American Renaissance magazine
Vol 10, No. 5	May 1999

 

CONTENTS

The Racial Revolution
The Origins of “Racism”
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers

COVER STORY

The Racial Revolution

No people can long survive when common sense becomes a crime.

by Jared Taylor

Everyone knows that during the last 50 years or so there have been fundamental changes in the ways Americans think about race. In fact, what has occurred is nothing short of a revolution, a complete rejection of what earlier generations of Americans — from Colonial times until perhaps the 1950s — took for granted.

Although contemporary racial thinking is so monolithic it has become hard to imagine how Americans could have thought otherwise, we can get a sense of how radical the change has been if we try to imagine equally far-reaching changes: What would it be like for America to reverse the sexual revolution completely and return to Victorian propriety in just a few generations? Or for a country suddenly to stop being deeply and universally religious and become atheist? Or to abandon the principle of private property and switch to hippy-style communal living?

The United States has gone through a revolution that is not only just as dramatic, but astonishing in another respect: What was once taken for granted about race has become not just outmoded but immoral. Only revolutions bring such sweeping, back-to-front moral changes.

Yesterday’s Assumptions

The best way to gauge the extent of the revolution is to compare the present to the past. The contrast is staggering. Practically every historical American figure was by today’s standards an unregenerate white supremacist.

Until just a few years ago virtually all Americans believed that race was a profoundly important aspect of individual and national identity. They believed that people of different races differed in temperament and ability, and that whites built societies that were superior to those built by non-whites. They were repelled by miscegenation — which they called “amalgamation” — because it would dilute the unique characteristics of whites. They took it for granted that America must be peopled with Europeans, and that American civilization could not continue without whites. Many saw the presence of non-whites in the United States as a terrible burden.

Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote at greatest length about race. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites, and though he thought slavery was a great injustice he did not want free blacks in American society: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was, therefore, one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or sending blacks back to Africa.

He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially conscious people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” The empire was to be homogeneous.

Jefferson thought of the United States as only the latest outpost in the ever-expanding march of the Anglo-Saxon, the Saxon branch of which had originated in the Cimbric Chersonesus of Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein. He was thinking of the Saxons when he proposed a 1784 ordinance to create new states in the Mississippi valley, suggesting the name Cherronesus for the area between lakes Huron and Michigan. Its shape reminded him of Denmark. The race was not to forget its origins.

James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the race problem was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public land to raise the huge sums necessary to buy the entire black population and ship it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After his two terms in office, Madison served as president of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy.

The following prominent Americans were not merely members but officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Gen. Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. As for James Monroe, the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his help in returning blacks to Africa.

Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be — in his words — “a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he said:

. . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

He, too, favored colonization and even in the midst of a desperate war with the Confederacy found time to study the problem and to appoint Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration. Free blacks were going to have to be dealt with, and it was best to plan ahead and find a place to which they could be sent.

Before Lincoln’s time, no President had ever invited a group of blacks to the White House to discuss public policy. On August 14th, 1862, Lincoln did so — to ask blacks to leave the country. “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us,” he explained. He then urged them and their race to go to a colonization site in Central America that his Commissioner of Emigration had investigated. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he even argued for the forcible removal of free blacks.

His successor, Andrew Johnson, did not feel differently: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men. . . .” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear mandate: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race — the governing and self-governing race.”

Before he became President, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way. . . .”

What of 20th century Presidents? Theodore Roosevelt thought blacks were “a perfectly stupid race,” and blamed Southerners for bringing them to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away. . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.”

William Howard Taft told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last and for all times.”

Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton prevented blacks from enrolling. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the Presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.”

Warren Harding’s views were little different: “Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. This is not a question of social equality, but a question of recognizing a fundamental, eternal, inescapable difference. Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”

Henry Cabot Lodge took the view that “there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race, and when you begin to pour in unlimited numbers of people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force, you are running the most frightful risk that any people can run.”

