American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 16, No. 4	April 2005

CONTENTS

Sam Francis, R.I.P
Sam Francis: an American Hero Dies
Sam Francis in His Own Words
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Sam Francis, R.I.P.

Sam was an inspiring colleague and a close friend.

by Jared Taylor

One day in 1986 or 1987 I was sitting in my house in Menlo Park, California, reading an article in a San Francisco newspaper. I had not noticed the author’s name when I began to read, but halfway through the article, I said to myself: “This man is brilliant, and he is one of us.” I looked up at the by-line, and made a mental note to remember the author’s name. It was Samuel Francis.

I began to look elsewhere for the Francis by-line, and soon he and I were in correspondence. I flew to Washington, DC, on business — probably in 1988 — and Sam agreed to meet me for dinner. It was the first of countless dinners, meetings, phone calls, conversations, and was the beginning of what became a cherished friendship. This first meeting with Sam was before I had started what became American Renaissance, and over the months he strongly urged me to begin publishing. He promised to write for the magazine, and the knowledge that I could rely on at least one first-rate contributor was a source of much encouragement in what could have been an uncertain venture.

It was in those early years of our friendship that I learned that beneath Sam’s gruff manner there was a warm-hearted and sensitive man — even a shy man. When I telephoned, he would greet me as if I were a bill collector. “Great to hear from you,” was not Sam’s style. But he was glad to hear from me, and he continued to write for AR and offer invaluable advice.

When, after several years of publishing, I decided to hold a conference for AR readers, Sam was the first person I thought of as a speaker. The 1994 conference — once again, an uncertain undertaking — was a great success thanks, in no small measure, to Sam’s willingness to speak. At every AR conference since then, his talk was always one of the best attended and best received. His droll wit, his striking parallels, his arresting metaphors, his impromptu sallies during the question period — no one could both edify and entertain as Sam could, and after the day’s proceedings, he was always at the center of a convivial circle late into the night.

Unfortunately, much as Sam’s association benefited AR, the reverse was not always true. In fact, his participation at the 1994 conference was at least partly responsible for a sudden shift in his career. From the time I had first known him, Sam had been both a syndicated columnist and a staff columnist for The Washington Times. His position at the Times was one of high visibility and considerable influence, and just as many people subscribed to Chronicles mainly to read Sam’s column, a certain number of readers picked up the Times only because he wrote for it.

Sam first got in trouble at the Times for a column ridiculing the Baptist Church for a groveling, official apology for slavery. Though the column did not defend slavery, Sam pointed out that nowhere in the Bible is slavery described as a sin, and that the church had no doctrinal reason to apologize for something in which no living Baptist had had a part.

The Times gave him a warning, but kept him on. Soon after, however, there was some publicity about his remarks at the 1994 conference. Though Sam himself never got a full explanation for why he was dismissed from the paper, the following words, spoken to the AR audience, appear to have been part of the reason:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.

Perhaps today, the Times would have overlooked this not-very-shocking, even obvious statement. It has recently brushed aside ideological attacks on its writers in an exemplary manner. Ten years ago, however, this appears to have been too much, and Sam began a career as an independent journalist. If anything, we are probably the better for it, because he was so productive. In addition to his twice-weekly syndicated columns and monthly essays for Chronicles, he was editor of The Citizens’ Informer and book editor of The Occidental Quarterly. To this he added a regular stream of books and monographs, numerous speaking engagements, and service on several boards of directors, including that of AR’s parent organization, the New Century Foundation.

Of Sam’s brilliance and boldness as a thinker and writer there can be no doubt. His articles for AR alone are ample testimony to that (a selection from them begins on page six). He was undoubtedly the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time, and was an original and provocative writer on a host of subjects, bringing broad historical knowledge and years of reflection to any subject on which he wrote. Sam, indeed, felt he was at the height of his powers. Not long ago I told him I thought I detected in myself the occasional memory lapses and slipped mental cogs of which people over 50 often complain. Sam sounded surprised. His brain, he said, had never been more agile or more powerful.

Sam could have built an impressive career as a public intellectual or think-tank executive if, like so many, he had been willing to trim his sails and steer between the buoys. This, of course, was not Sam’s way, and by writing forcefully about what he knew to be true, moral, and vitally important, he sacrificed prominence and acclaim for the greater reward of doing what he saw to be his duty.

Sam’s convictions — so at odds with the pieties of his time — were in contrast to his private demeanor. He did not enjoy sharp disagreement, and had no taste for the shouting contests that pass for political debate. This was why he did not enjoy radio or television appearances, and did not seek them out. He could not abide the ignorance and even rudeness he could expect from the hosts of most programs.

Sam was a surprisingly shy man, and never pressed himself on others. At any large gathering he kept to the people he knew best rather than search out new contacts. But, of course, people came to him — attracted by his brilliance, his erudition, and his sometimes savage wit. His gruffness kept some admirers at a distance, but many more learned, as I did, to know Sam’s real warmth and charm. He made and kept friends from every period of his life, from Johns Hopkins, the Senate, and among the many people who clustered around the magazines and intellectual movements over which he exerted such a strong influence.

Like so many men of great talent, Sam’s attainments were striking even in areas for which he was not well known. For example, he read deeply in literature, both serious and popular. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the author H.P. Lovecraft, on whom he wrote several essays. His knowledge of literature made it a pleasure to discuss my own reading with him. Whenever I snatched the time to read a novel by Joseph Conrad or even just a poem by Alexander Pope, Sam always had insightful recollections about the author and the work itself. I was part-way through Dickens’s Dombey and Son when Sam died, and in a tiny corner of the immense sadness I feel, is the pang of knowing I will never have the pleasure of his commentary on that remarkable novel.

Unlike many people, whose Ph.D. is a labor undertaken for professional purposes and quickly left behind, Sam’s historical learning reflected a real joy in knowing the past. He seemed to retain all he had ever learned, and was an inexhaustible source of insight and information. When, in my desultory way, I might stumble across an obscure but piquant incident from a 19th century British colonial campaign, Sam would know everything about the campaign, why the colonial minister of the time had ordered it, and why the foreign minister opposed it. When I became acquainted with the Greek historian and geographer Strabo, Sam, of course, knew all about him and why he was important.

What a terrible waste that a man of such immense learning and insight should suddenly be struck down! Only a few weeks before he died, Sam had received a grant to write a major critique of American conservatism, and had been clearing away inessential commitments to make time for what would have been, I am sure, his most important book yet. This book that should have been — like others he would certainly have written — is a loss that can never be made good.

Sam was therefore, for me, both an inspiring professional colleague and a close friend. There was no man who accomplished more for our cause, nor was there one with whom a more agreeable and edifying evening could be spent. Our movement is fortunate to have had him, and I am even more fortunate to have known him in the confidential way I did.

Sam deserved many more years at his chosen place in the vanguard of our movement, laying bare the lies and hypocrisies of our time, and fighting for the people and civilization he loved. Our best tribute to Sam is to do what he would have expected of us: to carry forward with renewed commitment the great work of which he was so important a part.

ARTICLE

Sam Francis:

An American Hero Dies

Heroism is the triumph of the soul over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation and death.

— Henri Frederic Amiel.

by Sam G. Dickson

“I have bad news,” said the voice on the telephone. When I heard Louis Andrew’s words and the tone of his voice, my heart broke. I already knew what they meant. Like other friends of Sam Francis, I had been following with desperate hope his struggle to recover from a massive heart operation. I had feared from the first that his chances were slim.

Bad news? No. Catastrophic news. The death of a friend of over two decades would be horrible news under any circumstances, but the death of this friend, a man who is virtually irreplaceable, a man who filled so many positions in the struggle to preserve our race and its culture can only be termed catastrophic. Never had the old proverb “Death keeps no calendar” been so bitterly true.

