American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 7, No. 6	June 1996

 

CONTENTS

If We Do Nothing
AR in the News
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

If We Do Nothing

The nation we are building is one in which we would not wish to live.

by Jared Taylor

In March, the Census Bureau released its periodic projection of the ethnic makeup of the United States during the next few decades. It reported cheerfully that if current immigration and birth rates hold steady, by the year 2050 the percentage of Hispanics will have increased from 10 to 25 percent, that of Asians from three to eight percent, and that of blacks from 12 to 14 percent. All these increases will come at the expense of whites, who are projected to fall from 74 percent of the population to about 50 percent.

Within 54 years, therefore, whites will be on the brink of becoming just one more racial minority. And because whites are having so few children, they will be an old minority. Within just 34 years — by 2030 — they will already account for less than half the population under age 18, but will be three quarters of the population over 65. Some of the people reading these words will be alive when these things come to pass.

As usual, the Census Bureau’s projections stirred little interest. The New York Times did note that the projected changes would represent “a profound demographic shift” and that the future mix of old whites and young blacks and Hispanics might give the debate about Social Security “a racial and ethnic tinge.” This seemed to be the most disturbing thing the Times could think of.

Why is there almost complete silence about a population shift that, if it takes place, will transform much of the country beyond recognition? Why is there no debate about what this would mean in terms of education, politics, democracy, the jury system, national unity, racial friction, crime, foreign policy, labor productivity, or virtually any other national indicator?

The demographic future of the United States is perhaps the most important question we face, yet it receives no attention. Most whites simply refuse to think about what is happening to their country or about the third-world future they are ensuring for their children and grandchildren. Those who do think about demographic change have been browbeaten into believing that it is inevitable and that resistance would, somehow, be immoral.

What makes the silence so unaccountable is that there is very little mystery about the nature of the changes we can anticipate. Miami and Detroit and Monterey Park, California are good examples of what happens when a city becomes Hispanic, black, or Asian. The details of the transformation are interesting, but it is sufficient to note the obvious: Once the concentration of non-whites reaches a certain level, whites cannot or will not live among them. Except in a few gilded enclaves, there are virtually no whites left in Miami or Detroit or Monterey Park. “White flight” is a universal fact of American life. Liberals may deplore it, but no one can deny it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, whites were generally fleeing blacks, but the great black migrations have largely come to an end, and whites have reestablished distance between the two races. In recent decades, it is massive, non-white immigration that most often drives whites from their neighborhoods, and continuing immigration only hardens the alien character of these places. No one believes that the arrival of yet more Haitians, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Jamaicans, or Vietnamese will somehow restore the former character of South Central Los Angeles or Miami and induce whites to move back.

The process works the other way. As their numbers increase, non-whites continue to expand into adjacent areas. Whites, many of whom fled their homes in the face of the first incursion, move away once again.

This, then, will be one of the certain effects of demographic change: More and more parts of the United States will become, for whites, essentially uninhabitable. It will be physically possible for whites to live with the Mexicans of Brownsville, Texas or the blacks of Camden, New Jersey but such places will be almost as alien and as uninviting as Oaxaca or Mombasa. They will actually be more uninviting. The people of Oaxaca and Mombasa like and admire white Americans, whereas those of Brownsville and Camden have a strong and sometimes violent dislike for whites.

There is much irony in the course on which our nation has been set. Most white Americans can think of any number of communities or neighborhoods in which they might want to live. Not one is likely to have a non-white majority. Likewise, most whites cannot name a single non-white community in which they could bear to live. Furthermore, if one were to ask whites what countries they might move to if given a choice, almost all will mention a European country, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. All are white. Our country has therefore embarked on a course that will make ever larger parts of it inhospitable, even off-limits, to whites. Eventually the country as a whole could become one in which whites do not wish to live.

At some level, everyone in America understands this. Not even the most deluded white liberals live in Harlem or Watts or South Central Los Angeles, or in any of a thousand other neighborhoods that have been transformed by non-whites. Despite their pronouncements about the vital importance and desirability of integration, virtually no white is willing to take the most obvious step towards making it happen: buy a house in a black neighborhood.

Destroying the Infrastructure

Where it matters most — where they make their homes and rear their children — even the most liberal whites suddenly demonstrate a grasp of reality at odds with what they claim to believe and stand for. Even they have noticed that although the details of non-white dispossession differ according to the part of the country and the people who arrive, something essential is always lost when whites move away.

Blacks frighten even the most ardent integrationists. East Coast blacks, in particular, have the disconcerting habit of physically destroying the cities they move into. Detroit, Newark, the South Bronx, Camden, North Philadelphia, and the South Side of Chicago now have huge expanses of vacant lots and derelict buildings.

Detroit can no longer afford to serve some of its most blighted, sparsely inhabited neighborhoods. It is considering moving out the few remaining people and decommissioning whole sections of itself — shutting off utilities, stopping mail delivery, pulling out bus lines, ending police and fire service, and letting nature take over. There are similarly stark proposals for parts of down-town Detroit, where empty skyscrapers tower over deserted streets. Some people want to turn the area into a theme park for urban architecture — like the ghost towns in the West.

Blacks have destroyed cities in several ways. One is arson. Many East Coast neighborhoods never completely rebuilt after the race riots of the 1960s. Today, black youngsters in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere celebrate Halloween eve — which they call Devil’s Night — by burning down as many houses as they can. Other buildings, often charming turn-of-the-century townhouses, become uninhabitable because no one bothers to maintain them. Others are simply abandoned as the decent, responsible blacks flee crime and degeneracy. The result is the blasted, vacant look of so many Eastern black ghettos. Entire cities have slowly shifted away from the parts that blacks have occupied, as whites build homes and businesses away from the expanding blight. In what were once the centers of important cities, whole chapters of urban history have been wiped away. Not a trace remains of generations of industrious whites who worked hard, reared children, and hoped for a better future.

Hispanics do not ordinarily tear cities down, though the 1992 Los Angeles riots showed that they can sometimes burn and loot their own neighborhoods just as blacks sometimes do. Likewise, the Puerto Rican sections in New York’s outer borough can be as menacing as any inhabited by blacks.