In 1921, as Vice President-elect, Calvin Coolidge wrote in Good Housekeeping about the basis for sound immigration policy: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. . . . Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

Congressman William N. Vaile of Colorado was a prominent supporter of the 1924 immigration legislation that set policy until the revolution of the 1960s. He explained his opposition to non-white immigration this way:

Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo Saxons made this country. Oh yes, the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves.

Harry Truman is remembered for having integrated the armed services by executive order. Yet, in his private correspondence he was as separatist as Jefferson: “I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.” In a letter to his daughter he described waiters at the White House as “an army of coons.”

As recent a President as Dwight Eisenhower argued that although it might be necessary to grant blacks certain political rights, this did not mean social equality “or that a Negro should court my daughter.” It is only with John Kennedy that we find a President whose public pronouncements on race begin to be acceptable by contemporary standards.

Politicians usually express careful, non-controversial views, and their sentiments were reflected by men of letters as well. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, believed that “it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are written.” Walt Whitman wrote: “Who believes that Whites and Blacks can ever amalgamate in America? Or who wishes it to happen? Nature has set an impassable seal against it. Besides, is not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?” Jack London was a well-known socialist, but he did not think socialism was universally applicable. It was, he wrote, “devised for the happiness of certain kindred races. It is devised so as to give more strength to these certain kindred favored races so that they may survive and inherit the earth to the extinction of the lesser, weaker races.” Mark Twain, in an essay that no longer appears in popular anthologies, once described the American Indian as “a fit candidate for extermination.”

There is essentially no limit to the “racist” quotations one could unearth from prominent Americans of the past, but views that are considered unacceptable by today’s standards were so widespread that virtually anyone who said anything about race reflected those views.

Needless to say, this embarrasses today’s guardians of orthodoxy. Most historians ignore or gloss over the racial views of prominent figures, and most people today have no idea Lincoln or Roosevelt were such outspoken “white supremacists.” Some people deliberately distort the views of great Americans. For example, inscribed on the marble interior of the Jefferson Memorial are the words: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not stop there, but went on to say, “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government” — which rather changes the effect.

Another approach to Jefferson is to bring out all the facts and then try to repudiate him. Conor Cruise O’Brien did this in a 1996 cover story for Atlantic Monthly. After describing Jefferson’s views, he writes:

It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America — that is, an America in which nonwhite Americans have a significant and increasing say. Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way. Richard Grenier agrees, likening Jefferson to Nazi Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and calling for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial ‘stone by stone.’

It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we start purging American history of “racists” who will be left? If we demonize Jefferson we have to repudiate everything that happened in America until the 1960s — which is precisely what the revolution in racial thinking logically requires.

After all, until 1964, any employer could refuse to hire non-whites and merchants could refuse to do business with whomever they pleased. Until 1965, immigration laws were designed to keep the country white. In 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional, 20 states still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. State legislatures were unwilling to repeal laws that reflected the customs and ideals of generations of Americans.

The Revolution

So how does a society handle a revolution that turns the common sense of previous eras on its head? One thing that changes is language. Because the thinking of men like Lincoln and Wilson was so widespread, there was no need for a special term to describe it. Just as there is no word to describe only those days on which the sun rises — because it rises every day — there was no word to describe people who thought of race the way they did.

The word “racism,” therefore, did not appear until the 1930s, and was a description not of American thinking but of Nazi ideology. Only in the 1960s did the word become common in its current usage, and as late as 1971, the Oxford English Dictionary had no entry for it. We managed to establish slavery, abolish it, establish Jim Crow, and abolish it too without ever using a word that today’s newspapers find indispensable. When our ancestors wrote about race, they wrote of antagonism, kindness, hostility, admiration, hatred, and a host of other feelings, but never about “racism.” The word does not appear even in so late and influential a book as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published in 1942. Only in the context of mid-20th century assumptions did the word become necessary as a way to condemn what people had always taken for granted.