I first came to know Sam when he was working in the office of Senator East of North Carolina. It was not a case of love at first sight. At that time, in the early 1980s, I was already marked as a thought criminal, an American dissident, or what the Soviets would have called a “former person.” Sam, on the other hand, was a respectable figure, holding a doctorate from the University of North Carolina and an impressive work history with prominent conservative institutions, and was a top aide to a United States Senator, whom he served as legislative assistant for national security affairs. I understood the uneasiness and reserve I sensed behind his polite demeanor.

According to an old saying, courage is the wisdom of manhood while foolhardiness the folly of youth. I had been perhaps foolhardy to throw myself in early youth into the race issue and into many controversial actions and associations. Sam had not done that. In contrast to my youthful foolhardiness, Sam’s courage would be the wisdom of manhood and would be seen in the unfolding of time. As the years passed, Sam moved steadily toward our positions on the issues that matter. When we first met, it was natural that he be uneasy with a young lawyer with a radical reputation. Nevertheless, strained and formal though our introduction was, this was the beginning of over 20 years of association that would grow into a close friendship fostered by collaboration in the struggle that will determine whether our race and the civilization it built will have a future.

Sam had many fine qualities. He was famous for his wit. His learning and reading were of staggering breadth. He was erudite, but unlike pseudo-intellectuals he carried his erudition well and was happy to talk with people regardless of their social rank or credentials. He was interested in ideas and in actually communicating with other people, not in upstaging them or making them feel small.

But he also could be a hard friend. Many people, certainly those with modern notions of self-esteem, would have found it wounding to be on the receiving end of Sam’s critiques. His conversation could be harsh, sometimes even caustic. But there was never a personal agenda in what he said, and more often than not, he was right, even if it brought you up short. And Sam was a loyal and even a forgiving friend. Of all his great qualities the greatest — the ones that set him apart from thousands like him who have started out in the “respectable right” — were his loyalty and his courage.

Sam’s conservatism, unlike that of so many so-called conservatives, was not an artificial growth of some individualized libertarian philosophy. It was not inseminated by logical formulae, nor was it born in a philosophy book. Sam did not scorn logic or philosophy, and knew they are critical to hone, polish and perfect what is intuitively felt. Nevertheless, at its core, Sam’s conservatism — as any healthy conservatism must be — was rooted, real and not theoretical.

Sam’s other distinguishing feature, the feature that made all the difference, was his courage. Courage, like loyalty, is scarce in our society and age. Samuel Johnson once said, “We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on a highway than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.” Johnson’s observation that courage is necessary for maintaining virtue sheds light on the pathetic state of American conservatism and on the plight of American whites.

Sam’s courage, alas, was not characteristic of the conservative “leadership” of the last three generations. Had courage like Sam’s been the rule, our people’s situation would be very different. His courage began with the willingness to listen to radical viewpoints, to give a fair hearing to others with whom he initially disagreed. Sam did not pull down the shades and turn off his brain to avoid facing unpleasant truths. He was willing to face them head-on, and such intellectual courage is not common.

Sam was willing to follow where the facts led, and to make the hard decisions the facts required, and he was willing to pay the price in modern, “free” America for those who rap on sacred idols with the hammer of truth. And he paid the price. Sam lost his job as staff columnist and deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times because he spoke at an American Renaissance conference. He was not fired because what he said was untrue, but because he dissented from egalitarian dogma, and was guilty of associating with other thought criminals.

Sam was not fired by liberals, Marxists, or fanatic Trotskyites. He was fired by people who tell you they are “conservatives” (but “responsible” ones) and who no doubt convince themselves they are doing something to save the country. These people are the conservative opposition that conserves nothing and opposes nothing. Like Sam, and like the rest of us, they have faced unpleasant truths. Unlike Sam, they crumpled at the test; they turned their faces away from the truth.

John Henry Newman once observed, “Calculation never made a hero.” The conservatives who crumple probably think they are cleverer than people like Sam. They calculate the penalties. They tell themselves it is better to live and fight again another day. They calculate, and that is why they will never be heroes. That would be bad enough, but they don’t stop there. In their fear of criticism, their terror at being called names like “racist,” they panicked and cut Sam off, just as they did Joe Sobran, Kevin Lamb and others. Liberals know “conservatives” will do this, and can make them jump through hoops like trained dogs. One wonders what they will think when the day of their death comes? What could be more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree? The burden of their careful lives must be heavy.

Fired from The Washington Times, Sam went on to yeoman labor, year after year, for our race, civilization and nation. He wrote prodigiously and published widely. He spoke at every American Renaissance Conference, served on the board of directors of AR’s parent organization, was on the board of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and until a month before his death was editor of its newspaper, The Citizens Informer.

I never heard one whimper, one regret from Sam that he had lost his job, that he was cold-shouldered by former colleagues, that he was badgered and attacked by professional leftist witch-hunters. I don’t think Sam ever regretted the path he took. He personified the hero in the terms of the quotation from Amiel I cited above. Sam triumphed over fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness and isolation. He had the last laugh on his enemies and the false colleagues who betrayed him. Despite their efforts, he landed on his feet, and wrote and spoke more, and more powerfully, than ever.

Sam was admired and loved by a host of friends in a way that none of his detractors will be. He was and is a hero. Sam’s life was rich in honor. His life was well spent in dealing with things that matter, that are critical, that mean life or death for our people. Perhaps it is some consolation to reflect that as a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used like Sam’s brings if not a happy death, at least an honorable one.

Alas, Sam was cut off at his prime. We are bereft of his talents just when they are most needed. We honor Sam most by taking up the fallen torch, by rededicating ourselves to the cause for which he sacrificed and to which he dedicated himself. Our people at large may not know the measure of the man they have lost. But we know. And if our people are to survive and have a future, then in that future the name of Sam Francis will always be remembered.

Goodbye, friend. I will miss you.

SIDEBAR Milestones Samuel Todd Francis was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on April 29, 1947. He was educated at Johns Hopkins University (B.A., 1969) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he received a Ph.D. in modern history in 1979. From 1977 to 1981, he was a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, specializing in foreign affairs, terrorism, and intelligence. From 1981 to 1986, he was legislative assistant for national security affairs to Senator John P. East (Republican — North Carolina) and worked closely with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism, of which Senator East was a member. Dr. Francis joined the editorial staff of The Washington Times in 1986 as an editorial writer. He served as Deputy Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Times from 1987 to 1991, as Acting Editorial Page Editor from February to May 1991, and was a staff columnist until September 1995. Dr. Francis received the Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1989 and 1990. He was a finalist for the National Journalism Award (Walker Stone Prize) for Editorial Writing of the Scripps Howard Foundation in 1989 and 1990. His twice-weekly column was nationally syndicated through Creators Syndicate. A prolific writer on issues of public policy, Dr. Francis wrote for many newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, USA Today, National Review, The Occidental Quarterly, of which he was Associate and Book Editor, and for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, to which he was a Contributing Editor, and for which he wrote a monthly column, “Principalities and Powers.” He was on the board of directors of the Council of Conservative Citizens and edited its paper, The Citizens Informer. He wrote often for American Renaissance, and was a speaker at every AR conference, beginning in 1994. He was a founding board member of New Century Foundation, the parent organization of American Renaissance. Dr. Francis was the author of Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham (1984) and Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1993). He died on Feb. 15th from complications brought on by heart surgery in late January, and was laid to rest in his home town of Chattanooga, on Feb. 26. The graveside service, dappled in sunlight, was attended by appromixately 100 friends and family members. Dr. Francis, always a proud Southerner, lies in Forest Hills Cemetery, in the shadow of Lookout Mountain. There, on Nov. 23, 1863, outnumbered Confederates were forced back by Joe Hooker’s men, thus ending the South’s hopes of retaking Chattanooga.

