June 2011
| American Renaissance magazine | |
|---|---|
| Vol. 22, No. 6 | June 2011 |
| CONTENTS |
|---|
Who’s White; Who’s Not?
The Crisis We Face
The Galton Report: The Decline of the West
Bin Laden’s Death
The Bliss of Ignorance
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters
| COVER STORY |
|---|
Who’s White; Who’s Not?
Making sense of the 2010 census.
Those of us who care about the future of our country and our people have no source but the US census for information about demographic change. The problem, of course, is that for years, the racial categories for the census have been neither scientific, consistent, nor rational. Therefore, it takes some sleuthing to get a sense of the actual number of whites in America — those I would define as descended on both sides from white-skinned people of European origin.
One problem is subjectivity. Before 1960, census takers, who were known as enumerators, looked people over and determined their race according to instructions provided by the bureau. Since 1960, respondents have chosen their own race, and this makes the statistics less reliable.
Back when the country was essentially white and black with a few Indians, census categories were reasonably clear, and people of pure Spanish ancestry were categorized as “white” wherever they were born or came from. Hispanics, however, began to bedevil the process earlier than most people realize. A “Mexican” category first appeared in instructions for enumerators for the 1930 Census, and was described as “a racial mixture difficult to classify.” Anyone enumerators found who was “not definitely white, Negro, or Indian . . . should be returned as Mexican (Mex.).”
The Mexican government lodged a formal protest with the State Department for the perceived slight of being considered non-white. Therefore, in 1940, the bureau dropped the Mexican category and told enumerators that “Mexicans are to be regarded as white unless definitely of Indian or other nonwhite race.” The same practice was followed in 1950. In 1960, the first year Americans chose their own race, there was no category for Mexicans or Central/South Americans. Presumably, they called themselves “white.”
“Hispanic” appeared for the first time in the 1970 census with the question, “Is this person’s origin or descent . . . Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, ‘Other Spanish,’ or ‘No, none of these’.” Ever since, as if the Census Bureau were celebrating the enormous growth of the Hispanic population, the very first question it asks about race or ethnicity is whether someone is Hispanic (see page 3 for Question 8 as it appears on the 2010 form). 2000 was the first year the census used the preposterous term “Latino,” which now appears to be a permanent fixture.
At this initial separation, those who are not Hispanic check “No,” and go on to the next question that asks specifically about race. Those who check “Yes,” have four choices: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, or “another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin.” Anyone in the “another” category is supposed to write in his nationality of origin. There is room for more than one, so someone whose father was Colombian and mother was Dominican could write in two nationalities.
Both Hispanics and non-Hispanics answer Question 9, the race question. The Census Bureau tells us that Hispanics can be of any race, but it is clear that the form pushes them to call themselves white — most are obviously not black, or some other category such as Chinese or American Indian.
Hispanics do have the option of choosing more than one race or the “Some other race” category. “Some other race” first appeared in the 2000 census, and that year, 42 percent of Hispanics chose it. The information about what race they claimed to be — Latino, Hispanic, Mexican? — is not easily available, but 97 percent of the 15.3 million people who chose that category — 5.5 percent of the population — were Hispanic. Forty-seven percent of Hispanics said they were white, with the remaining 11 percent scattered among other races. A dark-skinned Dominican, for example, could conceivably describe himself as black.
Understandably, Hispanics complain about the race options available to them. Who wants to belong to “Some other race?” In a March 11, 2011, letter to USA Today, a Hispanic whose family emigrated from El Salvador complained that most people like him “had no choice but to select ‘white’ as their race.” He asked his local census office for advice, and “a representative explained that there was no better option for [him] than to choose white.” He didn’t like that: “To me, white doesn’t really describe my race at all.”
In the 2010 census, the “Some other race” category had grown to 19.1 million people, or 6.2 percent of the population. Again, it is not clear what “other race” people claimed, nor is it possible at this point to learn what percentage of those who chose that category were Hispanic. However, there is no reason to believe it was very different from the 2000 figure of 97 percent.
Of course, the census would be even more misleading without “Some other race,” because even more Hispanics would be forced into the “white” category, making the country appear less Third-World than it really is. Between 2000 and 2010, the Census Bureau tried to drop “Some other race” — one wonders why — but Congress intervened in 2006 to keep it. That was unusual. Executive-branch agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget usually set race categories; not Congress.
On the other hand, a growing number of Hispanics like to think of themselves as both Hispanic and white. According to Roderick Harrison, a demographer at Howard University and a former chief of the Census Bureau’s racial statistics branch, this means they “can identify as white without feeling that they are . . . in denial about their Hispanicity.” Slightly more than half of all Hispanics in fact call themselves white, and this greatly inflates the figure for whites.
| The Most Common Multiple Race Mixes | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||
Even more surprising, no fewer than 46 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States claim, at least on their census forms, to be white. What they might claim for race-preference purposes could be a different matter, but it suggests there is still a strong attraction to the idea of being white.
The Census Bureau has no biracial or mixed-race category, but it does let respondents choose more than one race for themselves and their children. This, along with “Some other race,” was the other big innovation introduced in 2000, and it was a response, in part, to the fact that in the 1990 census, half a million people disobeyed instructions to choose a single race, and chose more than one. In 2000, when they first had the opportunity to do so, 2.4 percent of Americans chose multiple races.
In the 2010 Census, the multi-racial category increased slightly to 2.9 percent. This is still an underestimate, since many mixed-race people identify with the race of just one parent. The most common mixes have not yet been released for 2010, but their percentages from 2000 are in the following table. In reality, the number of people who can claim both white and black ancestry is far greater than those who can claim to be white and Asian. Clearly, many prefer to call themselves black rather than multi-racial.
The government, at least unofficially, seems to be pushing this new, multiple-race category. In December 2010, before the results were in, Robert Groves, head of the US Census Department, was looking forward to a sharp increase. “I can’t wait to see the pattern of responses on multiple races,” he said. “That’ll be a neat indicator to watch.”
The Asian section of Question 9, the one about race, is undoubtedly the most incoherent part of the whole census form. Most people agree that white and black are races. (The inclusion of “Negro” as an option for black is not a careless anachronism. The Census Bureau surveyed a lot of blacks and found that many of them like to think of themselves as “Negroes.”) Most people would also agree that American Indians and Eskimos are yet another group different from blacks or whites. But there then follow 11 different racial categories just for Asians.
Virtually no one besides census bureaucrats thinks Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese are “races,” and the form goes on to underline this strange thinking by adding in the “Other Asian” section, “Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai . . .”