Even the word’s predecessor, “racial prejudice” is a recent construction (it is the term Myrdal used). Whatever Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt thought about other races, they would have been insulted to be told it was prejudice, that is to say, unreasonable preconceived judgment. “Racial prejudice” was a particularly clever coinage because it implied that white attitudes were a form of ignorance that could be cured with proper education. It managed to discredit while appearing to describe.

What Americans traditionally practiced was racial discrimination, that is, they made distinctions. Choice and freedom are impossible without discrimination, and a “discriminating man” is one who knows the differences between things and chooses wisely. Discrimination — the most necessary and natural thing people do — is now called “bigotry.”

The very newness of terms like “racism” and “racial prejudice” is reason enough to be suspicious of them. To define a serious moral failing with words that did not even exist in the time of our grandparents is not a sign of normal social change. It is panic and hysteria.

The race revolution has been like the Russian revolution, which also stood common sense on its head. In the Soviet Union the profit motive, which had been the driving force of every economy in history, became a sin against the people, and new words had to be invented for new crimes. People who still believed in private property had a “petty bourgeois mentality.” Those who wanted to keep what they made were “stealing from the state.” Anyone who defended free markets was a “stooge of imperialism.” After the fall of Communism common sense was rehabilitated, and all the new crimes and words to describe them disappeared.

Ironically, during the years that led to the return of common sense in the former Eastern Bloc, the reverse process continued in the West. “Racism” was such a success it inspired the discovery of all sorts of new crimes: sexism, lookism, ableism, speciesism, male chauvinism, homophobia, nativism, etc. One natural, healthy distinction after another was discovered to be a crime. It must be a uniquely 20th century experience for large numbers of people to be accused of crimes for which the very words to describe them have only just been invented.

Rules for Whites

So what is racism, anyway? For whites (and only for whites), it is anything that deviates from the following principles: Race is an utterly insignificant matter. It means nothing, explains nothing, and stands for nothing. The races are not only equal, they are interchangeable. Therefore, it makes no difference if the neighborhood turns Mexican or the nation turns non-white or your children marry Haitians. For whites, race is not a valid criterion for any purpose, and any decision they make on the basis of race is immoral. For whites to take notice of race at all is “racism.”

Of course, this contradicts one of the current myths about America, that racial diversity is one of our great strengths. If the races are equivalent, how can racial diversity have any meaning at all? For racial diversity to be a strength (or a weakness or be noticed at all) race must have some kind of meaning, and to the extent that race stands for something why is it wrong for whites to take race seriously both in their personal lives and political views?

The benefits of racial diversity are now supposed to be so important that they justify “affirmative action,” or racial discrimination against whites. If racial diversity is that valuable, race has to mean something significant. But if race is both real and important, why is it wrong to notice and care about these meanings? Why is it wrong for whites to find these differences not to their liking?

Presumably, the theory is that although races are essentially equivalent and interchangeable, blacks, for example, have had different experiences from whites, and whites benefit from contact with the different “culture” blacks have acquired. This doesn’t explain why whites must be forcibly brought into contact with this “culture.” And if it is so different from white culture that “affirmative action” must be resorted to in order to expose whites to it, some whites will find that they don’t like it all, and decide they want nothing to do with it.

The real, unspoken explanation for why diversity is a strength is that race is in fact meaningful. Diversity exposes whites to superior people and superior ways of thinking. After all, sermons about diversity are directed only at whites. Bringing non-whites onto campus or into the club is supposed to be improving and edifying for whites, not for non-whites.

In fact, the idea that whites are inferior, or at least deeply and uniquely flawed is the one distinctly racial idea whites are allowed to have about themselves. Outside the underground “racialist” press it is impossible to find whites portrayed in positive terms as a race. In the past 30 years, probably no mainstream public figure or commentator has expressed pride or satisfaction in being white or urged other whites to do so. On the contrary, in any discussion of race, it is obligatory to write disparagingly about whites, to remind them of past and present crimes, to make them ashamed to be white. Most of the time, whites are supposed to believe that race is simply an empty category, but if they are to have one explicitly racial sentiment about themselves, it is shame.

