t rear their children right. This sort of thing is deeply painful to the “whiteness” experts.
| Factors that may have helped you to get ahead in life | Whites | Non-Whites |
| Favoritism helped | 17% | 23% |
| Favoritism held back | 5% | 17% |
| Hard work and effort helped | 93% | 90% |
| Hard work and effort held back | 1% | 3% |
| Upbringing helped | 86% | 89% |
| Upbringing held back | 3% | 4% |
| Access to resources like schools and social connections helped | 73% | 76% |
| Access to resources like schools and social connections held back | 4% | 8% |
Finally, in the last table we see that nearly a quarter of non-whites say racial favoritism helped them get ahead, whereas only 17 percent of whites say so. Whites say hard work was what mattered most and, to the surprise of the “whiteness” gurus, so do the non-whites. The authors mumble something about how remarkable it is that everyone seems to have pretty much the same view of “the American dream,” but they seem to want their pets to think American society is so drenched in racism that hard work hardly matters.
This paper’s findings are so far removed from what the authors expected that they concede, “it would be easy to take these results to suggest that whiteness theory needs to be severely qualified and reworked, if not abandoned altogether.” Needless to say, they quickly recover form this spasm of clarity, and promise to carry on, as moon-calf egalitarians always do, in spite of the facts. Let us hope they continue to blunder onto data the rest of us find useful.
The full report can be requested from Nina Shepherd at Media and Public Relations, 10 Church St. S.E., 300 Bell Museum, University Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 or by e-mailing Miss Shepherd at sheph001@umn.edu.
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Report From Sweden
Modest but encouraging progress.
After the Swedish general election of Sept. 17, most foreign observers focused on the victory of the center-right alliance over the Social Democrats and their Green and Communist allies. But as neither side is any good on race or immigration, of considerably greater interest is how the nationalists fared. That means mainly the Sweden Democrats (SD), which is by far the biggest nationalist party.
The political establishment — right, center, left — was united in its determination to keep immigration out of the election, and to treat the SD as if it didn’t exist. Anyone forced to acknowledge its existence would denounce it as “racist” and “xenophobic.” The theory was that if no one ever mentioned it — and slurred it when it had to be mentioned — few Swedes would vote for it.
The media were in on the deal. Therefore, even though opinions polls put the SD as by far the biggest party not represented in the Swedish parliament, it got almost no attention. Two other smaller parties not in parliament — the moderately libertarian EU-skeptical June List, and the radical feminist Feminist Initiative — got quite a lot of media attention and were never called names.
Sweden’s third-biggest news paper Dagens Nyheter, for example, frequently compared the positions of different parties, and in addition to the seven parties in Parliament always included June List and Feminist Initiative but never the Sweden Democrats. The June List and Feminist Initiative were the acceptable “anti-establishment” parties.
Occasionally the media had to mention the SD out of pure necessity. For example, it got strong support in Ungt Val, an Internet-based “election” for high school students in June. It was a profound shock to the establishment when the SD received a full 11.9 percent of the votes, and its more radical splinter group, the National Democrats (ND) got an additional 2.1 percent.
This could not be passed over in silence, but was another opportunity to use words like “xenophobic” and “racist,” and to trot out “analysis” from the “anti-racist” watchdog group Expo (similar to the SPLC in America), which claimed that the SD was full of Nazis and criminals and just plain losers. After that brief bit of media attention, the SD rose in the polls to 2.5 percent. During late June and July, there were no opinion polls because most Swedes go on vacation, and after that, the establishment hoped, people would forget about the Ungt Val results. When polls started up again in August, the SD had established itself at a markedly higher level than before, around 1.5 to 2 percent, forcing the media to at least mention its name, albeit with the usual adjectives.
The virtual blackout continued. One exception was a “documentary” by Robert Aschberg , who runs the private station TV3 and who also happens to be editor of Expo, the “watch-dog” magazine. It was the usual: threatening background music, a dramatic narrator voice, pictures from neo-Nazi rallies, and the assertion that several SD candidates were convicted criminals.
The program wasn’t as effective as Mr. Aschberg had hoped because he felt compelled to invite SD’s leader, Jimmie Akesson to comment. Mr. Akesson pointed out that there were just as many convicted criminals among candidates for the established parties, and, when a few days later, leading tabloids revealed that several candidates for the Social Democrats and the Conservative Party were convicted paedophiles, the “SD is just a bunch of criminals” message was effectively neutralized.
During the last days before the election, the SD continued to poll at roughly two percent, probably an underestimate, since some people are reluctant to tell pollsters they’re going to vote for a party everyone condemns. When the election finally came, the exit polls first indicated that the SD would get just 1.9 percent. The election authorities decided that during the initial election-night count, the SD would not be counted separately, but would be dumped in with “other parties.” It soon became clear, though, that it was getting more than 1.9 percent because “other parties” were doing so much better than expected. Absurdly, “other parties” even got the largest share of the vote in traditional SD strongholds in the two southern provinces of Skane and Blekinge.
