American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 18, No. 8	August 2007

CONTENTS

In Praise of Homogeneity
Can ‘Diversity’ Ever Be Good?
How Whites Stack Up
A Setback for Our Cause — In France
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

In Praise of Homogeneity

The Japanese know how to run a country.

by Jared Taylor

I have just returned from several weeks in Japan, and am again struck by the forceful example that country offers of the advantages of homogeneity. As the years go by, Japan’s steady record of successes stands in ever-greater contrast to America’s failures, and to its inability to think seriously about the kind of country it is becoming. Japan is not without problems, of course, and some are disconcerting by our standards. But the Japanese have a much better chance than we do of surviving into the next century as a coherent, prosperous nation with a culture and civilization it can unmistakably call its own.

Japan is one of the most homogeneous countries on earth. Ethnic Japanese make up 98.5 percent of the population, followed by Koreans and Chinese at 0.5 and 0.4 percent. The largest non-Japanese populations are, therefore, from closely related races and are visually indistinguishable from the majority. Wherever you go in Japan, you are likely to see Japanese and only Japanese.

Japan is at the same time a sound refutation of the view that homogeneity means dull uniformity. (This is the implication, of course, of the common assertion that immigrants have livened up the United States, saving it, presumably, from the suffocating sameness of whiteness.) Japan has as much variety — cultural, esthetic, culinary — as anyone could want. Whether it is clothing styles, amateur orchestras, motorcycle clubs, art exhibits, restaurants or museums, visitors are struck by the rich variety of Japanese life. There are endless ways to be Japanese. Thus, traditional Japanese instruments like the koto and shamisen have never been more popular, but Japan also produces internationally-known classical musicians. In addition to its own sports like sumo or judo, Japan has mastered baseball to the point that it sends Japanese stars to the major leagues.

American orthodoxy about immigration and diversity suggests that a country could not have opera without a colony of Italians, or golf and Scotch whiskey without Scots. Japan proves that a country can open itself to what it considers the best foreign influences while shutting out foreign people. Japan therefore has first-rate opera without Italians, jazz without blacks, heavy metal without Brits and some of the best “Western” science and technology without Westerners. What Japan does not have is “honor killings,” voodoo, MS-13, bilingualism or racial tension, and it will never have these things if it keeps to its current no-immigration policy.

We are told over and over that immigration is an inevitable consequence of world travel, of a shrinking globe, and that without big doses of foreigners a country cannot be truly international or participate in the global economy. Again, Japan proves this is nonsense. It is a full participant in everything from the G8 Conference of industrialized nations to Rotary International. It is a considerably more successful participant than the United States in the global economy, exporting 9.7 percent of its GDP versus 7.8 percent for us, and registering a trade surplus of $168 billion in 2006 as opposed to our staggering deficit of $836 billion. Anyone who told the Japanese they would improve their trade balance or understand the world better if they would only let in a million Puerto Ricans or Haitians would be politely escorted to the nut hatch. Japanese believe they are entirely capable of handling their affairs themselves.

It is important to realize, however, that the fruits of homogeneity are profoundly different for the Japanese than they would be for, say, the Yoruba or the Cherokee, who could probably have been left homogeneous for centuries without emerging from the state in which Europeans found them (see next article). International testing has repeatedly shown that Japanese have a very high average IQ — three to five points above the European average — and any society they build will reflect this. But if homogeneity brings out a group’s most characteristic traits, what characterizes the Japanese?

Japanese behave in many ways as they and other North Asians do in the United States. Japan has, for example, one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world. The murder rate is approximately one tenth that of the United States (about 0.5 murders per 100,000) and the robbery rate is on the order of one 150th (about one per 100,000). Japanese, both in Japan and in the United States, have lower rates of violent crime even when compared only to white Americans, and although it is not easy to get accurate statistics, violent crime rates for Japanese are essentially the same whether they live in Japan, where there is very tight gun control, or in the US, where guns are plentiful.

(Interestingly, of all the foreign groups living in Japan, Africans are the most crime prone, with rates considerably above the native Japanese rate. Europeans and Americans commit the least crime, with rates below native Japanese rates. Africans and whites resident in Japan are much better behaved than the averages for their groups back in their native countries, because Japan is careful about whom it lets in, even temporarily. This keeps crime rates for resident or transient whites — but not for blacks — lower even than the very low native Japanese rate. Even the tiny number of carefully selected blacks living in Japan are still the most crime-prone group in the country.)

At the same time, Japanese police are good at solving the small number of violent crimes Japanese commit: 95 percent of murders and 75 percent of robberies, compared to 65 percent and 25 percent in the United States. Police do not have to worry about some groups refusing to cooperate with the police for fear of being called “snitches.” Japan has crime syndicates called yakuza, but they mainly run gambling, prostitution, and protection rackets. Yakuza touch ordinary people’s lives about as much as the cosa nostra touches ordinary Americans.

The net effect for Japanese society is that there is essentially no place at no time that is or feels unsafe. Even if a huge crowd of young people were let out of a rock concert late at night, passersby might think they were a little boisterous, but no one would feel afraid.

Japanese are therefore much less security-conscious than Americans. There are no neighborhoods in which drivers nervously lock their car doors. Even in big cities, no one has triple locks on his doors, and doorman-security buildings are more status symbol than necessity. There are flowerbeds in public places where they would be torn up in any American big city. In the US, restrooms in subways were locked up decades ago because bums, loonies, and psychopaths lived in them. In Japan, public restrooms are plentiful and safe.

Japanese still trust each other the way small-town Americans used to trust each other. It rained one day during a recent stay in Osaka. When the bellhop at my hotel leant me an umbrella he didn’t even ask for my room number; he took it for granted I would bring the umbrella back.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of Japanese respect for the law and for each other was the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. This was a major quake that killed more than 6,400 people, and caused property damage worth about 2.5 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product that year, making it one of the most costly natural disasters in history. The deaths were not scattered around the country but were concentrated in Kobe, a major port city with a population of 1.5 million. Not only were there no reports of looting, there was a huge outpouring of private and corporate volunteerism, and even the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza mobilized to help distribute food. There would have been very ugly scenes in any major American city if a disaster killed thousands, paralyzing the authorities.

Still, what probably first strikes a visitor from America is the sense that Japan is simply more advanced than the US. There are many things that contribute to this impression, but some of the most important are that everything seems to work, everything is clean, everything is orderly, everything spruce and tidy. Even the international airports by which most people arrive in Japan are cleaner and more efficient than Kennedy, Dulles, or San Francisco. The personnel are quietly competent, luggage shows up quickly, and there are helpful signs in several languages to guide you through customs.

But it is outside the air terminal that the impression of Japanese superiority gains force. The taxis are sparklingly clean, driven by courteous, well-dressed Japanese — unlike the battered hulks driven by loutish immigrants that turn up at most American airports. Buses that serve the airports are spotless, and leave on time, practically to the second. As the traveler continues on his way, this impression of efficiency, cleanliness, and competence only grows.

It is almost impossible to find loose garbage in Japan, graffiti, broken sidewalks or tumble-down buildings. There are practically no vacant, overgrown lots, and hardly anything that could be called a slum. By American standards, it is as if the entire country were manicured, with every square foot tidied and cared for. It is almost impossible to find a beat-up old car. Japanese keep cars clean, and have dents repaired after minor accidents. In probably no other country are roads more carefully and meticulously marked with turning lanes and crossings, or equipped with so many guardrails and pedestrian over- and underpasses.

There are no potholes in Japan. For some years on trips there — even into the countryside — I have looked hard for potholes, and there is none to be found. On the island of Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands, I recently asked a man in the construction business about potholes. He told me crews keep the roads patched up or resurfaced, and if a crack in the pavement gets any wider than about half an inch, the local people call city hall to complain.