ARTICLE

Sam Francis in His Own Words

Why Race Matters

This is an excerpt from the speech Dr. Francis gave at the first AR conference, held in Atlanta in 1994. Although he never received a full explanation of why he was fired from The Washington Times, publicity given to this speech by his detractors was certainly a factor. The original article was published in the September 1994 issue.

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

In the universalist world-view, there is neither history nor race nor even species, neither specific cultures nor particular peoples nor meaningful boundaries . . .

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

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

[A]t a time when the self-declared enemies of the white race define themselves in racial terms, only our own definition of ourselves in those terms can meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda, they will do so not because we are “Westerners” or “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals” but because we are white.

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

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

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

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

Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival

In the February 1995 issue of American Renaissance (and following issues) several writers discussed approaches to ensuring the survival of American whites and their culture. This is excerpted from Dr. Francis’s typically pugnacious reply to those who proposed partition of the United States along racial lines.

Ending [the threat] to the white European character of the United States would involve no vast constitutional or political changes, but it would involve an uncompromising assertion of white will and identity. The fundamental problem with whites today will not be solved by giving away any more of what remains of their country and their heritage but by asserting their own will and identity in order to retain the primacy of their heritage in their own country. It is that lack of will and identity, that lack of racial and cultural consciousness, that must be remedied before we resort to any dissolution of the country (or indeed any other resolution of the racial crisis) . . .

Nevertheless, though I am not convinced by their arguments, white separatists are correct that we do face what is probably the most serious and threatening crisis in our racial history, a crisis that, if it is not resolved in our favor, will almost certainly result in the loss of white control of the United States within half a century, the disappearance of white civilization, and eventually in biological extinction. If white separatism is not the answer, what is?

The answer is, quite simply, the reconquest of the United States. This reconquest does not involve any restoration of white supremacy in the political and legal sense that obtained under slavery or segregation, and there is no reason why nonwhites who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights. But a white reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural sense, or in the sense of what is nowadays called “Eurocentrism.” There are essentially three things that whites must do in order to carry out this reconquest of the nation and culture they have almost lost:

(1) Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization. The formation of a white racial consciousness does not mean that whites should think of themselves only as whites, to the exclusion of ethnic, national, religious, regional, class, or other identities, nor that individuality should yield to the collective category of race. It means merely that we recognize racial realities, that we recognize that racial-biological endowments are necessary to certain kinds of human behavior (e.g., the political and civic behavior appropriate to stable self-government, the work habits and life-styles appropriate to a dynamic economy; the intellectual behavior that is necessary for science and scholarship, etc.) and that because these endowments are largely unique to whites, the behavior they make possible cannot be replicated by most nonwhites.

Nor does the formation of white racial consciousness mean that we should conceive of ourselves only as biological beings to the exclusion of religious or metaphysical identities. Racial consciousness means that we add recognition of biological and racial factors to our traditional concepts of human nature and modify both our biological and non-biological conceptions of what man is, as evidence and reason dictate. It may be true that some traditional religious and metaphysical conceptions would not survive recognition of the scientific realities of race, just as some did not survive earlier scientific discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology.

But the formation of white racial consciousness does mean that whites would recognize themselves as a race and their racially based behavior as legitimate, and hence it would mean the end of tolerance for nonwhite assaults on white people and the norms of white civilization. Whites would simply no longer countenance nonwhite aggression and insults or the idolization of nonwhite heroes, icons, and culture; white children would be raised in accordance with what is proper to being white, and norms openly recognized as appropriate to whites would be the legitimizing and dominant norms of American society as they were prior to the 1960s. Racial guilt and truckling would end.

(2) Based on this racial consciousness, whites must counter the demographic threat they face from immigration and nonwhite fertility and whites’ own infertility. This means (a) an absolute halt to all future legal immigration into the United States, deployment of the armed forces on the appropriate borders to cut off illegal immigration, and deportation of all illegal immigrants (and perhaps many recent legal immigrants); (b) the end of subsidies for the nonwhite birth rate through welfare programs, obligatory use of contraception by welfare recipients, and encouragement of its use among nonwhites, and (c) encouragement of increases in white fertility.

(3) Whites must correct the political and legal order to end the political power of nonwhite minorities and their white anti-white allies. This political effort would involve a radical dismantling of all affirmative action and civil rights legislation as well as a good part of the federal governmental superstructure that entrenches minority power. It also would require recovering an understanding of constitutional law that permits local and state governments to govern, and private institutions to function independently of government . . .

In order to achieve these goals and the reconquest of the United States they involve, there must be an immense amount of cultural and intellectual reconquest beforehand, a long march through the dominant institutions and apparatus of power by which the incumbent elites exercise control over the state, the economy, and the culture of the United States. I have outlined the theoretical framework of such a long march elsewhere (see “Winning the Culture War: The American Cause,” Chronicles, December 1993). Recent political developments encourage me to believe that such a movement remains possible and is indeed beginning, though the danger is that it will be captured and betrayed by agents of the incumbent elite.

However great that danger may be and however remote the chances of victory today may seem, it remains a strategy that is far more likely to succeed than the strategy of surrender that racial separatism involves. What white Americans must do is get on with ensuring that it does succeed before they lose their country, their heritage, and their posterity forever.

The King Holiday and Its Meaning

In this excerpt from a February 1998 cover story, Dr. Francis describes the purpose and effect of celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday.

Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own holidays in honor of King have been vilified and threatened with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a “racist” — but due also to the political utility of the King holiday for those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major universities and in many areas of public and private life . . .

To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

It is hardly an accident, then, that in the years since the enactment of the holiday and the elevation of King as a national icon, systematic attacks on the Confederacy and its symbolism were initiated, movements to ban the teaching of “Western civilization” came to fruition on major American universities, Thomas Jefferson was denounced as a “racist” and “slaveowner,” and George Washington’s name was removed from a public school in New Orleans on the grounds that he too owned slaves. In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they will by no means be the last.

. . . The logical meaning of the holiday is the ultimate destruction of the American Republic as it has been conceived and defined throughout our history, and until the charter for revolution the holiday represents is repealed, we can expect only further installations of the destruction and dispossession it promises.

The President’s Dialogue on Race: A Critique

Early in 1997, safely back in the White House for a second term, President William Clinton hit upon a project he hoped would establish his legacy as a great president: he would solve the American race problem, or at least win renown by trying. With much fanfare, he launched what was officially known as “One America in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race.” Today, hardly anyone even remembers this grand program that was supposed to immortalize Mr. Clinton. The initiative accomplished exactly nothing, partly because it was upstaged by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment, but mainly because race is an intractable biological and social fact that cannot be papered over by initiatives, presidential or otherwise. In this May 1998 article, Dr. Francis explains the real objectives of Mr. Clinton’s project.

The purpose of the president’s race initiative, then, whether manifested in his own words, in the actions of his advisory board, or in what the advisory board and the president fail to discuss or forbid to be discussed, is not “tolerance,” “diversity,” “harmony,” “equality,” or “justice.” The real purpose is to accommodate white Americans to the end of their culture and their dominance as a majority of the American nation and as the cultural core of the nation, and to manage their adjustment to the coming non-white dominance of the near future. The real issue of the president’s race initiative, then, is, as so many things are, a question of power — in this case, racial power.