Hispanics have a different effect. They bring crime and lower the quality of public schools — reasons enough for whites to move out — but they also bring an alienness blacks do not. Many are willing to live ten to a room, turn garages into bedrooms, park cars in the front yard, keep chickens, and practice a gaudy, third-world version of Catholicism. But the greatest sign of alienness is Spanish. The airwaves, magazine racks, storefronts, and the very air itself ring with a language most whites do not understand. The occasional passing car marked “Police” rather than “Policía” is a reminder that this is still, theoretically, the United States.

In 1991, the president of a black homeowners association in South Central Los Angeles explained her opposition to a wave of Mexicans moving into a formerly black area: “It’s a different culture, a different breed of people. They don’t have the same values. You can’t get together with them. It’s like mixing oil and water.” The now-forgotten and long-departed white residents may well have said the same things about blacks.

When Asians arrive in large numbers, their effect is more ambiguous. Some North Asian groups commit fewer crimes than whites, make more money, and do better in school. Others, like the Hmong and the Cambodians, have fantastically high rates of poverty and welfare dependency. However, it does not matter whether Japanese or Chinese build societies that are, in some respects, objectively superior to those of Europeans. It matters only that they are different.

When large numbers of North Asian immigrants moved into Monterey Park, the long-term white residents did not leave because the newcomers rioted, opened crack houses, covered walls with graffiti, or were rapists and robbers. They moved out because Monterey Park, in countless ways, ceased to be the town in which they had grown up or the town to which they had moved.

The merchandise in the stores and the faces behind the counters changed. So many signs appeared in strange languages that the fire department insisted that at least street numbers be legible to English-speakers. Even city council meetings began to include exchanges in languages other than English. The new-comers reworked zoning laws to permit businesses in what had been residential neighborhoods. Asians bought the little bungalows whites had lived in, bulldozed them, cut down all the trees, and built huge new houses nearly out to the property line.

All these changes and many others — some of them vastly more troubling than issues that are routinely put to the voters to decide — took place without the permission or consent of the whites who had lived there for years. One unhappy resident paid for a billboard that said, “Would the last American to leave Monterey Park please take down the flag.”

Once again, the significance of racial change does not lie in the particulars. It lies in the fact of unwelcome, uncalled for, irreversible change. People have every right to expect their children and their children’s children to be able to grow up and walk in the ways of their ancestors. They have a powerful, natural desire that their grandchildren be like them — that they speak the same language, sing the same songs, tell the same stories, pray to the same God, take pride in the same past, hope the same hopes, love the same nation, and honor the same traditions. The crucial elements of peoplehood cannot be preserved in the face of a flood of aliens, especially when the central institutions of the nation itself preach fashionable falsehoods about the equivalence of all races, cultures, and peoples.

Most people who grew up in America want to grow old in America, not in some bustling outpost of Mexico or Southeast Asia. They should not have to move to Montana or Idaho in order to grow old with people like themselves. Eventually, of course, if the foreign outposts continue to expand, there will be no refuge in Montana and Idaho either. This, then, is the effect of racial change at the local level: Whites become refugees in their own land.

What will happen at the national level? We cannot be sure but we can guess. Many non-whites now seem genuinely to believe that equal treatment requires preferences for themselves. It may yet be possible to abolish racial preferences while whites are still a majority, but what will prevent their reappearance when whites become a minority?

Whites will still have higher incomes than blacks and Hispanics, but this will be seen only as proof of white wickedness and exploitation. Is it so outlandish to imagine outright confiscation of property owned by whites? Supplemental taxes for whites? Sumptuary laws? Exclusion from certain professions? Asians will also be a small but successful racial minority, and their wealth, too, is likely to attract unwelcome government attention.

What sort of foreign policy would a non-white America have? What would it do — or not do — with nuclear weapons? What sort of public health standards would it maintain? How would a third-world America treat its national parks, its forests, its rivers? So far, only whites have shown much interest in the environment.

In the long term, there is some doubt that a non-white America could even maintain a functioning democracy or any semblance of the rule of law. The record of non-white nations suggests not. Even if our forms of government survive, what fanciful, anti-white readings will a black and Hispanic Supreme Court find in the Constitution? What subjects or opinions will be found to lie outside the protection of the First Amendment?

Not an Ounce of Sympathy

But these will be future concerns. To return to the present, in the United States today, there is not an ounce of public sympathy for whites who escape when the neighborhood turns black or Mexican. The theory is that only ignorant bigots run away from non-whites, but the fact is that people with money never even have to face the problem. As a very clever man once put it, the purpose of a college education is to give people the right attitudes about minorities and the means to live as far away from them as possible.

And, indeed, college-educated, right-thinking people have come up with a whole set of mental exercises for the working class unfortunates who do not have the money to send their children to private school. The first exercise is to try as hard as possible to believe that aliens and strangers are bearers of a special gift called diversity. We are not being displaced; we are being enriched and strengthened.

Of course, the idea that racial diversity is a strength is so obviously stupid that only very intelligent people could have thought it up. There is not one multi-racial anything in America that doesn’t suffer from racial friction. Our country has established a gigantic system of laws, diversity commissions, racial watchdog groups, EEO officers, and outreach committees as part of a huge, clanking machine to regulate and try to control racial diversity — this dangerous, volatile thing that is supposed to be such a source of strength. People are so exhausted by this source of strength that they run from it the first chance they get. Families, churches, clubs, and private parties — which are not yet regulated by the government — tend to be racially homogeneous.

Nothing could be more obvious: Diversity of race or tribe or language or religion are the main reasons people kill each other on a large scale. Diversity — within the same territory — is strife, not strength.

Another comical idea is that a “diverse” workforce is somehow a great advantage for business or world trade. This is one of those giant, untested notions that otherwise skeptical people swallow without a gurgle. Ninety-nine percent of the things we buy have nothing to do with “diversity.” No one cares whether his computer was assembled by a Chinaman or a Dane or whether his bread was baked by a robot or a chimpanzee.

It does not take an Irishman to sell things to the Irish. The world’s most successful trading nations today are Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even China, none of which has even heard of “diversity” or “tolerance.” American companies are full of blather about multi-racial workforces that “look like America” — and are constantly being whipped in their own markets by workforces that look like Yokohama.

