American Renaissance magazine
Vol 6, No. 1	January 1995

 

CONTENTS

Morality and Racial Consciousness
A Reply to Father Tacelli
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

Morality and Racial Consciousness

A priest and philosophy professor gently reproves the AR point of view. He calls attention to a larger crisis.

by Fr. Ronald K. Tacelli, S.J.

I’ve recently been at Oxford University, doing research in the New College Archives. New College, as many of you may know, is oddly named because it is among the very oldest of the Oxford colleges. Almost everything about it stands in witness to what Europe once was. But there are some things about it, I found, that witness to what Europe has recently become.

There is a part of New College known as the Cloisters. It’s a rectangular walkway enclosed on all four sides. Neither the sun nor the sounds of the city ever quite seem to penetrate the cool darkness of this place. The stone walls and floor are decorated with inscriptions, some in Latin, some in English, to deceased fellows of the College. And as the visitor goes round to the back, to the darkest part of the Cloisters, he can see, dimly at first, but then with distressing clarity, the statues.

There against the wall, towering in various stages of grotesque decomposition, are statues of some of the central figures of Christian Europe: Mary and the Child, John the Baptist, Augustine, a small assortment of English royalty and divines. Their features are eaten away, crumbling even as you look at them, as if by a kind of stone-ravaging leprosy.

I don’t think anyone seeing these giant statue-corpses could fail to be moved by strange feelings of disquiet. For myself, I came to think of them as representing the true state of Western European civilization, in the way that the picture of Dorian Grey represented the true state of his body and soul.

Anyone who visits Oxford, as I did, must be struck by the fact that almost nobody seems to know why they should be doing what they’re doing. The last of the older dons realize that something is happening around them, that they will not be replaced by people like themselves. They know that the very existence of Oxford, and what it means to have an Oxford education, are things that have somehow, after all these many years, fallen into serious doubt. And this doubt about the place of a great university stems from a deeper and more profound doubt about the culture within which the university was born.

Religious Moorings

Everywhere there are signs of cultural malaise. To take just one that interests me specially: Many people in England — and not merely there, of course — feel cut adrift from their religious moorings. I don’t mean merely that the influx of Muslims into England has created a strain in the celebration of various holidays in the public schools. It has. But I mean something that cuts much deeper; for any problems raised by Muslims could be dealt with if the established Church spoke with any sort of coherent voice. But there is a fairly strong — and ever more publicly voiced — sentiment that the Church of England is little more than a sick joke. After all, what can you think of a Church, a number of whose clergy, apparently in good standing, belong to a support group, called ‘Sea of Faith,’ for priests who no longer believe in God? You understand how this could discourage a great many ordinary people; and it does.

Livy once wrote about “the sinking of the foundations of morality . . . . then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them . . . Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be . . . in love with death both individual and collective.” My time in England has convinced me that we are in a time, if not of final collapse, at least of rapidly increasing disintegration. And — perhaps most unsettling — this conviction, this sense that something is terribly wrong, is widespread in the population, but is accompanied by a sense of doomed helplessness: an unwillingness or inability to articulate what the problems are and what first steps should be taken to remedy them.

One of the things that is on many people’s minds, but is not talked about seriously, involves race. And nothing sums up the mood of unease more trenchantly, I think, than the horrifying incident that occurred some weeks back before the elections in South Africa last April. The scene was caught on camera: two members of the white African resistance, injured, sprawled, half sitting, half lying outside their automobile, begging for their lives, surrounded by reporters, in broad daylight, taunted and then shot at point-blank range by a black soldier.

It’s impossible to convey to you the feeling that the video-tape, played over and over on British television, and the still photographs of the same event, printed in color in the papers, stirred up in the people with whom I lived — people who might be expected to hold the politically correct view of African politics. The media greeted this incident with an unspeakably ghoulish glee; but I can tell you that the people with whom I lived were chilled to the bone. As I teased out what they believed, I realized that they saw in this brutal death the future of South Africa, and the future, perhaps, of their own country as well. They saw the black soldier’s gun, in other words, aimed not merely at that pathetic and deluded member of the resistance; they saw that somehow it was aimed at their heads too, at the head of every member of their race.

These things, as I say, had to be teased out; they emerged very slowly, tentatively, almost with a sense of shame — as if people were talking about a forbidden secret. And in a way, of course, they were.

Racial matters are not openly talked about these days, either in this country or in England; there is a world of difference between what people are told it is right and proper and moral and true to believe, and what people themselves see and feel to be the case. In fact, I don’t know of any matter on which people’s natural sentiments are so at odds with what opinion-makers and intellectuals hold as a vitally important truth — except perhaps the healthy normality of homosexual culture.

Now I ask: Is it wrong to hold that there are racial differences? that these differences are biologically or genetically grounded? that they influence various abilities and behaviors? that awareness of these differences could legitimately influence social policies — even personal social policies, the policies I make for myself, about whom to associate with and befriend?

But surely there is a prior question: Is it true? For if something is true, how can it be wrong to believe it? We’ve come to a strange pass in our history where a belief is considered so horrible, so wrong, that it can’t possibly be true. Most people in their hearts believe it to be true; but they can’t express this belief — even to themselves! People — not all people of course: I mean people of European ancestry — consider it wrong to feel that they’d rather be with people more or less culturally or racially like themselves.

How strange and how sad! Because it is the most natural thing in the world to want to socialize with, and relax with, people more or less like yourself. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you hate or despise other cultures (though it may in fact mean this); it need only, and usually does, mean that all the various ways of interacting that are familiar to you, that you feel most comfortable with, are the ones you’d like to see in place when you are relaxing at home and with friends and neighbors. And I emphasize: there is nothing wrong with this; it is natural and healthy.

Consider the example of Catholic immigrants here in America. In my neighborhood, there was an Italian parish, an Irish parish, and a Portuguese parish — all in rather close proximity. Was this wrong? Some, today, I suppose, would say it was. But those of us who were in that situation felt differently. We wanted to be among people who ‘did’ things the way we did, liked the Church decorated with a certain kind of vulgarity (yes, it was vulgar; but it was our vulgarity). We knew that those in other parishes were Catholics, too — and God bless them; but we wanted to be free to do things our way.

This was a common experience within Catholic culture in America; and I think it was a magnificent way of realizing the universal in the particular. In any case, nobody considered this a violation of anybody’s rights; it was only when there was a move to close parishes and merge them that resistance was met and trouble arose.

So it seems to me that to prefer ‘your own kind,’ to want to congregate with people from the same cultural (and this will often enough mean the same racial) background as yourself is not inherently wicked; and since this presupposes noticing those differences which become the basis of preference, then neither is such noticing wicked; it is perfectly natural, normal, and healthy. A sign that it is perfectly natural is that it still exists — even among white Europeans — although we’ve been told for decades that to think and feel this way (and to act on these feelings) is morally flawed. It reminds me of Horace’s dictum: You can cast out nature with a pitchfork — until it returns.