These are, of course, nationalities, not races, and it is odd that Asians and Hispanics can list nationalities but whites and blacks cannot. In 2009, the US Commission on Civil Rights actually recommended that whites be given “analogous opportunities” to “specify any sub-group to which they belong,” such as “Irish, Swedish, or Arab.” Otherwise, “Some may be left with the impression that sub-groups, ethnicities, and ancestries within these categories [white and black] are less important, less worthy of attention or unlikely to suffer from discrimination on account of national origin. These are not impressions the Census Bureau should wish to leave.” The Census Bureau rejected this advice. Maybe whites will get that option when African immigrants get the option of writing in an African nationality.
The “black” category has traditionally been a consistent group composed of former slaves, but immigration is changing even this. Of the 37.3 million American blacks, more than 8 percent were born outside the United States; the figure was just 1 percent in 1960. Half of all foreign-born blacks are from the Caribbean and 34 percent are from Africa. There are now more than one million genuine African-Americans, in the sense that they were born in Africa and immigrated here. That is well over the estimated 800,000 Africans who were brought to North America during the slave trade.
The black and white categories suggest another — brown — and even though many Hispanics informally call themselves “brown,” that is not an option for the Census Department. Hispanics are therefore the largest group that does not fit logically into any of the department’s “races,” but there are others, and this means confusion for three more rapidly growing population groups: South Asians (e.g. sub-continental Indians, Pakistanis), North Africans, and Middle Easterners.
South Asians, according to the lower part of Question 9 on the census form, are treated as a subset of Asians. This means Northern Chinese and dark-skinned Dravidians from southern India are lumped together as “Asians,” even though they are listed on the census form as different “races:” Chinese and Asian Indian.
Arabs and Middle-Easterners obviously should have a category of their own. If Hmong and Laotians get their own designation, surely Arabs deserve one. Instead, by calling them “white,” the government has made that racial category so broad as to be almost meaningless. Thus, by Census Bureau decree, as soon as they set foot in the United States, Yemenis and Libyans become “white.” This may be flattering to them but bewildering to Americans, the vast majority of whom have no idea that, according to the government, their new Middle Eastern neighbors are fellow whites.
And consider the Pashtuns. This dark-skinned Islamic tribe straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border. According to the Census Bureau, Pashtuns who come from Afghanistan are white, while their cousins who come from Pakistan are Asian.
National Racial Percentages, 2010
The Census Bureau now releases two sets of data. One divides the population into seven racial categories but ignores Hispanics. The results for 2010 are:
| Racial Percentages (Without Hispanics) | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||||||||
The second set of data lists Americans according to whether they are Hispanic or not, and results for 2010 are as follows:
| Hispanics and non-Hispanics | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||||||
Most American Hispanics are from Mexico and Central America, where there are few whites, and the whites rarely immigrate to the United States. Latin Americans also have an expansive conception of whiteness. Therefore, even though when they are forced to choose between “white,” “black,” and “other” about half of all Hispanics call themselves white, most whites would not put them in that category.
Combining data from the two sets we get the results on the next page.
| More Meaningful Racial/Ethnic Figures | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||||||||
The “Some other race” category has been removed because it mostly overlaps with Hispanics, and what remain are the racial/ethnic groups that make the most sense to Americans. The total adds up to 101.3 percent because the small number of Hispanics who identity as Black, Asian, or American Indian has not been removed from those groups. The Census Bureau could make that adjustment and release more meaningful numbers but it does not.
The non-Hispanic white category is the closest approximation of the actual percentage of whites in the country. There is some number of genuinely white Hispanics — those of pure Spanish heritage, Germans from South America — but they are greatly outnumbered by the North Africans, Middle-Easterners, South Asians, etc., who are counted as white. There are no precise figures for these populations, but there are, for example, an estimated 2.5 million Arabs, 2 million subcontinental Indians, and half a million Pakistanis living in the United States.
In 2010, the non-Hispanic white figure of 63.6 percent was down from 69 percent in 2000. Keep in mind that due to the dynamics of mass immigration and high fertility rates among immigrants, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites gets increasingly smaller for younger population groups. White newborns, for example, are a minority of their cohort the moment they are born.
The future of America is on display in California, where the non-Hispanic white population has fallen to 40.1 percent, and Hispanics have nearly overtaken us at 37.6 percent. Whites are fleeing the state. Over the last 10 years, the number of white Californians fell by 860,537. During that period there were slightly more white deaths than births, but the bulk of the decline represents whites who left the state. For whites, the California dream is over.
Welcome to the New America
On March 25, 2011 USA Today published an article called “Census: A new face of America ” by someone named Haya El Nasser. Mr. (or Miss?) Nasser starts the story thus: “The nation ended the first decade of the 21st century much the same way it did a century ago: as a strikingly more diverse and less rural nation.” Much the same way it did a century ago? The article draws a crude and misleading analogy between the post-Civil War era of mass immigration and our own post-1965 period, without mentioning that nearly all of the immigrants from that earlier period were white, European, and Christian while only a tiny percentage are today. And of course, the U.S. is no longer a nation; it is an empire.
Only further into the article do we get the real story, with a quotation from Robert Lane, an urban sociologist from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “2010 brings the next step in the American story,” he says. “This is the transformation of the U.S. into a post-European-dominated society.” But even here, there is deception, since the article uses the inflated 72.4 figure for the percentage of white. That, of course is the category that includes all the Hispanics who call themselves white — willingly or not. The more accurate, “non-Hispanic white” figure — which nevertheless inflated with Middle Easterners and North Africans — is 63.6 percent, and if immigration does not stop that number will keep falling.
Why Count by Race?
Since the chattering classes think race doesn’t exist or shouldn’t matter, why does the government even collect race data? A “panel of experts” meeting before the US Commission on Civil Rights in Washington, DC, in April 2006 answered that question. According to Kenneth Prewitt, a former director of the Census Bureau, it is “to inform the government . . . of any population groups suffering from discrimination.” Sharon M. Lee, a sociologist from Portland State University, explained that “racial statistics are now used to document racial discrimination, leading to new laws and policies to redress systematic racial inequalities.”
But how does knowing the racial makeup of the country “document racial discrimination?” Because according to the US government, everything should work by quota. If 16 percent of the population is Hispanic, 16 percent of everyone — from bum to banker — should be Hispanic. If fewer than 16 percent of the bankers are Hispanic, that is a prima facie case of discrimination, and the banks have to justify the difference. This is the primary official use of race statistics in the United States.
This, of course, is why every minority group wants its members to be counted (and wants them not to be counted as multi-racial). The more blacks there are in an area, the more jobs blacks can demand, and this puts pressure on the census. As Miss Lee of Portland State pointed out to the Civil Rights Commission, “satisfying advocacy and interest groups” is an important reason to count by race, but maintaining “scientific and statistical standards of data quality” is “a difficult balancing act” (see Editor’s Note on discrimination, this page).
