American Renaissance magazine
Vol 3, No. 2	February 1992

 

CONTENTS

Is a Multiracial Nation Possible?
History for Everyone and No One
A is for Ashanti, B is for Black
The White Man’s New Burden
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Is a Multiracial Nation Possible?

The Meaning of ‘Multicultural’ Textbooks: Is it possible to write histories that satisfy everyone? Blacks understand what is at stake even if whites do not.

By Jared Taylor

Of all the ways in which a nation defines itself, few are more important than what it teaches its children about itself. In the history classes of its public schools, a nation retells its own story and instills a national identity in the minds of young citizens. In today’s America, where competing racial, cultural, and linguistic claims now make it nearly impossible even to speak of national identity, questions about history have become a struggle for the possession of America’s past.

The multicultural, multi-perspective history that has arisen from this struggle is not merely a departure from the history America has always taught its children. It may be the first time that a nation has abandoned the single identity of its origins and set out deliberately to adopt multiple national identities.

Significantly, the understanding by many non-whites of multicultural history is entirely different from that of whites. For whites, the central concepts are “inclusion” and “pluralism.” American history is to be rewritten so that racial and cultural perspectives that were once “ignored” or “neglected” will get equal treatment. For many non-whites, however, multicultural history is merely a step on the way to an explicitly racial, Afrocentric or Hispanic history. Their goal is separation rather than inclusion.

The “conservative” view is that explicitly racial histories are illegitimate. America, it is argued, must be united by a common history, and exclusionist histories will disunite us. This position is logically correct; exclusionist histories are divisive. But as we shall see, the “conservative” position is wrong — practically, emotionally, and even morally. America is already disunited by race, and no approach to history can change that. Just as it would be impossible to use the same history book in both France and England, it is impossible to write a single American history that satisfies, white, black, Indian, Hispanic, and Asian.

Schooling as Assimilation

The purpose of American public education has never been simply to impart knowledge. One of its central goals has been to make children into Americans. American schools fly the American flag and students pledge allegiance to it. The central events of history are from the American past. The most glorious achievements are American achievements. There is nothing odd about that. Every nation gives its children a national education.

Nevertheless, American schools have had an even more explicitly nation-building purpose than others because of the need to assimilate immigrants. John Quincy Adams wrote that immigrants “must cast off their European skin, never to resume it.” Horace Mann argued that “a foreign people . . . cannot be transformed into the full stature of American citizens merely by a voyage across the Atlantic.” One of the strongest motives for building public schools was, therefore, the need to make Americans out of Europeans.

Europeans weren’t going to be made into Americans by teaching them about the contributions of Africans, Mexicans and Indians. The old, standard history united Americans because it had a coherent purpose and a single voice. It emphasized one point of view and ignored others. To put it bluntly, it was history about white people for white people.

This history served the country well, so long as the population was overwhelmingly white, and the two traditional minorities — blacks and Indians — did not have voices. All this changed, beginning in the 1960s. The civil rights movement gave voices to blacks and Indians, and changes in immigration laws brought a massive influx of non-whites. It was the end of a certain kind of America.

Non-whites began to complain about a version of history that left them out. The nation-building history that had bound Europeans into a single people had not bound whites and non-whites into a single people. “Multicultural” history was therefore to be a broader, more inclusive history that would give every American his rightful share of America’s past. At the same time, “culturally relevant” history would keep blacks and Hispanics in school and stop them from dropping out at ever-increasing rates.

Squaring the Circle

Something that well-meaning whites did not understand is that an “inclusive” history — one that would be all things to all people — is impossible. History has winners and losers, and they see the same events with different eyes. At the same time, virtually every non-white group sees the conflicts of the past as struggles with whites, so multicultural history becomes a collection of perspectives that are often not merely non-white but anti-white.

How, for example, is a multicultural history to treat the discovery and settlement of North America by Europeans? The old history called it a triumphant advance for civilization. But for Indians, the same historical events are an unending sequence of defeats and disasters. Does a multicultural textbook call this a triumph or a disaster or both or neither?

What about the Mexican-American War? At the time, it was thought a glorious success because it added huge chunks to the American West. But was it instead, an imperialist atrocity? Are today’s school children to rejoice that California is part of America or are they to weep over the stolen birthright of their Hispanic brothers?

Slavery poses a similar riddle. Blacks want to make it the centerpiece of their history, and in many ways it is. For nearly 300 years, most American blacks were slaves, and virtually everything that blacks did or thought was circumscribed by slavery. Today, it is still the centerpiece of black history, because it excuses failure and can be used to extract benefits from whites.