Liberalism and Equality

But if all this is natural, normal, healthy, I’d like to ask: why is it considered so very wrong? And the answer, I think, can be summed up in a word that is both unfortunate and convenient: Liberalism. A certain sort of Liberalism has traduced the intelligence of almost all the people in the media and the academy. These people have come to believe that unless we subscribe to some sort of racial egalitarianism, it is impossible to believe in the dignity of man. So for Liberals a great deal hangs on the notion of equality. I don’t think it’s too much to say that racial equality is a secular religious belief; if it weren’t I don’t think it would be defended with such ardor, and in spite of so much contrary empirical evidence. But why do Liberals hold to this view of equality?

I realize there’s nothing more tedious than for a professor of philosophy to try to trace the roots of some intellectual current. But the more I study and live with Liberals (and especially the more I study the French Enlightenment), the more I come to see that Liberalism is a form of Christianity — not a Christian heresy exactly, but a kind of ersatz Christianity: something that rejects Christianity itself, but attempts to keep some of the things within Christian teaching it found attractive and appealing. One of these notions is equality.

Within Christian teaching there is a sense in which all men are equal; all men come from one source — God. They are all called to share in God’s plan of salvation. Since this plan is God’s, it is also the ground of the dignity of all who fall under it. But notice: This does not mean, and was never thought in orthodox Christianity to mean, that all have the same abilities, are equally good or talented.

In fact the Christian teaching is that we’re a pretty miserable lot: that if there is to be equality, it’s an equality of badness! But even here there are degrees. Christians could believe that there are innate differences among various peoples and yet still believe that these various peoples have the dignity proper to all human beings as children of God. Put it another way: Though Christians believed that all fall equally under the plan of God’s salvific will, they also believed that there are some cultures and cultural practices I as a Christian can find repellent; that there are certain sorts of people who will never be my confidants; that there are many people who will never reach anything but a low level of intellectual achievement. And all this could be held with an easy conscience.

Now with the coming of Liberalism, there was a denial of the Christian God. And therefore equality and dignity could no longer be grounded in God’s salvific plan. How then could they be grounded? Liberalism had to find a ground for equality and dignity within nature. But where? Christians had believed that we have a common origin and that in this sense we are one. But accidents of evolution could never convincingly ground a kind of equality that is something to prize: a kind that has real worth. And since empirically it was (and is) obvious that there is much inequality and difference among different races, this equality had to be seen as potential: an equality of the seeming worst with the best: an equality unverified only because of accidental circumstances, because of a lack of opportunity, a lack of education, a lack of justice on the part of the privileged toward the deprived. The engine that drives Liberalism is the need to prove concretely — to verify in history — the dignity of man: to eliminate those obstacles that hinder the nobleman waiting to emerge from every peasant.

Note: This is nothing less than a program to salvage something of a religion long abandoned. That something — human dignity — is thus the object of a secular faith. And since Liberals see equality as among the necessary conditions for this object of their faith, it isn’t really possible to have empirical arguments about it. The data can always be interpreted in such a way as to reinforce the belief.

And of course if you talk of racial differences at all, it’s never long before Liberals catch the scent of Zyklon B. This is the second reason why today’s Liberals cling to belief in racial equality, forbid any frank and open discussion of racial differences. They point at the wreckage of post-World War II Europe and say: This is where your belief in racial differences leads! If for nothing else, the Nazis deserve to be condemned for saddling us with this aspect of contemporary Liberal etiquette.

To be honest, I don’t know how to argue with a Liberal on this last point and I’d be grateful for some help from the audience. But I do think that Liberals might be open to realizing some of the harm that their egalitarian doctrine inflicts upon the innocent.

First, if it is false, then it will create unreal expectations in some races. When these expectations are not met, what happens? Those still not on a par with others will assume that the fault is not their own and accuse those who are successful of injustice. So this dogma pursued in the teeth of the evidence creates social pain.

Second, not only is there no convincing evidence for this doctrine of equality; the overwhelming weight of evidence is against it. This means that people’s sense of self worth — their belief in the dignity of all persons — is bound up with a highly implausible thesis. And so as people begin to suspect that the thesis is false, they will also come to disbelieve in their own dignity. And this seems to me one of the most pernicious effects of Liberal egalitarianism.

You don’t have to read very far in the arguments of egalitarians to notice a message between the lines: If we’re wrong, then by gosh black people really don’t have dignity: it very well might be all right to enslave them, demean them, humiliate them, kill them at will. And so Liberals hold themselves and the beneficiaries of their professional kindness hostage to a theory; reject it, they seem to say, believe the evidence against it, and you are worth nothing.

And sadly — witness the current spate of books tracing everything from Greek Metaphysics to the Calculus back to an African origin — many blacks are now convinced that their dignity depends not merely on an equality yet to be, but on a superiority that already was and has somehow been stolen away. (I say ‘sadly’ because the almost transparent falseness of this will lead hostile whites to mock and despise blacks even further, and many blacks to begin to despise themselves.)

Doomed and Wrong-Headed

But that said: ‘racialism’ seems to me both wrong-headed and doomed to failure. Recall the letter to American Renaissance by Malcolm Meldahl [published in the Dec. 1993 issue]. It was a kind of apologia for his no longer subscribing; he argued that AR had embarked upon a hopeless and dangerous road. Samuel Taylor responded effectively — on one level. But I’m still haunted by Mr. Meldahl’s words; there are depths to his challenges that went not so much unanswered as unrecognized. So I’d like, if I may, to bring some of them to the surface.

Mr. Meldahl speaks of “a certain animus motivating AR, sometimes naked, mostly veiled, which . . . really does lend to hurting people . . .” Mr. Taylor disputes this with an air of wounded innocence. But consider. Who are the people attracted by AR? The ones I know are those who see our cities disintegrating, our neighborhoods becoming unsafe or, even if not completely unsafe, at least unlivable; who see our country becoming more and more barbarous; and who — most important — identify this problem with the problem of the black population; who note that the presence of blacks in sufficient numbers involves the disintegration of a way of life into something they do not (and really should not) wish to tolerate.

People’s experience of blacks leads them to conclusions different from those they have been told are the only ones any decent intelligent person can accept. They see an image of blacks in movies and on television that is completely at odds with their experience. They know what concentrations of black population mean, and they bristle that their experience is denied. I don’t think that there is much positive feeling of white pride here. No; it is a fear and dislike of what they see as the encroaching of black culture (or anti-culture) that motivates them. And then AR comes along and tells them: these things you don’t like about blacks are genetically grounded; they cannot go away under the ministering hand of Liberal welfare programs.

AR is extremely naive if it thinks that what it stands for is not anti-black, or that it is unfair that it should be perceived that way; given how social problems have occasioned an interest in AR, and given the genetic/biological slant that is dear to its heart, the primary effect is bound to seem — and perhaps to be — not pride in white achievements but a sad and sometimes contemptuous disdain at black failure.