In the final count, SD got 162,463 votes, or 2.93 percent. That was a disappointment for SD activists, who hoped to reach the key four percent threshold for winning seats in the Swedish parliament, but it was still more than twice the 1.44 percent they got in 2002. And they did cross another important threshold: the 2.5 percent needed to get financial support from the state. Together with the campaign money they receive for having won local council seats, they will now get 45 million kronor (roughly $6.5 million) in state support — an unprecedented sum — to spend on the next election. (It is worth noting that the June List and the Feminist Initiative, on whom the media had lavished such attention, respectively got a derisory 0.47 and 0.68 percent of the vote.)
The SD was quite successful in local elections, particularly in Skane and Blekinge provinces, and its total number of county seats rose from 49 to 285. The party also won 16 seats in provincial assemblies, whereas it had none before the election.
The SD’s greatest success was in the city of Landskrona in Skane, where it won 22.3 percent. In Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo, it got 7.5 percent, and it won 9.6 percent in Blekinge’s biggest city Karlskrona. What prevented a breakthrough in the national election was that many people who voted for SD locally seem to have voted for established parties in the national election. In the city of Landskrona, for example, the SD won 22.3 percent of the vote for county assembly, but just 8.25 percent for parliament. This was probably because many voters didn’t think the SD would make it into parliament and didn’t want to “waste” their votes, whereas they knew its candidates were certain to make it into the local assemblies.
The results for the other nationalist party, the National Democrats, were far worse. The ND was started in 2001, after the SD expelled two leading activists who were accused of trying to build a separate organization within the SD. Whereas the SD at least officially says its opposition to immigration has nothing to do with race, the ND uses the word “ethnicity” in a way that leaves no doubt that it means race. Unfortunately, The ND went through a period of scandal and internal feuding, from which it has not entirely recovered.
In the parliamentary election, it received just 3,064 votes, or 0.06 percent, meaning it lost two thirds of the 0.18 percent it got in 2002. It showed the same pattern as the SD of winning a lot more votes in the election to county assemblies than in the vote for parliament.
This again illustrates that aside from media hostility, nationalist parties must fight self-fulfilling prophecies. Their supporters may not vote for them because they fear they won’t make it into parliament anyway, and they don’t want to waste votes. I, myself, seriously considered voting for the National Democrats because of their greater honesty about race, but ultimately I voted Sweden Democrat because I believed the most important thing was to get restrictionists into parliament. Four more years of the current obnoxious consensus about the blessings of diversity was just too appalling. Unfortunately, the SD didn’t make it into parliament, which means consensus about the blessings of diversity remains intact.
That should change in 2010, with the next general election. Given their greatly increased financial strength, the fact that they are mentioned in the polls, and the permanence of immigration-related problems, the party should clear the four percent hurdle. It is even possible that the fear of nationalists entering parliament in 2010 will at least keep the new center-right government from increasing immigration.
Interestingly, two Conservative candidates were caught making “racist” remarks. Agneta Ostman-Wenger, who was running in the town of Nykvarn, wrote this to a local newspaper: “School has started again in Sweden, and Swedish children do in fact exist there, but they [the newspaper] are doing everything to find these dark heads [to photograph]. I love the sight of little blonde children. Is that wrong in a country which originally had a lot of them?” The answer from the Conservative Party leadership was unequivocal: Yes, it is horribly wrong to love the sight of little blonde children. Party secretary Sven Otto Littorin said Mrs. Ostman-Weng-er’s comments made him “so angry he boiled,” and she was immediately expelled. Sweden Democrat party secretary Bjorn Soder supported Mrs. Ostman-Wenger, suggesting that despite protestations to the contrary, his party thinks race matters, too.
Bengt Hansson, the second-highest ranking official in the party, was attending a Conservative gathering on election night. As the news of SD’s success in Landskrona came in, he was heard to say, “No wonder they’re successful there with all the damn immigrants they have there.” One of his colleagues said, “Be careful with what you say here,” to which Mr. Hansson replied, “What do you mean? Surely there is no problem saying what you really believe, here among friends.” His colleague said “look over there,” pointing to a journalist standing behind Mr. Hansson.
Mr. Hansson has now denied he said “damn immigrants.” Surprisingly, Mr. Hansson has not been expelled, presumably because the journalist hadn’t taped the conversation, so it cannot be proven he really said “damn.”
Even “respectable” politicians, therefore, who would never publicly associate with the likes of the SD or the ND, occasionally have healthy impulses that cannot be suppressed. If the electorate eventually sends a few men of good sense to parliament they could finally begin the debate Sweden has been putting off for 20 years. Sweden is the most mentally closed of the Scandinavian countries, so progress is especially welcome.
Mikael Widmark is the pen name of an economist who lives in northern Sweden.
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The Most Gruesome Multi-cult of All?
Jim Jones and the Jonestown mass suicide.
Almost everyone has heard of the charismatic cult leader Jim Jones, and the 1978 mass suicide to which he led his followers in the South American nation of Guyana. Far less well known is that Jones was an early proponent of the anti-white, racial diversity thinking that is now so widespread.