It is not as though white people are incapable of taking care of a country the way the Japanese do. Scandinavia and parts of Northern Europe are said to have the same meticulous sheen, but I have no first-hand experience.

Japanese are completely unprepared for some of the rougher aspects of American urban reality. One day last summer I was with a carload of Japanese on their way to the federal courthouse in Trenton, the capital of New Jersey. Trenton is so heavily black that the governor doesn’t even live there. As we rolled through blasted neighborhoods the Japanese’ eyes got bigger and bigger. It was a hot day, and Trentonians of both sexes were sitting on the curb, dressed and coiffed in their uniquely colorful way, expressing themselves energetically. The Japanese were shaking their heads. “There is nothing like this in Japan,” one said in a low voice. If this was diversity, they weren’t interested.

That day, I learned there is no good Japanese expression for “abandoned building.” There are words for “rundown building” or “untenanted building,” but Japanese just don’t leave a building empty and boarded up. Land is too valuable for that and, besides, it would be an eyesore.

As befits a truly developed country, Japan has what must be the most beautiful manhole covers in the world. Many cities have a famous local scene forged into them. Osaka’s covers depict Osaka Castle, and the nearby town of Minoh, which is famous for its waterfall and autumn foliage, shows the falls as seen through maple leaves. Perhaps most astonishing, many manhole covers are painted pretty colors. The colors eventually scuff off, leaving bare metal, but someone must come around every so often and freshen up the paint job. Every manhole cover pictured on this page is colored.

Japan abounds in little efficiencies. Perhaps because so few people would ever break into them, everything from train tickets to beer to hot noodles to umbrellas to fish bait is sold in automatic vending machines. Most machines take credit cards, and make change for bills.

One efficiency Americans would do well to copy is small automobiles. There is an entire class of small vehicles zipping around Japan with engines of only 0.66 liters, the maximum displacement to enjoy the most favorable tax treatment. The smallest car engine in the United States is 1.5 liters, and the smallest truck engine is 2.3 liters. “Light” vehicles, as they are called, get almost 60 miles to the gallon, and come in a huge variety of four-seater sedans, two-seater sport models, and whole lines of minivans and pickups. They are an enormously cost-effective way to make small deliveries or get around town, but have power enough to reach highway speeds. The occasional American-style SUV, camper van, or pickup truck one occasionally sees looks like an irradiated monster.

Japan probably has the densest, most efficient network of railroads and subways of any country in the world, and a place like the United States that has committed itself to roads has no chance of matching it. But just as striking are the extensive underground shopping areas in major cities. Even on sunny days, the streets of downtown Kobe and Osaka can seem oddly quiet, and when it rains they are almost empty. Beneath the streets is an ocean of humanity surging past miles of commercial outlets, skipping traffic lights and avoiding the rain.

People

Behind all this efficiency, of course, is the Japanese people, who by keeping out alien populations, have maintained complete control over their society. To the Western eye, they are physically homogeneous, with the same black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. But there is a different and more pleasant homogeneity that goes beyond racial traits. Almost no Japanese are overweight, for example, and the occasional fatty is nothing like the waddling colossi one finds among the American lower classes of all races.

Japanese also dress much better than Americans. There is a stylishness about them that seems to recoil from the baggy-shorts-and-T-shirt regimen common in America. If you see someone dressed like a bum, it is probably an American.

Even in uniform, American police officers or TSA baggage screeners may be fat or sloppy-looking. Blacks and Hispanics, especially, often show a slouching kind of contempt for their jobs. Japanese bustling about in their trim uniforms almost never give this impression.

Physical beauty is subjective, but many Westerners think that even if Japanese women never achieve the breath-taking beauty of European models or movie stars, they have a high average level of attractiveness. Staying slim and dressing stylishly have a lot to do with it.

At the same time, Japanese have a spirit of service and attentiveness that is rare in Americans. As in any country, levels of service vary with the price and elegance of the establishment, but Japanese almost never treat each other with the obvious indifference common in America. Japanese waiters or sales personnel hurry to help you, welcome you with smiles, and apologize for any inconvenience. Americans are surprised to find there is no tipping in Japan. Japanese rush to serve you because that is their job. In a way, they have no choice; Japanese consumers expect first-rate service, and will not patronize a store or restaurant that doesn’t give it.

I recently fell into a conversation with a Japanese who works as a flight attendant on trans-Pacific flights for United Airlines. I told her it might not be polite to say so, but that service is always much better on the All Nippon Airways flights that are sometimes offered as United codeshares. Of course it is, she said. What would you expect? Japanese are always thinking of how to please the customer while Americans watch the clock and do the minimum.

Japan has one of the highest standards of living of any country. Figures for life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, etc., are some of the most impressive in the world. Income distribution is usually cited as the most equitable of any industrialized country, with most Japanese describing themselves as middle class. While the average Japanese chief executive of a publicly-traded company gets about $400,000 a year, the average German gets about $800,000, and the average American CEO gets one to four million. Japanese stockholders would not allow salaries at that level.

Japan is certainly not a paradise. Wealth and modernity seem to have the same socially corrosive effect on the Japanese as on other people. Although they are still at small fractions of American rates, crime, divorce, and illegitimacy are up. Japan does not produce the “Child Drowns in Mother’s Vomit”-type of headline that sometimes bubbles up from the American underclass, but it has begun to have the occasional rape/murder/mutilation that would have been unheard-of 30 or 40 years ago.

Japan also has its own peculiar problems probably found nowhere else. Japanese have long had what seem to Westerners a juvenile attitude towards sex. Many men, for example, like to grope women on crowded trains and subways. The problem is so bad that on some notorious lines there are separate cars for women at rush hour.

The Internet has spawned disturbing trends. Some unknown number of men who live with their parents have stopped coming out of their rooms. They watch television and read, but mostly they stare at the computer screen. Worried parents can’t get them to look for a job, or even come out for meals. They leave trays of food by the door, and see their sons only when they come out to use the bathroom.

The Internet has also added a gruesome touch to Japan’s high suicide rates. Japanese men kill themselves at a rate of about 36 per 100,000 compared to the US rate of about 17 (more than 70 per 100,000 Russian and Lithuanian men kill themselves each year). Japanese men and women (women in all countries kill themselves less often than men) have started meeting each other on the Internet to arrange group suicide. Japanese, who generally prefer to do things in groups, seem to like company even as they die. A Japanese news story from 2004 reported 26 such Internet-arranged group suicides in just a two-month period.

At the same time, some of Japan’s advantages do not reflect anything special about the Japanese but stem from the mere fact of homogeneity. At the most obvious level, all Japanese speak the same language and therefore understand each other. They expect anyone living in Japan to learn Japanese. They would not dream of “bilingual” education or sending interpreters to PTA meetings or offering tests for drivers licenses in foreign languages.

Racial homogeneity means Japan has none of the oppressive machinery America has instituted to cope with “diversity.” It has no civil rights commissions, equal employment offices, or diversity consultants. Japanese never yelp about discrimination when something goes wrong, and never sue employers for “racism.” There is no racial tension, no race riots, no hate laws. No one gets in trouble because the board of directors is all Japanese or because all the faces on television are Japanese. Nobody complains about “profiling” when the police pat down the most likely trouble-makers. No one is ever fired because he said something “insensitive” or told a forbidden joke or used a forbidden slur. Elections are about politics, not about whether Hispanics or blacks are taking over. Voting districts can have logical geographic boundaries, because no one worries about whether black or Hispanic votes are being diluted. There are no ethnic or national minorities that meddle with Japan’s foreign policy. Any number of hugely vexing and intractable problems are simply absent from Japan.