Former census director Prewitt went on to say: “Many thoughtful Americans, myself included, wish that anti-discrimination laws were not necessary, wish that we live in a society that is truly color-blind. But if we are to create such a society we need to know what is happening to various population groups.” That brings to mind the famous remark of a recent Supreme Court Justice that “in order to get beyond race we have to take race into account.”
Of course, no society will ever be “beyond race” and government-enforced racial quotas just makes divisions even sharper. But at least, thanks to the census, whites have some idea of where they stand.
|
Proving Discrimination Today, the purpose of counting Americans by race is to use the figures as the basis for detecting discrimination, but the process is not as simple as it sounds. In the example on this page, 16 percent of the members of all professions are supposed to be Hispanic, barring discrimination. Of course, in certain parts of the country Hispanics are less than 16 percent of the population; in some parts more. Where they are numerous, they are likely to be in positions to make hiring decisions themselves, which should be a factor in calculations of alleged “discrimination.” At the same time, most professions require qualifications. If fewer than 16 percent of the bankers are Hispanic, could it be that fewer than 16 percent of the people who understand accounting are Hispanic? People who accuse whites of “discrimination” rarely consider that. In fact, when different racial groups with genuinely equivalent qualifications are compared, researchers find that blacks and Hispanics often get preferential treatment. As far back as 1987, Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware found that after controlling for IQ, blacks were more likely to be hired than whites (The Practical Significance of Black-White Differences in Intelligence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10 (3), 510-512.). Virtually all of the hiring disparities attributed to discrimination are due to differences in ability and qualifications. Discrimination based on statistics is essentially a fraud, but because the government assumes that all groups are identical, it is a widespread, successful fraud. |
| BOOK REVIEW |
|---|
The Crisis We Face
Jared Taylor calls for a revival of white identity.
Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, New Century Books, 2011, 344 pp. $24.95 (softcover)
In 1990, computer journalist and Japan expert Jared Taylor, a man with a can’t-miss future, took complete leave of his senses, and founded a monthly devoted to scholarly and journalistic inquiry into race, thereby committing career suicide. That journal was American Renaissance.
Soon thereafter, I first read about AR in the late New York Newsday, then New York’s most far-left daily, to which I was an occasional contributor. Then a liberal, I recall thinking what a vile person that Taylor fellow must be.
Two years later, he published one of the few important, honest books on race of the past generation, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Modern America. That book, which was published by Carroll & Graf, a mainstream publishing house, could no longer be published today, and even then, the author had to skip over the subject of race and IQ. The book was a systematic refutation of the conventional view that all the differences in black-white achievement were due to discrimination.
I picked up a copy in a Manhattan used-book store in 1998 or so, after I had been thinking for at least nine years about race and no longer considered myself a liberal. I learned a great deal from Paved, but what most impressed me was that although its author covered many incidents that I had also researched, I did not find a single case of misrepresentation. Race was already a topic on which credible writers were almost extinct.
After Paved with Good Intentions, Mr. Taylor continued publishing the magazine that I have called the gold standard on race, while also sponsoring biennial conferences, debating racial liberals at universities and on the radio, reprinting classic works on race, and giving speeches here and abroad. He was also working on a sequel to Paved with Good Intentions.
Three or four years ago, Mr. Taylor started having new experiences: being shut down, sometimes violently. In Halifax, Canada, in 2007, masked anarchists violently ended his lecture. In 2010, his American Renaissance conference, which had gone off eight times without a hitch, was shut down when anarchists and communists threatened hotels that planned to host it. When Mr. Taylor sought to hold another conference in February of this year, black Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon personally intervened, warning the hospitality industry not to host the conference.
Amid these tribulations, Mr. Taylor continued editing American Renaissance and running its sponsoring organization, New Century Foundation, which has published state-of-the art reports on race and crime, as well as a carefully researched “statistical portrait” of Hispanics. This journal-foundation-website-research hub was a perfect platform for a follow-up to Paved with Good Intentions. Mr. Taylor’s literary agents — one for two years, another for a year and a half — pitched the book to countless mainstream publishing houses, but all of them turned it down. White Identity, as the new book is called, had to be published by New Century Foundation.
It is a chronicle of the revolutionary changes that have followed the disappearance of white consciousness. America was created by whites with a strong racial identity, but over the past 40-odd years they have lost that identity and have persuaded themselves they have no collective racial interests. Yet they encourage non-whites to cultivate racial consciousness and to pursue their own racial interests.
“Diversity”
For perhaps the last 20 years, Americans have been endlessly assured that “diversity is our greatest strength.” Mr. Taylor’s refutation of this myth is probably the most merciless ever published. He notes that all the available evidence shows that racial diversity is a disaster; by no measure can it be shown to be a strength. He points out that not even diversity managers can name its strengths; they argue only that by “managing diversity” they can limit its costs.
The author argues that people have been unwilling to criticize “diversity” because it would mean criticizing the civil rights movement and acknowledging that America’s commitment to the civil rights ideals of transcending race was misguided. At an intellectual level, that is correct. However, in practice, I believe that people do not criticize diversity because of the power of anti-white race politics and the terrible fate — losing one’s job, being assaulted at lectures, having one’s conferences shut down, etc. — that awaits any white willing to state the obvious.
“Diversity” is the consequence of integration, which was promoted by social scientists who believed that the white race was the black man’s burden. One of the most prominent was Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote in An American Dilemma, published in 1944, that blacks’ problems grew out of a vicious circle, in which white oppression caused black pathologies, which in turn caused whites to see their prejudices as justified. Mr. Taylor writes that Myrdal hoped for a new, virtuous cycle: “[I]f white attitudes could be reformed, oppression would ease, the status of blacks would rise, white attitudes would improve further, and blacks would find yet more opportunities for success.”
Meanwhile, according to social psychologist Gordon Allport’s “contact theory,” carefully supervised integration of white and black children would cure whites of “prejudice.” He and his fellow liberals believed that supervised mixing in schools was so important that, as Mr. Taylor notes, “the opposition of parents should be ignored. . . . Integrated education was the best way to reform ‘the malignant hearts and minds of racist white citizens’.”
Contact theory led to coercion, in violation of the freedom of association, and Mr. Taylor argues that even more than the black race riots of the 1960s, the forced busing that began in the 1970s drove whites to put as much distance as possible between themselves and blacks. Moving beyond school district boundaries was often the only way to avoid going to school with disruptive, poor-performing black students. Not even pumping billions of tax dollars into luxurious “magnet schools” could lure whites into integrated public schools.