After all, most white people don’t normally think of themselves as ‘white.’ Not even in the better days before the Liberal ascendancy did they think of themselves this way. They most often thought of themselves as Poles, Italians, Irish, English, Catholics, Protestants, Jews; as members of this neighborhood, this town, and so on. These are the most familiar groupings. In my experience, people think of themselves as ‘white’ when they sense or think about things that specially bother them about ‘non-whites’ — especially blacks.

And that is again why AR is open to the charge of animus: because in making the ‘white man’ its rallying cry, it is focusing on something that most people focus on in a moment of negative comparison. For most people ‘whiteness’ as such is much too abstract to inspire positive loyalties; their loyalties are concrete: family, clan, culture, faith. To be able to share AR’s positive enthusiasm for the white man, people would have to embrace a philosophical perspective I look upon as part of the problem of our increasingly barbaric society, not part of its solution (more on this below).

Mr. Taylor has said that nothing in AR’s point of view should be specially offensive or hurtful to blacks. After all, we don’t mind that Chinese are on average more intelligent than white Europeans. So why should blacks be particularly hurt if we whites are on average more intelligent than they?

But this, too, seems more than a bit naive. Is it foolish to think that the grotesque follies AR reports in “O Tempora! O Mores!” are meant to illustrate what this deficiency of black intelligence concretely means? And is it really surprising that blacks would be distressed or hurt by it — especially those who have been raised on a diet of Liberal lies? But even to an older generation the news cannot be easy to swallow. Certainly it’s much harder to swallow than our being on average less bright than the Chinese. For we have an enormously rich intellectual heritage to be proud of; the blacks do not. And the message of AR is that it has been arranged that way by nature. It says: All the things we whites don’t want to live around you people for are the result of a comparatively meager genetic endowment. And that is hard doctrine.

Being intellectually at the bottom is a bitter pill; it would take I think a saint’s humility fully to accept. But humility is a virtue AR, with its emphasis on biological imperatives, is really in no position to commend.

Mr. Meldahl complained that he’d “like to see the fervor with which you militate against liberalism and its obvious excesses matched by the fervor to preserve what’s good and admirable.” But here we are confronted by a problem. What is good and admirable, and why do we want to preserve it?

To answer these questions we need to ask another: What sort of resources does AR have at its disposal in order to give a satisfying answer? The philosophical perspective that seems to drive AR is materialist/evolutionist. And that perspective I believe to be (a) false and (b) fatal to even a minimally decent moral vision.

Consider these statements from Prof. Revilo Oliver, surely one of racialism’s most learned spokesmen. “[T]he universe . . . was not made for man and is totally devoid of moral values.” “[A] moment’s thought should suffice to show that, in the absence of a decree from a supernatural monarch, there can be no rights other than those which citizens have . . . bestowed on themselves; and while . . . citizens may show kindness to aliens, slaves, and dogs, such beings can obviously have no rights.” “The morality that is highest is the one that most conduces to . . . survival and . . . expansion at the expense of inferior peoples.”

I would like to know how any racialist can escape from this grim and hopeless vision. Remember Meldahl’s words: “I do not . . . perceive the means to resist excesses possible to commit in the name of AR’s ideology . . . There is no set of crampons sufficiently sharp and strong to keep you guys from sliding . . . into a bloodbath.” Are these fears groundless? Unless AR can show a convincing way out, it can hardly claim that they are.

Let me put this another way. Mr. Taylor says we whites must in some sense secede or disengage. Well, suppose we do. What will our white disengaged society look like? What music will we listen to? Puccini? Wagner? Madonna? The Rolling Stones? Skrewdriver? Part of the problem — I’m tempted to say the major problem — of this society is our betrayal of our own heritage: the precious thing we have a duty to hand on.

After all, why should non-Europeans treat with honor the things that we ourselves disdain? And that we disdain them seems to me to be the most urgent crisis that the West now faces. If our basic convictions about who we are, and what we profess, were still intact our only problems would be problems of detail — for example in immigration: How many can reasonably be assimilated during what period of time. But the problem is that we no longer believe that there is a same something that immigrants should be assimilated to. It is the fundamental basic beliefs of our society that have broken down; and that is why we feel scattered and routed. What is it that makes us cohere — that can make us cohere — as a nation? I’d like to hear some suggestions.

I oppose affirmative action as strongly as anyone; and I think that abolishing it immediately would be a good first step in helping people of all races to gain some sense of self-respect and responsibility; in helping our nation recommit itself to true excellence. The trouble is that we have as a people lost any sense of what the good life — let alone the excellent life — should be. And it’s hard to orient yourself toward an unknown goal.

Please don’t get me wrong. The problems raised by AR are real; it’s not a waste of time to discuss them; in fact they should be discussed more. My fear is that a unity about this can delude us into ignoring the far graver and more profound things separating us. And when you fight separately against a powerful articulate enemy, as Tacitus reminds us, you will be no more successful than the ancestors of the British were against the Romans: singuli pugnant, universi vincuntur: they fight as individuals, they are conquered all together.

I hope that this conference can be the beginning of a kind of conversation that leads to greater unanimity about both our plight and the things needed to rescue us from it. Liberalism is dauntingly powerful. But the one force it does not have on its side is truth. And that, finally, is its one invincible enemy, and our one unshakable friend.

Fr. Tacelli is a member of the Society of Jesus. Since 1984, he has taught philosophy at Boston College. This is an abbreviated version of the talk he gave at an AR conference in May.

ARTICLE

A Reply to Father Tacelli

by Jared Taylor

Fr. Tacelli’s critique of the ideas expressed in American Renaissance is particularly valuable and thought provoking because he writes as a conservative — even a reactionary — rather than as a liberal. Unlike liberals, who refuse to consider the premises of racialism and thereby dismiss it as “hate-mongering,” Fr. Tacelli accepts those premises. In fact, he explicitly states some of the basic tenets of any thoughtful racialism:

• That our heritage is “the precious thing we have a duty to hand on.”
• That “there is no convincing evidence for this doctrine of [racial] equality; the overwhelming weight of evidence is against it.”
• That a preference for “your own kind” is “the most natural thing in the world.”
• That “the presence of blacks in sufficient numbers involves the disintegration of a way of life into something they [whites] do not (and really should not) wish to tolerate.”

These four propositions alone amount to a rejection of the vision of multi-racial America shared by liberals and mainstream “conservatives” alike. And yet, Fr. Tacelli then goes on to say that racialism — the perspective that would seem to follow naturally — is “wrong-headed and doomed to failure.” Why?

At the heart of his resistance to “making the ‘white man’ . . . [our] rallying cry” is the view that racialism can arise only out of a materialist, non-theistic philosophy, and that this philosophy destroys morality. I believe both views are mistaken, but since theological debate is difficult and usually inconclusive, let us for now merely take note of this key objection and return to it later. Fr. Tacelli has other — entirely worldly — concerns that fall short of a complete rejection of racialism, and that bear reflection and reply.