Jim Jones (Credit Image: Nancy wong / Wikimedia)
Jim Jones was born in Indiana in 1931. He began preaching in his 20s, even though he had no formal religious training, and mixed religion and politics while still a young man. His views were radically politically correct, even by today’s standards, let alone those of the 1950s. His religious style was charismatic, and included faith healing.
Jones’s belief in “equality and justice” led him to start his own racially integrated church in Indianapolis, which he first named Community Unity and later The Peoples Temple. In 1958, Jones started what he called his Rainbow Family by adopting three Korean children and a black boy. His one biological child was named Stephen Gandhi Jones.
Jones impressed the authorities in Indianapolis with his multi-racial efforts. In 1960, the mayor named him president of the Indianapolis Commission on Human Rights, with a salary of $7,000 a year, but he decided to move his church to California.
Again, Jones won favor with the authorities. He was elected president of the Grand Jury of Mendocino County, and after moving to San Francisco, the church grew to over 7,500 members. In 1975 he mobilized 800 members to work full-time for the successful mayoral campaign of George Moscone.
In 1976, he bused in hundreds of followers to a campaign meeting with Rosalynn Carter, wife of the future president. His photo appeared with Mrs. Carter in the papers the next day, and the President-elect invited him to Washington for the inauguration. Then-California State Assemblyman Willie Brown said, “San Francisco needs 10 more Jim Jones,” and helped to have him appointed by Mayor Moscone to the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission.
Despite these honors, there was an investigation of the church for tax evasion, and Jones moved the church again, this time to a commune in Guyana. Jonestown, founded in the summer of 1976 along with about 1,000 followers, did not last long. In November 1978, a congressman named Leo Ryan flew to Guyana, and spent three days investigating complaints in Jonestown. Fourteen of Jones’s followers, unhappy with life in Jonestown, asked to fly back to the United States with Ryan. At the airstrip, just as the congressman’s party was about to leave, a truckload of Jonestown security guards arrived and started shooting, killing Congressman Ryan and four others.
Jones then decided on mass “revolutionary suicide,” a phrase he borrowed from Black Panther leader Huey Newton. On Jones’s instructions, all members of the cult were to drink cyanide-laced Flavor Aid (a Kool-Aid knock-off). Children were poisoned first, then adults. Some were shot trying to leave. In all 914 died, including 276 children.
Jones eventually became a kind of communist in his politics, but much of what he and his followers stood for is very close to the politically correct mainstream. The goal of Jonestown was to build an agricultural paradise free of sexism and racism. As part of this program, Jones promoted mixed-race marriage and adoption of bi-racial children. He also taught that all inequality was caused by white male oppression.
In Jones’s view, white men were the enemy. He believed the world might be destroyed either by nuclear war or by genocide against people of color. Church members went through radical loyalty tests called “white nights,” so named because of Jones’s belief that white men were trying to ruin his project. One church member wrote a final testament praising Jonestown because there were “no more racist tears from whites and others who thought they were better.” Jones even claimed that the final suicide decision was necessary because some of his white followers had defected and wanted to escape with Congressman Ryan. About 80 percent of his followers were black, but Jones made intelligent but gullible white women his chief assistants and main sex partners.
A Temple member named Edith Roller wrote in her diary about a boxing match between a young man accused of sexism, and a young woman. The woman knocked out the man, to the delight of the crowd.
Jones was dictator of Jonestown. He insisted that some couples divorce and remarry partners of his own choosing, and he had the right to have sex with anyone he liked. Armed guards patrolled the perimeter, and there were public beatings of disobedient children. Members who failed to meet work targets or who criticized Jones’s management could have their heads shaved, or be forced to wear a yellow hat or a special badge of dishonor. His followers did not address him by some fancy title; they called him “Dad.”
Although Jones was a preacher, and claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, Akhenaten, Buddha, Lenin, and Father Divine, it is not clear how religious he really was. He once said, “If there were no rich, no poor, if everyone were equal, religion would soon disappear.” One Jonestown survivor, asked if Jones was mainly interested in socialism or Christianity, answered, “Jim was a socialist first and an atheist second.”
In a larger sense, there are two main conclusions to be drawn from the Jim Jones story. The first is that politically correct liberals ought to be embarrassed by Jonestown but are not. A pioneer of racial diversity and feminism led a large movement to a grisly end of murder and mass suicide. If a conservative or nationalist had done this we would never be allowed to forget it.
The other is that many political moderns feel divorced from the world as it is constituted, and Jones took this feeling to a radical conclusion. Not only did he try to reconstitute society as a utopian commune, he drove his followers to suicide as a final act of renunciation.
“We were too good for this world” said Jim Jones as his followers prepared to die. One devotee left behind a note addressed to Jim Jones, in which he wrote, “Dad, I can see no way out, I agree with your decision . . . I am more than tired of this wretched, merciless planet and the hell it holds for so many masses of beautiful people.”