Because of their similarity in outlook and background, Japanese tend to have similar expectations of others. Traditionally, when Japanese companies did business with each other, lawyers didn’t get involved. Businessmen sat down together and wrote out the terms under which they would do business. Often, at the end of a contract, where Americans would specify which courts would have jurisdiction in case of a dispute, Japanese would write that if there were a disagreement, the parties would meet, and resolve it. This worked because Japanese have a broadly similar sense of what is right, and of how to handle unexpected problems. Japanese companies with extensive dealings overseas have adopted some of the legalisms typical of American business, but Japanese life is still governed far more by custom, manners, and common expectations than by law.

Homogeneity in Japan also squeezes out most of the tremendous variation in schools that is now common in America. Japan has nothing like the typical American big-city public school, with its unmotivated mob of blacks and Hispanics, its dreary record of violence and failure, its futile round of new gimmicks that are supposed to teach the unteachable. Japan has well-regarded private schools at all grade levels, and elite universities that get the best students, but the spread of abilities in Japanese institutions is usually not broad enough to justify either gifted programs or “special” education. Virtually all Japanese are literate and do math. If the cash register breaks down, they can make quick and accurate change, unlike the people at Burger King who would be stumped if you paid for a 17-cent item with a quarter.

One result is that many mid-level technical jobs that would require a college degree in the US are filled with high school graduates. There are demanding national standards for a high school diploma, and just about everyone manages to meet them.

Interestingly, homogeneity does not produce in Japan one of the results it is credited with in Europe. Among white people, the more homogenous the country, the more willing people appear to be to support welfare. The theory — quite plausible — is that citizens are less resistant to paying more taxes if the handouts go to people like themselves. The welfare state went the farthest in the then-homogenous countries of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, suggesting that this may be the kind of society wealthy whites are inclined to build.

Japan, by European standards, has niggardly social services. This is not because Japanese are rugged individualists — they are very group oriented — but because the family has traditionally been the safety net. The extended family looked after old people, took in drunks, reared orphans, and gave a hand to relatives down on their luck. It would shame the entire clan if a family member went on the dole. For this reason, despite its homogeneity and sense of service, Japan has almost no tradition of private or public charity.

As Japan grew rich and urban, it tended to atomize. Family ties weakened. There are now drunks and bums in some public parks, who build rather elaborate homes for themselves out of cardboard boxes. This sort of thing has prompted both more government services and more private charity. But even the layabouts and winos are unmistakably Japanese. If they ask for money they do so very politely, and if you peer into a cardboard house, the owner is likely to be absorbed in a copy of a literary magazine that he fished out of the trash.

For decades after the end of the Second World War, Japanese looked up to the United States as the superior power that had defeated them in the Pacific. They had an almost servile admiration for things American. Not anymore. Many Japanese realize that, in many respects, they have a better country than we do. They envy us our continent-sized country and our raw materials, but they no longer see us as a model for much of anything.

When Japanese who live in the United States get together, talk often turns to horror stories about life among the natives: the dealer that couldn’t fix the brand-new Chevrolet, the perpetually broken sidewalk in front of the office, the slovenly habits of American employees, the child who was beaten up for lunch money, and endless stories of bad service. It sounds like the complaints I heard years ago from whites living in West Africa — the inevitable comparisons people from countries with high standards make when they live in a country with low standards.

Japanese are not blind to the fact that non-whites are a big part of the problem. They have not been brainwashed since childhood about racial equality, and know very well that not all groups are the same. Back in 1994, when The Bell Curve had just appeared, I was reading it during breaks while working with some Japanese clients. They had heard of the book, and asked me to tell them about it. I spent several minutes giving them the gist: that IQ is real, is heritable, and correlates strongly with social success — that there are substantial racial differences in average IQ, which are almost certainly partly genetic. When I was finished my three or four clients looked at each other quizzically, and one asked, “Doesn’t everyone know that?”

I have never met a Japanese who is shocked at the idea of racial differences in IQ, or who thinks blacks and Hispanics are good for America. In an extended conversation about race and immigration, they may at first suggest that high-IQ Asian immigrants are good for the country, but quickly see why whites would want to keep the country white. They understand racial loyalty and the benefits of homogeneity, and often ask why everyone in America doesn’t think as I do.

Perhaps it is because so few Americans visit Japan. On my most recent trip, I went with clients who had never been to Japan before. They marveled at the safety, the cleanliness, the efficiency, the cheerful service. After two weeks, I asked them if they missed black people. They looked at each other sheepishly; no, they didn’t miss black people at all. How about Mexicans? No they didn’t miss them, either. I asked why they thought anyone would ever claim “diversity” is America’s greatest strength. This completely stumped them.

It is because Japanese instinctively understand the dangers of diversity that there is essentially no immigration to Japan, despite an average lifetime fertility rate of 1.23 that is so low the Japanese population has begun to shrink. There are a few prominent people who talk as if waves of Pakistanis and Indonesians will solve the population problem, but most Japanese know better. Even if they haven’t seen for themselves what Third-World immigration has done to the United States, they know what it would do to Japan. They want Japan to stay Japanese, even if it means a shrinking population and high labor costs.

That is one reason Japan invests so heavily in mechanization and robotics; machines are cheaper than people. Japanese are already one of the oldest populations in the world, and will only get older. Who will run the retirement homes? Some already have special robots that lift people in and out of wheelchairs and baths. Japanese would rather pay for machinery than depend on foreigners. This is another reason for vending machines: they free people for other jobs.

This is not to say that there are no illegal immigrants. Men work on construction sites and women in the prostitution/entertainment business. Labor is too tight for even the Japanese to keep out everyone who wants to come, but the problem is nothing like that in the United States, and shows little sign of getting worse.

The Japanese government is also trying to persuade people to have more children, though not with much success. Every tiny uptick in birthrates gets enthusiastic press coverage, but Japan’s young people want to have fun, not babies. This leads to high wages for young workers, delayed retirements, and attractive salaries for older people who return to work. Shrinking school districts are consolidating, and rural villages that can no longer support their own government services are merging. Universities compete for students in surprising ways. Fukuoka University in southern Japan advertises the spa-like baths and karaoke rooms in its dormitories.

No nation has yet learned how to revive flagging birthrates, so for the foreseeable future Japan’s population may be destined to shrink, but if anyone can figure out how to decline gracefully, it will be the Japanese. Black humorists like to calculate how many centuries it will take before Japan’s declining population will drop to zero — when the Japanese people finally go extinct — but Japan is determined to stay Japanese as long as it possibly can.

I recently stumbled onto a one-man show of lacquer products made for the tea ceremony. The artist was there, and we fell into conversation. There was a corner of the gallery set aside for making the bitter, frothy, bright green tea for the ceremony, and he called for two servings. We turned the bowls the ritual three times in our hands to admire the workmanship — my host had made them, after all — and drank our tea. A smile played across the man’s face. “When I drink tea like this,” he said, “I can’t help but think how lucky I am to have been born Japanese.”

It has probably never occurred to this man to wonder whether his great-grandchildren will be anything but pure-bred Japanese. I’m sure he is confident that whatever happens, his descendants — and his country — will be unmistakably his. He has every reason to be confident that many generations from now, his people will taste that bitter green tea and feel lucky they were born Japanese.

ARTICLE

Can ‘Diversity’ Ever be Good?

What’s good for savages is good for us, too.

American Renaissance has always opposed racial diversity on the grounds that it threatens the long-term survival of whites and the civilization they created. AR opposes diversity so consistently that it would be easy to assume that it must be an unalloyed evil. But perhaps it is not. It is possible to imagine diversity that was good for a group, if the arrival of aliens improved its chances for survival. This would be the case if the newcomers were much more advanced than the natives, and bettered their living conditions and reproduction rates.

When the Europeans came, North American Indians were living in the Stone Age. The conquest of the continent by whites swept away their way of life, but it would be possible to argue that their descendants living today are better off because of it. Left to themselves, they would not have developed anything like the white man’s medicine or technology.