The Question of Animus

Is AR anti-black (or anti-Hispanic, -Asian, -immigrant, etc.)? Insofar as we are being dispossessed by these people, AR certainly devotes a great deal of attention to them. It is impossible to harbor kindly thoughts towards groups that are transforming our nation and have no compunction about displacing us. However, animus towards non-whites simply because they are non-white is wrong and if AR exhibits such animus it is wrong to do so.

A point that has often been made in these pages is that when blacks take advantage of affirmative action or when Mexicans go on welfare, they are behaving normally. They see opportunity and exploit it. They are also squeezing the life out of white America, and it is natural to view this with dread. However, they are only doing what misguided and suicidal white people let them do.

If one returns to the formerly-white neighborhood of one’s childhood and sees the wreck that non-whites have made of it, how can one not feel bitter? Of course, it does no good to “hate” the newcomers, who are only establishing the kind of society that it is their nature and custom to establish. If anyone is to be hated, it is the whites who brought this about in the name of “integration” or “diversity” or “cultural enrichment.” White integrationists and the non-whites they welcome into our midst are a mortal threat, not because they are likely to kill us but because their increasing numbers destroy our habitat, without which we cease to exist as a people.

The problem is that most whites do not see the long-term threat that immigration and multi-racialism pose. The urgency with which racialists oppose it therefore seems to them absurd, perverse, and hateful. Ironically, it is non-whites, who have a vivid racial consciousness of their own and who know very well what the shift in population balance will mean, who most easily grasp a white racialist’s fears.

Our struggle is one of survival. Even if the threat is nothing more than the natural and not-always-hostile expansion of other races into the vacuum left by our own capitulation, there are certain emotions one cannot avoid feeling for those who would displace us. Animus may not be the right one, but affection is impossible.

Hard Doctrine

Part of AR’s purpose is therefore to alert sleepwalking whites to the fate that awaits them. As Fr. Tacelli concedes, the races are not interchangeable. Liberalism insists that they are — at least when it is not claiming that whites are uniquely blameworthy. Part of AR’s task is to refute liberal foolishness about the equivalence of races, and that is one of the purposes of “O Tempora.”

As a school or neighborhood or region turns non-white, whites find it so alien that they must move on. In the case of blacks and Hispanics, differences in average intelligence (and probably in other behavioral traits as well) are an important part of what makes them alien. It is part of why, in the aggregate, they are not like us and will never be like us. Whites must learn to grapple rationally, humanely and honestly with this.

Fr. Tacelli writes that this is “hard doctrine,” and perhaps it is, but do Catholics suppress doctrine just because it is hard? Original sin is hard doctrine. Eternal torment for unbelievers may be the hardest doctrine ever propounded. Does the Church not enjoin us to build our lives squarely upon doctrine, be it ever so hard?

It may be true that the facts of racial differences cannot be expressed without wounding people, but surely Fr. Tacelli does not suggest that we fashion a nation upon a deliberate untruth because the truth is hard. This would be just the sort of squeamishness about hurting feelings that has prevented any effective opposition to affirmative action, “inclusion,” “diversity,” and any number of other liberal schemes that are destroying us.

On a different matter, he is right to say that most whites do not think of themselves as “white,” or do so only after an unpleasant encounter with non-whites. This is only a recent aberration. One of the compliments Kipling paid Gunga Din was:

An’ for all ‘is dirty ‘ide
‘E was white, clear white, inside

In A Child’s Garden of Verses, Robert Louis Stevenson speaks these words through the voice of a child:

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo
Little Turk or Japanee,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?

Until the 1950s or 1960s, most Americans knew that they were white and that their country and culture were white. They took whiteness for granted and could not conceive of being washed away in a rising tide of color. And here, I believe, is one of the crucial, missing elements to the cultural rebirth that Fr. Tacelli — and I — so earnestly desire. Is it a coincidence that white racial consciousness and pride disappeared during the horrible 1960s, when every standard of decency came under assault?

The call for racial consciousness is not a call for something new but for a return to something old. In his nostalgia for a more certain and more spiritual time, is Fr. Tacelli not evoking an era when racial pride was no less taken for granted than belief in God? As he suggests, Liberalism in its most virulent forms rejects God.

Fr. Tacelli writes that if only we were sure of ourselves and of what we were about, the rest would be mere details: how many immigrants to let in and what to make them learn. But surely, a fundamental part of our loss of identity has been the loss of our pride as the white, European heirs to Western civilization. No people can carry on its traditions unless it feels in its bones that the ways of its ancestors are true and best. Once the biological identification with the creators of those traditions is severed, once one’s own culture and race are not merely relativized but demonized, even the will to survive may disappear.

It is no coincidence, by the way, that it is both the white race and European “dead-white-male” culture that are demonized. Unlike the deluded white defenders of “inclusion” and “multi-culturalism,” who pretend that Haitian refugees can be made into Jeffersonian republicans, those who would displace us know very well that the race and culture are one. Without the race, the culture dies.

I agree entirely with Fr. Tacelli that we have shamefully neglected our patrimony. Nevertheless, I suspect that if whites still had Stevenson’s and Kipling’s innocent pride in being white, their culture might not have become the plaything of the likes of Madonna and Skrewdriver.

Race, therefore, must be our rallying cry. It was within the context of racial consciousness that our precious heritage arose, and we can be certain that racial dilution only hastens its decline. We cannot be sure that whites, once disengaged from non-whites, would not wallow in swill. But we know that if we throw in our lot with the rest, we will have no end of Snoop Doggy Dog and Niggaz With an Attitude.

At every opportunity, blacks and Hispanics rename our schools, pull down our monuments, rewrite our textbooks, and revile our heroes. Groups that are destroying our heritage cannot be expected to hand it on to future generations. We may yet fail to do this ourselves, but only we will even try. Fr. Tacelli urges us to rededicate ourselves to the great culture and civilization to which we are heirs, and he is right; we must do this. But it will have little effect if we do not regain our racial consciousness. Indeed, only through racial consciousness can we end our dispossession and begin the task of cultural renewal.

Materialism

To return, finally, to what I take to be Fr. Tacelli’s main critiques of racialism: First, that it can spring only from Godless materialism. This is clearly wrong. Many of the Founding Fathers, British imperialists, Confederate generals, and Southern segregationists were both racial nationalists and devout Christians. Many readers of AR are professing Christians. In important respects Fr. Tacelli is himself a racialist. To acknowledge a preference for one’s own kind and to observe that non-whites, in sufficient numbers, transform society in unacceptable ways are clear expressions of racial consciousness.

Second, Fr. Tacelli writes that unbelievers are incapable of even “a minimally decent moral vision.” Hard doctrine! To say of people that they are incapable of basic morality comes close to calling them less than human. This is a far harsher division of sheep from goats than anything to be found in AR, and is the very opposite of the call for unanimity with which Fr. Tacelli ends his remarks. Decency and integrity have never been the monopoly of believers.