“It is living which is treacherous” was one of Jones’s last pronouncements before he, too, committed what he called “revolutionary suicide” by putting a bullet through his head.
Mr. Richardson is a secondary school teacher from Melbourne, Australia, and publishes the Oz Conservative (ozconservative.blogspot.com).
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O Tempora, O Mores!
‘Wetback’ Redux
Arizona state representative Russell Pearce, Republican, is a strong proponent of border security and enforcing immigration law. He also doesn’t mince words. Speaking about illegal immigration during an interview on a Phoenix radio station in late September, Rep. Pearce said, “We know what we need to do. In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower put together a task force called ‘Operation Wetback.’ He removed, in less than a year, 1.3 million illegal aliens. They must be deported.”
His comments riled up the usual suspects. Roberto Reveles, president of something called Somos America, called Rep. Pearce’s comments “outrageous,” and said his views show “a sense of insecurity on his part and his fear and loathing of undocumented immigrants.” Arizona Democrats are calling for the state GOP to denounce Rep. Pearce, and are insisting he apologize for using the term “wetback.”
Rep. Pearce is standing firm. “I’m not rewriting history to make the silly leftists feel good,” he says. Rep. Pearce may have a personal interest in securing the border. In December 2004, an illegal alien shot his son, Maricopa County Deputy Sheriff Sean Pearce, as he was trying to serve a search warrant in a homicide case. Officer Pearce survived, although he lost part of his large intestine. [Amanda J. Crawford, GOP Urged to Denounce Pearce, Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Oct. 3, 2006. Rep. Pearce Calls for Mass Deportations, AP, Sept. 29, 2006. Kim Smith and Kristina Davis, Representative Russell Pearce’s Son Shot by Illegal Alien, East Valley Tribune (Mesa, Ariz.), Dec 17, 2004.]
Rep. Pearce Speaks Out
When AR posted a story about Rep. Pearce on our website, one of our readers wrote to thank him for his support for border enforcement. Here are excerpts of Mr. Pearce’s reply:
It is incredible how the liberal icons of Arizona have turned an HISTORICAL comment about a federal government program into a full blown scandal.
However, the troika of the Arizona Latino Research Association, the pro-illegal alien Democrat party and the Arizona Republic wants to paint me as a racist. That is a claim which I vehemently deny.
Yes, during a radio interview last week, I referenced a federal program called ‘Operation Wetback.’ It was the name given the program to deport illegal aliens by the federal government in the 1950s. That is neither a term I use nor one I approve of. But I didn’t name the program . . .
WE need to see a desire on the part of the federal government to deport illegals. Enough is enough!!! The Cost in Crime, Cost in Dollars, the Cost in Lives!!! I hope folks understand the damage to America by this invasion of over 3 million illegal aliens annually, 5,000 to 10,000 every single day. One out of 12 of those crossing our borders illegally already has felony convictions. I did not even mention the over 9,000 lives lost each year (25 everyday, 13 by DUI, and 12 by stabbings and shootings) by the hands of illegal aliens according to Congressman King on the Homeland Security Committee . . .
The Arizona Latino Research Association would have us believe that illegals are needed and our economy would collapse without them. The group’s tactics do not scare me and they should not scare you. Our economy hummed along for generations with minimal involvement of illegal aliens and will continue to do so.
The Republic, much to my dismay, refuses to even acknowledge that illegals exist. The paper refers to them as undocumented immigrants. That is like referring to someone who breaks into my house as key deficient.
As much as Democrats, ALRA and the Republic want to make me the issue, they will miss the growing resentment festering throughout Arizona communities. They will miss the increased crime, lower wages and the damage to our cities and towns. But the growing movement to oust illegal aliens will continue to expand; that I am confident of.
I will never apologize for my zeal to secure our borders. And I will never back down from those who would rather cover up their own complicity in the illegal alien invasion than work to find a realistic solution.
In August, the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse announced a tuition hike of $1,320 for each student to pay for more “diversity.” The university plans to use the $15 million to recruit 1,000 non-white and poor students, set up 100 new teaching jobs, and hire an unknown number of bureaucrats. Since only a quarter of the money would be used for scholarships, the rest would presumably pay for “outreach” and diversity operatives. The Board of Regents has approved what the university calls its “Growth and Access Agenda,” and is submitting the proposal to the legislature as part of the next budget request.
University administrators say all students will benefit from a more diverse campus, claiming that companies like GM and Proctor & Gamble have stopped recruiting at UW campuses, citing a lack of diversity. “We realized that if we’re going to be serious about diversity, we have to do something bold,” says Al Thompson, assistant to the chancellor for affirmative action and diversity. Many students and parents, however, aren’t worried by the supposed lack of diversity (the campus is already 5.5 percent non-white), and even many of those who are, don’t want a tuition hike. “I support racial diversity, but I don’t want to pay more for it,” says sophomore Jay Rumpca.