For whites, though, slavery is a minor historical event. Except for the Civil War (which was set in motion and fought by whites) the course of the nation’s history would hardly have been different if there had been no slavery. To give it a prominent place in white history is a transparent effort to manipulate the way that whites think about the present.

Once slavery is promoted to the status of unparalleled evil, much of the past becomes incomprehensible. Is George Washington both the Father of his Country and a wicked man because he owned slaves? Is Abraham Lincoln the storied savior of the Union or is he a fiend because he thought blacks were inferior and should be sent back to Africa?

Those of us who went to school when American history still had coherence are likely to learn about the new, multicultural history only by accident. One such accident is that this year is the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. A typical multicultural problem has thus spilled out of the classroom and gotten wider notice: Was Columbus a great explorer or was he a genocidal tyrant? Are we to celebrate half a millennium of European America or are we to hang our heads in shame? Or are we to do both?

Problems and Uncertainties

Multicultural histories, by their very nature, cannot answer these questions. And because they cannot, they present American history as a bundle of uncertainties, as a series of unsolved “problems.” Unlike the old history, which viewed the past with pride and the future with confidence, multicultural histories are diffident and perplexed. Unlike the old history, which at least gave white children a firm foundation for national identity, multicultural history says, in effect, that America has no identity. The only thing left to unite a multicultural America is geography.

One way to understand the impossible task that multicultural history has set itself is to imagine how one would write a school history book to be used in both France and Britain. How would it treat Napoleon? The very geography of London — Waterloo Station, Trafalger Square — is a monument to Englishmen who killed Frenchmen. Napoleon’s tomb, Austerlitz station, and street names like Jena and Ulm all mark the pride the French take in their ancestors’ readiness to slaughter foreigners. A “multicultural” history book of the Napoleonic wars would be an absurdity, and everyone knows it. And yet, it would be no more absurd than the history books American children use today.

Non-whites have a much keener sense of their group interests than whites. They see very clearly that the future will have its winners and losers, just as history had them. Thus, while virtually every school district with a white majority is trying to square the circle by teaching a history that is everything to everyone, school districts with black majorities are beginning to replace the old “Eurocentric” curriculum with one that is openly “Afrocentric.” They are not interested in supplementing the traditional history with different points of view. They want a single, African point of view.

In Atlanta, where 92 percent of the public school students are black, history and social studies courses have been rewritten from an “African-American” perspective. New York’s public schools recently authorized a curriculum revision based on an openly anti-white position paper drafted, in part, by the black-supremacist professor, Leonard Jeffries. In California, school districts in heavily-black Oakland and East Palo Alto started the 1991/1992 school year without social studies textbooks. They decided to develop their own black-centered materials because they could find nothing suitable.

Private black schools have gone the farthest. Some reject America, and teach their pupils that they are the African diaspora. Many teach patent nonsense, claiming that the ancient Egyptians and even King Solomon were black. Nevertheless, even if some of their material is ridiculous, Afrocentric teachers have recognized something that white teachers have forgotten: History has a point of view; it cannot be all things to all people.

Building a Nation

Blacks, then, are learning the kind of history that whites once learned — a history that builds identity and certitude. White children are learning that every interpretation is valid, that nothing is certain, that their nation’s past is all paradoxes and unsolved problems. Patriotism will not grow in the heart of a child who cannot look back with pride upon his nation’s past. We have come a long way from schooling that made Europeans into Americans. We now make Americans into nothing at all.

Multicultural history is like affirmative action. Just as whites are to step aside to give hiring preferences to minorities, whites are to set aside their own point of view and study those of others. Non-whites, on the other hand, are free to promote their own interests and exclusionist histories.

Like affirmative action, multicultural history is possible only because the majority has abandoned its position at the center. If whites insisted on their own history as strongly as non-whites insist on theirs, the inevitability of separate histories would have been recognized long ago. Nor will whites be willing to forego their own history for ever. They will eventually realize that only they are studying a past with no answers and no certainties. They will eventually see that there cannot be one history that satisfies all. And they will begin to wonder whether there can be one nation that satisfies all.