But how many people would be convinced by this argument? Would it be more convincing if we were to imagine a benign European presence that left most of Indian society intact and shared only useful technology? Perhaps not even then.

Over the centuries, Europeans and European-influenced people have made contact with scores of South American jungle tribes that were barely into the tool-making stage, and the results were usually bad. The newcomers sometimes massacred or enslaved the primitives, or killed them unintentionally with diseases to which they had no immunity. It is hard to know whether today’s full-blooded Indians of Bolivia or Peru would prefer that the white man had never come — it is virtually impossible to imagine how they would be living now if the Americas had remained undiscovered — but there are plenty of leftists who would argue that they should prefer the dignity of cultural integrity to subordination to Europeans and a few crumbs of Western technology.

Still, humans are glad to get running water, electricity, and Western medicine, and even if they don’t have it themselves, like to think their children might have it some day. No primitive people has ever collectively turned its back on improvement and proudly shut itself up in the Stone Age. (The Japanese strictly limited contact with the outside world from about 1640 to 1854, but theirs was a sophisticated society that absorbed useful Western technology and learning even during this period of seclusion.)

The government of Brazil, however, has established an indigenous peoples policy on the assumption that contact and the resulting diversity are never good. Brazil is one of the few countries where there are still tribes deep in the jungle who live in a purely or mostly “pre-contact” state. Official policy now is to leave those peoples alone, and to prohibit loggers and developers from interfering with them. Why?

During the 20th century, even under what were thought to be the most sensitive and solicitous conditions, “contact” turned out badly. Once they saw tools and foods and trinkets from the outside, tribesmen were unsatisfied with their own. When they came out of the forest, they had no way to make a living, and if they got handouts, they quickly forgot how to live in the forest or simply refused to go back. Many became drunks. The Brazilians finally decided that the damage done by “contact” was so great that forest people should be left alone. Even if it meant death in childbirth, rampant disease, unpunished murder, and perpetual ignorance, this was better than the devastation of suddenly being drawn into a new and bewildering world.

Though this may, in the end, be the most humane policy, one hardly knows whether to call it “liberal” or “conservative.” But it does raise questions about the purpose and advisability of “diversity.” Contact offers to primitives an entire universe of possibilities and powers that are entirely beyond their reach. Potential for improvement is so great that this would appear to be the most obvious and perfect example of the benefits of “diversity.” And yet even when these powers and possibilities are introduced with the best of intentions, the Brazilians have decided it is best to withhold them because things are likely to go wrong. Even “diversity” of a kind that should theoretically bring incalculable benefits is too damaging.

It is worth noting that no one in Brazil complains that the “no contact” policy deprives the rest of the country of the wonderful gifts the forest people could bring. Brazilians understand that they are not giving up something in not trying to get the primitives out of the forest. Nor does one hear of even the most Third-World-besotted white leftists emigrating to the jungle to live the rest of their lives in natural, untainted authenticity. No. Everyone implicitly assumes that the primitives have nothing to offer us. We have a great deal to offer them, but they cannot absorb it, so we and they are all better off if they just stay where they are.

Why is it so difficult to see why this argument does not apply to the diversity of the kind white people all around the world are supposed to be celebrating? Brazilians have finally decided that no one benefits when newcomers try to bring the Nuclear Age or even the Age of Steam to people who are still living in the Stone Age. They realize that the reverse process — ambassadors from the Stone Age bringing their “civilization” to the 21st century — would be ridiculous. And yet, this is what Americans are officially supposed to promote. Think of the “diversity” that could be brought to an American university by someone who has never worn clothes or counted past three. Why even expect such a paragon to go to classes? Let him just walk around campus radiating diversity.

This is only a slight caricature of what we are required to believe. People from failed, hopelessly sclerotic societies who have nothing to offer us (except, perhaps, for a willingness to do manual labor at below-market wages) are a wonderful addition to our society, even though decades of failure have taught Brazilians that people who bring penicillin and pocket knives to people who never heard of them end up leaving their “beneficiaries” worse off than they were before.

Can we not get the same respect and consideration as Amazon savages?

BOOK REVIEW

How Whites Stack Up

An ambitious report describes what we face.

Nicholas Stix, Editor, The State of White America — 2007, National Policy Institute, 2007, 107 pp., bound copies $10.00, free download from nationalpolicyinstitute.org

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

The National Policy Institute (NPI) is a race-realist think tank established in 2005. It’s purpose and motto are taken from the US Constitution — “to form a more perfect union” for “ourselves and our posterity” — and its staff are well aware of how far from perfect the union is and how acute is the crisis our posterity face.

NPI has issued studies on such subjects as the costs of diversity, the prospects for mass deportation, and the contemptible activities of the Southern Poverty Law Center, all of which are available for free download from its web site at nationalpolicyinstitute.org. It’s latest and most ambitious publication is called The State of White America — 2007, and is loosely based on an annual report issued by the National Urban League since 1976 called The State of Black America.

This is an admirable undertaking. Every other racial group in the United States keeps close tabs on how it is doing, and does not hesitate to promote its own interests. Most whites have a vague sense that things are going badly for their group, but have been trained not to think in racial terms. It was a brilliant idea to commission a study that would frame the question in terms of the legitimate interests of whites and quantify their deteriorating position, but the results are uneven.

Nicholas Stix, who wrote the cover story for the previous issue of AR, was the director of the project and principal author. He has clearly put great effort into gathering an enormous amount of material, but has blunted its effect by using language that will drive away whites who do not already have a strong racial consciousness. On only the second line of the introduction, he writes that the report is “a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America, and thus, on America herself.” It is possible to defend the view that white America is the real America, and that white America is besieged, but these ideas are so far beyond the grasp of most whites that if this report fell into their hands they would dismiss it as crank literature. Likewise, it is not useful to assert that “life in America is heading inexorably in a totalitarian direction” or that black and Hispanic leaders and educators “prevent minority children from learning English” and “encourage them to lead lives of crime.” Not even the converted will necessarily agree, and skeptics will roll their eyes.

This said, the first and longest chapter of the report, “A Statistical Review of the Condition of Whites in the United States,” is a model of sober reporting. Written by Edwin Rubenstein, who is probably best known for his analytical articles on VDare.com, it covers a great deal of ground, beginning with the demographic decline of whites in the United States and around the world. Experts predict, for example, that whites, who were only 17 percent of the world population in 1997, will have slipped to a mere nine percent by 2010, and that by 2040 the absolute number of white Americans will begin to decline.

It has long been predicted that the rapid rise in numbers of non-whites will reduce whites to a minority by mid-century. Whites are already a minority in the District of Columbia and four states — Texas, California, Hawaii, New Mexico — and Mr. Rubenstein projects that by 2025 they will be a minority in five more: Florida, Maryland, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. This will make it increasingly difficult for whites to live in their preferred surroundings. Despite ritual praise for “diversity,” Mr. Rubenstein notes that the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 83 percent white.

Mr. Rubenstein gives considerable attention to Hispanics, who have recently established themselves as America’s largest minority. He points out that Mexicans have high birthrates of nearly three children per woman, but Puerto Ricans have fewer children than whites and, at 1.84 children per woman, are not reproducing themselves. Mexicans would have even more children were it not for abortion. Despite their reputation as devout Catholics, Hispanic women have abortions at about twice the white rate. Hispanics are also three times more likely than whites and 20 percent more likely than blacks to become teenage mothers.

Interestingly, Hispanics are not the most “linguistically isolated” group, defined as living in a household in which no adult speaks only English and no adult speaks it well. Twenty-nine percent of Asian households fit this description, while the figure for Hispanics is slightly lower, at 24 percent. The first table on this page, taken from the report, explains why: No fewer than 68.9 percent of Asians living in the United States are foreign born, compared to 40.2 percent for Hispanics.