At the same time, people seem to be too dazed by this incomprehensible diversity argument to notice that it seems to be only whites who suffer from the paralysis of homogeneity and for whom diversity is going to be such a tonic. No one is urging Howard University, which is overwhelmingly black, to recruit Hispanics or Asians so its students can benefit from racial diversity. No one is suggesting that Mexico should start an immigration program to reduce Hispanics to a minority in a few decades. But if racial diversity is such a great thing for the United States, why not for Mexico, too? Why not for Howard and for all the other “historically black” universities?

If white Americans were pouring across the border into Mexico demanding that their children be educated in English, insisting on welfare, demonstrating for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, demanding voting rights for aliens, celebrating July 4th rather than Cinco de Mayo, could anyone trick the Mexicans into thinking this was joyous diversity? No. The Mexicans would recognize an invasion when they saw one. They would open fire.

There used to be much talk about “ugly Americans,” who traveled over-seas expecting to find hamburgers and English-speakers, and who ignorantly deprecated the quaint customs of the natives. We were supposed to be deeply ashamed of them — and they were only tourists! “Ugly Mexicans” and “ugly Haitians” come here to live permanently, but we are supposed to be endlessly sensitive to their peculiarities, and revel in the diversity of toadying to their ethnic demands.

“Racial diversity,” therefore, is strictly a one-way street. Only whites are ever expected to practice it or benefit from it. The ultimate insult is to expect whites to celebrate diversity. This is nothing less than asking them to celebrate their own capitulation, their dwindling numbers and declining influence. The astonishing thing is that so many whites actually do go through the motions of rejoicing in their decline.

Just Deserts

Of course, a few whites refuse to believe that dispossession is a fine thing. For these stubborn cases, there is a completely different argument to justify demographic shift: Whites took America away from the Indians, so it is now someone else’s turn. This argument is made by the same people who chant the mantra of diversity, but it implicitly concedes that diversity is a fraud.

Diversity advocates never suggest that what happened to the Indians was a good thing. But have Indians not benefited more than any other people in history from the joys of precisely the kind of diversity whites are, today, supposed to welcome? If diversity is to be celebrated, it should be Christmas all year “round for the Indians. Of course, no one tries to make this point. The you-took-it-away-from-the-Indians argument recognizes that the European conquest of the continent was a catastrophe for Indians and that what is happening now is a catastrophe for whites. It is a catastrophe whites are supposed to accept cheerfully because they took America from its rightful owners.

But this, too, is a completely one-sided argument. The Cherokee, for example, took away the land of an earlier group called the Mound Builders. Why are they known as the Mound Builders? Because the Cherokee exterminated them and no one even knows their name. All that is left of them are their strange earthworks.

If whites are supposed to stand aside while every third-world tribe marches into the United States because whites took the country from Indians, then the Cherokee should have stood aside for the Europeans — because they took the place away from the Mound Builders. Needless to say, current orthodoxy holds that for Indians it makes no difference how many people they killed to get the land or how recently; it was theirs to defend with every means at their disposal. Whites, on the other hand, have an unending debt not just to the descendants of the peoples they refrained from exterminating but to every other non-white people on the face of the earth. Just like fairy tales about the joys of diversity, the land-title argument is used exclusively to criticize and demoralize whites.

Successful Societies

What is it, though, that gives rise to movements of peoples and debates about who has rights to the land? It is the fact that whites build successful societies non-whites want to move into. Generous Nicaraguans and Haitians do not come to America eager to share the gift of “diversity” with poor, benighted white people who are about to expire from a galloping case of homogeneity. They come because their societies don’t work and they know life will be better here.

The same process is at work in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Whites establish the most desirable societies in the history of man. Desperate people from failed, non-white societies are willing to risk nearly everything — sometimes even their lives — for a chance to live in these societies.

If Europeans had turned North American into a giant pesthole no one would want to come. No one would then have to think up reasons why everyone had the right to come, or why whites actually benefit from being outnumbered and pushed aside by people unlike themselves.

The same is true on a smaller scale. Rarely is it ever said, but in the United States virtually every desirable place to live, work, or go to school is desirable because whites made it that way. Non-whites naturally want access to these places even if they did not — and could not — create them. This is why it is always non-whites who are pushing their ways into white institutions — never the other way around — and why all the overblown dramas of “exclusion,” “tolerance,” “justice,” and “racism” are played out on white territory and put whites on the defensive.

Whites are not, of course, clamoring to get into Howard University, live in Harlem, or to move to Guatemala. But if there were something rare and desirable in those places, the non-whites who made them desirable would fight like demons to keep others out.

The sad truth is that, generally speaking, once non-whites have gotten what they want, and have arrived in large numbers in what were previously white institutions or neighborhoods, those institutions and neighborhoods slowly lose the qualities that attracted non-whites in the first place. Whites leave, and the spoor of European man begins to fade. For the most part, third-world immigrants eventually recreate in the United States the societies they left behind — with all the shortcomings that prompted them to leave home in the first place.

The mystery in all this is not why non-whites want the benefits of white society, but why whites are so willing to hand over to strangers the land of their ancestors — why they appear to be so willing to permit aliens to occupy and transform their nation. Just like every other argument about race in America today, white passivity is based on yet another double standard: Non-whites have powerful and legitimate group interests but whites do not.

Before he was assassinated, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained that what mattered most to him as an Israeli was that his country remain at least 80 percent Jewish. No one suggested that Mr. Rabin was a bigot or hate-monger — and of course he was not. He was merely stating the obvious: That if Israel ceased to be predominantly Jewish it would change in irreversible ways that would be intolerable to Jews.

Mexicans, Japanese, Algerians, Senegalese — all non-whites understand that demographic transformation is a national calamity. It is so obvious it need not even be stated. For whites it is just as much a national calamity, and the morality and reasoning of a white who wants America to stay at least 80 percent white are exactly the same as those of Yitzhak Rabin.