 

SIDEBAR Multiracial Harmony in California A recent northern California survey on racial stereotypes has left the chattering classes tongue-tied. Asians, for example, are three times as likely as whites to report that they wouldn’t stand for it if a black or Hispanic moved in next door. Hispanics are about twice as likely as whites to say they wouldn’t have a black neighbor and three times as likely to say they wouldn’t have an Asian neighbor. Whites are supposed to be the big racists in this country, so commentators were reduced to wringing their hands over “how quickly immigrants learn racism in America.” Some racial activists insisted that the questions were ambiguous. When asked whether blacks could pull themselves up to better positions if they worked harder, 65 percent of Hispanics agreed, followed by 58 percent for both blacks and Asians. Only 42 percent of the whites agreed; most dutifully blamed society for black poverty. When asked if Hispanics could get ahead if they worked harder, the percentages were similar except that an even larger number of Hispanics (72 percent) agreed. [Steve Johnson, Survey Finds Bay Area Tolerant of diversity, San Jose Mercury News, 11/17/91, p. B1.] Hispanic activists were no doubt annoyed that their people weren’t more worried about “institutional racism.” If this survey shows anything, it is that of all the races in California, whites have been most successfully browbeaten into giving evasive answers on whom they would accept as neighbors and into pretending that non-whites can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try.

ARTICLE

History for Everyone and No One

By Marian Evans

Five years ago, the California Board of Education adopted guidelines for a new history curriculum that would “accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society.” Several book companies proposed texts to meet that requirement, and last year, Houghton Mifflin won approval for its series for grades one through eight.

The title of the fifth grade text tells the whole story. It is a line from a poem by the black writer, Langston Hughes: America Will Be. It is hard to imagine any other country publishing a history book that puts the nation in the future tense. Most nations want their children to look back on their people’s history with pride. This book seems to suggest that the real, multicultural America is yet to come.

Of course, as the texts go to great pains to explain, America was always multicultural. A typical section is entitled, “A Nation of Many Peoples,” and this does not mean Englishmen, Swedes, and Germans. One gets the impression that Europeans were a furtive side-show in a vast history that began with Indians and ends with Chinese, blacks, Hispanics, West Indians, and Native Americans.

Among the “moments in time” that the books illustrate with full-page portraits of people typical of a period, is a lasso-whirling, bronco-busting, Mexican lady-cowboy, or vaquera. Such an apparition would probably have astonished the longhorns as much as this “moment in time” astonishes anyone over the age of twenty. In the 50 pages that one text devotes to the horrors of Negro slavery, there is a full-page portrait, not of a working slave but of an escaping slave.

This was not enough for the racial activists, for what they want is their own, exclusionist history. Houghton Mifflin officials, who expected praise and gratitude for their painstakingly “inclusive” history, were astonished by the accusations hurled at them. They did not realize that, for the most part, it is only whites who want a multi-perspective history.

The overall director of the series, Professor Gary Nash, is a well-known leftist and a leading proponent of multiculturalism. He, too, was shocked by critics who called him a racist and a white supremacist. “If I’m the bad guy,” he wanted to know, “who are your allies?”

Several majority-black school districts rejected the texts outright. In San Francisco, where 82 percent of the public school children are non-white, the school board reluctantly accepted the books, but added a supplemental reading list with titles like Black Heroes of the Wild West, Chinese Americans, Past and Present, and Gays in America (homosexuals were angry that these grade school texts said nothing about their contributions to America).

The battle over text books was especially bruising in California because, by 1995, a majority of its public school students will be non-white. Nevertheless, the white decline is rapidly moving East. The struggle for America’s past is only warming up.

Some battles have already been lost. A 1983 study by Nathan Glazer and Reed Ueda of six leading history texts found that blacks and Hispanics got at least four times as much coverage as European immigrant groups, and even trivial non-white successes were paraded as brilliant achievements.

The multiculturalists have already come a long way. As we noted in the December issue, more American 17-year olds can tell you who Harriet Tubman was than know who Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin were. They are more likely to know about her than to know that Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation or that George Washington commanded the American revolutionary army.

ARTICLE

A is for Ashanti . . . B is for Black . . .

Private schools based on an Afrocentric curriculum are springing up all across the country. The students and teachers are all black, and much of the teaching is based on unproven, even preposterous claims of African achievement (see AR, May 1991). More significantly, the teaching is explicitly racialist, even supremacist.

As Newsweek reports without so much as a raised eyebrow (9/23/91), every morning the students of Shule Mandela Academy in East Palo Alto (CA) pledge to “think black, act black, speak black, buy black, pray black, love black, and live black.” At Visions for Children in a Cleveland suburb, the Fourth of July is not a holiday but Emancipation Proclamation day is. Halloween has been replaced by Africa Day. Children learn in groups that are named for African tribes. In Afrocentric schools, children often recite a Pledge to African People, rather the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ujamaa School is the oldest private, Afrocentric school in Washington (DC). Every Friday, it holds a Family Night, which is open to parents and to anyone else who is black. Baba Zulu, founder of the school, reminds his listeners, “We are not African-American; we are not Afro-American; we are African people born in America.” At one meeting, a young man introduced the evening’s speaker with a 10-minute chant about revolution and black salvation. The audience joined in the chorus: “People get ready, there’s a war a-coming . . . The last white dog must die.”