Even when blacks and whites did attend school together, a funny thing happened. Contrary to academic dogma, according to which children are natural race liberals who learn “prejudice” from their parents, educators found that black and white students did not mingle. Researchers also learned that another racial dogma is false. Mr. Taylor writes:
An unwillingness to associate with blacks has long been considered a sign of lower-class closed-mindedness, but a 2006 study by Michael Emerson and David Sikkink of Rice University found that the more education white parents had, the more likely they were to rule out schools for their children simply because of the number of blacks. . . . ‘Our study arrived at a very sad and profound conclusion,’ said Dr. Emerson. ‘More formal education is not the answer to racial segregation in this country.’
Mr. Taylor writes that school integration produced none of its expected benefits:
The larger purpose . . . was to solve the American dilemma, but integration had three specific goals of its own: Lift black academic achievement, raise black self-esteem, and give black and white children better impressions of each other. There have now been hundreds of studies of the effects of school integration, and none of these goals has been achieved.
When white children go to school with blacks and Hispanics it does not break down negative stereotypes; it establishes them.
Mr. Taylor does not fail to point out the profound hypocrisy of our elites. He cites research on the housing patterns of 3,400 mainstream journalists which found that they seek out lily-white communities. Chris Matthews and Ted Koppel, who are always complaining about white “racists,” were no different. Today, real racial integration seems to be mainly a punishment that upper-class whites inflict on poor whites.
Mr. Taylor points out that it is not only whites who prefer the company of their own race. No group wants to mix, and newcomers practice forms of discrimination the “experts” never anticipated. In Southern California there are Mexican landlords who refuse to rent to Mexicans who are not from their home state!
When different races come into contact despite their preference for separation there is trouble. Mr. Taylor notes that since blacks and Hispanics have no history of Jim Crow or segregation, according to diversity theory, they should integrate smoothly. “If anything, two groups that share common experiences as minorities should find contact especially rewarding,” he writes with dry humor. Instead, they are at each others’ throats, with some California schools locked down repeatedly because of race riots. In prison, as well, integration results in murderous mayhem, but the national media rarely report the violent consequences of diversity and integration.
Mr. Taylor devotes an entire chapter to scientific studies that suggest human beings have evolved a tribal sense that makes them suspicious of strangers, especially when they are of different races. Although I am not a Christian, neither am I a Darwinian, so I found this chapter the least persuasive. I believe racial conflict is political. While most whites simply want to be left alone by other races, a small number of altruists devote themselves to evangelism and humanitarian intervention among non-whites.
Things are not so simple for blacks and Hispanics. Blacks, especially, want exclusive neighborhoods and institutions, but also insist on the right to encroach upon whites. Wherever whites build something successful, blacks demand access . . . and claim they are being victimized.
Racial consciousness
Taylor devotes three thoroughly researched chapter to the racial consciousness of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, with an emphasis on their open rejection of “the civil-rights ideal of transcending race.” He quotes black poets and professors on their desire to murder whites, and Reconquista Hispanic academics who talk of white genocide. Asians, long considered the “model minority,” are increasingly shedding that role, as they see that it is more profitable to push group interests rather than assimilate.
Although this is a book of radical dissent, I believe Mr. Taylor sometimes gives liberals more credit than they deserve:
The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was based on the assumption that consciousness of race is a prejudice that is learned from a prejudiced society. The movement’s goal was to eliminate racial prejudice and even consciousness of race, and build a society in which race would not matter.
I would say, rather, that the goal of the American civil rights movement was to increase black and communist power, but that it skillfully used racial idealism as a cover for its real aims.
Mr. Taylor argues that only whites took civil-rights ideals seriously:
Up until the 1950s, most white Americans felt the same kind of racial identity that is common among non-whites. These sentiments have almost completely disappeared — certainly from public sight . . . Across the political spectrum, Americans assert that any form of white racial consciousness or solidarity is despicable. Whites, therefore, have tried to keep their end of the civil rights bargain. They have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same.
Mr. Taylor then backs up these assertions with an eye-opening account of the decline of white racial consciousness. He quotes not only one American president after another who saw blacks as a burden to be “colonized” back to Africa, but even abolitionists, most of whom had the same goal. Except for a few radical egalitarians such as William Lloyd Garrison, abolition was never about racial equality, and abolitionists opposed miscegenation.
As Mr. Taylor notes: Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, expressed the majority view: “Do your duty first to the colored people here; educate them, Christianize them, and then colonize them.”
Now, of course, we must equate pre-1960 white consciousness to Nazism. “Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler,” writes Mr. Taylor, “and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.”
He continues:
It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history.
Mr. Taylor forces the reader to conclude that either America’s greatest men were racist monsters or that something has gone terribly wrong in our approach to race, and that hard-won wisdom has been forgotten. Far from embracing diversity, the Founding Fathers were suspicious even of white foreigners’ loyalties: “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it,” wrote John Quincy Adams.
Today, the leading white voices in the media and academia preach contempt for whites, and encourage it in blacks and Hispanics. In effect, they promote the extinction of whites through miscegenation, sub-replacement fertility, and displacement by non-white immigrants. Even neoconservatives like Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom say that the “crumbling of the taboo on sexual relations between the two races [black and white]” is “good news,” because it will improve race relations by making it impossible to draw racial distinctions. Mr. Taylor is indignant:
For most of American history, miscegenation was the ultimate nightmare for whites. That whites should now see it as the ultimate solution to racial conflict is a sign not only of how radically our thinking has changed but also of how stubborn racial conflict turned out to be. Civil rights laws were supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. To propose now that the only solution to racial enmity is to eliminate race itself through intermarriage is to admit that different races cannot live together in peace.
Of course, widespread miscegenation would not eliminate race; it would eliminate whites . . . No one is proposing large-scale intermarriage for Africa or Asia. Nor would mixing eliminate discrimination. Blacks, South Americans, and Asians discriminate among themselves on the basis of skin tone even when they are the same race.
In the final chapter, Mr. Taylor counts the harrowing costs of an increasingly non-white America: rising school failure, illegitimacy, crime, welfare dependency, domestic violence, child abuse, health care costs, poverty, and corruption. He leaves no doubt that a nation of Third-World people can only be a Third-World nation. Those who displace whites will live off them as long as they can, and cut them off when they cannot. Young generations of blacks and Hispanics will certainly not tax themselves to support white pensioners.
The author warns whites that the only way to forestall this grim future is to resume the racial consciousness and identity that all other groups take for granted, end diversity propaganda, rekindle pride in their accomplishments, and take the only steps that can possibly save them from the void: end immigration and take back the right to free association. Mr. Taylor asks nothing for whites that he would not willingly grant to all other groups.
This is the best book on race of our time. A work of staggering learning, it is scholarly yet readable, and though it supports its positions with hundreds of examples, is marvelously succinct. It is written in a dispassionate tone, yet every page is explosive.