I do not think that Western Civilization can be restored by issuing a call only to believers and without regard to race. I would return to Fr. Tacelli’s poignant evocation of what the Cloisters of New College came to mean for him. What an Italian-American Jesuit felt in the presence of those ancient British statue-corpses is what a Frenchman, German, or any European-American might have felt, whether Christian or unbeliever. I do not think that a black or Hispanic-American, no matter how deeply Christian, would have been moved in the same way for the same reasons.

We cannot afford to let questions of faith divide us; it is our race and our belief in our heritage that must unite us.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Elections, 1994

California voters passed Proposition 187, which denies illegal immigrants welfare, public housing, education, and all but emergency medical treatment. A state court immediately flouted the will of the people by prohibiting enforcement of the provision that applies to education. Fortunately, Prop 187 has the support of Governor Pete Wilson, who has vowed to take the fight to the Supreme Court.

A number of school boards, including those in Los Angeles and San Jose, have outraged voters by joining in the suits against the enforcement of Prop 187. This has provoked a gratifying wave of protest among organizers for the proposition, who find it unconscionable for elected officials to use public money to violate the public will. There has been such an uproar in some areas that school boards have dropped their suits for fear of voter recalls. [Laura Mecoy, Public wrath hits officials suing the foil prop. 187, SF Examiner, 11/22/94.]

Outgoing Mexican President Carlos Salinas denounced the measure as “xenophobic.” The new, recently-installed President, Ernesto Zedilla, has also complained about it. Honduran President, Carlos Reima, has promised to lead five other Central American heads of state in denoucing Prop 187 at a Western hemisphere summit that was to be held in Maimi, December 8-11. They say it violates the “spirit” of NAFTA. [Brian Tooney, Next: free movement of labour, Australian Financial Review, 12/1/94.]

The proposition passed by a margin of three-to-two, but whites were the only race whose majority voted “yes”(though a different survey found that a majority of Asians voted in favor, also). The racial breakdown as reported in the Los Angeles Times was as follows: [A Look at the Electorate, LA Times, 11/11/94.]

	Yes	No
White	63%	37%
Black	47%	53%
Hispanic	23%	77%
Asian	47%	53%

As California’s population — and voter rolls — change, there is no telling what could happen in the state. If 77 percent of Hispanics, who may soon be California’s dominant group, are in favor of welfare for illegal aliens, it is a safe bet that a majority is in favor of complete Mexicanization.

To the dismay of the mainstream press (television commentator Cokie Roberts shed tears on camera as she announced election results), the Republicans have taken control of both the House and the Senate. They will be better than Democrats but they only slow the rot rather than stop it.

Republicans are becoming the party of white people (58 percent of whites voted Republican in 1994, compared to 50 percent in 1990), but its leaders do not dare recognize this. The Republican “Contract with America,” for example, says nothing about reducing immigration or stopping affirmative action.

The Republican victory is nevertheless unhappy news for blacks in the House of Representatives. Under the Democrats, they chaired three full committees and 17 subcommittees. Under the Republicans, they will chair nothing. Republicans will abolish the District of Columbia committee and strip D.C. “representative” Eleanor Holmes Norton of her limited but clearly unconstitutional voting rights. Perhaps most important, Congress will stop funding the Congressional Black Caucus. Blacks can still meet informally, but they will no longer have the taxpayer-funded staff that made the organization so influential. [Eleanor Clift, The black power outage, Newsweek, 10/28/94, p. 32.]

The election season was full of ridiculous statements by candidates of all races, but one of the choicest came from black New York City congressman, Charles Rangel. Only racists, he said, could be in favor of lower taxes or the death penalty. [Deborah Orin, Rangel draws fire by calling ‘tax cuts’ a code for racism, NY Post, 11/3/94.]

Perhaps the most blatantly racial campaign appeal was made by a black congressman from Cincinnati named David Mann. One of his radio commercials, broadcast over black stations, said this about his Republican challenger:

In our congressional election there is a serious threat to the African-American community. His name: Steve Chabot. His party: Republican.

Steve Chabot wants to destroy families of the poor only because they are black and poor . . . Chabot wants more African-Americans given the death penalty than white Americans.

[Paul Gigot, Race card becomes a joker for democrats, WSJ, 11/3/94.]

Fertility and Welfare

Welfare recipients are automatically eligible for Medicaid, which routinely pays for fertility treatments for women who cannot have children. The federal government pays 90 percent of the cost, and the states pay the remaining ten percent. Even liberals have begun to wonder about the wisdom of this. Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York all recently opted to stop putting up the ten percent of matching state funds for these treatments (and thus ended the programs), but about ten states continue to help welfare mothers get pregnant.

In 1993, the last year New Jersey paid for treatments, Medicaid paid more than half a million dollars for drug therapy as well as reversals of tubal ligations. What finally prompted Massachusetts to end the treatments was the news that two welfare mothers with eight children each were being helped to have more. In 1992, in New Mexico, an unmarried welfare recipient had quadruplets after Medicaid paid for fertility drugs. [Evan Gahr, Supplementing mother nature, NY Post, 8/31/94.]

The Rewards of Race

Affirmative action operates so powerfully that non-white college graduates can virtually count on being offered jobs. The Wall Street Journal reports that for the class of ‘94, non-whites received an average of three job offers compared to two for whites. Non-whites also got slightly higher starting salaries. [Leon Wynter, Business and Race, WSJ, 9/7/94.]

Simpson Jury

After interminable haggling, the jury has been selected for the O.J. Simpson murder trial. It is composed of eight blacks, two Hispanics, one white, and one half-white half-Indian. Eight are women and four are men. A majority of blacks have repeatedly told poll-takers that they do not think Mr. Simpson is guilty, and at least some of the black jurors do not think so either. One wrote in a juror questionnaire that he would be “surprised” if Mr. Simpson were guilty. Another wrote that he “just didn’t believe it” when he first learned that Mr. Simpson was a suspect. [Kenneth Noble, A jury is chosen to hear the Simpson Murder case, NYT, 11/3/94]

Truth and Consequences

Earlier in 1994, the Chicago Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) came under unwelcome national scrutiny for having long overlooked a household in which 19 black children were living in filth and squalor. In October, the president of the Illinois Senate, James Philips, spoke to reporters about the DCFS caseworker who should have taken charge much sooner:

‘Of course, she was a minority. Her boss was a minority. It’s probably a terrible thing to say, but I’ll say it: Some of them do not have the work ethics that we have.’ He went on to say, ‘Secondly, they don’t tend to turn in or squeal on their fellow minorities. I don’t know what you do about that, but it’s kind of a way of life.’ [Pate Philip’s Racism and the work ethic, (editorial), Chi Sun-Time, 10/7/94.]

Many unkind things were then said about Mr. Philips, one of the most incomprehensible by Nefertiti Smith, the black woman president of a public employee labor union: “He is part of the problem why we can’t provide services to the children and families in the poor economic communities.” [Ray Lang, Workers Defended; Resignation urged, Chi Sun-Times, 10/7/94, p. 4.]