It is not possible to know how common are such overtly separatist and anti-white sentiments. Nevertheless in 1979 and 1980, the National Survey of Black Americans asked blacks whether they felt closer to black people in Africa or to white people in America. Fifty-six percent said they felt closer to Africans, 20 percent said neither or both, and only 24 percent said they felt closer to white Americans. This means that more than twice as many blacks say they feel closer to people whom they have never met, and with whom they have nothing in common but race, than they do to their fellow American citizens. A survey today would probably show an even higher identification with Africa.

If at first it seems shocking that some blacks would celebrate Africa Day and not the Fourth of July, a moment’s reflection makes it less shocking. What was Independence Day to slaves who remained slaves? Why pledge allegiance to the flag of a nation that captured one’s ancestors? It is not clear what the practical and political implications of Afrocentric thinking may be, but many blacks are preparing themselves psychologically for a complete break with white America. They dismiss any pretense of loyalty to the United States. Their allegiance is openly and unapologetically to their race. Can we tell them with complete confidence that this is wrong?

The only unexpected aspect of black nationalism is that the harder whites try to pretend race does not matter, the more blacks assert its primacy. The more whites try to open their society to blacks, the more firmly blacks close theirs to whites. The more whites try to teach a multicultural history that includes everyone, the more blacks insist on a history for Africans.

One of the clearest manifestations of this is the current push, by blacks, to establish all-black (and sometimes all-male) public schools with a consciously racial curriculum. Milwaukee, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, Newark, and New York City have all taken steps to establish such schools, though civil rights groups have balked at explicit racial segregation, and some plans have been held up by the courts. The most common solution is likely to be the one that the city of Atlanta hit upon: simply switch the curriculum to Afrocentrism and watch the non-black remnant in the schools dwindle to nothing.

REVIEW

The White Man’s New Burden

Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action, Frederick R. Lynch, Praeger Publishers, 1989, 238 pp., $37.95 (Softcover edition, 1991, $14.95)

Reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Over the last 20 years, “affirmative action,” or discrimination in favor of non-whites and women, has been pushed into nearly every corner of American life. It has gone largely unchallenged. Invisible Victims, by Frederick Lynch, is an attempt to understand how affirmative action came about and to assess the damage that it has done to white men. In an era of sustained, willful blindness on the subject of race, this sympathetic study of the inevitable casualties of officially sanctioned discrimination is a refreshing corrective.

Invisible Victims is also a good introduction to the history of affirmative action. Mr. Lynch explains how, in the legal half-light of ambiguous court decisions, racial activists instituted policies that were the very reverse of those required by the original civil rights laws. His book is filled with examples of affirmative action gone berserk: the California Highway Patrol advertises jobs in Mexico so as to get “Hispanic” applicants; the Los Angeles school district urges high schools to send mixed-race teams to scholastic contests because it looks bad when all-white teams win.

The Invisible Victim

Nevertheless, the genesis of this book, and its greatest strength, is original research on how white men react to racial and sexual discrimination. It is a pleasant surprise to learn that there are institutions willing to fund such research. With grants from the Earhart Foundation and the Institute for Educational Affairs, Mr. Lynch found and interviewed 34 men who had been denied promotions, fired, or given poor assignments because of affirmative action.

Mr. Lynch located the men through an informal network of friends and colleagues. In a few cases, he could corroborate discrimination claims, but he relied mainly on what his subjects told him. Obviously, his study would have been more persuasive if he had had airtight proof of discrimination, but attempts to confirm subjects’ stories would have violated the confidentiality that many demanded. Even if confidentiality had not been a problem, it would have been very difficult to get employers to confess to anti-white policies. Mr. Lynch had to endure enough hostility from his own colleagues to his research without the added battle of trying to hunt down perpetrators of discrimination.

As one would expect from a work of sociology, Invisible Victims includes tables of the various ways in which subjects reacted to discrimination (acquiescence, defiance/protest, etc.) and of eventual outcomes (was transferred, quit, changed careers, was eventually promoted, etc.). Mr. Lynch can’t resist the jargon of his profession — he tells us a lot about “cognitive dissonance” and “self-esteem,” — but he still gives us a clear picture of what goes on in the mind of an unsuspecting white man who walks into the teeth of an affirmative action program.