However, this book has two shortcomings: It mentions race and IQ only in a footnote, and does not cover genocidal black-supremacist ideologies. A sinking average IQ will make it impossible to maintain an advanced economy or a Western democracy. At the same time, genocidal black ideologies are institutionally anchored at all economic levels of the black community, and contribute to black pathologies, including the savage crimes some blacks perpetrate against whites.
Schweitzer’s warning
When I was a young boy, my uncle, who had become a college librarian after fighting in World War II and Korea, gave me a book about the world’s greatest living humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), who was a medical missionary in Africa. What the book did not say, and my liberal uncle surely did not know, was what Schweitzer thought of the people he was helping. Mr. Taylor quotes him:
They have neither the mental or emotional abilities to equate or share equally with White men in any functions of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring unto them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: White the superior, and they the inferior.
For whenever a White man seeks to live among them as their equals, they will destroy and devour him, and they will destroy all his work . . .
Never fraternize with them as equals. Never accept them as your social equals or they will devour you. They will destroy you.
For a more dispassionate judgment, Mr. Taylor quotes Jefferson from an inscription on the wall of the memorial in Washington:
‘Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.’ Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: ‘nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government.’
For more contemporary language, the author quotes the eminent American biologist E. Raymond Hall:
[Prof. Hall] stated as a biological law that, ‘two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.’ Prof. Hall explains that human races are biological subspecies, and that the law applied to them, too: ‘To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.’
Mr. Taylor’s entire book is evidence that Prof. Hall was right. For whites, it is only a matter of time: rekindle a collective will to live or face oblivion.
Mr. Stix is a journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education.
| ARTICLE |
|---|
The Galton Report
The Decline of the West
In 1918 the German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880 -1936) published The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), in which he advanced a cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, and predicted that the West had about a century or two to run before decline set in. Hitherto, Spengler’s prediction has not been realized. The West retains the economic, cultural, and militarily world leadership that it possessed in 1918.
Nevertheless, there are ominous signs that Spengler will be proved right. The US Census Bureau estimates that whites will become a minority of the population in the United States about the year 2042, and in two recent columns (February and April, 2011) I summarized the work of Oxford University demographer David Coleman, estimating that whites will become a minority of the population throughout Western Europe in the second half of the present century. He calls this “the third demographic transition,” consisting of the replacement of the European peoples in their own homelands by non-Europeans.
There are different views as to whether this matters. Many of those on the Left, such as Bill Clinton and the late Edward Kennedy, have welcomed and promoted this demographic transformation, claiming that “diversity is our strength.” Most of those on the Right deplore it. The essential difference between these two positions is that those on the Left believe non-Europeans are exactly the same as Europeans, except for skin color. Brothers Under the Skin is the title of a book by leftist British geneticist Professor Steve Jones.
For most of those on the Right, this is a profound misconception. The races are very different not only in skin color but also under the skin, and therefore the third demographic transition will have grave consequences. Professor Coleman notes that according to Harvard sociologist Professor Robert Putnam “the expansion of diversity through immigration can magnify social division, require the reinvention of national identity, erode trust, and risk turning a society of notionally equal citizens into a corporate state of communities with group rights . . . [E]thnic diversity may erode the necessary solidarity and trust on which coexistence depends. Ethnic imbalances between the recipients and paymasters of services, it is claimed, weaken public support for universal welfare, diverting attention to narrower group interests.”
Professor Coleman adds that the growth of the non-European population “could conjure up the unlooked-for problem for the majority of its adjustment to minority status, hitherto unimaginable. Much depends on the groups that account for the diversity. The influence of Islam concerns many in the secular societies of Europe, who fear the intrusion of strongly held religious views into the public realm, especially if Islam is a stronger identity than citizenship.”
The immigration of Muslims is certainly a problem. Significant numbers of them harbor a deep hatred of the Western countries in which they live, and seek to damage them through terrorism. In Britain, a recent study by the think tank Policy Exchange reported that among British-born Muslims aged 16 to 24, 37 percent would like to see the introduction of sharia law, and 36 percent think Muslims who convert to another faith should be executed. These beliefs are profoundly alien to Western values. There are estimated to be some 1.5 million Muslims in Spain, 2.9 million in Britain, and 5 million in France, and the numbers are growing rapidly because of their large families and continued immigration. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life predicts that their numbers will approximately double over the next 20 years throughout Western Europe.
The increasing number of Hispanics in the United States also presents problems. They do not have the crusading zeal of Muslims to impose their religion and culture on Western societies, but many of them do not assimilate in the same way as previous immigrants. They insist on retaining their Spanish language and culture, and some campaign for a transfer of the southwestern American states to Mexico.
The increasing number of blacks in the United States and Western Europe presents a different kind of problem arising from their high crime rates which, in the United States and Britain, are approximately seven times those of whites. Much of this crime is directed against other blacks, but blacks also mug and rape whites. Virtually all cities in the United States and Britain have black ghettos that whites enter at their peril.
Another consequence of the increasing number of non-Europeans — except for the northeast Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) — will be lower average national IQs. For the United States, it is possible to estimate the magnitude of this decline. Compared to a white average IQ of 100, the Hispanic average is 89, the black average is 85, and Asians have an average IQ of 98 (based on an average of 104 for Northeast Asians and 92 for Southeast Asians, whose numbers are approximately equal).
From these figures we can calculate that in 1960, when whites were 88 per cent of the population and blacks were 12 percent, the American IQ was 98.2. The Census Bureau predicts that in 2050 whites will fall to 45 per cent of the population, Hispanics will be 30 percent, blacks will be 15 percent, and Asians will be 9 percent. Using these figures, the American IQ will have declined to 92.4. This is the same IQ as in the Balkans (Greece, Bulgaria and Romania), lower than Uruguay (96), and not much higher than Turkey (90), according to figures given by Profs. Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.
We can make a similar calculation for Britain. In 1950, when virtually the entire population was white, the average British IQ was 100. In the year 2056, according to Prof Coleman’s calculations, whites will be 56 per cent of the population, South Asians (IQ 93) will be 26 percent, blacks (IQ 86) will be 6 percent, and others (IQ 96) will be 12 percent. The British IQ will therefore have declined to 96.8. Professor Coleman estimates that in the second half of the century, the numbers of non-Europeans will continue to increase and that the indigenous British will become an increasingly smaller percentage. This will bring about a further decline in IQ, and similar declines will take place throughout Western Europe.