Some of Mr. Rubenstein’s most interesting observations are about income. He notes that although whites continue to outearn blacks and Hispanics, Asian men are, on average, the best paid group in the country (white men earn three percent less). Although the gap between rich and poor has grown for all racial groups, it has grown most rapidly for whites. Mr. Rubenstein points out that in 1983, the richest five percent of whites had an average annual income that was 14.6 times the average income of the poorest 20 percent. By 2003, the multiple had grown to 23.6 times, with the top five percent making an average of $272,772 compared to $11,556 for the bottom 20 percent. Although the poverty rate for whites, at 8.6 percent, is still about a third of the 24.7 percent for blacks, the white rate increased from 2000 to 2004 at close to twice the rate for blacks. Mr. Rubenstein suggests that the surge of low-paid Hispanics has pushed wages down for the least qualified workers, both black and white, but that the effect has been most dramatic for whites. If these trends continue, more will join blacks and Hispanics at the bottom of an increasingly stratified society.

Mr. Rubenstein offers some well known crime statistics — blacks are seven times more likely and Hispanics are three times more likely than whites to be in jail — and some more obscure: Black women are only 4.5 times more likely and Hispanic women 1.8 times more likely than white women to be in jail.

The educational lag for Hispanics is widely reported; they drop out of school at even higher rates than blacks, and those who remain in school perform at about the same level as blacks: the average 12th grader reads and does math about as well as the average white 8th grader. Hispanics are 16 times more likely than whites to have had only a 5th-grade education, while blacks are almost three times more likely. These deficiencies have absorbed a huge proportion of the growing federal education budget. Mr. Rubenstein notes that three quarters of federal money goes to the “disadvantaged” and handicapped. Only 0.02 percent — two cents out of every $100 — goes to gifted and talented programs.

Some of Mr. Rubenstein’s most interesting findings are outside the usual scope of statistical profiles. Eighteen- to 24-year olds are the age group least likely to vote, but there are clear racial differences even within this group. In recent elections 49.8 percent of young whites voted, compared to 47.1 percent for blacks, 34.2 percent for Asians, and only 33 percent for Hispanics.

The second table on this page shows quite interesting racial differences in voting behavior according to whether a voter is native born or naturalized. Naturalized blacks and whites vote less often than native-born blacks and whites, but naturalized Hispanics and Asians vote more often than native-born Hispanics and Asians. At least in their case, the fact of having deliberately chosen to become a citizen seems to stimulate greater interest in politics. Although Hispanics and Asians in general have lower voter participation rates than blacks and whites, there is a good chance those rates will rise as Hispanics and Asians become better entrenched politically. Blacks already have many black candidates to vote for; Asians and Hispanics will vote more often if there are more Asian and Hispanic candidates. Elections will increasingly become racial headcounts.

Mr. Rubenstein’s chapter ends with some interesting poll data. Blacks and Hispanics are considerably more likely than whites to attend church, and to say religion is important to them. They also have different views of government: Although only 35 percent of whites say they would prefer to pay higher taxes and get more government services, the figures for blacks and Hispanics are 43 percent and 60 percent. At the same time, when asked to agree or disagree with the statement “It doesn’t do any good to plan for the future because you don’t have any control over it,” only 15 percent of whites agree, but no less than 33 percent of blacks and 42 percent of Hispanics agree. America will certainly be a different place if backs and Hispanics retain their passivity and approval of big government as their numbers grow.

Mr. Stix has contributed a chapter on education that has probably gathered together the most complete list of recent school-based racial outrages to be found anywhere. He begins with a very thorough account of the 2006 performances at the middle and high schools in Peekskill, New York, of the black, 11-year-old “poet” Autumn Ashante. Miss Ashante was so openly anti-white that even the somnolent majority was stirred to anger, and the schools were forced to apologize. What Mr. Stix emphasizes, however, is how strongly black elected officials and other authority figures supported the young “poet.” Most whites prefer not to face the evidence of just how deeply anti-white animus can run, even among successful, middle-class blacks.

Most disturbing in this chapter, however, are the examples Mr. Stix gives of the horrors white students and teachers have faced in majority-black and black-run schools. Black administrators simply look the other way when whites — even teachers — are insulted, harassed, and beaten up. Some whites have gone to court and won cash settlements, but most simply run away. These accounts are a deeply worrying sign of what whites can look forward to as their country falls further into the hands of non-whites.

Mr. Stix also covers more familiar ground: the rantings of Leonard Jeffries and Francis Cress Welsing, the irredentism of bilingual education, and the loony, blacks-invented-everything theories that Afro-centrists teach their students. There is much good material here, but it would be more effective if Mr. Stix were less polemical. It is not convincing to write without explanation about “the socialist mainstream media” or “black supremacist Medgar Evers College.”

Mr. Stix ends the chapter with a good summary of the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax, but this case has been so well covered elsewhere that it does not have the same impact as the less well known cases Mr. Stix has so diligently uncovered.

The State of White America includes a chapter on job discrimination against whites. This, and racial preferences in college admissions is a very rich field, but this is the weakest chapter. Despite extravagant praise for the author, the Australia-based R. J. Stove — Mr. Stix calls him “one of the most brilliant and elegant writers presently working in the English language” — there is little here besides a denunciation of job out-sourcing.

The concluding chapter on crime, again written by Mr. Stix, is much better. He gives full credit to and cites liberally from the New Century Foundation report, The Color of Crime, but casts his net considerably wider. He notes some of the absurdities racial orthodoxy forces on police today. In Los Angeles, for example, officers cannot arrest members of the violent MS-13 gang unless they commit a crime for which they have a good chance of being convicted. Although most are known to be in the country illegally, they cannot simply be deported because this would upset Hispanics. Likewise, although there is strong pressure on police to crack down on street crime, politicians tie officers’ hands by screaming about “racial profiling” and unacceptably high minority arrest rates.

Mr. Stix also has a good summary of gun control opponent John Lott’s work on black police officers. Prof. Lott has found, for example, that for every one percent increase in the number of black officers in a department, property crime goes up by four percent, and violent crime by 4.8 percent. This effect is especially pronounced in areas with large black populations. Increasing the ratio of black officers in Maine will result in more crime, but the effect is much greater in Washington, DC or Detroit. Prof. Lott has likewise found that police shootings also rise with the number of black officers.

New Orleans is perhaps the best example of what happens in a largely-black city with a largely-black police force. The city spent years in a miasma of crime and police incompetence, which suddenly appeared to very public view after Hurricane Katrina. Two hundred-fifty officers simply left their posts after the hurricane, and another 250 turned out to be “ghosts” listed on the payroll simply to siphon off federal money. Although the media did their best to backtrack after initial reports of black, post-hurricane lawlessness, Mr. Stix points out that there was simply too much to be swept under the rug. He warns there will be no recovery for New Orleans unless it reinstitutes stiff hiring standards, and stomachs an inevitable increase of white officers. He notes that Atlanta — another majority-black city with a majority-black police force — is beginning to resemble New Orleans.

Clearly, The State of White America — 2007 represents a major research effort, and it is perhaps quibbling to suggest it should have covered more ground. However, in terms of what whites can look forward to as their numbers decline, there could have been a useful chapter on hospitals, for example. What happens when non-whites run them, as in the case of Martin Luther King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles? What happens when white-run hospitals are overrun with uninsured blacks and illegal immigrants? There have also been illuminating press reports on the shocking level of corruption that surfaces when municipal governments fall into the hands of blacks or Hispanics, and of how Mexican levels of crime and degeneracy are slowly seeping north along the southern border.

At the same time, non-whites are leaving their mark on the cultural landscape, as television, radio, museums, and even national parks and symphony orchestras rush to cater to them. Some cities now spend more money on Cinco de Mayo than Fourth of July, and even the White House celebrates Kwanzaa. In increasing numbers of school districts pork is never on the lunch menu for fear of provoking Muslims. In California, public sculpture must not celebrate white achievement, but must promote Indians and Mexicans. There are many ways in which the state of white America is in steep decline, and let us hope that future editions of this very promising report will cover more of them.