“The white race is the cancer of human history,” says Susan Sontag. “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” says Noel Ignatiev of Race Traitor magazine. He wants to “abolish the white race — by any means necessary.” Christine Sleeter writes that “Whiteness . . . has come to mean ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity.” This is presumably this sort of thing President William Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, was supposed to think about when her high school had her write an essay called “Why I am Ashamed to be White.” The text book for teacher training reviewed in the previous issue of AR is packed with creative ideas about how to make whites apologize for their race and for their very existence.

The black author James Baldwin once wrote that any white person who wants to have real dialogue about race must start with a confession that is nothing short of “a cry for help and healing.” Perhaps columnist Maggie Gallagher was crying for help when she wrote that she thinks of herself as an American, a Catholic, and sometimes an Irish-American but added, “I hate the idea of being white. . . . I never think of myself as belonging to the “white race.’ Those who do, in my experience, are invariably second-raters seeking solace for their own failures. I can think of few things more degrading than being proud to be white.”

For almost all whites, the only time they ever speak as whites is to apologize. President Clinton is typical. When he speaks as a white man it is to apologize for the Tuskeegee medical experiment that left black men untreated for syphilis or to apologize for slavery.

The celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday is an orgy of white apology. King spent his life telling whites they were wrong. This is now thought to be so valuable a role that it makes no difference that he was a plagiarist, adulterer, and communist sympathizer. For having succeeded in persuading so many whites that they were wicked he has now eclipsed George Washington as America’s most honored secular saint. Only whites could make a hero of a man who spent his life denouncing them.

The Final Solution

So where has the revolution brought us? Whites are to pretend that race is meaningless. They have no legitimate group aspirations. Racial diversity is a good thing if it comes at the expense of whites. Slavery is a crime for which we — and only we — must be forever guilty. The conquest of the continent was not the expansion of civilization but a rape and an abomination. We have no claim to this land, but must let in every band of Third-Worlders who have wrecked their own countries and who will cheerfully wreck ours. If we believe the propaganda of the last 50 years, we must rethink and abandon virtually everything about America. Whites are a uniquely wicked race, and the sooner we are shoved aside by virtuous non-whites the better.

Once more, we can rely on President Clinton to show us the way. He says that after independence from England and the War Between the States, the reduction of whites to a minority will be “the third great revolution of America.” He looks forward to the challenge of seeing “if we can prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture.”

Former Republican congressman Robert Dornan of California agrees. In 1996, while he was still in the House, he said, “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants. And if we lose our Northern European stock — your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair — tough!” In his next election, he lost to a Hispanic, Loretta Sanchez. This is exactly what Mr. Dornan’s cheerfulness about immigration should have prepared him for — his constituency had rapidly become half Hispanic — but apparently it did not. He refused to concede defeat and charged Miss Sanchez’ supporters with vote fraud. He has not, however, changed his position on the advisability of whites becoming a minority.

And it’s not just Americans who happily look forward to oblivion. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, takes for granted that “ethnic diversification” is a good thing for white countries, but notes that Canada and Australia, which have opened their borders to non-white immigration, are trying to “do good by stealth.” Politicians understand the advantages of diversity but think they must not let ordinary whites know what is happening: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Being reduced to a minority will be good for whites but the prospect must be kept secret from them for fear they might object. Miss Dyer looks forward to the day when politicians can be more open about displacing their own people.

Pauline Hanson is the famous Australian politician who doesn’t want whites to become a minority. Such a view is “racist,” of course, and an Australian writing in the Washington Post describes the people for whom Miss Hanson speaks as “the beast,” which is “alive and well, slimily squirming.” No doubt these loathsome forces will be vanquished. The Chicago Tribune gave an article about Miss Hanson the sub-headline: “A new, anti-immigrant party appeals to some Australians who still harbor notions of remaining a Caucasian society.” Fancy that: There are still a few Australians who “harbor the notion” that their country should stay white.