One of the greatest problems these men faced was that America does not recognize what happened to them as injustice. Since affirmative action is an unassailable good, and only white males can be oppressors, their plight was a logical impossibility.

After all, it is taboo to point out that favors for non-whites can come only at the expense of whites. Affirmative action is the law of the land, is practiced by America’s most prestigious institutions, and is praised by a chorus of media partisans. It must be a good thing. Many government agencies and private companies even put on seminars designed to explain that anyone who objects to affirmative action is “racist.” As a consequence, many whites have been so thoroughly stripped of common sense and self-respect that they cheerfully submit to discrimination.

But what of those who do not? Nothing is more demoralizing than to be grievously wronged and then to be told that one’s injury is an illusion. Furthermore, a white man has no recourse. Unlike non-whites, who have well-funded organizations that spring to the defense of alleged victims, he is on his own.

Many of Mr. Lynch’s subjects got little sympathy even from friends or fellow workers. Colleagues who feared the affirmative action ax themselves treated bona fide victims as if they carried the plague. Whites who had liberal friends were especially hard hit. Their friends were less likely to show sympathy because it meant denying the validity of a quintessentially liberal social policy.

Mr. Lynch also found that many whites who suffered discrimination felt it would be “unmanly” to complain. Perhaps because women are now routinely urged to complain about “sexism,” some men found that their wives or girl friends were angrier and more willing to make a stink than they were. A school teacher who was transferred to a distant, problem-ridden school so that the staff would be “racially balanced” reported that he had to physically prevent his wife from telling off the principal.

For many of Mr. Lynch’s subjects, there were serious psychological consequences from having suffered a clear injustice at the hands of society only to be told that this was as it should be. Marriages deteriorated, friendships ended, and careers were thwarted. Some men started drinking, and some even lost respect for the ideas of public-spiritedness and fair play. To be betrayed by the central institutions of society — government, employer, university — leaves a lasting bitterness and alienation.

Many of Mr. Lynch’s subjects became more politically conservative, and some lost all faith in social engineering. As one who developed a deep cynicism about liberal politicians put it, “I turned the other cheek and had the s**t slapped out of me.”

It did not occur to most of these men that they could seek redress in the courts. A few mavericks did sue their employers, but usually found that the laws of “equal opportunity” are stood on their head when a white man is the victim of discrimination. As one man who fought his denied promotion clear through to a hung jury put it, “The courts are a crap shoot. The legal system grinds you down.”

At the same time, since whites have had every trace of racial solidarity beaten out of them in the name of “tolerance” and “equality,” they do not act in concert. Even though white job applicants have every reason to file class action suits against employers who discriminate against them, the legal battle is usually drawn between one, lonely Don Quixote and the bureaucratic windmill.

The irony in the isolation that whites feel in the face of discrimination is that it is unjustified. Although virtually none of Mr. Lynch’s subjects knew this, opinion polls have repeatedly shown that 70 to 80 percent of whites think that race- and sex-based preferences are wrong. At the same time, equally large numbers think that most Americans support such preferences. As Mr. Lynch points out, opponents of affirmative action are a large majority but think they are a minority. Why?

The Great Riddle

Mr. Lynch tries to answer this question, but has bitten off more than he, or perhaps anyone else, can chew. It may not be possible fully to explain why whites have established and continue to submit to anti-white policies that most whites oppose. To explain this mystery would be to explain everything from an immigration policy that will reduce whites to a minority, to the fact that blacks who love blacks are showing “pride” whereas whites who love whites are “bigots.” The desperate joy that whites take in their own dispossession is a riddle that will torment the historians of the future.

Nevertheless, Mr. Lynch is certainly right to argue that the mass media are a huge obstacle to fairness and good sense. They jabber about “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” as if they were identical rather than exact opposites. If they talk at all about white resentment of affirmative action, it is only to suggest that whites are sore losers who refuse to recognize the superior abilities of blacks and Hispanics.

The newsweeklies run cover stories on school failure and teacher incompetence, but pretend that affirmative action has nothing to do with it — despite miserable performances by blacks on teacher competency tests. The media cling to the view that any test on which non-whites do badly is biased — despite the National Academy of Sciences’ failure to find bias in standardized tests.

All this is true, and Mr. Lynch is right to point it out. But then why are the media — and the nation — so skittish about race? Mr. Lynch sniffs around the edges of one possible reason. He points out that many people think that if white racism is not what makes non-whites fail, genetic inferiority must be the cause. Since that is officially unthinkable, white racism is the only possible culprit. Whites who claim to be victims of affirmative action can therefore be dismissed as opponents of legitimate redress.