Let us also hope future editions will not shout about a “war on white America” but will let leaders draw their own conclusions. There is a great deal in this report that would surprise most whites, and it would be highly edifying for them to see the facts all together in one place. However, they will be suspicious of a report — no matter how factual or well-sourced — that proclaims its politics in harsh or unfamiliar terms. The state of white America is dire enough; the facts themselves speak more eloquently than any of us ever could.

ARTICLE

A Setback for Our Cause — In France

Defeat plunges National Front into crisis.

by Frédéric Legrand

Ever since its founding in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front has been one of the most enduring and influential nationalist parties in Europe. For more than three decades, it has demanded that immigration be sharply curtailed so that France remain French. Its struggle is our struggle. The front’s strong popular appeal has forced mainstream parties to adopt many of its policies, and it reached the apex of its political influence in 2002, when Mr. Le Pen came in second in the French presidential election, defeating the Socialist candidate.

Recently, however, the party has faced stunning reverses. Coming on the heels of its miserable showing in the French presidential elections (see “A Setback for Le Pen; a Victory for ‘Lepenism’,” AR, June 2007), more miserable results in legislative elections in June have plunged the National Front into crisis. The once-mighty party now faces hard choices — and the prospect of a power struggle that could leave it even weaker. The front will not disappear, but it is likely to face a long period of retrenchment before it again becomes a serious force in French politics.

The numbers tell a grim story: In 1997, the front won 15 percent of the national vote; ten years later, a shameful 4.3 percent. In 1997, 134 front candidates made it to the second round of voting; this year, only one (in elections for the National Assembly, if no candidate wins a majority of the district’s vote, candidates who won 12.5 percent or more go on to a runoff). The National Front is back to its 1984 levels, when it first emerged as a serious political party.

This is a financial as well as political defeat. The French government pays campaign expenses in proportion to votes won in the previous election, and the front stands to lose two thirds of the 4.8 million Euros a year ($5.75 million) that have kept it afloat. It will have to lay off full-time workers, and could even lose its party headquarters building in the Paris suburb of Saint Cloud.

All this has revived grumblings about Marine Le Pen, Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, whom he has named as one of the party vice presidents, and who ran the disastrous presidential elections. Many front stalwarts see her as a political and intellectual light-weight and beneficiary of blatant nepotism. “Le Pen and his daughter better learn from what happened, or Le Pen will end up back where he started, with nothing,” is the sentiment among the old guard.

And yet Marine has arguments on her side. After the presidential elections in May, there was such a backlash against her that Mr. Le Pen handed control over the legislative elections back to the traditionalists. Bruno Gollnisch, a member of the European Parliament and long-time party leader, ran the campaign, with a return to the uncompromising nationalism that has been the party’s hallmark — to no avail.

Perhaps activists were demoralized by the defeat of just one month before, but they put in a poor performance. Local party headquarters were often unmanned, and when staff were available they were rude to anyone who asked about the front’s positions. Many campaign workers acted as if anyone who was not in complete agreement was a sworn enemy.

The front’s campaign literature and posters were surprisingly bad — perhaps it’s just as well they were scarcely to be seen. At outdoor markets, and at the doors of factories and schools there were representatives of every party except the National Front. With one notable exception, as we will see below, it was as if the party had run out of gas. During the entire, month-long campaign, Jean-Marie Le Pen addressed only one mass meeting, and managed to fill only half the hall. He denounced “the imposter Sarkozy,” calling him “Le Pen light.”

As they did in the presidential elections, huge numbers of former front supporters voted for Mr. Sarkozy’s UMP Party (Union for a Presidential Majority) rather than “waste” their ballots on a symbolic protest vote that might let a leftist win. As if deliberately to spite the old guard, it was none other than Marine Le Pen herself who was the sole front candidate to finish with more than 12.5 percent in the first round, and make it into the runoff. There, as is usual with the front, supporters of every other party, including the “conservatives,” ganged up against her, and she lost to a Socialist — though with a respectable 41.65 percent.

Setbacks at the polls will only make the coming power struggle more ruthless. Mr. Le Pen is 79, and will not be a candidate in the next presidential election. At this point, Marine has the inside track to follow her father as party leader, but she is not a shoo-in. Her many detractors put little stock in her recent “success.” Marine got far more party money than any other front candidate, and after she qualified for the runoff, some 100 activists poured into her district to help with the second round (no one else needed their help). The eldest of the Le Pen daughters, Marie-Caroline, who broke with her father over a terrible party schism in 1998 (see “Crisis in the Front National,” AR, Feb. 1999), campaigned for her sister Marine, as did a number of other former and current party notables.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen broke open the piggy bank for his daughter, but he placed a bad bet,” said Socialist Albert Facon, who beat Marine in the runoff. He said he had never seen so many National Front activists putting up posters and handing out leaflets, and he scrambled to fight back. “I had to print twice as many posters and leaflets as I had planned,” he said. As her opponents point out, Marine lost despite all the help she got.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has called for a party convention for the 17th and 18th of November in Bordeaux, where two incompatible views of the front’s future will meet head-on. The newcomers who support Marine want to break with the old National Front they call “a party of amateurs.” They want a modern and professional party — the old-timers would call it watered down. Louis Alliot, who is the Secretary General and close to Marine, puts it this way: “I will propose to Jean-Marie Le Pen that half the local party heads be replaced. Some showed bad faith during the presidential elections, and others were slipping banana peels under Marine Le Pen’s feet during the legislative campaign.” He wants to eliminate certain positions within the party — they somehow happen to be filled by conservatives — and says “the front must cut off all those little groups that just give us trouble.” By that he means traditional Catholics and anyone who doesn’t like Marine. In other words, he wants a purge.

The old guard would like Bruno Gollnisch to take over, and return the party to its roots as a home for all real conservatives. Its ranks would stretch from the openly race-conscious groups on the front’s right, through the traditionalist Catholics and core front voters, to include supporters of Philippe de Villiers, founder of the MPF party (Movement for France) and outspoken foe of Islamicization.

Carl Lang, a front vice president and a member since 1978, sees the party as “the big tent for the nationalist right.” It was he who helped paper over some of the differences that date back to the bitter 1998 split with the front’s former number two man, Bruno Mégret, and persuaded Mr. Mégret to lend support to front candidates. “We can survive divided,” he said, “but we cannot win elections without unity.” He wants “everyone to come together and work out the compromises necessary to build a great party.”

Mr. Le Pen is not about to open the door to those who bolted in 1998. “That’s foolishness,” he says. “Those are people who betrayed the party, and want to come back only because they think they can take over if there is a battle for the succession.”

The old chief clearly wants his daughter Marine to glide into his place as undisputed head of the party. She, in turn, points to her (relative) success in the legislative elections as proof that her toned-down, mainstream approach works. “There should not even have been a debate about radicalizing the NF,” she says. “My election results show that far from going radical, we must defend our positions without excess — but, of course, without weakness either.”

Even if Jean-Marie Le Pen is reelected as head of the party in November, the two camps are already marshalling their allies. Jean-François Touzé, who is close to Marine, calls her opponents “pen knives who think they are long knives.” This remains to be seen. In any case, the battle lines are drawn, and blood will be shed before the National Front regains unity and coherence.