The forms of civility, the folkways, the demeanor and the texture of life that whites take for granted cannot survive the embrace of large numbers of aliens. The things whites love most about culture and human society have not survived in Detroit and Miami. It is not considered “nice” to say so; it prompts shouts of “racism” to say so. But it is because the things they love have not survived that whites have moved away from Detroit and Miami. Individually, whites react in an entirely natural way to racial change. American Renaissance is unusual only in making explicit what virtually all whites feel but never say.

The crisis that whites face today is that for fear of being called “racists,” for fear of being thought not nice, they seem prepared to let their country change in ways that they know will not be an improvement. How can it be good for America — or good for whites — for it to become increasingly like those very parts of the country in which they refuse to live?

Whites are so fearful of the charge of “racism” that they are unwilling even to discuss what they might do to avoid leaving a third-world nation to their grandchildren. Whites are therefore preparing to pass on to future generations a nation in which they might well be unwilling to live.

The colonists did not fight for independence from Britain in order for our generation to turn this country over to Mexicans and Haitians. The Founders did not frame the Constitution to celebrate diversity. Americans did not spill their blood at Gettysburg or in Europe or the Pacific for multiculturalism. And yet, the rightful heirs to what could have been a shining beacon of Western Civilization are giving up their country without a struggle — for fear that to do otherwise would be “racist.”

What we are witnessing is one of the great tragedies in human history. Powerful forces are in motion that, if left unchecked, will slowly push aside European man and European civilization and then dance a victory jig on their collective grave. If we do nothing, the nation we leave to our children and grandchildren will be a desolated, third-world failure, in which whites will be a despised minority. Western Civilization will be a faint echo, vilified if it is even audible. There is no other tragedy that is at once so great, so unnatural, and so unnecessary.

ARTICLE

AR in the News

Hysteria in Louisville

In the run up to the May conference, AR has received an unprecedented amount of news coverage. Much of this attention has been prompted by an organization called Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (which has the unlikely acronym of FAIR), a lefty group that tries to ensure that the media never violate current taboos.

FAIR appears to have first become exercised about AR in January when the very popular New York City radio talk show host, Bob Grant, said a few kind words about the conference. During his program, Mr. Grant mentioned the names of some of the speakers, and concluded by saying, “These are outstanding speakers and if I can, I’m going to take my microphone down there and tune in.”

This prompted FAIR to devote the April 1996 cover story of its newsletter, Extra! Update, to denunciations of Bob Grant, AR, and of several of the speakers. In its usual way, FAIR took what it thought were the most provocative, out-of-context quotations from the writings of these speakers and tried to make them sound representative.

For example, Professor Philippe Rushton’s very comprehensive and important work on racial differences was introduced in this way:

“Philippe Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, conducts crank studies comparing cranial capacity with genital size. “It’s a trade-off,’ Rushton explains, “more brain or more penis. You can’t have everything.’”

Samuel Francis was quoted as saying that non-whites do not deserve (FAIR’s word) “the right to political equality, the right to vote, or the right to hold political office, let alone . . . the “right’ to attend the same schools, to serve on juries, to marry across racial lines.” In fact, in his March 1995 AR article, Dr. Francis writes that no citizen of any race has these rights under the Constitution, and that such “rights” should be granted locally.

The FAIR story ended with an invitation to readers to denounce Bob Grant by writing letters of complaint to the radio station’s parent company, Walt Disney. This was, of course, an attempt to have Mr. Grant fired. Another part of the firing campaign was a quarter-page ad in the March 31 New York Times, which took the form of an open letter to Michael Eisner, Walt Disney’s chairman. The letter ran under the headline “Is Bigotry a Disney Family Value?” and referred once again to Mr. Grant’s comments on the “white supremacist” AR conference.

In April, Mr. Grant was duly fired, but was almost immediately given a new job at a different New York City station. His program is as popular as ever.

In the meantime, local “civil rights” activists in Louisville had received FAIR’s material and had visited the AR web page. Horrified that “white supremacists” would dare hold a conference in their town, they alerted the Louisville Courier-Journal, which obliged with a good-sized article headlined: “White Supremacist Conference Planned at Seelbach Hotel.” The article recycled some of the FAIR material, but also printed a few paragraphs from the web page. It noted that despite pressure to cancel the conference, the management of the Seelbach was taking a “neutral” position.

The local lefty weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer wrote a cover story about the conference, with photographs of a man in a suit wearing a KKK hood. The headlines were, “Louisville, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Racists Without a Klu.” The story mainly contained more recycled FAIR material, some of it printed word-for-word.

The day after the Courier-Journal article appeared, a “prayer vigil” of half a dozen people materialized in front of the Seelbach Hotel. Having failed to persuade the hotel to cancel its contract, “civil rights activists” prayed to God to intervene and derail the conference. The local television news led with the story.

There has since been a considerable amount of media whooping about AR and the conference. Not just once but twice, the Courier-Journal has denounced AR in its editorials. One was titled “Fear’s Disciples,” and along with the usual bromides about “fighting racism” and “continuous dialogue” unbosomed the view that “purveyors of racial division are, at heart, scared people.”

The second, only three days later, complained somewhat incoherently that AR was getting far more ink and air-time than it deserves. It described a letter to the editor by Jared Taylor, published on the same day, as “a study in either semantic deception or self-delusion.” The letter included the AR telephone number and web page address, however, and produced a gratifying wave of inquiries.

This is a story that will not die. Two high schools, which had scheduled proms for the same weekend as the conference, asked the Seelbach to cancel its agreement with AR so that the frolicking could take place away from the sinister aroma of “white supremacy.” The Seelbach politely explained that it would abide by its contract with AR. When the high schools decided to take their proms elsewhere, the Seelbach refunded deposits that it had every right to keep.

Part of the irony of the prom boycott is that one was scheduled for Friday evening and the AR conference does not start until Saturday evening. The one that would actually have overlapped with the start of the conference was scheduled for an entirely different floor, and the promenaders would not even have known the conference was taking place. The students have now learned that some views are so dangerous they can contaminate an entire building — and do so 24 hours before the people who hold those views even arrive.

The media have also covered a “debate” between Jared Taylor and a black minister, Louis Coleman, who has been one of the leading lights in the campaign to persuade the Seelbach to cancel its contract. Debate was somewhat hampered by Mr. Coleman’s tendency to read prepared statements, but excerpts were aired on radio and television, and appeared in the Courier-Journal.