The proposal faces strong opposition in the legislature. Both candidates for governor oppose the plan, fearing it will make tuition, currently $5,555 per year for in-state students, unaffordable for some students. One state legislator asked the university’s chancellor point blank, “Could you explain what I would learn about working with people of ‘color’ had I attended the university that you envision?” [Megan Twohey, Some Balk at Tuition Boost for Diversity, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sept. 11, 2006.]
Promoting “diversity” has become one of the main purposes of many universities. Michael J. Tate, the black vice-president for equity and diversity at Washington State University, epitomizes the fetish. He is head of an office with a staff of 55 and an annual budget of $3 million. Mr. Tate says he is helping students “embrace difference,” which is supposed to help them prepare for “a global society.” His office has given diversity training to more than 1,000 people, and is also renovating two dormitories to be used exclusively by blacks and Hispanics. When Mr. Tate isn’t promoting brainwashing and segregation, he is junketing to Seattle for “diversity luncheons,” used to recruit non-whites. Over just the last two years, many colleges and universities, including Harvard, Texas A&M, Berkeley, Texas, and Virginia, have set up similar positions. [Ben Gose, The Rise of the Chief Diversity Officer, Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 29, 2006.]
Sensible Swiss
Twenty percent of Switzerland’s population of 7.4 million are foreign-born, one of the highest percentages in the world. More than half of these are non-European. Tired of being seen as a “soft-touch” for asylum-seekers from the Third World, on Sept. 24, the people of Switzerland voted by a two-thirds majority to enact one of Europe’s strictest asylum laws. The new law allows for the easier removal of people whose asylum requests have been denied, and carries mandatory prison sentences for both adults and children who falsely claim to be refugees.
Swiss voters also approved a law to bar all unskilled, non-European immigrants from moving to Switzerland. Opponents of the laws, which were proposed by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party, say they will turn non-Europeans living in Switzerland into “second-class citizens.” [Swiss Voters Ratify Tougher Asylum and Immigration Laws, AP, Sept. 24, 2006.]
Black Magic
We reprint the following item verbatim and in toto:
LAGOS, Nigeria — A Nigerian murder suspect accused of killing his brother with an axe told police investigators he actually attacked a goat, which was only later magically transformed into his sibling’s corpse, officials said Thursday.
The man, whose name wasn’t released, offered police this explanation after his arrest on Tuesday in the death of his brother the previous day at Isseluku village in southern Nigeria.
“He said that the goats were on his farm and he tried to chase them away. When one wouldn’t move he attacked it with an axe. He said it then turned into his brother,” Police Commissioner Udom Ekpoudom told the Associated Press.
Murder suspects in Nigeria, where many people believe in black magic, sometimes claim spirits tricked them into killing. In 2001, eight people were burned to death after one person in their group was accused of making a bystander’s penis magically disappear. [Murder Suspect: Goat Turned Into Corpse, AP, Sept. 15, 2006.]
Also in Nigeria, villagers are thwarting efforts by World Health Organization (WHO) doctors to wipe out polio, claiming the vaccination is really a trick to sterilize them. “Allah used Muslim scientists to expose the Western plot of using polio vaccines to reduce our population,” says Ramatu Garba, a food vendor in the town of Kano, who refuses to have her daughter immunized. In some rural areas of Nigeria, entire villages run away at the sight of vaccination teams. Others paint their children’s fingers with fingernail polish, which is the way WHO teams usually mark people they have vaccinated.
According to the agency’s chief polio expert, rumors of sterilization have cost WHO an additional $200 million, and set back by two years its plan to eradicate the disease by 2005. In Kenya, the rumor is that the polio vaccine is a tool for devil worship. Many other Africans are convinced vaccinations cause AIDS. [Maria Cheng and John Alechenu, Polio Vaccination Dismissed as Devil’s Work Across Africa, news. scotsman.com, Sept. 14, 2006.]
Violent Tendencies
People who are quick to condemn the United States as hopelessly violent are largely silent about South Africa. Since blacks took power in 1994, South Africa has seen a dramatic upsurge in murder. Gunfights routinely take place on city streets and in shopping malls. Robbers more often than not murder their victims — whether or not they resist. Between April 2004 and March 2005, 18,793 people were murdered in South Africa — an average of 51 per day in a country with a population of 44 million. There were an additional 24,516 attempted murders, 55,114 reported rapes and nearly 250,000 violent assaults. (Since these are government figures, the actual numbers are probably much higher.) A South African is therefore officially 12 times more likely than an American and 50 times more likely than a Western European to be murdered.
The violence is leaving many who should know better scratching their heads. “This is an extraordinarily violent society and nobody understands it,” says Peter Gastrow of the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town. He believes it may have something to do with white minority rule and the fight against apartheid, but adds, “There is no explanation that makes sense. The million-dollar question is why.”