Mr. Lynch quickly drops the subject of genetic inferiority but refrains from the usual expressions of horror at the idea. Perhaps he is like the affirmative action victims he studied: part of a majority that mistakenly thinks it is a minority and therefore dares not speak. A recent study found that 53 percent of whites (and 30 percent of blacks) were brave enough to tell a pollster, face to face, that they think blacks are less intelligent than whites (see AR, April, 1991).

Despite Mr. Lynch’s pioneering research and his irrefutable arguments about the injustice of affirmative action, it is an affliction that will not go away until America comes to grips with the overwhelming evidence of racial differences in intelligence. Invisible Victims is a badly needed analysis of a policy that makes a mockery of the principle of equality. As its author points out, the first step towards getting rid of affirmative action is to ask the hard questions about it that its proponents do not wish to hear. Mr. Lynch asks those questions.

Nevertheless, until it is possible to discuss racial differences openly, black failure — of which there will always be plenty — will be laid at the feet of white racism. As long as whites are thought to be collectively guilty, there will be few tears for the “invisible victims” of affirmative action.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Black Korea

Many of the Korean immigrants who remain run grocery stores, sometimes in black neighborhoods. Blacks often resent the success of these hard-working newcomers, and claim that Koreans do not treat them with respect. By this they usually mean that Koreans keep a sharp eye out for black shoplifters, of whom there are many. Altercations between blacks and Koreans have led to well-publicized shoppers’ strikes, fire-bombings, death threats, and even killings.

The rap singer Ice Cube has taken up the subject in his latest album, “Death Certificate.” His song, “Black Korea,” has the following lyrics:

So don’t follow me up and down your market,
or your little chop suey ass will be a target.
So pay your respect to the black fist,
or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.

‘Too European’

Atlanta, Georgia and Tblisi in ex-Soviet Georgia are sister cities. As a gesture of friendship, and to commemorate the struggle for freedom in the Soviet Union, the citizens of Tblisi decided to give to the citizens of Atlanta a towering, 67-foot sculpture called “Birth of a New Man.” It is a Herculean figure, with arms upraised, bursting through a massive wall.

Atlanta, with a population that is more than 70 percent black, is not sure it will accept the statue. The city’s Urban Design Commission says that the statue is too “European,” and doesn’t fit in with Atlanta’s claim to be the “cradle of the civil rights movement.” Since “civil rights” appear to leave no room for the aspirations of whites, the New Man of Tblisi is expected to remain homeless. [Alma Hill, New Man stuck in Tblisi, Atlanta Courier Journal, 12/2/91.]

Join the C of CC One of the great frustrations in seeing one’s nation and one’s people on the road to decline is the sense that there seems to be so little that can be done about it. One grass-roots group that has decided to fight back is the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Councils oppose the many minority groups that want to do away with America’s heritage. They fought the NAACP’s attempts to ban the confederate flag, and the ACLU’s demands that Christmas displays be removed. At the national level, the Councils favor strict immigration control, states’ and local rights, an end to legislation by the courts, and a foreign policy the puts American interests first.This is a nation-wide organization of coordinated citizen’s groups that fight — and win — local battles. Often it is a the local level that decisions are made about forced busing, racial hiring quotas, welfare, and other giveaway programs. The C of CC publicizes the folly of these measures, encourages conservatives to run in local elections, and provides a focal point for the growing resentment that middle-class whites feel about government programs that run directly against their own interests. The Council of Conservative Citizens has a large number of supporters in the Southeast, but it has members in every state. All members receive both a newspaper and a newsletter. To find out if there is a Council in your area, or to get information on how to go about starting one, you may write: Council of Conservative Citizens P.O. Box 9683 St. Louis, Mo. 63122

Telling it Like it is

The Canadian thought police are just as active as their American counterparts, but may not be quite as sophisticated. A 40-year-old Canadian author, Jud Cyllorn, has thrown the politically correct into a fearful tizzy with a trick that might not have worked so well south of the border.

He has written a book called Stop Apologizing, which deliberately breaks all the taboos about race and non-white immigration. How do you get publicity for a book that distributors are afraid to handle? Mr. Cyllorn sent 1,300 complimentary copies to media people, government officials, and certified liberals of all kinds. They rose to the bait very cooperatively and made an enormous fuss about how awful Mr. Cyllorn is. He and his book became the latest media and talk show craze.