Also in October, one of the co-writers of a successful television program, “NYPD Blue,” unburdened himself a little too truthfully. During a seminar on screen-writing in Los Angeles, he told participants that blacks do not make good screen-writers. He once ran a special program to encourage blacks to get into the profession, but noted that of all the writers in that program only a handful became successful and “none of them are black. None of the black writing was any good.” [Verne Gay, Race, Writing and ‘NYPD Blue,’ NY Newsday, no date or page.]

Teach Them Young

The Washington Post has recently started a new section in its paper called “Horizon: The Learning Section,” which is geared towards young people. In one of its first issues, “Horizon” published a long cover story about race, in which the very idea of race was generally pooh poohed. In a box, all by itself, was a separate story called “Race and Intelligence.” We reproduce the item in toto:

Arguments that one human population is intellectually superior to another are fairly new in human history, dating mainly from the time of massive enslavement of Africans. The idea of using Africans in the New World, however, grew out of the racist assumption that they were superior to the American Indians. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish priest of the 1500s, argued that Indians being enslaved by the Spanish conquerors were not up to the ‘civilized’ work demanded of them in farming, mining and industry. He argued that the colonial rulers should import more advanced people such as Africans.

Much later, when some people challenged the morality of slavery, defenders claimed that Africans were not fully human, especially in intellect.

In modern times researchers have made many tests of the mental powers of all groups of people and repeatedly found that if they test people of equivalent social and educational background, they find no significant differences. In 1961, the council of the American Anthropological Association ruled unanimously that it knew of no evidence that any population was less capable than any other of participating fully in modern, complex society. Further studies have reinforced that conclusion. [Race and Intelligence, Wash Post, 11/16/94]

One of the less obvious errors in this passage concerns Bartolomé de las Casas. He did not consider blacks intellectually superior to Indians. He recommended them as slaves because enslaved Indians were sickly and often ran away. He soon regretted this recommendation and opposed slavery of all kinds.

Nor is it true that only recently have different races been thought to differ in intelligence. As early as the second century AD, the Greek physician Galen wrote of the African’s “defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.”

Whitewashing the News

The New York Post of last September 9th published a full-page story about an unusual rush-hour subway shooting in New York City. A black passenger named Garvey Wright approached another black man who was wearing a suit and reportedly asked him, “Why are you wearing those clothes?” The well-dressed black is said to have replied, “I have to because I need them to go to work.” After a brief argument, the man in the suit shot Mr. Wright twice, severely wounding him. Panic ensued in the packed train, and several people were trampled. [Grand central terror, NY Post, 9/9/94, p. 3.]

The New York Times of the same date published two photographs of the incident, one of rescue workers hustling a gurney to an ambulance, and another of police searching the tracks after the attack. It printed brief captions to the photographs mentioning a “rush hour shooting,” but gave no indication of the race of either man or of the nature of their dispute. [NYT, 9/9/94, p. B1.]

On October 17th, all four New York City newspapers ran stories on two unrelated violent crimes: a black raped a white jogger in Central Park, and a black shot a white investment banker to death. Only the Daily News reported that both perpetrators were black. The New York Post pointed out that the rapist was black but left out the race of the murderer — although the Daily News had reported that the dying man’s last words were “I’ve been shot by a black man.” The New York Post said the killer was black but left out the race of the rapist.

The New York Times, needless to say, found the race of the perpetrators irrelevant in both cases, though it did say, rather pointlessly, that the rapist was “in his late twenties, six feet tall, and 160 pounds, and wearing blue jeans and a brown and green shirt.” Several days later the Times did publish a photo of the apprehended suspect: a Senegalese.

We Will Follow You

Even before the latest South African elections, the abolition of housing laws permitted blacks to move into previously all-white neighborhoods. Predictably, whites have been moving out. One reason is that blacks have a practice of propitiating their ancestors by slaughtering an animal on the driveway of their new home — often a sheep, goat or cow. When white neighbors call the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals they learn that driveway sacrifices are protected religious practices.

One black, noting that he briefly had white neighbors, says “They seem to be disappearing. I don’t know where they are going. But there are more of us than of them. Wherever they disappear, we will be there, too.” [Isabel Wilkerson, The suburbs of Johannesburg stay cold to blacks, NYT, 11/3/94.]

We Have Followed You

Many neighborhoods in Queens, New York, have begun to ignore zoning laws. Residents have converted garages into illegal stores and other businesses. In one otherwise quiet neighborhood, a welding shop emits a deafening din. Back-yard roosters crow every morning. The most brazen residents build squat, concrete bunkers for their illegal businesses. The New York Times notes that this “is a particular problem in neighborhoods with high concentrations of recent immigrants.” [Norimitsu Onishi, Why’d a Rooster Cross 30th Ave.? and Amid the Houses, the Bodegas Grow, NYT, 8/28/94, p. 7.]

Another result of immigration has been a change in construction technology. Now, non-white laborers mix concrete on the sidewalk with a shovel and buckets of water, just like in the 19th century. It is cheaper to hire mobs of illegals than to pay for a cement truck. [David Gordon, U.S. Sliding to Third World Status, LA Times, 9/8/91, p. D2.]

Trouble to Come

President Bill Clinton has been steadily stacking the federal courts with “nontraditional” appointees. Of his 82 confirmed appointments, 41 percent are black, 16 percent Hispanic, and only 40 percent white. He has appointed one American Indian and one Asian. Fifty-two percent of his appointees have been women. [Marcia Coyle, Clinton’s judicial choices change the bench’s face, The National Law Journal, 10/24/94.]

Disqualifying the Best

Every year the Illinois State Science Fair gives an award to the Illinois school that enters the best science team project. For the last four years, the winner has been Avery Coonley School, a private academy that does not admit students unless they have IQs of at least 120. This is too much for the people who give out the awards; they have banned Avery Coonley School from the competition for the next two years. “We have decided to give other schools an opportunity to win,” explains the contest sponsor. [AP, Brainy Schoolkids barred from contest, no paper name or date.]

Bad Signs

British deaf people are politically incorrect. Their sign language gesture for homosexuals is a limp wrist. For Chinese, they slant their eyes, for Jews they make crook noses, and for blacks they flatten their noses with a finger. Very bad, indeed, but the Chinese don’t seem to mind. Their sign for a white person is to make circles with their fingers and put them over their eyes like binoculars.

BBC television, which signs some of its broadcasts, has invented new signs to replace the old ones. This has provoked an uproar among British deaf mutes, who are taking no lip, so to speak. They are furious that people who talk should presume to tell them how to communicate. [Rajeev Syal, Deaf fight to keep their offensive signs, Sunday Times, Aug. 28, 1994.]