These projections assume that the immigration of non-Europeans into Western nations will continue. Will it? There are certainly movements in the United States and Europe to restrict immigration. However, in the United States they have not had any significant impact. In Europe, “far right” parties campaigning for an end to immigration typically secure about 5 to 10 per cent approval ratings, and have some electoral success in France, Britain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Austria. In France, support for the Front National, now led by Jean Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine, is running at around 20 percent. But despite the rising tide of public opposition to immigration, the political and practical problems of halting or even reducing it are so formidable that it is doubtful whether any significant reduction is likely to be achieved.
The most probable scenario is that Prof. Coleman’s third demographic transition will proceed, and that during the present century non-Europeans will become majorities of the populations in the United States, Britain, and much of Western Europe. This does not bode well for the relative position of the West, which has been based on high IQ.
Nevertheless, all is not gloom and doom. The scenarios for Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Eastern Europe are more encouraging. There is immigration to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but most of the immigrants are Chinese and South Asians. The Chinese are the model minority, while the South Asians are not a serious problem. Eastern Europe, including Russia, has negligible immigration, and as these countries become fully functioning market economies they will grow in economic, cultural, and military strength.
However, they will be no match for China. With the introduction of a market economy China has developed rapidly during the last two decades, and in February it overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. China is projected to overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy in approximately 10 years, and in as little as 20 years the Chinese gross domestic product is on course to nearly double that of the United States. With its high average IQ of 105, its powerful economy, and its large population of around 1.3 billion, it seems inevitable that China will become the world super-power sometime in the current century, and probably sooner rather than later. Oswald Spengler will turn out to have been right, although for reasons he did not anticipate.
References
Lynn, R. & Vanhanen, T. IQ and Global Inequality. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2006.
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
| ARTICLE |
|---|
Bin Laden’s Death
Blacks and Whites saw it differently.
When I turned on the TV news on May 1, 2011, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan by US forces. As I flipped channels, I noticed a common theme: utter jubilation by pundits and interviewees alike. CNN showed thousands of people spontaneously flockinig to the gates of the White House to celebrate the death of the world’s most infamous terrorist.
I watched as the crowd sang patriotic songs, waved flags, and chanted “USA! USA!,” and noticed something that someone without a consciousness of race might have missed: The impromptu rally was virtually all white. It was whiter than a Tea Party rally. It was so white that any company with a workforce that white would be sued for violating Title VII.
Although Presidents Obama and Bush have asserted that the attacks of September 11 united the country, the crowd that gathered outside the White House suggests otherwise. Washington, DC is only about 33.5 percent white. Why did white people — and apparently only white people — gather by the thousands to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden?
It seems to me that only white Americans are deeply concerned about the conflict between Arabic Muslims and their country. I suspect that this is because only white Americans — deep down — think of the United States is their country, whereas nonwhites do not have the same level of attachment.
White Americans abhor Osama bin Laden, but Chicano Atzlan activists have compared him to their hero, Pancho Villa.
Six months after the September 11 attacks, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, Malik Zulu Shabazz, referred to Bin Laden as a “brother,” called him a “bold man,” and praised his allegedly visionary “reforms.” Shabazz’s remarks drew roars of approval from the black crowd.
Three months after the attacks, the Washington Times reported that Al Sharpton ridiculed our soldiers — likewise to deafening applause — at the State of the Black World Conference where he asked the 700 black attendees, “This country can’t find a guy who comes out every two weeks to cut a video, and then you challenge us to stand under one flag?”
Mainstream black author Brian Gilmore wrote in The Progressive that after the attacks blacks were “not feeling that deep sense of patriotism that most Americans feel.” He added that blacks “were Americans, but not quite as American as white Americans.”
He’s right. In 2008, a black player for the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, Josh Howard, participated in a charity flag-football game, where the television cameras caught him making faces as the National Anthem was played. “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is going on,” he said. “I don’t celebrate this shit. I’m black, goddammit.” These sentiments help explain why, as the Washington Post reported, white Americans supported the 2003 Iraq invasion 78 to 20 percent, while black Americans opposed it 61 to 35 percent.
More recently, Rashard Mendenhall, a Pittsburgh Steelers running back, condemned the celebration by whites of bin Laden’s death via Twitter: “What kind of person celebrates death? It’s amazing how people can HATE a man they have never even heard speak. We’ve only heard one side . . .” On the black website TheGrio.com, columnist Edward Wyckoff Williams even compared the death of Osama bin Laden to the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Not surprisingly, American Muslims — blacks and immigrants alike — view the world differently from non-Muslims. According to a 2007 Pew Research Center survey, 47 percent of American Muslims consider themselves Muslim first, American second. American Muslims think it was wrong to attack Afghanistan — 48 percent to 35 percent — while other Americans think it was right — 61 percent to 29 percent. Only 25 percent of American Muslims think the War on Terror is a sincere effort to combat terrorism (that number drops to 20 percent for American-born Muslims, including blacks), whereas 67 percent of non-Muslims think it is a sincere effort.
Thirty-nine percent of American Muslims ages18 to 29 think Muslim immigrants should remain “distinct from American society” rather than adopt American ways, and for native-born Black Muslims that number rises to 47 percent. Perhaps this is why President Obama sent a letter to Congress in 2010 saying it was “in the national interest” to permit another 80,000 Muslims to immigrate during 2011.
Many blacks simply do not feel loyal to the United States, which they associate with slavery and “racism.” Others are openly hostile. Here are Malcolm X’s classic 1962 comments after an airplane carrying white Americans crashed in France:
“I would like to announce a very beautiful thing that has happened. I got a wire from God today. He really answered our prayers over in France. He dropped an airplane out of the sky with over 120 white people on it because the Muslims believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. We will continue to pray and we hope that every day another plane falls out of the sky.”
Malcolm X would no doubt have been ecstatic about the September 11 attacks, and to the extent they share his views, blacks are saddened by the death of the man who planned the operation.
In international relations there is something called the “rally ‘round the flag effect;” patriotism and national solidarity rise when a nation experiences a triumph or a defeat. This was very clear after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the attacks of September 11. In the case of Osama bin Laden’s death, it appears that it is mostly white Americans who are rallying ’round the flag. Non-whites seem to think it doesn’t concern them.
It is whites who care about the United States, who grieve for its losses and celebrate its triumphs. Perhaps subconsciously they think of the United States as a white nation, and of Osama bin Laden as an enemy of white America. Their celebration of his death was a celebration of their civilization and of a country they still think belongs to them.
Kyle Bristow is a third-year law student at the University of Toledo and is the author of White Apocalypse, which is available at Amazon.com.
| ARTICLE |
|---|
The Bliss of Ignorance
Can Montanans keep what they have?
After living and working in Montana for nearly four years, I finally attended my first authentic rodeo. Like the state, the attendance at the Great Falls rodeo was nearly all Caucasian. There were young families, aging cowboys, and even teenagers dressed in cowboy hats, flannel shirts, and boots. The lights went down, and someone read a story about the challenges and achievements of the United States, and then we sang the national anthem. A young blonde cowgirl on a white horse then swept around the arena waving the American flag.