What does Mr. Cyllorn say? That since the 1960s, Canada has sponsored a “continued influx of non-assimilating, non-Christian, non-democratic, non-industrial peoples who can’t or won’t fit it.” That whites should stop apologizing to “the different, the disadvantaged, and those whose skin color is a badge of historic failure.” That they should stop feeling guilty about the fact that they have established a better way of life and stop thinking that they are responsible for the world’s poor and for “the failures of non-achievers.”

There is just one hitch: Canadians can’t get the book because it is not in stores. They must call a privately publicized 800 number to order it. For the time being, all that many Canadians need to know is that the book stands up for white people. Callers who haven’t even read Stop Apologizing have been telling talk show hosts that they agree with everything in it. Mr. Cyllorn expects to have his book in stores soon, even if it means he will be prosecuted under Canada’s hopelessly vague “hate” laws. [Virginia Byfield, Speaking freely, in a plain brown wrapper, British Columbia Report, 12/9/91, p. 29.]

AR on the AIR AR’s editor is often on radio talk shows, but we seldom have enough advance notice to let readers know. San Francisco area subscribers can hear Mr. Taylor, Feb. 7 on KGO Radio (810AM) at 9:00 p.m

Muddy Meditations

Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, friend of pop stars and inventor of Transcendental Meditation, had a plan to save Washington (DC). Ten years ago, he moved his American headquarters there, and encouraged followers to come and live in the city. The theory was that if enough high-powered meditators were gathered together in one place, it would create a “Maharishi effect” that would bring down the crime rate and promote world peace.

It didn’t work. Washingtonians continued to murder each other at a frightful clip, and this interfered with world peace. At least the Maharishi knows a bad thing when he sees one. Last August, he quietly moved his US headquarters to Fairfield, Iowa, and has now given his Washington disciples new marching orders: Clear out. Saith the guru, “I would not advise anyone to stay in the pool of mud.” [Jim Naughton (Washington Post), Tip to meditate on: Flee Washington, Denver Post, 12/19/91.]

Loco Rulings on Local Rules

The town of Harrison (NJ) has always had a policy of hiring only residents for public jobs. Many municipalities have such a policy because people are loyal to their towns and are likely to work hard for them. Also, if off-duty police or firemen must be suddenly called out for emergencies they can respond quickly.

The NAACP decided this policy was discriminatory because only one percent of the population of Harrison is black, and only one black person had ever worked for the town. Both a federal district court and the 3rd Circuit US Court of Appeals agreed with the NAACP. Harrison has now been ordered to junk its residency requirement and to hire blacks by quota. It must hire black employees in proportion to their population in the five surrounding counties. [City Rule Discriminated Against Blacks, HR Manager’s Legal Reporter, November, 1991, p. 8.]

It doesn’t do much good to wonder how the courts might have ruled if the situation were reversed, that is, if a non-resident white were to sue a largely-black municipality that had a residency requirement for its employees. People who are not black seldom want to join the local Black Firefighters Union or go to “historically black” colleges or attend “Afrocentric” private schools or join the Negro Theater Ensemble.

Just as non-whites immigrate to white countries and not the other way around, integration and the promotion of “diversity” are always at the expense of whites. The pressure to break apart any white grouping is so great that even a venerable and perfectly reasonable practice like Harrison’s residency requirement must be sacrificed in the name of “racial justice.”

Turning the Other Cheek

A 12-year-old white girl in the Detroit suburb of Southfield was recently raped by a 26-year-old black man. The crime was particularly shocking because the girl was walking to the school bus stop, just seven doors from her home, when she was attacked and dragged into a back yard shed. At the trial, Judge Gene Schnelz called the rape “a parent’s worst nightmare.” He pointed out that it took place in “what normally would be a very safe neighborhood,” and said the attack “bordered on the perverse and filthy.” Strong talk for a judge.

What did the girl’s father think about all this? At the sentencing he made an emotional appeal for, yes, racial harmony. “Most people I know would like to see him [the criminal] hanged, at the minimum thrown into jail and the key thrown away,” he said, but went on to suggest that this would be harsh and divisive. “An incident such as this fuels racial hatred among those who do not think,” he warned, and called for a time of “healing.”

“Healing” will have to be a one-way street. In 1988, there were 9,406 reported cases of whites being raped by blacks. There were fewer than ten reported cases of blacks being raped by whites.

‘Invisible Victims’ Win in Court

A South Bend (IN) white man has finally won a reverse discrimination suit against the city, which had deliberately discriminated against white applicants for firefighting jobs. Timothy Janowiak has been sworn in as a fireman and was awarded $62,000 in back pay. He has been fighting the suit for eleven years.