A White National Assembly Although Nicolas Sarkozy has appointed three non-white women to his cabinet, the National Assembly — where legislators must be elected by the people — remains overwhelmingly white. In accordance with French law that requires a balance of male and female candidates, 51 percent of the new legislators are women, but the other kind of diversity is going to have to wait. Not one black or North African candidate from mainland France was seated. There are, however, 15 non-whites among the 22 representatives of France’s overseas territories. Among the 555 mainland legislators there is only one non-white face. George Pau-Langevin, a lady lawyer from the Antilles, won a seat representing Paris. “We regret that the diversity of our country is not represented in the National Assembly — and because the political parties did not give it the importance it deserved,” complained the French Council of Democratic Muslims, which welcomes people of any political tendency, so long as they are Muslims. The council pointed out that Britain has 15 non-white paliamentarians (out of 646) and Germany has four (out of 614). The Muslims should blame the voters, not the parties. There was a record number of black and Arab candidates; the French just didn’t vote for them. Only one seemed to have a real chance. Salem Kacet arrived in France with his Algerian parents when he was eight years old. In the first round, he got 36.62 percent of the vote, representing Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party, but was trounced by a white Socialist in the second round. Mr. Sarkozy sent in two cabinet ministers to stump for him (including one of his pet non-whites, 43-year-old Rachida Dati, who is the new Justice Minister) but it did no good. Another exotic UMP candidate was named Nesrédine Ramdani. None other than Marine Le Pen helped knock him out in the first round.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Victory — For Now

In March, the National Council of La Raza (“the race” in Spanish) presented its 2007 Capital Award to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. In his acceptance speech, Sen. Graham explained that when he was a young Air Force JAG officer, a Hispanic sergeant showed him the ropes. He was “one of the finest men I ever knew,” said Sen. Graham, which apparently explains why we must not enforce our immigration laws. Sen. Graham ended his speech with a promise to keep pushing for “a path to citizenship.” “We’re going to tell the bigots to shut up,” he declared to sustained applause.

On June 28, the “bigots” — meaning the majority of Americans — told Lindsey Graham to shut up. And Ted Kennedy, John McCain, Mel Martinez, and Harry Reid and all the other Senators who supported so-called comprehensive immigration reform. It was the second time public anger stopped the legislation. Majority Leader Harry Reid first tried to push the bill through before Memorial Day. Pro-enforcement senators like Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, David Vitter of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas were able to drag out debate while immigration-control organizations rallied supporters for a massive show of grassroots opposition to the bill. As a result of intense public pressure on the Senate, on June 7, the bill failed on a cloture vote, which was necessary to stop debate and put the bill to a vote.

At President Bush’s urging, Sen. Reid brought the bill back in mid-June, using procedural tactics to limit debate. President Bush then twisted arms, trying to get Republicans to back what he called his number-one domestic priority, while his allies sharpened their rhetoric. Mel Martinez of Florida, a Cuban immigrant who also serves as GOP chairman, joined Sen. Graham in calling opponents simple-minded bigots: they “just want to build a fence.” Sen. Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, implied that public opposition was driven by ignorance, and Sen. Edward Kennedy said enforcing immigration law would amount to using “Gestapo tactics.”

On Tuesday, June 26, it looked as though the bill might pass after the vote to bring it back passed with 64 votes. Another cloture vote — again to end debate and pave the way for a vote on final passage — was scheduled for Thursday, June 28. Over the next two days, tens of thousands of Americans faxed, e-mailed and phoned the Senate. According to Sen. Jeff Sessions, the calls overloaded the Senate switchboard. On Thursday morning, no one was quite sure how the vote would go; both sides claimed optimism. But once voting got underway, it was clear the Senate would submit to the will of the people. In the end, the cloture motion failed badly, with only 46 votes out of the necessary 60. It was a tremendous victory for the American people.

Some legislators still haven’t gotten the message. Harry Reid has not ruled out bringing the bill back a third time, and other senators may try to pass parts of the bill, such as the so-called Dream Act, which would grant citizenship to illegal alien students. [James Rowley and Nicholas Johnston, Immigration Legislation Blocked Again in US Senate, Bloomberg News, June 28, 2007. US Senate Defeats Immigration Bill, Reuters, June 28, 2007.]

Another Victory

In order to ensure “diversity” in public schools, both Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky limit the number of whites in certain schools. Seattle classifies each student as “white” or “non-white” and assigns them accordingly, while Louisville keeps black enrollment at all schools between 15 and 50 percent. White parents sued, claiming their children were kept out of schools because of race. On June 28, the Supreme Court issued a five-to-four ruling against the school systems. Four justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, ruled that race-based student assignment violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. According to Chief Justice Roberts, “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again — even for very different reasons.” His conclusion? “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, relishing the role of “swing justice” he inherited from Sandra Day O’Connor, refused to join in Justice Roberts’ ruling. He agreed that the two school districts in question had gone too far in assigning students by race, but refused to rule out all race-based decision-making. He wrote a concurring opinion in which he described the race-blind position as “all-too-unyielding,” and “dismissive” of cases in which the government may take race into account to ensure that “all people have equal opportunity regardless of their race” (whatever such cases may be). Justice Kennedy thinks diversity is so important that race discrimination is sometimes justified in achieving it — just not quite as much discrimination as Seattle and Louisville were practicing. One of his proposed race-conscious measures would be “strategic site selection” of schools, or building them between black and white neighborhoods so they get a mix of students.

The Court’s four liberal justices — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stephens — were incensed at the majority ruling, claiming it “betrayed” the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. In his dissent on behalf of the other liberals, Justice Breyer warned that both the Court and the nation “will come to regret” the ruling. He thinks racial discrimination is justified and desirable if it increases diversity.

Because Justice Kennedy refused to join the Court’s conservatives in declaring that the way to stop discrimination is by not discriminating, the victory is not complete. Only four of the nine justices have taken the position that racial discrimination by government is always wrong. Still, experts say many school systems will now abandon “race-conscious” student assignment. Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation’s largest urban public school systems, says the Court has left little room for maneuver so “many school districts are likely to give up.” [Robert Barnes, Divided Court Limits Use of Race by School Districts, Washington Post, June 29, 2007.]

Ward Connerly, who led the fight for racial preference bans in California and Michigan, hailed the ruling: “The Supreme Court today made a glorious decision that directly fits with our plans to eliminate race in all facets of American public life. This Supreme Court decision shows that the era of race preferences is quickly coming to an end.” [Jennifer Bollenbach, Connerly Declares Supreme Court Decision ‘Glorious Victory,’ American Civil Rights Institute, June 29, 2007.]

Happy Juneteenth

“Juneteenth” is a black “holiday” that commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops under General Gordan Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and told slaves the War Between the States was over, and that they were free. Juneteenth is becoming increasingly popular among blacks, and many cities now mark the day with parades.

Juneteenth celebrations, however, suffer from a malady that frequently afflicts black gatherings. This year, in Syracuse, New York, police stopped the fun three hours early when rival groups of blacks started fighting each other. Three were stabbed and 14 were arrested. [Robert A. Baker and Pam Lundborg, Brawls Mar Juneteenth, Post-Standard (Syracuse), June 17, 2007.]

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the revels turned violent for the second year in a row. A mob of blacks pulled a man from his car and began punching him. Two young women started fighting, and then attacked police who arrived to restore calm. When other women started fighting, a man fired five shots into the crowd, wounding a bystander. [John Byman, Juneteenth Celebrations Turn Violent, WTMJ Radio (Milwaukee), June 20, 2007.]

In Austin, Texas, a driver accidentally struck a young black child on a street crowded with Juneteenth celebrants. The driver stopped, and he and a friend went to check on the child, who was not seriously injured. A crowd of blacks attacked them. The driver managed to get away but the crowd beat his friend, 40-year-old David Morales, to death. [Texas Crowd Kills Man After Car Hits Kid, AP, June 20, 2007.]