Tottering NAACP

The national organization of the NAACP, wracked by scandals and squeezed by reluctant donors, has stopped paying its professional employees. The Baltimore-based organization has a staff of about 100 and an annual budget of $15 million. Its troubles do not directly affect local affiliates, which are mainly run by volunteers. [John Cushman, Short of Cash, N.A.A.C.P stops paying its employees, 11/2/94, p. A14.]

The NAACP has had so much bad press, that the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund is considering changing its name. It has been entirely independent from the NAACP since 1957, and in the 1980s the two groups battled over whether the fund would be allowed to keep using the initials in its name. Now it is thinking of shedding even the appearance of any ties. [Steven Holmes, Rights Group Seeks Distance from N.A.A.C.P. Troubles, NYT, Nov. 8, 1994.]

Berserkley Blues

A mother who withdrew her child from public elementary school in Berkeley, California, wrote an article in a local paper, the Berkeley Voice (Sept. 22, 1994), to explain why:

In my son’s first grade class he got to wear the Outstanding Student medal around his neck one day and he came home elated to tell us about it. When we proudly inquired of his teacher as to how he had won it, we were told that every student gets to wear it one day . . .

Elementary school students are never graded on projects or tests. Report cards reflect the student’s level of cooperation and effort rather than any skills actually mastered. One of my sons received S and E (Satisfactory and Excellent) grades all the way through second grade before his teacher informed us at the end of the year that he had not mastered the second grade skills and needed, he felt, to repeat the grade. Prior to that meeting, we had had no communication whatever to indicate that there was a problem.

[Gail Entrekin, Relief, regret marks Berkeleyans’ departure, Berkeley Voice, 9/22/94, p. 2.]

Kappa Omega

The Kappa Alpha Order is a fraternity that was founded shortly after the War Between the States with the express purpose of honoring and preserving the qualities of duty, honor, and integrity embodied by Robert E. Lee. The general is referred to as the “spiritual founder.”

The fraternity house at the University of Florida is still draped with Confederate flags and displays a portrait of Gen. Lee, but the current president is Prineet Sharma, whose parents immigrated from India. The vice president is Cuban, and one member is black. [Jack Wheat, At UF, signs of new South in fraternity of Old South, Miami Herald, 10/18/94, p. 1A.]

Facing the Future?

In the high schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District, fewer than 10 percent of the students are white. Not surprisingly, they are made to feel like unwanted minorities. One 17-year-old has been treated to so much school-sponsored Hispanic-boosting that she says, “I don’t really see any cultural tradition that white people have. But I envy Latin culture, it’s so enriched with tradition.”

One teacher at Hollywood High — which is 95% non-white — founded an Anglophilia Club in order to prevent just this sort of white drift. As he explains, “Any time the school would recognize a holiday it would be something like Cinco de Mayo, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the United States. I’d say, why aren’t we having an assembly for Veteran’s Day, for Pearl Harbor Day?” This teacher retired in 1989.

Iris Ring, a student who is now 15 years old, first learned she was a minority at age six. She was playing in a neighborhood park when several girls came up to her and told her that this was a Mexican park and that no whites were allowed.

Katie Coffey, a fifth-grader, goes to a school that is 95 percent black and Hispanic. Her heroine is Harriet Tubman. “Sometimes when they have multi-cultural day, she feels left out,” explains her father, “but she gets a lot of white culture from books . . .” [Denise Hamilton, The new Minority, LA Times, 11/4/94, p. E1.]

Swarthmore Rejoins Union

In the 1960s, the students of Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia, voted to take down the United States flag from the administration building. The flag was racist, imperialist, capitalist, sexist, etc., etc. Recently, in a hard-fought battle, students voted, 376 to 239, to put the flag back up. One of the dissenters wrote to the campus newspaper: “I absolutely refuse to believe that a flag that, for most of the world, means bloodshed and violence can mean freedom for me.” [America Reclaims Swarthmore, Accuracy in Academia, p. 3, no date.]

Coup, Anyone?

Hialeah, Florida, which is about 90 percent Hispanic, is having a hard time deciding who its mayor is. A state judge has ruled that “overzealous” and “unscrupulous” campaign workers forged so many absentee ballots that the election results must be thrown out. A new election was scheduled for December 8th.

Raul Martinez, the incumbent, was previously elected despite a conviction in federal court for accepting bribes. His conviction was thrown out on appeal, and a new trial will be held soon.

The city charter is generally interpreted to require Mr. Martinez to step down until the next election, since his reelection has been ruled “invalid.” City council president, Herman Echevarria would then be acting mayor. Mr. Martinez refuses to step down. The other candidate, Nilo Juri, promises to sue. Federal prosecutors have launched an investigation and expect to charge more than a dozen people with voter fraud. [Betty Cortina & Dexter Filkins, Mayor Mess: Who’s Boss of Hialeah?, Miami Herald, 11/8/94, p. 1A.]

The Latin Life

Colombia has its own solution to rampant crime and vagrancy: limpieza social, or “social cleaning.” Street children, prostitutes, drug addicts, bums, and criminals — all known as “disposables” — are often hunted down and killed by neighbors and shopkeepers who are tired of watching their neighborhoods deteriorate. Often the police help them. Between 1988 and 1993, some 2,000 people are said to have been disposed of by furious civilians.

Some vigilante groups have semi-permanent organizations, and give public notice of their intentions. In Medellin, the drug capital, a group calling itself Death to Car Thieves has killed 50 people since it first announced itself in March 1994. In July, a group calling itself Columbia Without Guerrillas issued a statement saying that it would track down and kill left-wing rebels. Limpieza social began in the 1980s along with a sudden rise in crime and vagrancy. [Vigilantes in Colombia kill hundreds of ‘disposables,’ NYT, 10/31/94, p. A7.]

Deutschland Unter Alles

Charlotte Hoehn used to run the Population Studies Institute, a unit of the German government. She was “relieved of her duties” after she expressed the view that Africans may not be as intelligent as other people. “It’s an example of media assassination,” complained Johannes Otto of the German Society for Population Studies; “She said nothing you couldn’t say on a talk show in America. But this is Germany and taboos remain.” [AP, German loses job for ethnic slur, Chi Tribune, 9/17/94, p. 14.]

Who’s Insane Here?

Colin Ferguson is the man who killed six people and wounded 17 others on the Long Island Railroad in December of 1993. He is being defended by William Kunstler and Ronald Kuby who have invented the “black rage” defense. The theory is that Mr. Ferguson was justified in attacking white people because America is so viciously racist.

In November, Mr. Ferguson wrote a letter to the court saying that he doesn’t agree with his lawyers. “The ‘black rage’ defense is nothing more than Kunstler and Kuby satisfying their own dishonest political agenda,” he wrote; “They don’t want to try the case on the facts.” Mr. Ferguson wants to fire Messrs. Kunstler and Kuby and represent himself.

Mr. Kunstler says that Mr. Ferguson is insane and should not be tried. “He is so insane he thinks he’s sane,” he explained. [AP, Suspect rejects ‘rage’ defense, Chicago Law Bulletin, some time in November.]