White Americans today are confronted with the two most overwhelming facts of our time — first, the coming demographic transformation of American society from a majority white to a majority non-white society, and, secondly, the emergence of what can only be described as an explicit racial consciousness among non-whites that identifies whites as their enemies and oppressors, a racial consciousness that is encouraged and exploited and certainly seldom challenged by many whites themselves, whether liberal or conservative. This racial consciousness ranges in its expression from a mild but unquestioned assumption of non-white solidarity in conflict with whites to outright, militant hatred of whites, but whatever its form of expression, white Americans need to ask themselves what will be their fate as a white minority in a non-white society where the racial demonology created by non-whites prevails, and they need to think hard about the answers they reach.

White Americans also need to question and indeed reject the very premises of the president’s “dialogue” — that the racial and cultural transition to a non-white America is inevitable or desirable; that whites somehow possess a monopoly on racial bigotry, the perpetration of racial injustice, or racial consciousness and solidarity; and that it is morally incumbent on whites to alter their behavior, their culture, and their sense of moral and social responsibility in deference to non-white and often anti-white demands. If there is anything we as a nation have learned since the civil rights movement thirty years ago, it is that race is a reality, a natural as well as a cultural and social reality, and that the denial of racial realities that has been written into our laws, our public conduct, and our national public discourse is a denial of a major truth about human beings. Every other race and ethnic group in the United States has learned or is presently learning this truth, and only white Americans deny it, deny themselves their own racial consciousness, and deny the threats to their civilization and to their own safety that their denials invite. If we are to have a real dialogue on race, then let us have one, but let it be one in which white Americans engage only if they are able and willing to claim the identity and the heritage to which they have every right.

Race and the American Identity

In the following passages, Dr. Francis refutes the fashionable view that the United States was founded as a “universal” or “proposition” nation. It is taken from remarks at the 1998 AR conference, which were published in two parts, in the December 1998 and January 1999 issues.

But the most casual acquaintance with the realities of American history shows that the idea that America is or has been a universal nation, that it defines itself through the proposition that “all men are created equal,” is a myth. Indeed, it is something less than a myth, it is a mere propaganda line invoked to justify not only mass immigration and the coming racial revolution but also the erosion of nationality itself in globalist free trade and a One-World political architecture. It also justifies the total reconstruction and re-definition of the United States as a multiracial, multicultural, and transnational swamp. Nevertheless, the myth of the universal nation or proposition country is widely accepted, and today it represents probably the major ideological obstacle to recognizing the reality and importance of race as a social and political force . . .

In short, taken out of the context of the whole document of the Declaration and the historical context and circumstances of the document itself, the “equality clause” of the Declaration opens so many different doors of interpretation that it can mean virtually anything you want it to mean. It has been invoked by Christians and freethinkers, by capitalists and socialists, by conservatives and liberals, each of whom merely imports into it whatever his own ideology and agenda demand. Taken by itself, it is open to so many different interpretations that it has to be considered one of the most arcane — and one of the most dangerous — sentences ever written, one of the major blunders of American history . . .

As late as 1921, Vice-President-elect Calvin Coolidge wrote an article on immigration called “Whose Country Is This?” in the popular women’s magazine Good Housekeeping. He argued that “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” Not only the white but the Northern European racial identity of the nation could thus be publicly affirmed by a leading national political figure in a widely read magazine as late as the 1920s . . .

[I would like to] reinforce two points: First, we are not and never were a “universal nation” or a “proposition country” defined by the equality clause of the Declaration or the bromides of the Gettysburg Address. On the contrary we — Americans in general and our public leaders in particular — repeatedly and continuously recognized the reality and importance of race and the propriety of the white race occupying the “superior position,” [as Lincoln put it in his debates with Stephen Douglas] and indeed it is difficult to think of any other white-majority nation in history in which recognition of the reality of race has been so deeply imbedded in its thinking and institutions as in the United States.

Second, whatever we think of that history and its recognition of race, we have to understand that the current propaganda line about being a universal nation is not only a totally false account of American history but also is a prescription for a total rejection of the American past and the national identity as we have always known it. Racial universalism is not simply an adjustment or a “reform,” let alone a continuation of the proper direction of American history, but a revolutionary reconstruction of the American identity . . .

Americans have never been asked whether they think it’s a good thing for their nation to undergo the transition from a white majority to a non-white majority country. They have indeed been lied to about the transition, in being told in 1965 that it wouldn’t happen, but until President Clinton embraced it last year, no president has even bothered to mention it.

If white Americans do not desire the transition, they still have a short time to prevent it and to try to salvage what is left of the Old Republic most of them still imagine they live in, and if they do wish to salvage it, they will have to reject, as clearly and firmly as the original Framers did, the universalism and egalitarianism that now threaten to destroy them and their race. Political philosophies and constitutional forms come and go, but nations — peoples and races — remain. Yet without the common blood that made us a nation in the first place, there will be no American nation, no matter what abstractions and forms we vainly invoke.

The War on White Heritage

In this excerpt from a July 2000 article, Dr. Francis warns that the attack on Confederate symbols is really an attack on white heritage, and should be understood as such by all whites, Northern and Southern.

The indifference and hostility of non-whites to symbols and icons of white heritage and identity expose the central fallacy of the “multiracialism” that our current political and cultural elites promote. Its premise is that different races and ethnic groups can all “get along” with each other, that they can live together in egalitarian harmony, and that, as President Clinton said in 1998, “we can strengthen the bonds of our national community as we grow more racially and ethnically diverse.”

But the reality is that the egalitarianism and universalism of the “civil rights” era have led to the rediscovery of race and the rebirth of racial consciousness among non-whites and hence to the animosity that non-whites feel toward whites and their heritage. It is racial consciousness, not egalitarianism and universalism, that fuels the non-white crusade against the American past, and obviously, if “multiracialism” means that some races with more consciousness, more solidarity, and more power can boycott and bludgeon out of existence the symbols of other races and the cultural legacies the symbols represent, then multiracialism promises nothing but either perpetual racial conflict or merely the same kind of racial supremacy that used to exist in the United States — though with a different supreme race whose rule would be perhaps considerably more draconian than that of whites. Of course, whites can always try to buy temporary peace and harmony by agreeing to every demand of non-white radicalism and abandoning the symbols of their own heritage. That, of course, is exactly what whites today are doing, though every concession merely leads to further demands from non-whites . . .

What the racial assault on the Confederacy and other non-Confederate symbols really shows, however, is not only the dangerous flaws of multiracialism and the inexorable logic of the racial revolution of this century but also that today regional differences among whites — like many other cultural and political differences — are no longer very relevant. It shows that Southerners and “Yankees” today face common enemies and common threats to their rights, interests, identity, and heritage as whites, and that the forces that have declared war on them and their heritage define themselves as well as their foes not in political, regional, or cultural terms but in terms of race. Whites who have been indifferent to the fate of the Confederate flag and similar symbols in the recent controversies should not be surprised, therefore, when historical symbols important to their own identity come under assault from anti-white radicals in the future.

And it is as a race that whites must now learn to resist the war being waged on them. So far from being a symbol of a lost and forgotten cause relevant only to a dwindling band of Confederate loyalists, the Confederate flag and the battles swirling around it today should serve as reminders to all white men and women of a simple lesson: Unless they forsake the many obsolete quarrels and controversies that have long divided them and learn to stand, work, and fight together for their own survival as a people and a civilization, the war against them that their self-proclaimed racial enemies are waging will not permit them or their legacy as a people and civilization to survive at all.

It’s Race, Stupid

In this January 2001 article Dr. Francis pointed out the folly of Republican attempts to win more non-white voters.