So far, the news coverage has been largely shouts of “racism!” and “white supremacy!”, bolstered by unflattering commentary from lefty “watch-dog groups” and “civil rights activists.” The Courier-Journal is not insensible to this, and has granted Mr. Taylor a chance to speak for himself, for a change, on the Op-Ed page. Likewise, Mr. Taylor is scheduled to explain his views on a local “meet-the-press” television program.

Radio talk show hosts in Louisville have been timid. One of the most popular scheduled an hour’s interview but canceled the day after the Courier-Journal complained that Mr. Taylor was getting too much air time. In explanation, the station invoked formula: The appearance “would not be in the best interests of the program.” The substitute for Mr. Taylor was another black minister, a colleague of Mr. Coleman, who denounced AR. Meanwhile, a Lexington radio station has broadcast an excellent, hour-long interview with Mr. Taylor.

Throughout this fracas, the Seelbach Hotel has faced considerable pressure to cancel its contract with AR. Ever since news of the conference was made public, there have been weekly “vigils” in front of the hotel. The number of demonstrators is small, but this is not the kind of publicity a four-star hotel seeks. During the Kentucky Derby, some of the demonstrators were shown on television asking hotel guests not to stay in the Seelbach if they ever return to Louisville.

The Seelbach has been superb. The manager has assured us that the hotel will honor its contract, and his public statements have been consistent and principled. It is most unusual for an American company to hold firm in the face of a sustained “civil rights” campaign, no matter how unfair or misguided. We tip our hats to a first-class hotel and look forward to a first-class conference.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Different Worlds

Elvie Whitney is a black English teacher who sued Chabot Community College in Oakland, California for discrimination when she was denied tenure. Her lawyers claimed that the English department at Chabot was a “bastion of elitism” and resisted multi-cultural change. In April, a jury duly awarded her $290,000 in damages plus legal fees. Later interviews revealed that the jurors indeed did find that Miss Whitney was treated differently on account of race, but not as she had claimed. They found that the college had been so eager to ensure that the one black woman in the department succeed that colleagues had not warned her that she would not automatically get tenure. They constantly gave her the benefit of the doubt, and refrained from criticizing her in ways that might have led to improvement and an offer of tenure.

“Well that’s nice, and that’s perhaps humanitarian of them but it wasn’t fair to her,” said one juror. This difference in treatment — based on race — was found to be “discrimination” worth $290,000. (Judy Campbell, Chabot Community College Found Guilty of Racial Discrimination, Express (Berkeley, CA), April 26, 1996, p. 2.) This case shows how different are the worlds in which blacks and whites live. Whites, for fear of accusations of racism, weigh every word before they utter it. The result, in the eyes of blacks is “racism” that justifies legal action.

Glimmers of Light

Miami, Florida is located in Dade county. Whites have long been an elusive minority, a trace ingredient in its exotic brew of Caribbean and Hispanic immigrants. For years, the Miami Herald has chirped about the multi-racial joy that immigrants bring, but reality seems to have begun to penetrate even its self-imposed blinders. The paper has tumbled to the fact that people with no education or profession can’t find jobs.

A recent article noted the percentage of households in various Dade County groups that are in poverty (the percentage of poor people is higher because poor families tend to be bigger than average): Haitians 35 percent; Nicaraguans 31 percent; Mexicans 31 percent; American blacks 30 percent; Hondurans 29 percent; Dominicans 24 percent. Even Cubans, the fabled Hispanic group that is supposed to be such an American success story had a household poverty rate of 16 percent, more than twice the white rate of seven percent. As usual, Asians did well, with a household poverty rate of eight percent. Interestingly, the next best performance was by Jamaicans, with a rate of 14 percent.

Since Dade County is so overwhelmingly non-white and run by Hispanics, the Herald could not even manage to find white people to blame for all this poverty, though it did refrain from suggesting that unemployable foreigners should stay home. (Gregg Fields and Mimi Whitefield, Face of the Future, The Herald (Miami), April 29, 1996, p. BM22.)

Low-g Thinking at Wiley

Christopher Brand is a professor of psychology at University of Edinburgh, who has written an excellent little book on intelligence called The g Factor. John Wiley and Sons was the publisher, and brought the book out initially in Britain, with the intention of releasing it later in the United States. Since Prof. Brand writes sensibly about the heritability of intelligence, as well as the gap between black and white IQ, the book prompted a storm of criticism in Britain, complete with the usual shrieking about “racism.” In the midst of the uproar, Wiley suddenly discovered that the book it had until then been promoting as first-class science was, on reflection, “repellent” and decided to depublish, so to speak. It has stopped filling orders and no longer wants anything to do with the book. The U.S. release has been canceled. Next month we will publish a review of The g Factor, along with a more complete account of Prof. Brand’s travails.

Straight Talk

Loompanics Unlimited (Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368) is a book distributor that specializes in the unconventional. One of its featured offerings is You Are Going to Prison, by Jim Hogshire. It purports to be a realistic, insider’s guide for people who are about to become guests of the state. A few excerpts:

To the simple question ‘Am I going to get butt-f***ed?’ the simple answer is ‘yes.’ Sorry, the odds are not with you, Mr. Fish.

Rape, especially gang rape, is almost exclusively a black on white occurrence. More than 90% of prison rapists are black and the instance of a white raping a black is the rarest of all. If this rankles your ideals about racial harmony and the essential equality of the races, etc. — tough s**t. Most rape victims are young and white.

Race relations in prison are worse than abysmal . . . 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 . . . In some cases this may happen within hours of your arrival. (Loompanics catalogue, p. 14.)

It is almost impossible to find careful, scholarly studies of prison rape. This silence gives rise to anecdotal accounts like Mr. Hogshire’s. Things may or may not be as gruesome as he suggests, but at the very least, his book may discourage whites from committing crimes.