Of course, reducing whites to a minority is only a good first step; with enough interracial marriage, whites might be made to disappear completely. It has therefore become increasingly common to propose miscegenation as the final solution to the race problem. “It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color,” writes Morton Kondracke in The New Republic; “In America, this can happen.” “I think intermarriage may be the only way out [of our racial problems],” writes Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Examiner. Ben Wattenberg, noting the increase in interracial marriages writes happily, “Does all this mean that as we move into the next century race will be much less of an issue? That we will all end up bland and blended? That (as I believe) we will fulfill our difficult destiny as the first universal nation?”

Even “conservatives” think intermarriage is the answer. Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute says it may be “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” In a recent book, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom write that the “crumbling of the taboo on sexual relations between the two races [black and white]” is “good news,” because that will make it impossible to draw racial distinctions.

John Miller is a reporter for National Review, which is thought to be the main “conservative” magazine in America. He thinks miscegenation is inevitable and could be the only way to end racial tension. “Perhaps the best way to undermine the ideology of group rights is to permit this natural process of assimilation to work its way down the generations as people of mixed background marry and have children.” “In the future,” he adds confidently, “everyone will have a Korean grandmother.” This is the happy ending. As they become a minority, whites will dissolve into a glorious, café au lait.

Not only was this the very reverse of what the founders had in mind, it was not even what the racial activists of just a few decades ago had in mind. The post-1965 changes in immigration policy were not supposed to upset the ethnic balance. The civil rights movement was supposed to usher in a new Camelot of racial understanding and harmony. Both predictions were dead wrong: the percentage of whites is shrinking and scarcely anyone pretends that race relations are good. What do we do? Just toss the whole country into a blender and do away with race entirely. Of course, this really means doing away with whites. Whites are only about 15 percent of the world’s population and are having perhaps seven percent of the world’s babies. No one is proposing the blender treatment for Africa or Asia.

It is only whites who have been stripped of any intellectual defenses against this final solution. Race is a forbidden criterion — at least for their purposes — and whites are a shameful bunch anyway. A people whose only collective sentiment is guilt might as well fade away. We have come a long way from Jefferson’s vision of Europeans filling the Americas from north to south.

Pierre Vergniaud (1753–1793) was a French lawyer and revolutionary politician who, like so many others, ended up on the guillotine. It was he who said that the revolution “might devour each of its children in turn.” Ours has been a revolution that, if left unchecked, will certainly devour our children.

However, revolutions that violate the laws of human nature eventually founder. Some day ours will collapse, as biology reasserts itself over sociology, and white racial consciousness reawakens. The Soviet Union staggered on for 75 years before its revolution collapsed under its own weight. The racial revolution has been in full swing for 50 years, and its absurdities and contradiction have never been more evident.

ARTICLE

The Origins of ‘Racism’

The curious beginnings of a useless word.

by Samuel Francis

The Oxford English Dictionary is a multivolume reference work that is one of Western scholarship’s most remarkable achievements — the standard dictionary of the English language on what are known as “historical principles.” Unlike most dictionaries, the OED also provides information on the first historical appearance and usage of words. The range of the erudition in the OED is often astounding, but for AR readers, one of its most interesting entries is for the word “racism.”

According to the second edition (1989) of the OED, the earliest known usage of the word “racism” in English occurred in a 1936 book by the American “fascist,” Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism. The second usage of the term in English that the OED records is in the title of a book originally written in German in 1933 and 1934 but translated into English and first published in 1938 —  Racism by Magnus Hirschfeld, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. Since Hirschfeld died in 1935, before the publication of Dennis’ book the following year, and had already used the word extensively in the text and title of his own book, it seems only fair to recognize him rather than Dennis as the originator of the word “racism.” In the case of the word “racist” as an adjective, the OED ascribes the first known usage to Hirschfeld himself. Who was Magnus Hirschfeld and what did he have to tell us about “racism”?