If there is one pattern that emerges from the confused national election of 2000, it is that race and ethnicity are the driving forces in American politics today. An analysis of exit polls confirms that, so far from evolving toward a “color-blind” society in which most citizens are indifferent to racial identity, Americans are voting along clearly defined racial and ethnic lines. These voting patterns strongly suggest, if they do not confirm, that racial consciousness is a major determinant of voting behavior and that political appeals to racial interests and consciousness will continue to play a major role in the politics of the future . . .

For all the rhetoric among “new Republicans” about winning non-whites, the lesson of the 2000 election for the GOP ought to be clear: Trying to win non-whites, especially by abandoning issues important to white voters, is the road to political suicide; the natural and logical strategy of the Republican Party in the future is to maximize its white vote.

The party could accomplish this by supporting a long-term moratorium on legal immigration, terminating welfare and other public benefits for immigrants, seeking the abolition of affirmative action, and working for the repeal of “hate crime” laws and the end of multiculturalism. The Republicans could become and remain a majority party by seeking to raise white racial consciousness; they do not need to appeal to irrational racial fears and animosities, but they can and legitimately should encourage white voters to (1) perceive that they as a group are under threat from racial and demographic trends and (2) believe that the Republican Party will support them against this threat.

Advocates of Rainbow Republicanism will argue that this is not possible or desirable, that it will only promote racial divisions, and that attracting more white voters than the Republicans now are able to win is not practical. This line of argument is wrong. Racial animosity is already being inflamed by the Democrats’ willingness to exploit anti-white sentiments and by racial demagogues like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and analogous Hispanic activists. The only force that can quell or check this kind of anti-white racism is the solidarity of whites against it and those who try to use it for political gain.

Twelve Years After

In this December 2002 reflection on AR’s first 12 years, Dr. Francis describes how current “race-realist” thinking differs from racial thinking of the past.

What attracted me to Jared Taylor and AR is what seems to attract most of their other readers — not that AR is the last, quaint representative of a dying breed gnashing its fangs at a world that has passed it by but that it is in fact the harbinger of a new breed. The left senses this truth about AR (and for that matter about the Council of Conservative Citizens) when it tells us that such publications and groups are “Klansmen in coats and ties” or “more dangerous” than Timothy McVeigh. Both have succeeded in learning how to discuss, and in teaching others how to discuss, the scientific, social, and political realities of race without reliance on the old rhetoric of what was called “white supremacy” and “hate.” The older rhetoric may have been appropriate for its time, but just as conservatives in the post-World War II era of the 1950s needed to adopt a new rhetoric in place of that of the political right of the pre-Depression and pre-World War II era, so racially conscious whites today need to learn a new rhetoric about race. In so far as American Renaissance has accomplished any significant achievement, it is that it has begun to develop and disseminate just such a rhetoric, and it is largely the absence of such a rhetoric in American political culture that makes white racial consciousness so weak.

The older rhetoric of race among racially conscious whites assumed that the political and cultural dominance of whites was secure or at least intact, and that non-white racial consciousness was weak, non-existent, and not a serious political or cultural force. Hence, the older rhetoric could rely on a broad base of agreement among whites — about such matters as the importance and meaning of the US Constitution, the danger of communism, the heroic stature of such figures as Washington and Jefferson, and a whole universe of assumptions about human nature, human society, science, religion, ethics, and cultural values — assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted. So secure was this cultural consensus among almost all whites that racial consciousness really did not need to appeal to race itself very much or very directly. Today, that shared cultural (and political) fabric is in tatters, and appeals wrapped in it no longer work . . .

What is happening or has happened in almost all these instances is that the common cultural and political framework that enabled racially conscious whites to deflect non-white drives for power has eroded or vanished entirely. Its erosion has come about in large part because of its deliberate subversion by its enemies (not always for racial purposes), while at the same time the emergence of explicitly non-white racial consciousness and the political unity this subversion generates has rendered appeals to traditional white values and institutions ineffective. When blacks themselves regard Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and even Abraham Lincoln as well as all other early American icons as mere bigots, slaveholders, and white supremacists, when they dismiss the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as fraudulent documents that merely empowered racial oppression, then political dialogue and a shared political culture cease to be possible — unless whites themselves give up these icons as well, which is what seems to be happening. Those who seek to resist or defeat the non-white quest for power have no prospect of success if they appeal to a Constitution that non-whites respect only in so far as it can be exploited for their own purposes. What is happening, in other words, is that all the social, cultural, political, legal, and constitutional (as well as religious, moral, etc.) integument of the white race has been stripped away — delegitimized or “deconstructed.” What remains, of course, is the bare biological reality: Race . . .

The rhetoric [AR] has developed is the rhetoric of race itself, of what should be called “racial realism.”

This rhetoric, in the first place, is grounded in a fairly careful scientific view of race — that race is indeed a natural reality and not just a “social construct,” that it includes not only gross morphological and physiological features but also affects IQ, personality, and behavior, and therefore that race is a socially and historically significant force. More than any other publication in the English-speaking world, AR has actually tried to explain and popularize the earth-shaking discoveries about race by major scientists and thinkers like Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, the late Glayde Whitney, and many others. Similarly, the AR rhetoric of race also makes fairly sophisticated use of statistics to support claims about differences in racial achievement and behavior (education, crime, etc.).

But perhaps most significantly, the rhetoric of American Renaissance in a sense does the opposite of what the older rhetoric tried to do. Whereas the older rhetoric tried to defend the race in terms of the culture (e.g., desegregation should be opposed because it is unconstitutional, “communistic,” “un-Christian,” or “un-American”), the new racial rhetoric of AR defends the culture in terms of the race (e.g., the Constitution itself, as well the culture and nation, are important achievements of the white race; no other race has created anything similar to them, and there is no prospect of any other race creating them or adapting to them; similar ideas about the racial foundations of white science, religion, and other cultural achievements are common in AR). The meaning of this rhetoric is that in so far as white Americans still care about their culture — the Constitution, religion, science, art, language, literature, aesthetics, social institutions, and morals — they must care about the race that created them and sustains them and without which they cannot exist. It does not, as far as I can recall, argue that race by itself is sufficient to create and sustain our civilization, but it does insist, clearly and unequivocally, that race is necessary . . .

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Diversity Eyesore

A new sculpture in Denver’s City Park, called “Meeting of Minds,” symbolizes the superiority of openness over rigid thinking by portraying a black woman triumphant over a dying white man. Douglas Kornfeld’s steel profiles of two heads stand over 16 feet tall. Inside each head is a circle that appears to be a brain, containing the figures of men and women that identify public restrooms. Inside the black woman’s head, the figures are jumbled together in a disorderly way, and stretched into different shapes and sizes. The sculptor explains that “this head celebrates diversity and symbolizes a progressive way of thinking.” Inside the white man’s head, uniform figures in straight rows “symbolize an old way of thinking or narrow mindedness,” which “hopefully is disappearing.” The white man’s head is sinking into the ground, while the black woman’s head is upright, gazing boldly ahead. American cities display more than a dozen of Douglas Kornfeld’s works, which often use the symbols for men’s and women’s restrooms. “Meeting of Minds” cost Denver $52,000. [Michael Booth, New Public Art Explores Race, Gender, Stereotypes, Denver Post, Feb. 7, 2005. Douglas Kornfeld, Press Release on “Meeting of Minds,” awaka-inc.com.]

Better as Cabbies

In Canada it is fashionable to believe that highly-qualified immigrants are stuck in menial jobs because they do not get enough help from the government and face discrimination. As Canada’s largest newspaper put it recently, “Canadians regularly meet foreign-trained doctors who drive cabs, engineers who clean floors and professors who wait on tables in their local café. They know something is wrong with their immigration system.” [Carol Goar, Ontario Could Have Led The Way, Toronto Star, Feb. 21, 2005.]