As I watched the bronco riding and barrel racing I was struck by the audience’s blissful ignorance. Parents don’t worry about their teenage daughters being assaulted by Muslims as parents in Europe and Australia must. No one worried about being mugged in the parking lot or returning to a vandalized vehicle. Certainly no one worried about being carjacked and raped. For those who are not forced to live with it, diversity and the destruction it brings are invisible — until it is too late.
Crime rates in Montana are the seventh lowest in the nation, and all the states that are safer have one striking similarity: they have the highest percentages of whites. The safest states are, in order, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, Maine, Idaho, and Wyoming. The western states, particularly Montana, fall behind eastern states because of their Indian populations, which commit violent crime at more than three times the white rate.
Former Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, who moved to Montana this summer, recently gave a stirring speech in Kailispel, in the Northeast corner of the state. The event was called “Montana: The Tip of the Spear,” and promoted the idea that the Rocky Mountain West and Montana, in particular, will be the center of the “fight for liberty.” As he explained, “There are a lot of people, like me, who were not born in Montana but we have been Montanans our whole lives.” I believe it is true, as Mr. Baldwin says, that “real Montanans will fight and die for the principles of truth, honor and freedom.”
Montanans have a fierce independence and a healthy suspicion of the federal government, but most are unaware of the dangers of diversity. Many people I’ve met in this state have fled diversity and readily admit it; however; others move from diverse areas and still claim that “diversity is our strength.” Bozeman is notorious for its influx of Californians who refuse to acknowledge they fled California because of the very liberal ideology they now promote.
After the final event, bull riding, the crowd began to exit and I was struck by the civility of this mass departure. There was no pushing, but plenty of “excuse me”s. There had been beer and snacks for sale, but there was no littering. Plenty of people had bought 24-oz cans of Coors or Coors Light, but the crowd did not leave a single one in the stands; every one went into the recycling bins.
The order and safety and even the very atmosphere of the Great Falls rodeo would be swept away by “diversity.” I drove away from the stadium that night feeling a great sense of pride, but also a sense of urgency. Unless Montanans understand the threat diversity and multiculturalism pose to our culture, their state could quickly become like others. Only a collective white consciousness will save the few remaining Montanas from the curse of diversity.
Mr. DeWitt lives and works in his adopted state of Montana.
| IN THE NEWS |
|---|
O Tempora, O Mores!
Lies and Intimidation
On April 23, 2010, Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed SB (Senate Bill) 1070 into law, making it a offense for an alien to be present in the state without proof of legal entry. Although the bill was supported by strong majorities not just in Arizona but the entire country, enforcement of most of its provisions has been held up in federal court.
Less well known than SB 1070 is another bill Governor Brewer signed into law just a few days later. HB (House Bill) 2281 bans high school courses that promote ethnic solidarity, “the overthrow of the U.S. government,” and “resentment towards a class of people.” The law was directed at the Mexican-chauvinist “La Raza” or Mexican-American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, which promotes resentment towards whites.
Mexican-American studies, which have been taught in Tucson for a dozen years, use Rodolfo Acuna’s Occupied America as a textbook. The book waxes nostalgic for the 1915 Plan of San Diego, according to which “supporters would execute all white males over age 16,” and “the Southwest would become a Chicano nation.” The book also quotes Texas University professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, who is famous for saying: “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.” Raza courses fulfill the district’s American history requirement for high school graduation. [Dave Gibson, Angry ‘Raza Studies’ Mob Shuts Down Tucson School Board Meeting, Norfolk Examiner, April 28, 2011.]
In January of this year, when the new law took effect, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal told the Tucson school district that its Mexican-American courses were covered by HB 2281, and that if it kept teaching them the district would lose $15 million in annual aid.
The defenders of Raza studies reacted in their usual way: law suits, intimidation, and, lies. Augustine Romero, the director of the program at the Tucson school district has been claiming for years that he has “nine cohort studies” proving that “the students that partake in Ethnic Studies courses, as proven by test results, are more likely to pass the Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) exam than those students who do not partake in said courses; have a 97 percent graduation rate, and have a college matriculation rate 193 percent greater than the national average.” Local and national media have repeatedly parroted these claims, in an effort to make HB 2281 sound like a mean-spirited attack on doughty young high-achieving Chicanos.
This February, school board member Michael Hicks had the district’s statistician look into these claims but Mr. Romero would not produce his data. The statistician then did his own investigation and found that every claim was false. According to a report released in March, students who “take one or more Mexican American Studies (MAS) classes are far less likely than other students to pass the (Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards) the first time.” (italics added) Arizona students get five chances to pass the very undemanding test, and by the time they have taken it five times, students who took Raza studies pass at about the same rate as people who do not.
The 97 percent graduation rate was also baloney. The district-wide graduation rate (people who made it through in four years) in Tucson in 2010 was 84 percent, and the rates for Raza students were no different. Poor students who took Mexican American Studies and were touted as having benefitted miraculously, had a graduation rate of 79 percent. Nor is there the slightest evidence that taking courses in Mexican supremacy makes anyone any more likely to attend college. Mr. Romero has not been disciplined for his fabrications. [Doug MacEachern, Bogus Arguments for Tucson Ethnic Studies Finally Debunked, Arizona Republic, March 6, 2011.]
In the meantime, as lawsuits held up the outright ban on Raza studies, Tucson school board member Mark Stegeman scheduled a vote on April 26 to at least make Raza courses electives that would not fulfill the US history requirement. He was thwarted when hundreds of protestors stormed the meeting. Several students chained themselves to board members’ chairs and prevented the vote. Police made no arrests, and school board president Judy Burns unbosomed herself of the usual mush: “Frankly, I don’t want to arrest students for speaking out about something they’re passionate about.”
The school board rescheduled its vote for May 5 — and got the same rough treatment. Mr. Stegeman had set aside a half hour for public comment on the vote, but a lot of Hispanics wanted to comment, and they took up well over half an hour. Mr. Stegemen eventually called a halt to public comment so the board could vote, and the audience started whooping and running around. This time police made seven arrests, but Raza activists again succeeded in delaying the vote. Again the school board president excused the students and promised no disciplinary action: “Yes they interrupted our meetings, but they weren’t being listened to either,” she explained.
So what now? The school board has postponed its vote indefinitely, and instead will hold an “Ethnic Studies” forum where everyone who wants will have a chance to vent. [Jennifer Waddell, Board Pres. Admits ‘Mistakes Were Made’ at TUSD Meeting, KGUN9-TV, May 5, 2011.]
Geronimo!
After Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden, it was reported that his code name was Geronimo. Indian groups say they are insulted. Jeff Houser, chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe says that “to equate Geronimo or any other Native American figure with Osama bin Laden, a mass murderer and cowardly terrorist, is painful and offensive to our Tribe and to all Native Americans.”
“If we are carelessly stereotyped as enemies of the state by the highest levels of government, then how will our voices ever be relevant,” asked Tina Osceola, a representative of the Seminole tribe, adding, “That is not the change we expected and were promised by this president.” Leon Curley, a Navajo from Gallup, New Mexico, sounded hopeless: “We’ve been oppressed for so long, it just doesn’t matter anymore.”
Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly wants the Obama administration and the Pentagon officially to change the code name “so that U.S. history books will not continue to portray negative stereotypes of Native Americans.”
The Defense Department says no insult was intended but refuses to explain why it chose the name Geronimo. A spokesman pointed out that code names are more or less random, and used simply to conceal identities. Others have speculated that bin Laden got the name because he eluded capture for many years, just as Geronimo did.
On May 5, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held a previously scheduled hearing on racist stereotypes and their impact on Indians. Nearly every witness complained about the Geronimo code name, as did Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico), who chaired the hearing. He said he had asked the Pentagon for an explanation but was told that none would be forthcoming because of military secrecy.
Not all Indians are on the war path. Louis Maynahonah, a Navy veteran and chairman of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, doesn’t think the code name was an insult. He points out that during the Second World War the paratroopers who shouted “Geronimo” as they jumped out of airplanes were not trying to insult the chief. He also notes that calling an attack helicopter an “Apache” is a tribute to his tribe’s fighting skills. [Some Native Americans Angry Over Use of Geronimo’s Name in bin Laden Operation, Associated Press, May 5, 2011. Senate Indian Affairs Committee Hearing on Stereotypes, Indianz.com May 5, 2011.]
According to a report by something called the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, 47 percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate.” Karen Tyler-Ruiz, director of the fund, explains what that means: “Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job — those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take . . . just your basic everyday tasks.”
Many people in the Detroit suburbs are also functionally illiterate: 34 percent in Pontiac and 24 percent in Southfield. Miss Tyler-Ruiz says only 10 percent of those who can’t read have gotten any help for their problem. She thinks her report will result in better training for local workers in the uplift industry. Miss Tyler-Ruiz adds that there are parts of Washington, DC and Cleveland that have high rates of illiteracy as well. She did not note what else those areas had in common.[Report: Nearly Half of Detroiters Can’t Read, WWJ Newsradio (Detroit), May 4, 2011.]
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
|---|
Sir — I greatly enjoyed “Will the South Rise Again?” by Gregory Hood in the May issue. I have always been proud of my Southern ancestors and am revolted by the current demonization of all signs of Southern (white) pride, but I have always been a patriotic American. Regardless of who won The War of Northern Aggression, America was built by strong white people, and I always believed in American principles.
America itself, however, is no longer salvageable. Even if we closed our borders tomorrow, we would still have over 100,000,000 non-whites among us, reproducing more quickly than we are. They will never be entirely like us — and who can blame them? If our way of life is to survive, some form of balkanization is inevitable. If it is not the South that breaks away, some other part of the country will. Whether we call it sectionalism, secessionism, separation, or something else, it is coming. We must be prepared because it will not be a smooth process.
Horace Scott Lacy, New Boston, Tex.
Sir — I read “Will the South Rise Again?” with much interest, but I am not optimistic that Southerners — even those who are proud of the Confederacy — have much backbone when it comes to race. For years I was active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but was disappointed in the members of my camp. I hear that some camps are different, but mine really was just a historical society. Members were proud of the courage and sacrifice of their ancestors, but aside from lukewarm support for conservative Republicans, they were politically inert.
I was open about my racial views. I was not shunned, and some camp members quietly agreed with me, but the general view was one of hopelessness. SCV members arranged their lives so as to have as little contact as possible with blacks or Mexicans, but seemed to think nothing could be changed. Even the thought of their children becoming despised minorities would not jolt them out of their lethargy.
Southerners will have to get sturdier spines if they are to stop their region from becoming a Third-World slough.
Richard Carey, Frankfort, Ky.
Sir — On the strength of Raymond Wolter’s May review, I bought and read The Affirmative Action Hoax by Steven Farron. This must be the most thoroughgoing critique of racial preferences ever written. What particularly impressed me were the details about how preference programs work, and the relentless way Professor Farron laid bare the deceptions of the people who run them. One question Prof. Farron does not answer is this: Whom are the practitioners of race preferences most trying to deceive: themselves or others?
Sarah Wentworth, Richmond, Va.
Sir — I like history, so I enjoyed Jon Sims’s account of the Eastern expansion of the Aryans. And yet, there is great pathos in articles about the people we once were. Four thousand years ago, our ancestors were spreading East and West, into India and Europe. Four hundred years ago they were sailing around the world. What are we now? A cowering remnant, not just in our New World and Antipodean outposts but, in the European heartland itself.
It is we who have changed. No foreigner defeated us. We defeated ourselves, lost the will to expand, perhaps even the will to survive. This is, of course, the great riddle of the latter half of the 20th century: Why did the white man lose his nerve? Thank you, AR, for reminding us that we once had nerve.
Thomas Elridge, Holland, Mich.
Sir — That was quite a collection of unkind quotations about blacks that Hippocrates treated us to in the May “Galton Report.” I understand the scientific interest in noting that Arabs thought blacks were no better than animals, but the effect of all that accumulated derision was not pleasant.
I would be curious to know, however, to what extent this low opinion of blacks persists among Arabs and Middle-Easterners today. Non-whites are generally much less inhibited by PC foolishness than we are, so I suspect the Baghdadi man in the street feels pretty much the same as Ibn al-Faqih Al-Hamadani did about blacks.
Allen Schneider, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Sir — Your April “O Tempora” item about the decline of Ciudad Juarez was terrifying. How can drug lords completely take over a city of 1.4 million people? I think the answer lies in your article itself. You write that so many people have fled Ciudad Juarez that the army is now going door to door to see who is left — but that many residents don’t answer the door because they are afraid that soldiers are just as likely as drug traffickers to shake them down.
Is this not Mexico’s great problem, that no one expects the people in uniform to behave better than the thugs they are supposed to be fighting? I recall that in 2007, police corruption was so bad in Tijuana that soldiers and federal police disarmed every cop in the city and issued them slingshots instead. And could the soldiers and federal police be trusted either? This is one of the reasons Third-World countries are a mess. Human societies require a certain level of trust; without it they fail. Mexican failure is moving north, along with the Mexicans.
Carol Taddeo, Lubbock, Tex.