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientist whose major work was in the field of what came to be known as “sexology” — the scientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinsey in the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collect systematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual “liberation.” His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he also published many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex. He wrote a five-volume treatise on “sexology” as well as some 150 other works and helped write and produce five films on the subject.

It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message — that traditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational, and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward. His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction to Racism, write of his “unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, because their sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecuted by their more fortunate fellow-mortals.” Long before the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the “normalization” of homosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior.

Hirschfeld was the founder of an Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and helped organize “sexology” on an international scale. In 1922, he was physically attacked and almost killed by anti-Semites in Munich. In May, 1933, the Nazis closed down his “Institute of Sexual Science” and Hirschfeld fled to France, where he lived until his death in 1935.

Racism is largely devoted to a highly polemical “refutation” of some of the main racial ideologies and theories of the 19th and 20th centuries. The writers whom Hirschfeld criticized, aside from his favorite target of the National Socialists themselves, were figures like Arthur de Gobineau, Vacher de La-Pouge, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and others generally denounced today as “pseudo-scientists.” In fact, that is an inappropriate term. Some of them were not trying to write as scientists at all but rather as political theorists, while others are better described as pre-scientific writers on race who worked with inadequate information, concepts, methodology, and terminology. While Hirschfeld may have been correct in rejecting their more egregious errors, his sneering at them for these mistakes is rather like ridiculing Copernicus and Kepler because they continued to accept some erroneous ideas from medieval astronomy.

Even when Hirschfeld is right in his critique of the early race theorists, it is often because he has chosen easy targets. His “refutation” of “racism” is largely centered on irrelevant common-places that even extreme exponents of racial differences might readily acknowledge — that all human beings are part of the same species and can interbreed, that blood transfusions can take place between races, that “there is no such thing as a pure race,” that the races are identical in the vast majority of physical characteristics, that cephalic index is not a meaningful measurement of intelligence or character, etc. Yet his “scientific” evidence is often merely anecdotal or simply his own opinion asserted as unquestioned truth.

In another section, he recounts the names of those he considers the 70 most outstanding figures in world history and announces that “all such lists, when made without bias, will show that persons of genius and persons of outstanding talent are not set apart from the ruck by any colour of their eyes, by a peculiar shape of the skull or the nose, by any “ethnological’ characteristics whatever. What is decisive in human beings is not race but individuality.” It does not seem to occur to Hirschfeld that all but about 8 or 9 of the 70 world-historical figures on his list are white Europeans. There are no Negroes and only two Asians (Confucius and Sun Yat Sen).

It is interesting that for all his contempt for “racism,” Hirschfeld never once mentions IQ studies or the considerable psychometric evidence about race and intelligence that was already available even in the 1930s. Most of Hirschfeld’s polemic is aimed at the proponents of intra-European racial differences (Nordics, Alpines, Mediterraneans, Dinarics, etc.) and not at differences between whites and other major races (though he steadfastly denies such differences as well). Curiously, he never cites the work of Franz Boas and his disciples against “racism,” though that work was available in Europe at the time, nor does he invoke the ideas of the Frankfurt School, though Hirschfeld’s own claim that “racism” is rooted in fear, loss of self-esteem, and other social and psychological pathologies resembles the ideas the Frankfurt School was formulating.

Nor, despite Hirschfeld’s own Jewish background and the Nazi threat to Jews, does he seem preoccupied with anti-Semitism; in one or two passages he criticizes Jews themselves for their own ethnocentrism and faults Zionism for having created a new “race hatred” between Jews and Arabs. Moreover, Hirschfeld is a stout defender of eugenics, though not on racial lines, and he even has a brief chapter exploring a distinction he calls “Gobinism or Galtonism” — that is, attacking the ideas of French “racist” Arthur de Gobineau and defending those of Francis Galton, who coined the word “eugenics” and pioneered its development. Today most critics of “racism” would lump Galton and Gobineau together rather than distinguish between them.