Let us hazard a guess: Under white rule, blacks knew they were subordinate, understood the authorities were firmly in charge, and that crime did not pay. Now, with blacks running the country, policing is much less efficient, and crime is more likely to pay. At the same time, the simple-minded expectation of blacks that black rule would make them all rich has been disappointed. This frustration, combined with the collapse in authority, probably explains much of the crime. A glance at the chaos of the rest of the continent suggests that Mr. Gastrow should ask a different question: Why did an African population high in testosterone and low in average IQ have relatively low crime rates under white rule? It is the unusual that requires explanation, not the commonplace.
South African whites worry less about the reasons for black violence than about how to protect themselves. They are among the most heavily-armed civilians in the world. There are 4.5 million registered firearms in the country, including 2.8 million handguns, and perhaps as many as a million more unregistered. [Terry Leonard, Murders, Theories Abound in S. Africa, AP, Sept. 27, 2006.]
One Nation, Divisible
According to the Census Bureau, sometime in October 2006, the US population was to reach 300 million. Whether an immigrant or a child born in the US, the three hundred millionth American had a good chance of being non-white.
There are 35.7 million immigrants in the United States, and they account for 12.4 percent of the population, the highest proportion since 1930. Hispanics are now the largest non-white group, having pulled ahead of blacks several years ago. There are now 42.7 million, or 14 percent of the population. Hispanics tend to be younger than whites, with an average age of 27 as opposed to 36, and a third are under age 18. The number of Hispanics is growing at a rate of 3.3 percent (1.3 million) per year. The Census Bureau expects Hispanics to make up a quarter of the population — 102.6 million — by 2050. Sixty-four percent of US Hispanics are Mexican.
At 39.7 million, blacks are the second largest non-white group. Of the non-white population, blacks are growing the slowest, at 1.3 percent per year. One fifth of the current increase is due to immigration from Africa or the Caribbean.
Asians currently number 14.4 million, making up five percent of the population. The Asian population increases by three percent per year, mainly because of immigration.
Fully one third of the population is now non-white. There are still 200 million whites in the country, but the percentage is falling rapidly. In just six years, their percentage dropped from 70 percent to 66.7 percent, and in 1960, the country was 90 percent white. Whites are already a minority in four states — California, Texas, Hawaii and New Mexico — and the District of Columbia. Perhaps most ominously, nearly half of all children under the age of five are non-white. [Virginie Montet, One in Three Americans is Hispanic, Black or Asian, AFP, Oct. 1, 2006.]
Blacks and North Africans in France have by no means lost the spirit that sent the country into two weeks of chaos last fall. Their suburban housing projects continue to be hives of degeneracy, where the authorities fear to tread. Police report that the old taboo against violent assault on officers is now broken, and that they dare not make an arrest unless they are present in force. Michel Thoomis, secretary general of the Action Police trade union explains: “You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their ‘comrades’ free when they are arrested.” Police work has become dangerous. By October of this year, a record 2,400 officers had been wounded in attacks on the job.
The official explanation for the violence is that crime bosses are consolidating their hold on the housing projects, and that massive police sweeps are breaking up crime networks. Mr. Thoomis disagrees. “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” he says. “This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails.” How would he solve the problem? “We need armored vehicles and water cannon. They are the only things that can disperse crowds of hundreds of people who are trying to kill police and burn their vehicles.”
Others worry that stern measures will only harden the anti-French, scoff-law spirit that already prevails among non-whites. The civil authorities in the worst-afflicted areas do not like crime, but worry that enforcing the law will fuel even greater hostility and may make things worse. [David Rennie, Muslims Are Waging Civil War Against Us, Claims Police Union, Daily Telegraph (London), Oct. 5, 2006.]
Hazleton Fallout
Hazleton is a small former mill town in the Pocono Mountains region of Pennsylvania. After the Sept. 11 attack, a number of Hispanics from New York City — mainly Dominicans — began moving there. By 2006, nearly a third of the population of 31,000 was Hispanic. Prompted by the murders of two illegal Dominicans last May in a drug deal gone bad, Mayor Louis Barletta and the city council passed an ordinance in September against hiring illegals or renting them property. The new law quickly won national attention, with Hispanic groups promising to challenge it in court and other cities from New Jersey to California adopting similar measures.
Critics say Hispanics “revitalized” Hazleton’s downtown, which they say was a ghost town before the Dominicans arrived. Local resident Ed Makuta is not impressed. “Half our stores have Spanish signs,” he says. “We’re not welcome there. I don’t even have a clue what they’re selling. We don’t need this new downtown. We don’t need it and we don’t want it.”
Police say downtown Hazleton has become a center for drugs and gangs. Thefts and drug-related crime have risen by more than 50 percent since 2001. “For a town our size that previously had very little of that type of activity, it’s very frequent,” says Police Chief Robert Ferdinand. There are an alarming number of [illegal] aliens involved in criminal activity.”
Local Hispanics say they’re suffering “xenophobia” and “racism” like never before. “We feel everything change,” says Oscar Rubio, a legal immigrant from Colombia who operates a downtown gift shop. “[Non-Hispanics] look at us, and they think we’re illegal. Never before this happens, that they say, ‘Go home. Go back to your country.’” Social worker Anna Arias of Catholic Social Services says, “You see contempt in people’s faces. You can see the rejection.”