Call for Papers

The Journal of Libertarian Studies is soliciting papers for a special symposium on immigration. Papers selected will be published in the Spring 1997 issue. The deadline for submission is October 15, 1996, and there is no submission fee. Authors need not be libertarian; winning papers may be expositions or criticisms of the libertarian position. This journal does not usually publish dry, timid stuff. It is edited by very wide-awake men who are likely to read all submissions with an open mind. The Journal of Libertarian Studies can be reached at Box 4091, Burlingame, CA 94011 or by calling (415) 692-8456.

Knickers in a Twist

Carrie Chapman Catt, who died in 1947, is the most famous female graduate of Iowa State University. She was a founder of the League of Women Voters and a tireless champion for the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. Last fall, the university honored this feminist paragon by putting her name on a building.

Alas, not all is well among the progressives. In speeches she delivered in Mississippi and North Carolina, Mrs. Catt urged ratification of the amendment because “white supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women’s suffrage.” She also referred to Indians as savages, and urged that uneducated immigrants be denied the vote. Curiously, all this was known and discussed when Mrs. Catt was honored. Twenty-six out of 27 lady law-makers in the state house signed a letter in her support.

Lately, black anger has been building, but the university seems to be holding firm. It has started emphasizing her support for the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations, and is now touting her as a crusader for world peace as well as women’s rights. (AP, Suffragette’s Racial Remark Haunts College, New York Times, May 5, 1995.)

More Pep for Jesse

Jackie Jackson, wife of Jesse Jackson, has described life in the Jackson household. He was pulling on his socks, she says, when he told her he had decided to run for President:

I said, ‘Hot dog! Way to go, Jesse!’ We had a little pep rally right there. ‘Yes! I am somebody! Never surrender! Keep hope alive!’ We do that sort of thing around the house, you know. (Race and Presidential Races, San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1996.)

Honest Dialogue

In late 1995, Kansas City appointed a task force to conduct an “honest, in-depth examination of race relations.” Mayor Emanuel Cleaver claimed that “If we are able to somehow erase this problem of race in our community, we will become the number one city on the planet.” (Philip O’Connor, Group to Explore KC Race Relations, Kansas City Star, Dec. 7, 1995, p. A1.) It is curious that racial diversity — said to be such a source of strength — is the only thing keeping Kansas City from being the top city on the planet. In any case, the task force has now grown to 300 people and has begun its work, part of which was a telephone survey of attitudes about race.

Perhaps the most significant finding is that in this age of “dialogue” and “sharing,” two-thirds of the people asked to participate in the survey refused. “And many, in declining, used racial epithets,” the Kansas City Star reports. Others, having agreed to be surveyed, stopped answering questions partway through.

So far, very few of the results of this unrepresentative survey have been released. We do know, however, that 51 percent of whites said they were in favor of affirmative action, which pleased the task force. Thirty percent of blacks said they had been harassed by the police, a figure the task force found suspiciously small. (Mary Sanchez & Glenn Rice, Race Relations Difficult to Discuss, Kansas City Star, April 6, 1996, p. C1.) It has been clear for years that people lie to pollsters about race. Now they are refusing even to talk.

Latin Solidarity

Under the slogan “Our Day is Coming,” a group of Hispanic newspapers and a Spanish-language television network have started a drive to register at least one million Hispanic voters for the November election. The main figurehead for the campaign is Cuban-born singer Willy Chirino. He recently explained his motives: “I am a person who believes there should be a way for Hispanics to get together as one nation within the United States, to forget a little bit about our own heritage — this business of “I’m Cuban,’ “I’m Mexican,’ “I’m Colombian’ — and think in terms of Hispanics and Latin people.” (Carol Rosenberg, An Anthem to Get Out the Vote, The Herald (Miami), April 17, 1996, p. 6A.)

Eyes on the Prize

Canada is such an attractive destination for immigrants that people have gone into businesses to help newcomers get legal status. The Yellow Pages for Vancouver alone list 41 immigration consultants. One is Jaswant Singh Mangat. One of his clients was an Indian woman from Fiji named Om Wati Chand. She paid Mr. Mangat $4,000 for advice and a virtual guarantee of refugee status. When her request was denied, she swore out an affidavit on Mr. Mangat’s methods, which included advice that she claim that she was raped by native Fijian soldiers:

Mr. Mangat told me that this false rape claim was necessary so that my claim would be accepted by the panel, as my story was weak. He told me that his Indo-Fijian wife, Aruna, who had attended school with me in Fiji, had received her visa to stay on a rape claim.

Mr. Mangat is now being sued by the Law Society of British Columbia for illegally practicing law. (Jerry Collins, “This False Rape Claim Was Necessary,’ British Columbia Report, Dec. 4, 1995, p. 11.)

CCRI on Ballot

The California Civil Rights Initiative, which would ban racial discrimination by the State of California, has received enough voter signatures to qualify for the November ballot. (Reuter, California Initiative to Bar Racial Preferences Qualifies, April 16, 1996.)

The nation has come to an astonishing pass when it takes a grassroots campaign by citizens to put an end to government discrimination against the majority population. Like mass immigration, affirmative action is forced upon Americans despite deep-seated opposition. All predictions are that the civil rights initiative will win easily. Voters will have had an opportunity to express themselves only because of the hard work and dedication of thousands of volunteers who put the issue on the ballot.

Bardot Speaks Out

Retired French actress, Brigitte Bardot, has written a column in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, in which she denounces Muslim immigration to France. Calling herself  “a Frenchwoman of old stock,” she notes that both her father and grandfather fought against foreign invaders.

“And now my country, France, my homeland, my land, is with the blessing of successive governments again invaded by a foreign, especially Muslim, over-population to which we pay allegiance,” she wrote. “We have to submit against our will to this Muslim over-flow. From year to year, we see mosques flourish across France, while our church bells fall silent because of a lack of priests.”

Miss Bardot, who has worked almost full-time for animal rights since she retired from the screen in 1972, is especially offended by the ritual throat-slitting of millions of sheep by Muslims on feast days. She wrote that practices of this kind are intolerable: “Could I be forced in the near future to flee my country which has turned into a bloody and violent country, to turn expatriate, to try and find elsewhere, by myself becoming an emigrant, the respect and esteem which we are alas refused daily?” [alas, not our translation]

A lefty French group called Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples says Miss Bardot has broken French law because her statement is a “genuine incitement to racial hatred.” (Reuter, Paris, April 26, 1996, France’s Bardot Under Fire for Blasting Moslems.)