As a serious critique of the view that socially significant natural differences between the races exist, Hirschfeld’s book is a failure, and even as a polemic against some of the more politicized and unverified claims about race made a century or more ago, it is weak. The importance of the book is not so much its content, however, as what it tells us about the word “racism” and how the enemies of white racial consciousness have developed and deployed it for their own purposes.

Hirschfeld describes his own political ideals as “Pan-Humanism,” a version of political, cultural, and racial universalism. The Pauls themselves write, “we think that the readers of Racism will detect a very definite orientation to the Left . . . [Hirschfeld] was one who fully realized that sexual reform is impossible without a preliminary economic and political revolution.”

In Racism, Hirschfeld offers what is essentially a definition of “Pan-Humanism:” “The individual, however close the ties of neighborhood, companionship, family, a common lot, language, education, and the environment of nation and country, can find only one dependable unity within which to seek a permanent spiritual kinship — that of humanity-at-large, that of the whole human race.” With one exception, he is unsparing in his denunciations of the ethnocentric loyalties of nations, races, and cultures: “Always and everywhere, except in Soviet Russia, xenophobia, xenophobia, xenophobia.” Later, he informs us, “It may be too early to speak, but perhaps the problem of nationalities and races has already been solved on one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe [i.e., Stalin’s Russia].”

“Racism,” therefore, is a term originating on the left, and has been so defined and loaded with meanings the left wants it to have that it cannot now be used by the supporters of white racial consciousness for any constructive purpose. Anyone who uses the term to describe himself or his own views has already allowed himself to be maneuvered onto his opponents’ ground and has already lost the debate. He may try to define the word differently, but he will need to spend most of his time explaining that he does not mean by it what everyone else means. As a term useful for communicating ideas that the serious supporters of white racial consciousness wish to communicate, the term is useless, and it was intended by those who developed it that it be useless for that purpose.

But understanding the origins of the word “racism” in Hirschfeld’s polemic also makes clear the uselessness of the word for any other purpose. No one seems ever to have used the word to describe his own ideas or ideas with which he agrees; its only application has been by the enemies of the ideas it purports to describe, and hence it has no objective meaning apart from its polemical usage. If no one calls his own ideas “racism” and its only application is to a body of ideas considered to be untrue and evil, then it has no use other than as a kind of fancy curse word, the purpose of which is simply to demonize anyone who expresses the ideas it is supposed to describe.

It is clear that Magnus Hirschfeld himself harbored deep ideological, professional, and personal animosities against those to whom he applied the word, and those animosities may have extended to the entire society that throughout his career he associated with sexual repression and which he wanted replaced by a kind of global communism under the label of “Pan-Humanism.” Whatever the flaws or virtues of his polemic against “racism,” his own opposition to racial consciousness was neither entirely rational nor disinterested. It is time that the enemies of racial, national, and cultural consciousness like Hirschfeld and the Frankfurt School cease to be able to claim a monopoly on rationality and sanity and that the obsessions and motivations that seem to shape their own ideologies and political behavior be subjected to the same scrutiny they apply to the societies and peoples whom their thinking could destroy.

Samuel Francis is a syndicated columnist.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Duke Runs for Congress

David Duke is running for the 1st Congressional District seat in Louisiana vacated by Robert Livingston — and appears to have a good chance of winning. In 1989 Mr. Duke was elected to the Louisiana state house from this 85-percent white district, and he carried 57 percent of the district vote in a 1990 race for U.S. Senate.

In his campaign literature Mr. Duke says, “it is Whites today who face racial discrimination in programs deceptively called “affirmative action.’” He describes the white flight and deterioration that resulted from integration and says, “I am unalterably opposed to forced integration of schools and neighborhoods. Homeowners and property owners should have the freedom of choice in these matters.” His literature also criticizes immigration, the Malcolm X postage stamp, and attacks on American heritage such as the removal of George Washington’s name from a black public school in New Orleans.