“People get concerned when they see the face of their neighborhood change,” says Rev. John Ruth, an opponent of the law, who welcomes Hispanics to St. Gabriel’s Church. In what is no doubt an unintended admission, he says, “Like any American in this day and age, what we’re all missing is a simpler time where we could all walk without fear. Our natural fear is being directed at the stranger among us.” [Gaiutra Bahadur, Hazleton Gets a Jolt It Didn’t Want, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 18, 2006, p. A1.]
Weeding Out ‘Racists’
Last year, Scottish police began using psychological screening exams to identify supposedly racist police recruits. The tests feature 24 policing scenarios. Recruits are asked to say what they would do, and to indicate on a scale of one to ten how certain they are that what they would do is right. The scenarios show alternating pictures of whites, blacks and Asians — which in Britain means Indians or Pakistanis. The recruits’ answers are then checked against what purports to be a “standard” to cull those whose responses reveal “unusual” or “undesirable” attitudes. The tests have apparently been so successful that the police are using them to ferret out sexism, “sectarianism,” and dishonesty. [Michael Howie, Police May Extend Screening Tests to Bar Bigots, news.scotsman.com, Sept. 26, 2006.] How often do non-whites fail the test?
Hispanic Votes Must Not Be Diluted
In 2003, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature redrew state Congressional districts to their own advantage, diluting Democratic voting strength as much as possible. The Republicans rejigged things so cleverly that they knocked four Democrats out of office. The Democrats cried foul and took the newly-drawn district lines to the Supreme Court, only to get a 7-2 decision upholding most of the newly gerrymandered districts. Blatantly political redistricting is apparently fine with the Supreme Court.
But only up to a point. The court said it was legal to dilute the voting strength of Democrats, but not of Hispanics. When Democrats happen to be Hispanic, which they very often are, even the most rigorously race-blind gerrymandering plan may violate the Voting Rights Act. The Court said that because Hispanics demonstrated “sufficient minority cohesion,” the new district lines reduced their collective power, and that “the Anglo citizen voting-age majority will often, if not always, prevent Latinos from electing the candidate of their choice in the district.”
In other words, the Supreme Court now admits that race trumps politics. It is business as usual for Republicans to dilute the voting strength of white Democrats, but if Hispanic Democrats have enough “minority cohesion” to appear likely to elect a Hispanic (who is also a Democrat), the Republicans had better leave them alone.
This, of course, is a big incentive for Democrats to fill the country with Hispanics. The Supreme Court has said that cohesive clumps of Hispanics must not be broken up by redistricting. Since cohesive clumps of Hispanics almost always vote Democratic, the Democrats have a race-based constituency that is now immune from gerrymandering. Presumably blacks — who also vote heavily Democratic — are also immune. The party in power can therefore draw new districts for the most blatant partisan purposes; it just better make sure the people whose votes they are diluting are white. The next time the Democrats get into power in the Texas legislature, they will redraw the district lines, just as the Republicans have done. However, they are unlikely to have to worry about race. All the clumps of Republican voters they break up are likely to be whites, and their votes can be diluted with impunity.
The League of United Latin American Citizens was the plaintiff in the case, and takes it for granted that more Hispanic voters mean more Hispanic congressmen. “Latinos are responsible for the fastest growth in Texas,” said a spokesman, “and the state of Texas refused to give us another district.” [Gina Holland, Court Nixes Part of Texas Political Map, Associated Press, June 28, 2006.]
Construction work has begun on a private hospital in Rotterdam, Holland, that will accept only Muslim patients. Scheduled to open in 2008, male and female patients will be segregated, and will be treated only by doctors, nurses, and attendants of their own sex. Paul Sturkenboom, whom press accounts identify as a “health industry entrepreneur,” justifies his new project on the grounds that newcomers have to be eased into Dutch society. He says a hospital in which they feel comfortable “will give Muslims time to integrate at their own speed.” [David Rennie, Anger In Holland Over ‘Apartheid’ Islamic Hospital, Daily Telegraph (London), Oct. 5, 2006.]
For many blacks, racial solidarity and law-breaking go hand in hand, that flouting the white man’s law can be an act of racial loyalty. Twenty-one-year-old Candace Darcel Jones of Sheffield, Alabama, gave an unusual demonstration of this in October. She had been shoplifting at a Sears store, and raced out with a pile of clothes. With a store detective in pursuit, she dumped the clothes, ran into the street, and started beating on the windows of cars with black drivers. “They’re going to take me to jail,” she shouted. “I’m black. I’m black. Let me in. You know how it is. Just take me anywhere, man.” Whether as an incentive to male drivers or because of her exertions, her breasts were seen to flop out of her shirt. In any case, a store detective caught her before she could get a ride. [Seth Burkett, Accused Shoplifter Exposed in Chase, Decatur Daily News (Ala.), Oct. 4, 2006.]