Scarcely News

Blacks in Oakland, California rioted on April 21 after a rap concert by Tha Dogg Pound. For three hours, thousands of fans threw rocks and bottles at police, stripped women naked, fought each other, and did “doughnuts” in the street with their cars.

One car streaked away from the riot at over 100 miles an hour, went out of control, smashed through a school yard fence, careened 200 feet across a playground, plowed through a stucco wall, and ended up in a first-grade classroom. Fortunately, no one was in school, but two riders in the car were killed. The riot and deaths were thought to be so uninteresting that they merited only a small story on page 17 of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Erin Hallissy, 2 Men Killed Speeding from Oakland Riot, San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1996, p. A17.)

Insecticide

Another school team is being pressured to change its name. The athletes at Virginia’s Emory & Henry College are not Rebels or Redskins; they are Wasps. College President Thomas Morris points out that the name was never meant to be racially exclusive but one member of the school’s African-American Society complains that it sounds too much like the acronym WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant). (Andrew Cain, College Keeps Wasp as Mascot Despite PC Buzz, Washington Times, April 19, 1996.)

Equal Rights, Equal Standards

Last month’s “O Tempora” section (“Sanity in the Fifth Circuit”) described an important federal court ruling under which universities in the 5th circuit — Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — are forbidden to use race as a criterion for admissions. The only exception is to correct a university’s own acts of past discrimination. The decision is causing consternation in Mississippi, where race-blind admissions are expected to cut the number of blacks entering university this year by at least 50 percent.

Ordinarily, about 60 percent of college-bound black Mississippians attend three virtually all-black colleges. Admissions standards have been significantly lower than at majority-white schools, but they must now be brought up to snuff. The entering classes at the black schools may be only 40 percent of their numbers in previous years. (Peter Applebome, Equal Admission Standards Leave Mississippi’s Black Universities Wary, New York Times, April 24, 1996, p. A14.)

Multi-racial Paradise

Winston Peters, a New Zealand Maori, is founder of the New Zealand First party, which opposes immigration, 60 percent of which is from Asia. His unabashed nativism has shot him to the top in political popularity polls. Now, an Asian immigrant named Robert Hum has founded the Ethnic Minority Party of New Zealand, which aims to promote immigration. The usual Pollyannas are saying that race has no legitimate place in politics.

Mr. Hum agrees in theory, but says that since the New Zealand First party is flirting with race, he must counter with race. “I think the Asian people are saying back to Winston Peters, “Since you have used the race card in the forthcoming elections, we have no other choice but to group ourselves under a race party as well’,” he says. (Matthew Brockett, Reuter, (Wellington, New Zealand) Asian Political Party Fuels Race Debate, April 22, 1996.)

Suffer the Little Children

When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) catches illegal border crossers it ordinarily puts them in detention before sending them home. As a humanitarian measure, this policy is not applied to illegals who cross with minor children, since detention centers are not thought to be good for children. Instead, families are released into the United States with the expectation that they will later appear for hearings. This policy has produced a market in borrowed or rented children. Once “families” are released into the United States they disappear. An INS official concedes that this problem cannot be solved so long as families are treated more leniently than adults. (Associated Press, (Brownsville, Texas) Illegal Immigrants Renting Children, April 5, 1996.)

The Usual Split

A Milwaukee jury has split along racial lines in the murder trial of a black man. Although the panel voted to convict Wayne Hollins of robbery, the ten white jurors voted to convict on murder and the two blacks voted to acquit. Deliberations become so disagreeable that at the end the two blacks, both women, isolated themselves in the rest room. They later accused the whites of “racism,” saying they were ostracized. Whites claimed that the blacks did not want to discuss the case and interpreted deliberations as personal attacks. One black was reported to have objected that the law was written for white men.

After a mistrial was declared, the ten white jurors visited the prosecutor to explain that the inability to reach a verdict was not due to bad lawyering. “He [the prosecutor] did a good job and we wanted him to know that,” the jury foreman explained. (David Doege, Racial Split Deadlocks Murder Case, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, April 6, 1996, p. 1.)

Out of the Mouths of Brits

At Oscar time, it was politely reported that Jesse Jackson was roaring about how few blacks had been nominated. The Sunday Times of London had this to say about Rev. Jackson:

Jackson and his merry gang went protesting against — now get this — ‘an industry that depicts blacks in such a demeaning manner as to constitute a form of violence.’ How was that again? In the films I have seen over the past 25 years, blacks are depicted as wise, heroic or compassionate figures who help whites, however racist. Rarely has a black been depicted as being on welfare, burning down Korean businesses, smoking crack and committing hate crimes against whites. Better yet, when was the last time you saw a film in which the military man was not a bloodthirsty fascist, the priest a sexual pervert, the businessman a crook, the CIA and FBI chiefs secretly plotting to take over the country — any country — while the black is portrayed as positively beyond reproach? (Taki, Sunday Times, March 31, 1996.)

Thought Crimes

The U.S. Treasury Department is considering new regulations on permissible off-duty behavior for its law enforcement officers. If task force recommendations are approved, more than 19,500 agents in the Secret Service, ATF, Customs Service and IRS would be barred from “on or off-duty abusive, derisive, profane, or demeaning statements, conduct or gestures evidencing hatred or prejudice . . . on account of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age or disability.” New proposals also call for a screening process that would ensure that no one is hired who is guilty of “invidious prejudices.” (Pierre Thomas, Treasury Panel Targets Off-Duty Words, Deeds, Washington Times, April 2, 1996, p. A1.)

Africans in Chains

Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group notes that there is still slavery in Africa. Film footage obtained by PBS shows that in Sudan, thousands of enslaved black Christian children are routinely chained and beaten by their Arab Muslim masters in what are called “Koranic schools.” The U.S. State Department reports that in Mauritania more than 90,000 blacks are classified as the property of Arabo-Berber Muslims. Mr. Jacob’s group has found slavery in third world nations from Bangladesh to Brazil. (Charles Jacobs, Black Slaves in Africa, Letters to the Editor, Wall St. Journal, Nov. 2, 1995.)