Canada has a doctor shortage — the number of graduates from Canadian medical schools has been declining since the 1980s, and in Ontario only 13 percent of doctors are accepting new patients — and the government thinks immigrants are the solution. This may be wishful thinking. To qualify for a Canadian residency, immigrant doctors must pass a medical exam and then a round of clinical tests of how they deal with patients. Last year, of 1,088 immigrant candidate-doctors, only 15 percent passed both tests.

This year’s crop appears to be similar. So far, the results of the paper test are in, and only 559 of the 1,041 candidates passed. The 559 have taken the clinical test, and the results are not yet known, but The Windsor Star published an e-mail message from one of the examiners as follows: “Just participated in the exam along with some of my colleagues. I was utterly dismayed by the caliber of these finalists. Out of the 30 that went through my . . . station, only two were practice-ready. Half failed to diagnose the straightforward case presentation and were functioning at a medical school level, the remainder were clerkship level. This is the underbelly of the politically correct movement . . . These people will be passed through on the wave of political expediency. The government is playing a shell game with this and is likely to create a public health fiasco.” [Doug Williamson, Many Foreign Physicians not Making the Cut, National Post (Toronto), Feb. 18, 2005. Paul Fromm, Cabbie, Heal Thyself, Canadian Immigration Hotline, March 2005.]

Unpleasant Surprise

The Canary Islands, a Spanish possession 56 miles off the coast of Africa, are a popular destination for illegal immigrants from Africa. Spaniards cannot expel the immigrants, because they come from countries without a repatriation agreement with Spain — or at least claim to — and since they don’t have papers the authorities cannot disprove their claims. The law says they can be detained in the Canaries for only 40 days, since there is no place to put them, so the government dumps them on the streets of Spanish cities on the mainland. Last year, the authorities chartered 227 flights, at a cost of $13,000 each, to send almost 8,000 Africans to Spain. The government issued no warnings, so the arrival of indigent Africans was a disagreeable surprise. In January, the Valencia city hall complained that Africans have tuberculosis and HIV, are sleeping in parks and under bridges, and living off charity or prostitution.

This is only a small part of Spain’s illegal immigration problem. Last year, an estimated 800,000 to a million illegals entered the country, mostly Moroccans and Latin Americans. In January, Spain only encouraged more illegal immigration by granting amnesty to illegals who have worked in the country for at least three years. It also angered other Europeans. Germany and the Netherlands complained that the new “Spaniards” will now be free to move anywhere in the European Union. [Elizabeth Nash, African Migrants Dumped on Spain’s Streets, The Independent (London), Jan. 31, 2005.]

Sewage and Suing

A fight over minority set-asides at a Maryland water and sewage commission has been so bitter, it has led to expensive lawsuits that raised the price of water, resulted in the dismissal of the head of the commission, and even threatened the quality of water delivered to customers. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission serves Montgomery and largely-black Prince George’s Counties in Maryland, and its commissioners are mostly black.

Shaaron Phillips, a black woman, was in charge of giving more of the commission’s sub-contracting business to non-whites. She had extraordinary powers, was extremely aggressive about eliminating white contractors, and did not seem to care if switching to non-whites led to bad service or excess costs. This put her in direct conflict with the manager of the utility, John R. Griffin, who is white. Miss Phillips first rigged the contract for maintaining the utility’s pipes so that minority firms got a better chance at it. When this did not work, she ordered the white-owned maintenance company to hire more minorities. When the company could not find any, she refused to let the commission renew the contract. No one is now looking after the pipes, and it will cost $1.5 million for the utility to catch up on missed maintenance.

Mr. Griffin was theoretically her boss, and in 2003, Miss Phillips filed a discrimination lawsuit with the EEOC against the commission, claiming it was delaying her performance reviews and keeping her from getting raises. The EEOC dismissed the action. She then filed another EEOC suit claiming Mr. Griffin called her “the pied piper for the black people at the commission.” Mr. Griffin denies this. This suit is still pending, but the two together have already cost the commission $220,000, and it has budgeted another $150,000 for future legal fees. These costs were one of the reasons the commission increased rates by three percent this summer, bringing the average annual water bill for a family of three to $255 — very high by national standards.

Things came to a head when Miss Phillips demanded that Delta Chemicals, a contractor that delivered chemicals to the utility, hire more non-white truckers. Miss Phillips recommended two trucking firms, which offered to join Delta as sub-contractors but be paid to do nothing.Delta refused this insulting offer, but Miss Phillips took them off the job, too. The utility got no shipments during this stalemate, and the board of commissioners delayed a vote on what to do. The utility nearly ran out of chemicals, and Mr. Griffin ordered a two-month emergency extension of the Delta contract because inaction “directly threaten[ed] the health” of customers. The board saw this as insubordination, and also wanted to put an end to Mr. Griffin’s fights with Miss Phillips, so it fired him. This violated procedure, but Mr. Griffin accepted a $250,000 buyout and left in October. Perhaps customers can expect yet more rate increases.

Miss Phillips was not left in triumph for long. In the past, she had lobbied the state legislature in favor of a law that would have increased her influence and raised her pay, which was a violation of the utility’s conflict-of-interest policy. On Jan. 31, the commission fired her, citing this violation. Miss Phillips thinks this was retaliation for her lawsuits. No one seems to think it had anything to do with her enthusiasm for set-asides. As for the chemicals, Delta — white-owned but capable — got the contract again. [Matthew Mosk and Lena H. Sun, Contracts, Race Bred Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission Rift, Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2005; Race and Contracts at WSSC, Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2005. Lena H. Sun and Matthew Mosk, WSSC Moves To Fire Official, Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2005.]

La Raza Comica

When Raul Yzaguirre took over as president of the Hispanic pressure group National Council of La Raza in 1974, it had a small, disorganized staff and little money. Today La Raza is the largest Hispanic “civil rights” group, with 35,000 members and a $28 million budget. During the 1990s it claimed credit for restoring $20 billion in welfare benefits for immigrants, establishing 100 charter schools, and putting a thousand families a year into new homes.

As he prepared to retire in December, Mr. Yzaguirre reflected on the Hispanization of America that La Raza has so vigorously promoted. “The culture has changed,” he says. “I mean, to walk into HEB [a grocery store in Texas] and feel like you’re in Mexico is pretty profound. You walked into HEB when I was growing up and it felt like every other American chain. They’ve adapted. They’ve Mexicanized their products and services.”

Mr. Yzaguirre says the term “La Raza,” which means “the race” in Spanish, is misunderstood by non-Hispanics, especially if they think it is exclusionary or racist. He says it was coined by Mexican intellectual Jose Vasconcelos, who in 1925 wrote of “la raza cosmica,” the “cosmic race.”

“We’re Caucasian. We’re Arab. We’re Jew. We’re African and we’re Asian, Native American,” he says. “So we celebrate our meztizos, our mixing, our blending of cultures. Some extremists say we’re ‘the race,’ and of course, the real definition is totally opposite. It’s an inclusive term.” [Lynn Brezosky, Longtime La Raza Chief Sees Positive Changes, AP, Dec. 19, 2004.]

A Hard Lesson

Meredith Brace of Santa Barbara was committed to stopping white flight. Before her son entered Harding Elementary School, which is 90 percent Hispanic, she went door-to-door touting the school’s achievements. Later she became PTA president, helped raise money, and held neighborhood meetings to promote the school to whites. She started after-school art and theater classes to bring whites and Hispanics together, but this failed. “We had so few people sign up, we had to eliminate a lot of the classes,” says Mrs. Brace. She tried to make friends with Hispanic parents, “but we have nothing in common. Every time my husband and I would go over for an event, my husband would feel like it was his first time. We haven’t made any friends.”