Domingo Garcia is a former Texas state legislator and is civil rights chairman for the League of United Latin American Citizens. He likes to sue police departments that do not require officers to learn Spanish. He sued the city of Irving, Texas, on behalf of an illegal alien, Jose Palomino, who had been working in the United States for 23 years but still did not understand when a police officer shouted “Down! Down!” The officer ended up pepper-spraying Mr. Palomino and hitting him with his baton. Mr. Garcia says the officer’s actions may have been justified by Mr. Palomino’s refusal to obey, but it was not Mr. Palomino’s fault he did not speak English. Instead, the city of Irving was negligent in not requiring officers to learn Spanish.
In September, Mr. Garcia filed a similar suit against Royse City, Texas, because one of its officers could not get through to a Spanish-speaker. Mr. Garcia is seeking $1 million in “exemplary” damages so that other cities will get the message. “A police officer, like any public servant or anybody in the private sector, has to cater to the language of the market,” he explained, in what was perhaps unintended recognition of the high rate of crime among Hispanics. [City Sued: Didn’t Teach Cop Spanish, WorldNetDaily.com, Sept. 30, 2006.]
Even if Mr. Garcia does not win any of his suits, some municipalities may well decide to hire Spanish-speaking policemen out of self defense. Jobs for the boys has probably been Mr. Garcia’s goal all along.
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — Your account in “Black Racial Consciousness, Part II” of the statement apparently made by Washington Post journalist Nathan McCall in his autobiography (his description of how he helped beat up a white man) prompts the following reflection: If your account is not true you should retract it immediately; otherwise Mr. McCall could and should sue you for libel. If it is true, and McCall has not yet been prosecuted, AR should swing into action by:
1) Demanding an explanation from the Washington Post as to why an established newspaper knowingly employs a self-confessed criminal. If the Washington Post refuses to react, I recommend you invite readers from the area to organize regular demonstrations outside the offices of the Washington Post, drawing the attention of the public to the kind of people the paper employs.
2) Getting on to the relevant police authorities and seeing that they investigate, as they are duty-bound to do, the published confession of a criminal act.
Michael Walker, Cologne, Germany
Sir — Your articles on black racial consciousness, which highlight how differently blacks and whites view the world, remind me of something Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1782 but that is seldom quoted today: “The real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one race or the other.” [John P. Kaminski, Citizen Jefferson: The Wit and Wisdom of an American Sage (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 101.]
Walter Sieruk, Harrisburg, Penn.
Sir — I may be able to contribute to an aspect of the debate on where America is heading. Several years ago I attended a conference here in London of an academic organization concerned with North American affairs in a world context. I will not say which, because I would like to be invited back.
In a question from the floor after a panel discussion, someone asked what effect the Hispanification of the United States would have on the traditional UK-US relationship and, indeed, on British economic and cultural life.
The man from the Foreign Office (he seemed to be an official representative) told us not to be concerned. The Foreign Office had looked into the matter and was keeping an eye on things. It had sought the views of sociologists, who had reported that it was inevitable Hispanics would assimilate in a way Africans could not. Within 50 years, he said, most would be inter-marrying with non-Hispanics, and their descendant would be unconditional Americans.
Ross Henderson, London
Sir — I read with amusement in your October “O Tempora” section that craigslist.com, which lets Internet users post notices for room rentals, roommates, etc., has been sued because some of its users are slipping racial preferences into their notices: “Room for rent to white male,” for example. The suit claims that since this isn’t allowed in newspapers, it shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. This reminds me of the one glaring exception to the race-mustn’t-matter-in-America rule, which is personal ads. People seeking romance almost always specify race, and there are well-recognized abbreviations for it — ”SWF” means “single white female.” When will we be forbidden to mention race in personal ads?
My guess is that when the battle comes (surely, it is only a matter of time), there will be some confusion over the fact that homosexuals almost always specify their preferences, too. “G” means “gay.” But if, in our daily lives, we are not supposed to discriminate on the basis of race or erotic orientation, and race is banned from personal ads, shouldn’t erotic orientation be banned as well? If we are to place our ads and take our chances on race, why shouldn’t we take other exciting chances, too?
I look forward to the forthcoming incoherence, but I have no doubt about the final result: homosexuals will be be permitted to continue discriminating.
Ellen Hope Caldwell, Rumson, N.J.
Sir — You report in the October issue that according to the BBC, authorities in Britain are in a dither because children as young as four have absorbed “racist stereotypes.” Toddlers think blacks are more likely than whites to be criminals, and they associate whites with success and trustworthiness. And — horrors! — children of all races think this. This means only that whether they have learned this from their parents or have had direct experience, children learn about the world at an early age. According to your report, daycare centers will now be charged with rooting out these “stereotypes.”
We have become accustomed to society promoting falsehoods about race, but it is especially painful to see lies being beaten into toddlers. Do the promoters of these lies not realize that any political point of view that must be instilled in infants is almost by definition false? This was the way Communists did things, but the Left never learns.
Paul Zable, Culpepper, Va.
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