Jeering the Jury

In his recently published book, In Contempt, black prosecutor Christopher Darden writes about the mostly-black jury on the O.J. Simpson case. From “the moment I walked into that courtroom . . . I could see in their eyes the need to settle some score. And I was the only prosecutor who knew what the score was.” “They didn’t want proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” he adds. “They wanted proof beyond some degree that mortal man can’t provide.” So why did he take the case? “I had naively believed my presence would, in some way, embolden my black brothers and sisters . . . and that they would convict a black icon when they saw . . . the overwhelming evidence. Instead, I was branded an Uncle Tom, a traitor used by The Man.” (Larry Reibstein, Donna Foote, and Mark Miller, Darden Takes the Gloves Off, Newsweek, March 25, 1996, p. 46.)

Next Question, Please

Colleges and universities as well as the College Board, which administers the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), have noticed a rise in the number of students who decline to disclose their races. Last year, 94,000 SAT takers failed to make a designation, as opposed to 78,000 five years ago. In the California university system, the number of applicants refusing to answer the question increased by 28.5 percent in 1995 over the year before. College officials and independent consultants agree that whites, who believe their race is a liability, account for the increase. (Steve Stecklow, Is “What’s Your Race’ a Trick Question? More College Applicants Now Say It Is, Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1996, p. B8.)

Innocence Betrayed

Well known for their generosity, retired Parisians Claude Vitrey and Denise Bouchard often took in poor strangers for the night, but they got little thanks from Mahmoud Benchaiba and Mohamed Meroue.

The two ex-convicts held the aged couple prisoners in their own home for a year. They stole the couple’s pension money, beat them, and barely fed them, while they sold drugs from the house. The ordeal finally came to an end only when the two Arabs were arrested for drug trafficking and police discovered their living arrangements. Mr. Vitrey was hospitalized for shock; Mrs. Bouchard for malnutrition. (AP, Kindly Couple Held Hostage for a Year, Detroit News, April 14, 1996, p. 8A.)

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — In the May issue there is a very interesting and informative review of Black Slaveowners by Larry Koger. In his review, Mr. Wilson mentions a black slave who escaped from the British during the Revolution to return to this master. This event tends to refute claims that slavery in America was invariably characterized by brutal cruelty.

Southerners who know their real history know that stories such as the one cited by Mr. Wilson are commonplace. One is of special interest for many reasons, including the fact that it marks the close of a disgraceful period in American history. It is a story which, for obvious reasons, has been allowed to be forgotten, but it was fortunately preserved in the WPA guidebook to South Carolina. (I heartily recommend the WPA guidebooks to AR readers. They are one of the few useful things to be produced by the Franklin Roosevelt presidency and are now repositories of much information that would be suppressed by liberals if they could.)

In the closing years of the War Between the States, the North embarked on a policy of seizing Southern hostages as guarantees against civilian resistance to the federal tactic of burning and destroying farms, villages, and cities. Gen. Sherman especially embraced this practice, since his armies were at times spread out over a front 60 miles wide. One can imagine that the Southern farmers of the 1860s were a tough breed, and took umbrage at the burning of their farms, but Sherman executed hostages if his soldiers met civilian resistance. While this seems harsh, and in fact the same policy by the Germans in World War II was rather hypocritically denounced by the United States, civilians who shoot uniformed soldiers are not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war.

As Southern resistance weakened, Sherman carried the policy even further. After burning Columbia, South Carolina, he announced that he would shoot prisoners and hostages even if uniformed soldiers of the Confederate army offered resistance. Gen. Wade Hampton denounced this as sheer murder.

In the last days of the war, as the Northern armies approached the southern border of North Carolina, a Sergeant Woodford of the 46th Ohio plundered a small farm near Pageland, South Carolina. He stole so much of the livestock and property that he could not haul off all his booty, and forced a black slave named Dick Sowell to help him carry it.

Sowell was outraged by the behavior of the Northern soldier. When Woodford stopped to take a nap, the slave picked up a piece of firewood and beat his brains out. He then collected the stolen property and returned it to his master.

When the body of the Federal soldier was found, Sherman decreed that a hostage had to die. He forced Confederate prisoners to draw lots. The unlucky draw fell to cavalryman James H. Miller who was executed by firing squad. His body lies in the Five Forks Cemetery four miles outside of Pageland, beneath a stone engraved “murdered in retaliation.”

Could a more politically incorrect story be written even as fiction? The last Southern hostage to be murdered by abolitionists died as a result of the brave actions of a slave outraged by the cruelty and thievery of a federal soldier. So much for the contemporary rewriting of Civil War history, according to which most black slaves “rose up” to greet their liberators.

Sam G. Dickson, Atlanta, Ga.

Sir — Your May cover story on race and health was the most boring thing you have ever published. If AR keeps counting cases of colorectal cancer it may soon be time for me to start reading something else.

John Hope, Lancaster, Pa.

Sir — I very much enjoyed your cover story about racial differences in medicine and health. Never again will I pay much attention to hand-wringing news reports about how blacks are dying of all sorts of diseases only because white society denies them adequate medical care. As the article clearly points out, by comparison with Asians and even American Indians, whites are dying in startlingly large numbers.

Public health and medicine appear to be just one more aspect of life that is needlessly complicated by our unwise policies of multi-racialism.

Ed Shoals, Bonnie Doone, N.C.

Sir — I was amused by the “O Tempora” item about Matteson, Illinois’ multi-racial town council, which is trying to lure back whites who have fled the town as it turns increasingly black. Middle-class blacks quite naturally do not want to live in the kinds of neighborhoods that black majorities invariably seem to produce. Nor, I suspect, do they wish to live in areas where Mexicans or Southeast Asians predominate.

Given the sensible desire of Matteson’s blacks to preserve the Euro-American character of their town — and the implicitly racialist message of this desire — would it be so farfetched to think that blacks could be persuaded to join a movement to reduce third-world immigration? My suspicion is that on this issue most blacks would make common cause with whites — if they had a choice.

Name Withheld, Gulfport, Miss.