Mrs. Brace didn’t have much luck convincing whites to send their children to Harding, either. The dozen families she had been wooing recently all sent their children elsewhere, even though they had to drive them to school. “[I]f half of [the neighborhood] is going in that direction, maybe we can carpool,” says one neighbor.

Her son had gone to Harding for three years, but Mrs. Brace concluded he would never feel at home. “He hasn’t been invited to a birthday party. There is absolutely no after-school interaction. For his birthday, he invited four of his classmates. Only one came.” Mrs. Brace finally gave up and transferred her son to a more distant, majority-white school. [Camilla Cohee, Diversity in the Classroom, Santa-Barbara News-Press, Feb. 24, 2005.]

Lexington, Nebraska, a town of 10,000, faces similar problems. As Hispanics pour in to work in meat-packing, whites transfer their children to schools out of town. Lexington now, in effect, has two separate school systems, and the school Superintendent says white flight is the cause. This is “unconscionable,” says Lincoln State Senator Ron Raikes, who is promoting a bill to consolidate Nebraska’s school districts. This would close down many of the smaller schools out of town, and whites would have to attend school with Hispanics. Opponents of the bill claim white parents are fleeing school overcrowding, not Hispanics. The bill is expected to be one of the most hotly contested this year. [Racism Part of Merger Debate, AP, Feb. 11, 2005.]

Hurban Radio

Clear Channel Communications, which owns more than 1,200 radio stations nationwide, is one of the largest broadcasting companies in the country. Clear Channel hopes to profit from increasing numbers of Spanish-speakers, by pushing “Hispanic radio.” It has converted a number of well-known classic rock stations in Washington, DC, Houston, Atlanta and Orlando to a Spanish-language format known as “Hurban” — a blending of Hispanic and black “urban” music, which features reggaeton (Puerto Rican-style reggae), Spanish hip-hop and Latin dance music. The stations try to appeal to 18- to 34-year-olds, the group advertisers like best.

The latest Clear Channel station to go from rock to Hurban is WZTA 94.9 FM in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. David Ross, Clear Channel regional vice president, says he made the change because none of Clear Channel’s 15 south Florida stations broadcast in Spanish, and their revenues were suffering. He says half the region’s 900,000 18- to 34-year-olds are Hispanic, and that advertisers spend $98 million a year to reach them. The station now plays Spanish-language songs, and its DJs speak “Spanglish.”

Tom Taylor, editor of the Inside Radio newsletter, says that when Clear Channel switched its Atlanta station to Hurban, its ratings increased nearly six-fold. “You’re going to see this everywhere,” he predicts. [Tom Jicha, Young Hispanics Drive New Format on Broward Radio, Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 12, 2005, p. B4.]

Clear Channel pulled the same switcheroo in Orlando. Listeners to Oldies Radio 100.3 FM were caught by surprise when it converted to Hurban on Feb. 3. The station switched at noon without warning, leaving English-speaking listeners fuming. “I almost drove off the road when I heard it,” says Sandy Winters. “I was very upset . . . I think we could have diversity here, but not by taking away what we have. They could have added a Spanish-language format elsewhere.”

“People are kind of mad,” says Linda Conner. “I don’t dislike the salsa music, but it seems like we are a minority now and this is being shoved in our face everywhere we turn.”

Hispanics say Clear Channel is just responding to the growing consumer power of Hispanic immigrants who, at 465,000, are now the largest non-white group in central Florida. “I don’t think this is about replacing any other group,” says Marytza Sanz, president of Latino Leadership. “If most of our minority residents had been from Asia we would be listening to Asian music, and that would be fine. But this is reality, and many people are learning to eat black beans and yellow rice with us or to listen to salsa.”

Clear Channel says it is just a business decision. As regional vice president Linda Byrd explains, “We own seven radio stations here in Orlando, and six of them are targeted at the white consumer, so it’s not like we have reverse discrimination going on.” Hispanics are happy the station has gone from oldies to Hurban. “It blew me away when I heard rumba,” says Daisy Galarza. “I don’t think we lose anything by getting more culture here.” [Victor Manuel Ramos, Radio Tunes in Cultural Uproar, Orlando Sentinel, Feb. 4, 2005, p. A1.]

Desperate Measures

Two thirds of Philadelphia’s 185,000 students are black. The district suffers from the inevitable problems, and is reaching deep into its bag of tricks to try to solve them. On February 16, the city’s School Reform Commission voted unanimously to offer classes in black American and African history in each of its 53 high schools, and the district is even considering making the courses mandatory. If it does, it would be the first school district to make black history a graduation requirement. The reform commission has also ordered the district to hire more non-white teachers and administrators, produce a plan to close the racial achievement gap, and discover new teaching methods that will work for blacks — boys especially. [Susan Snyder, All High Schools to Offer Courses in Black History, Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 17, 2005, p. B4.]

Business is Booming

Robert Mugabe’s war on whites in Zimbabwe is destroying not just the economy but the medical system, once one of Africa’s best. Zimbabwe’s National Medical Association says 40 percent of the doctors who used to work in the capital, Harare, have left the country, and that there are fewer than 900 doctors left in the whole country. Most medical school graduates go abroad to practice, and hospitals are running out of supplies.

The decline of modern medicine has been a windfall for witchdoctors, known as “healers.” They use tribal cures concocted from roots, bark, leaves, animal parts, and, sometimes, human organs. Many claim to have divine powers.

Julius Churi is a typical healer. He diagnoses diseases by throwing four animal bones in the air and seeing how they land. He doses patients with traditional medicines, and says customers are renewing their faith in the supernatural. “People are discovering that traditional medicines work more effectively than modern medicines,” he says. “Our methods are more effective because they are informed by supernatural powers. I am unlike these doctors who went to school to learn to treat patients. I communicate directly with the gods and spirits and they are the ultimate owners of humanity.”

Martin Mutero of Harare, who has consulted healers, says he doesn’t believe they are better than doctors, but says he has no choice. “What can you take when there are no drugs in state hospitals, no doctors to give any advice, no equipment to even examine your blood pressure and basically nothing to do anything for you when you enter state hospitals and clinics? You have to try whatever is at your disposal, including traditional healing.” [Basildon Peta, With Zimbabwe’s Heath Sector in Ruins, Witchdoctors are Busy, The Independent (London), Feb. 3, 2005.]

DiversiTV

Television advertisers use images of Americans of all races mingling in casual settings like bars and neighborhood gatherings, to convey an inclusive image they think will sell products to all ethnicities. The trend began in the 1980s when United Colors of Bennetton ran an ad with a black man and a white woman holding up an Asian child. In 1989, Bennetton ran another ad showing a black woman breastfeeding a white baby. Last year, Verizon, a telecommunications company, ran a series of ads about a mixed-raced white/Hispanic family, and it is now routine in commercials to see people of all races acting as if they were old friends.

While TV ads pretend race doesn’t matter, real Americans rarely mix voluntarily. Sociologist Charles Gallagher of Georgia State University, says television advertising is creating a “carefully manufactured racial utopia . . . that is far afield of reality,” noting that only around seven percent of marriages are interracial, and that most Americans have few close friends of another race. He says 80 percent of whites live in neighborhoods where 95 percent of their neighbors are white.

Sonya Grier, a marketing professor at Stanford, agrees that racially-inclusive ads are unrealistic, but says they show that “multiculturalism is socially desirable” and “reflects our aspirations, what we can be.” [Multiracial Scenes Are Now Common in Ads, AP, Feb. 15, 2005.]