Hard Times for Columbus

The state of South Dakota (which should know better) and the cities of Berkeley and Santa Cruz in California have all abolished Columbus Day and now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day. [AP, Town discovers Columbus Day alternative, 10/11/94, no paper.] The Mexicans have doubts about Columbus, too. In October 1994, Mexican riot police battled demonstrators in Mexico City who were trying to pull down a prominent statue of the discoverer.

Non-white AIDS

As homosexuals learn to take precautions against AIDS, it is gradually becoming a non-white affliction. In 1991, 51 percent of the new cases were among non-whites. In 1992, it was 52 percent and in 1993, 55 percent.

In 1993, Hispanics were three times more likely than whites to get AIDS, and blacks were 5.5 times more likely. Black women were about 15 times more likely than white women to get the disease. Minorities accounted for three fourths of the AIDS cases among women and for 84 percent of the cases in children aged 12 and under. About 0.3 percent of all black men got AIDS in 1993. [AP, More minorities hit by AIDS, Wash Times, 9/9/94, p. A3. Reuters, black far more likely than whites to have AIDS, agency says, NYT, 9/9/94]

Remapping the Past

In the United States there is a surprising number of place names that have the word “Negro” in them. In New York State alone, there are Negro Point (two of them), Negro Brook (5), Negro Bar Channel (1), Negro Hollow (3), Negro Creek (1), Negro Lake (2), Negro Marsh (1), and Negro Hill (7). Many of these place names originally used the word “Nigger,” but in 1963 Congress changed every instance of “Nigger” to “Negro.” Well into the 19th century, the word “nigger” was not a insult. For the most part, the names were simply descriptive of places either inhabited by blacks or associated with a prominent black. [John Nordheimer, One man’s campaign to rename a creek, NY Times, 11/3/94, p. B6.]

Our Kind of Diversity

The town of Wilmette, Illinois, is 91 percent white, seven percent Asian, two percent Hispanic, and one percent black. In 1992, 60 percent of the residents responded to a survey by saying that they were satisfied with the town’s current level of ethnic diversity. [Kate Griffin, Wilmette vehicle sticker looks too ‘correct’ for some, Chi Trib 11/15/94.]

The Simple Answer is ‘Yes’

Jim Hogshire has written a guidebook for middle-class people who are either going to prison or who know someone who is. He writes frankly about prison rape:

To the simple question ‘Am I going to get butt-f**ked?’ the simple answer is ‘yes.’. . .

Conservative estimates indicate at least 290,000 males get sexually assaulted every year in prisons and jails. For comparison, the Bureau of Justice estimates that 135,000 women get raped each year in the whole country. . .

Rape, especially gang rape, is almost exclusively a black on white occurrence. More than 90% of the prison rapists are black and the instance of a white raping a black is the rarest of all . . . Blacks do sometimes rape other blacks, however; if you’re black, you’re not in the clear . . .

In some prisons race is everything. If you are unlucky enough to be a white entering a large prison where young, aggressive blacks are in control and race war is continuous, you will be set upon very quickly by black guys who will try to get off in your ass. Being white in a prison like that is synonymous with being a punk.

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I read with interest your Nov. 1994 account of the return to power of Mayor Marion Barry of Washington. I am reminded of a Mr. Ronald Jackson of White Plains, New York, to whom the New York Times recently devoted a good-sized story. The 50-year-old Mr. Jackson, who is black, has been elected to the board of the White Plains Housing Authority (which oversees matters related to public housing) every two years since 1980. He is the tenant representative, and his constituents are almost all black.

Mr. Jackson was a janitor for a commuter railroad but was fired for chronic absenteeism. While on the housing board, he has been convicted twice: for bribery and forgery in connection with his job. He has been repeatedly taken to court for refusing to pay the subsidized rent on his apartment. He says his board stipend is being garnisheed for child support, and that his Social Security checks he claims a childhood foot injury — are being diverted to make up the losses caused by his crimes. He does not care to work.

None of this seems to bother his constituents. Just like Marion Barry, being punished by “the white man” is an important part of his appeal. Robert Snipes has run against Mr. Jackson several times and explains the incumbent’s popularity this way:

He has had a long-running battle with the housing authority and that is only making him a martyr to the tenants. Naturally, the tenants are going to be sympathetic to someone who is beat up on by the authority.

At least some blacks hate whites so much that they support anyone, no matter how vile, who irritates or infuriates whites.

Tom Eccles, Westchester, N.Y.

Sir — In the November issue you reprinted a semi-literate letter written by O.J. Simpson. It should be no surprise that he cannot write. Mr. Simpson could not enter the University of Southern California because his SATs and grades were too low. As with many other athletes, the university stashed him in a two-year junior college that did not have the same entrance requirements, so that in his third year he could be accepted at U.S.C. as a “transfer student.” This is why he played football for only two years at U.S.C.

Name Withheld

Sir — One of the common attacks on The Bell Curve is that IQ is insufficient because it leaves too much out. Howard Gardner of Harvard says that there are at least seven kinds of intelligence, including such things as musical ability, interpersonal skills, and athletic ability. Athletic ability? Does this mean that people who go to the track are betting on which horse is smarter? If horses run faster than men, are horses therefore smarter than men? Please call Mr. Ed.

Daniel Katz, Pembroke Pines, Fla.

Sir — White guilt could not be caricatured more exquisitely than in the neurotic response from Mr. and Mrs. Biehl to the convictions of three blacks who murdered their daughter, Amy, in South Africa. As AR previously reported, Amy Biehl was a white exchange student who went to South Africa to help educate black voters. She was murdered because she was white.

How did Mr. and Mrs. Biehl react to the 18-year sentences for the murderers? “I hope their sentence is as rehabilitative as possible,” lamented Mrs. Biehl; “We feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the accused — now convicted,” said Mr. Biehl. The Biehls were well aware that the murderers will probably serve only a part of their sentences, and may even be pardoned if an amnesty law for “political crimes” is enacted.

Trevor Feldman, Woodland Hills, Cal.

Sir — In the December “O Tempora” section you write about a white Chicago couple who are being forced out of their home of 20 years to settle a claim that they harassed their nonwhite neighbors. Frankly, it is hard to imagine an elderly, sickly white couple “harassing” non-whites in their late-20s. It seems all the more unlikely since — as you failed to mention in your story — the non-white man was a Chicago police officer.

I note in passing that Chicago has a Committee to Elect a Black Mayor. Its members are interviewed by the city’s mass media without a blink of a hypocritical eye.

Robert Grooms, Michigan City, In.

Sir — I am a member of the Electric Rail Roaders Association. Sometimes we watch films of transit systems of 40 or more years ago. One cannot help noticing that Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, etc. were so much more safe, clean, and civilized than they are today.

At a showing of a 1930s film about trolleys in Brooklyn, many members commented on how civilized East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Bushwick once were. We have a few black members, and they agreed. Of course, no one dares mention what accounts for the change.

Name Withheld, Brooklyn, N.Y.