It took John VanDam only six years to win a similar case against the Grand Rapids (MI) fire department. This time, it was women who were getting preferential treatment, and Mr. VanDam got $200,000 in back pay along with his job. However, this doesn’t mean the end of affirmative action in Grand Rapids; Mr. VanDam won on a technicality.

According to a state civil rights law, all cities must have their affirmative action programs approved by the state Civil Rights Commission, and Grand Rapids had not realized this was necessary. There was nothing wrong with the city’s discriminatory hiring policies — it simply hadn’t gotten all the right rubber stamps. Assistant City Attorney James Moore says that current affirmative action programs are not in danger because they have all the necessary approvals.

American Coolies

Immigration officials recently found 118 illegal immigrants from China packed into a three-bedroom house in Garden Grove (CA). They had all been charged as much as $30,000 to be shipped out of Fukien province and smuggled into California. From Garden Grove, they were to be sent to various destinations across the country.

Since very few Chinese have $30,000, most of the illegals had put up only a small portion of the fee. They had agreed to work off the rest of their debts as indentured servants. This kind of servitude has become increasingly common in large American cities. In a recent case in Chicago, the owners of a Chinese restaurant were found to be paying illegals $120 to $150 for 60 hours of work a week — not bad for Fukien province but against the law in America.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — It was in your November issue that I first learned about the 1990 Iowa law that requires an employer to hire an interpreter if ten percent of his workforce speaks the same foreign language. I have looked into this law and there is more to it than that. If the employees are Spanish-speaking — the most likely case — the employers must hire an interpreter from a list drawn up by something called the Spanish-speaking Peoples Commission. This list sounds like a perfect opportunity for Hispanic cronyism.

Iowa’s requirements don’t end with an interpreter. The employer must also have an employee whose “primary responsibility” (presumably he may a few other things, too) is to tell these foreign workers about community social services. That is to say, his job is to make sure that foreigners know how to apply for welfare, food stamps, Medicare, subsidized housing, affirmative action, etc. That makes two additional people an employer must hire whether they’re wanted or needed. So much for freedom.

There’s more. If an employer has recruited Spanish-speaking employees from more than 500 miles away, he must pay their way back home if they quit within the first four weeks of work. The employee can quit for any reason; he still gets a free trip home.

I wonder if there is any other country in the world that requires employers to offer special services to foreigners that are not offered to natives. What a topsy-turvy country we live in.

On a different question, several California congressmen (Elton Gallegly, Dana Rorabacher) have proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would end the current practice of granting of automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Your readers should write their congressmen saying they support this amendment.

Ruth Coffey, Stop Immigration Now, 2059 Cedar Ave.,
Long Beach, CA. 90806

The 14th amendment reads, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” This amendment, ratified in 1868, was meant to grant citizenship to freed slaves, but has since been stretched to include anyone born here.

It is this more recent interpretation that accounts for the fact that approximately two thirds of the people who give birth in Los Angeles County public hospitals are illegal aliens. Many pregnant Mexicans make the trip across the border for no other reason than to secure American Citizenship for their children. Lately Hong Kong women have been making the trek. They are worried about what the Chinese may do when they take over Hong Kong in 1997, and want to have US citizenship as a kind of insurance policy. — Editor

Sir — Your unblinking portrayal of Africa brings to mind something that columnist Georgie Anne Geyer recently wrote about Haiti: “If Haiti is to persist as a nation and not finally perish of hunger and hopelessness, it will have to be in some creative way ‘recolonized’ for a time.” Remarkable as it was that anyone should say this, it is even more remarkable that the black columnist, Ken Hamblin, agrees with Miss Geyer.

He points out that black rule has been a catastrophe not only for Haiti but for Africa. “Name a black-ruled country where you would be willing to relocate,” he says. “We must begin to confront the seemingly broad-based inability of black people to govern themselves by the same standards we demand from whites,” he adds, and he is not talking only about black people in foreign countries. He wants to know “why we appear so incapable of governing ourselves in urban ghetto cities.” Excellent question.

John Strong, Kexington, Ky.

Sir — I’m glad that a least AR had enough sense to see through the hoopla over “Magic” Johnson. With all the yelling that the feminists do over even trivial issues, I expected a terrific din over the attempt to make a hero out of a man who could have been passing out AIDS to “thousands” of women. I don’t doubt that if Mr. Johnson had been white, the professional man-haters would have been all over him.

Susan Grimes, Latrobe, Penn.

“Africa” Issue Reprinted

We have had so many requests for extra copies of the Jan. 1992 issue that we have reprinted it (including the complete text of “Kinshasa on the Potomac.”) The price is $2.00 per copy, which includes postage.