Uncivil Wrongs

On June 20, the House of Representatives passed HR 923, the “Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act,” by a vote of 422-2. The bill, named for a black teenager killed by whites in Mississippi in 1955 supposedly for whistling at a white woman, would provide more than $100 million over ten years to the Justice Department to hire new FBI agents to investigate old, unsolved “racially motivated” crimes from the 1950s and 1960s. The bill would also hire prosecutors for these crimes, and build a brand new bureaucracy to oversee everything. The bill would also grant $2 million a year to state and local police agencies and another $1.5 million a year to “improve coordination among investigative agencies.” Sponsor John Lewis, a black Democrat from Georgia, says, “We have an obligation . . . let us move to close this dark stain on our nation’s history.”

Mr. Lewis and Senate sponsor Christopher Dodd of Connecticut say Congress must move quickly on the bill before the passage of time makes it impossible to solve these cases — in other words, before white suspects die. The Senate is expected to pass the bill soon, and the White House has pledged support.

The two dissenters were both Republicans: Ron Paul of Texas and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia. A spokesman for Mr. Westmoreland says the Justice Department should investigate cases for which it has leads and evidence, and can do that with its current budget. “This was named for Emmett Till and that’s illustrative of the point. The guy who killed him has been dead for many, many years. We can’t prosecute dead people,” he says.

At a recent hearing on the bill, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Grace Chung Becker said the Justice Department plans to review at least 100 cases. Seventy-six are based on files turned over by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [Ben Evans, House Votes to Reopen Civil Rights Cases, AP, June 20, 2007.] Forty percent of the murders committed from 2000 to 2005 in New York City are still unsolved, but Congress wants to spend money on cases that are decades old.

Lewiston Update

Lewiston, Maine, is the former mill town made famous when Somali refugees started arriving by the busload in February 2001. Most had originally settled in Atlanta, where it was thought warm weather and a large population of blacks would make them feel at home. Instead, the Somalis found crime, drugs, and stingy welfare. In an updated version of the ancient practice of sahan, in which young men roam the countryside looking for water and good grazing, they send scouts looking for more fertile pastures.

Lewiston turned out to be the promised land. It was cold and 97.5 percent white, but it had just about the most generous welfare payments in the country and plenty of public housing because the population had declined as the textile mills closed. Welfare in Maine lasts five years and after that, extensions are easy to get. Even after Somalis filled the public housing, others got Section 8 vouchers, which offer government subsidies for private housing.

Nobody told anyone in Lewiston the Somalis were coming, and by late 2002, it had 1,000 new, mainly non-English-speaking, illiterate welfare cases on its hands. Then-mayor Larry Raymond wrote an open letter to the Somalis asking them to stop coming. They kept coming anyway, and now number around 3,500 — fully ten percent of the population. Lewiston has the highest percentage of Somalis of any city in the country, and an average of 30 more arrive each month.

Lisbon Street, Lewiston’s main thoroughfare, now has a mosque, Somali restaurants, and two halal grocery stores. Women in hijabs and burkas are a common sight. Most Somalis are still on welfare, and intend to stay on it as long as they can. When the president of the city council offered to hire 30 Somalis at $8.00 an hour to hold traffic signs at road construction sites, she got few takers — and they wanted to work only half days. Even if they wanted jobs, there is not much Somalis know how to do.

Many Lewistonians wish the Somalis would go away. Last summer, a man rolled a pig’s head into a Somali mosque. He was charged with desecrating a place of worship, and later committed suicide after a standoff with police. In April, a white middle school student tossed a piece of ham onto a table where Somali students were eating. Administrators suspended him, and the Maine attorney general considered but did not file hate crime charges.

At least one Somali, 46-year-old Said Mohamud, is doing fine. He manages a grocery called the Mogadishu Store, and has a daughter studying at Smith College (annual tuition $33,940; room and board $11,420) who plans to attend medical school. Another child is studying accounting at a university in Florida. He says he plans to send his six other children to college, too. [Roger McGrath, The Great Somali Welfare Hunt, The American Conservative, Nov. 24, 2002. Jerry Harkavy, A Maine City’s Somalis Facing Cultural Divide, AP, May 11, 2007.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Thank you for the in-depth coverage of the Knoxville Horror. My local newspaper never mentioned it, nor did the local radio “news” station. I don’t use computers, so I would have never heard about it if it were not for AR. I do recall seeing stories about James Byrd, the black man killed by whites several years ago in Texas, and the homosexual murdered in Wyoming. Apparently it is news when blacks and homosexuals are killed, but not whites.

Len Foy, Rangeley, Maine

Sir — I can’t say I enjoyed reading your story on the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, but I am glad you published it. I cannot imagine the terror those two young people experienced during the last hours of their lives. If there is any justice, the blacks who killed them will be executed.

Why do the Knoxville police insist that this brutal crime was not “racially motivated”? Three black men raped a white man, and they expect us to believe there is nothing racial about that? Would they have raped a black man?

Jackie Vincent, Dalton, Ga.

Sir — Fortunately, the media can no longer bury stories like the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. I didn’t learn about the Wichita Massacre until I read about it on the AR website in 2006, nearly five years after the fact. I’ve be reading about Knoxville online for months. More and more white people are getting fed up with the way the mainstream media tailor the news, and are turning to alternative sources. That can only help our cause.

Tim Holtzman, Milwaukee, Wisc.

Sir — I guess it’s a good thing that there were some whites who protested what happened in Knoxville, but it is unfortunate that Alex Linder got involved. Mr. Linder is a notorious anti-Semite whose web site preaches “Death to the Jewz!” He doesn’t represent me, and I suspect his presence, and that of his followers, offended a great many whites. The media already describe anyone claiming to speak for whites as a “hater.” People like Alex Linder would appear to support that point of view.

Anthony Redding, Philadelphia

Sir — Once again, I learn something new in AR, this time courtesy of Thomas Jackson’s article on Arthur de Gobineau. I had never heard of Gobineau, but he appears to have made a very serious attempt to understand the nature and significance of race, given the limitations of knowledge at the time. It is ironic that now, despite the enormous amount of scientific information available on the subject, most Americans would rather not understand the nature and significance of race. This is clear testimony to the mental cowardice of our times.

Christopher Weyler, Destin, Fla.

Sir — I was pleased to see your essay on Arthur de Gobineau, who does not get enough credit in race-realist circles. I have heard him dismissed for two reasons, both of which you covered, at least in part: (1) His passivity. At least in his writing, he seemed to believe nothing could be done about race-mixing and subsequent decay. However, simply by calling attention to the importance of race and the durability of racial traits, he made it less likely that whites would remain passive. (2) His emphasis on race mixing. There are passages in Gobineau that seem to suggest racial mixture can be good. However, that is only in the very early stages of a civilization’s establishment, and we are clearly beyond that stage. Gobineau thought miscegenation was inevitable but this does not mean he encouraged it.

Name Withheld, New York, N.Y.

Sir — I went to see the movie 300 on the strength of Mr. Sims’ review in the July issue. Although perhaps not transported by it as he was, I fully agree that it is inspiring to see white men heroically defending their race, culture, and tribe against invaders. I found myself longing for the unity of purpose shown by those Spartans fighting for Greece. Our people and way of life are just as much under threat as theirs were, and yet our people are dumb, like sheep led to slaughter. It would be better to fight and be crushed than slowly be bled to death — and if we would only fight we would easily win. Only because we have been mentally defeated can we be physically defeated.

Sarah Wentworth, Richmond, Va.

Sir — As an Alabaman, I am embarrassed that my state government issued such a craven apology for slavery. You reproduced some choice bits, but they don’t fully convey the extent of the groveling. I almost wish you had printed the entire, 1,500-word apology, but I understand your space is limited. And perhaps you wanted to spare your readers the spectacle of a once proud member of the Confederacy debasing itself.

You write that the Alabama legislature deliberately worded the apology to avoid creating an obligation to pay reparations. However, by bringing up “the broken promise of ‘40 acres and a mule’ to former slaves” it seems to me the legislature took a considerable risk.

Bill Porter, Hunstville, Ala.

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