Mexico’s Heroes

A new drug war is raging in Mexico. It started last year when gang leaders Osiel Cardenas and Benjamin Arellano joined forces to challenge the Juarez cartel, led by Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Joaquin Guzman. Since then, drug-related murders have soared, with more than 100 killings in January alone. The cartels are fighting for control of smuggling routes, so most of the violence is along the US border. There is now so much lawlessness in the area that the American consul at Nuevo Laredo, just south of the Texas border, says 21 American citizens were kidnapped in and around the town between last August and January. Two were killed. The State Department even issued a warning to American tourists about crime in the area — and got an official complaint from Mexico. [Chris Hawley, New Drug War Besets Mexico, Worries US, Arizona Republic (Phoenix), Jan. 30, 2005. Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, Inmates Undercut Drug War, Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2005.]

Violence is spreading beyond the border. American police think a Mexican gang called the Zetas has killed at least three people in the Dallas area, and is responsible for hundreds of murders and kidnappings in Mexico. The Zetas are particularly dangerous because they are former members of the Special Air Mobile Force Group, an elite Mexican paratrooper unit established to fight the drug trade. Thirty-one paratroopers have gone over to the other side and hired themselves out to drug runners. The Zetas have offered $50,000 to anyone who kills a US border-patrol agent, and may even have 80 Soviet-made SA-7 missile launchers from Nicaragua that US intelligence believes were recently on the black market. [Jerry Seper, Ex-Troops Aiding Drug Traffickers, Washington Times, Feb. 24, 2005.]

It is hard to punish big-time Mexican drug dealers. Joaquin Guzman of the Juarez cartel has operated freely since 2001, when guards helped him escape from a maximum security prison. Police know where he is but cannot arrest him because he has corrupted and intimidated police and townspeople in his home town of Badiraguato, Sinaloa, in Northwestern Mexico. The locals fear him much more than they do the authorities, and the mayor will not even say his name out loud to a reporter. Locals always warn Mr. Guzman when they see police on their way to his remote house. [James C. McKinley Jr., How Far Has Drug Lord Burrowed In Mexico? New York Times, Feb. 10, 2005.]

This kind of beyond-the-law swaggering helps explain why drug dealers have become national heroes for many Mexicans. Mexico has long celebrated outlaws in folk songs known as corridos. These songs first appeared in the 1820s, when the country became independent, and during the revolution of 1910-17 they popularized the exploits of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

The growth of the drug trade in the 1970s gave birth to a new variety called narcocorrido, which celebrate the sexual prowess of smugglers, the tricks they use to get drugs into the US, and their shoot-outs with Mexican or American police. After a successful drug run, smugglers often hire a singer to write a narcocorrido about it. The songs are popular in the United States, where the last album of Los Tigres del Norte, the best known group of this genre, sold 500,000 copies. [Chris Summers and Dominic Bailey, Mexico’s Forbidden Songs, BBC News Online, Oct. 3, 2004.]

Recently, the Mexican government ordered millions of new books for school libraries, and was embarrassed when a collection of corridos turned out to include some narcocorridos. This appears to have been an oversight, though some education officials are promoting the collection as a celebration of the common man. [Mark Stevenson, Drug Trafficker Songs in Mexico Kids’ Book, AP, Feb. 27, 2005.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — Christopher Brand’s March article about the multicultural elite’s success in ignoring or suppressing The Bell Curve might seem discouraging, but I still believe no important truth can be suppressed forever, and realists ought not be discouraged.

We should consider how advocates of free markets eventually triumphed in the 20th century, despite decades of setbacks. After the Bolshevik Revolution, many Western liberals were open admirers of communism, and by mid-century, anti-market ideologies ruled in the most influential circles. As late as the 1970s, even a supposed conservative, Richard Nixon, imposed wage and price controls and still won re-election by a landslide.

Yet the advocates of the free-market never gave up. The work of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek helped inspire new pro-market research and activism. Ayn Rand dramatized the entrepreneur’s superiority over the bureaucrat. Beginning with writers like William F. Buckley, a new conservative movement relentlessly criticized the welfare state. Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 campaign was a temporary setback, redeemed by Ronald Reagan’s triumph in the 1980s.

The success of the free-market movement can be seen in the fate of the Clinton administration. In 1993 and ‘94, it seemed that the so-called Hillarycare bill — which would have nationalized the medical industry — would pass. Yet not only was it defeated, its defeat helped fuel the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” In 1996, President Clinton even signed a bill that drastically cut back 60 years of federal welfare — the greatest achievement of his “liberal” administration.

American voters now reject tax-and-spend redistributionist schemes, and scorn “class warfare” rhetoric. Wherever else it has failed, at least in the area of economics, conservatism has won. Let us hope for equivalent victories on race.

Paul Sutter, Columbia, S.C.

Sir — I would like to comment on Jared Taylor’s generally excellent article, “The Racial Ideology of Empire.” There is a tendency to speak of empire and imperialism in one sweeping description that applies to all their manifestations. In fact, the outward thrust of Europeans to the world beyond has to be seen at two levels.

On the one hand there was the colonization of the so-called “lesser breeds,” justified as part of a civilizing mission to lift up the less favored. There was an enormous amount of hypocrisy in this, for behind it lay economic opportunism, acquisitiveness and greed. Mr. Taylor has also, quite rightly, highlighted the hypocrisy by which non-whites were excluded from white lands under various disguises like language tests, all designed to placate liberal consciences. White Rhodesians used similar language as a reason to hold onto power, saying that the blacks were “not ready” for self-government. It did not save them!

Mr. Taylor is generally right, although perhaps not in every detail, to say that the ultimate balance sheet for white nations from all this purported philanthropy was negative. I say not in every detail because the later mass migration of non-whites to white countries did not necessarily have to follow. It was consequent to a complete loss of will and common sense that would have horrified 19th century imperialists.

But this was only one manifestation of the drive to empire, and not by any means the most important. Whites also migrated from Europe in large numbers to colonize and settle in huge areas of the world themselves. Americans should understand this because it brought about their own existence as a nation. Also it is likely that without this same imperialism many Europeans, and particularly Anglo-Saxons, would today be living in conditions of intolerable overcrowding and population pressure.

Yet another aspect of imperialism was the eventual political separation of the colonizing people from their ethnic homelands, as exemplified by the American War of Independence. Whether this had good or bad racial consequences is something over which, no doubt, people will forever argue!

John Tyndall, Hove, United Kingdom

Sir — I disagree strongly with Steven Farron’s letter in the previous issue, in which he writes: “Turks are indistinguishable physically from Southern Europeans, and no one has ever doubted that they are white.” This is misleading. Autosomal genetic testing shows Turks are at the periphery of the European range. A few Turks actually are most similar to Northern Europeans, and a few more are most similar to Southeastern Europeans, but a significant portion shows predominant affiliation with Middle Easterners or South Asians. Unless Prof. Farron proposes that Europe screen Turkish immigrants for phenotype and genetic markers — which Europeans will not do — there is no way to distinguish between the nonwhite, genetically unassimilable Turks and those who are similar to Europeans. Race and class are probably correlated in Turkey as they are elsewhere, so Turkish migrants to Europe would tend to be nonwhite. The large, unassimilable populations of Turks in Germany is only the most obvious foretaste of what mass immigration would bring. Best to keep them all out.

Prof. Farron’s assertion as an “empirical fact” that Orientals assimilate into the West is bizarre. From the standpoint of ethnic genetic interests as explained by Frank Salter (see “What We Owe Our People,”AR, Jan. 2005), they are not assimilable; from a cultural standpoint as well, they are alien.

Carl Lundgren

You must enable Javascript in your browser.