There are seven Republicans running for the seat, including former governor and congressman David Treen, and a sitting state legislator. Of the two Democrats, Bill Strain, a wealthy trucking and construction executive, appears to have the edge. A primary open to candidates of all parties will be held on May 1st. If, as expected, no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the two top candidates will have a runoff on May 29th. Louisiana state Democratic Chairman Ben Jeffers predicts a runoff between Mr. Duke and Mr. Strain.

As it always does, the GOP has repudiated Mr. Duke. Republican National Chairman Jim Nicholson says, “there is no room in the party of Lincoln for a Klansman like David Duke” — although it has been 20 years since Mr. Duke was in the Klan. But some Republicans are hedging their bets. Louisiana Governor Mike Foster has refused to condemn Mr. Duke and says he will not endorse anyone in the primary. (Richard Benedetto, An Ex-Klan Leader, a Monica Among La. Hopefuls, USA Today, March 23, 1999, p. 7A.)

This race will be an important test of whether whites are still capable of voting for their own interests. Mr. Duke continues to be vilified in the press, and some voters will be frightened by his views. However, more and more whites are prepared to defy egalitarian and integrationist orthodoxies — at least in the privacy of the voting booth. A Duke victory would mark a major change in white attitudes that could have far-reaching consequences.

Race and Disease

Canada, England, Sweden and Denmark have eradicated syphilis, and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) would like to do the same in the United States. The problem appears to be that, as the CDC delicately puts it, “syphilis is concentrated in particular subgroups.” To be blunt about it, blacks get the disease at 44 times the white rate. Syphilis is therefore concentrated by region as well as by race. Montana, North Dakota, New Hampshire and Vermont have no syphilis at all, whereas states with large black populations have a lot. Seventy-five percent of American counties report no syphilis and over 50 percent of the cases are in just 31 counties — one percent of the country. Syphilis is a good candidate for eradication because it has no animal host, is not resistant to antibiotics, and its long incubation period means that carriers can be treated before they become infectious. (Efforts to Eliminate Syphilis in the United States by 2005, NCHSTP News and Notes, Spring, 1999, p. 8.)

Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the U.S. 100 years ago, but by the 1970s the disease was all but eliminated. In the mid 1980s TB made a comeback, and from 1985 to 1992 it increased by 20 percent. Third World immigration has been the main source of the disease. Almost 2 billion people (one-third of the world’s population) are infected with TB, and the overwhelming majority live in the Third World. In 1997, 39 percent of new TB cases reported in the United States were among the foreign-born. The racial breakdown of cases in 1997 was: Blacks 33 percent (6,610 cases), whites 25 percent (4,872), Hispanics 21 percent (4,228), Asians 19 percent (3,833). All non-white groups have higher disease rates than whites, with Asians the most likely to have TB. They are 16 times more likely than whites to have the disease, blacks are eight times, and Hispanics are six times more likely. (World TB Day: An opportunity to Recommit to TB Elimination, Ibid., p. 4.)

Everywhere the Same

Rivarol is a scrappy French newspaper that has been sued more often under France’s repressive thought crime laws than any other. The following short article is an example of why it calls itself the “weekly of the national and European opposition.”

Rapper = Rapist

In the current period of complete sexual liberation, you have no doubt noticed that even the most prurient journalists are suddenly seized with the modesty of a virgin when the satyrs happen not to be Gauls [native Frenchmen]. Thus it was that the Journal du Dimanche of Feb. 14 disposed in exactly six lines of the horrible affair in Goussainville, where a couple returned to their burgled house and found the body of their 11-year-old girl — raped and then strangled — abandoned under a bed. Are we to attribute this reticence to the fact that the suspects are two Sri Lankans — and political refugees, no less?

And how was it that only Le Parisien, and only in its Seine-and-Marne [regional] edition, wrote of an incident that was nevertheless particularly, shall we say, colorful?

On the morning of Jan. 20, three masked men burst into a house in Lagny, and tied up the owners, a tradeswoman and her daughter. First they beat the women, then held them under water in the bathtub in an attempt to get them to say where the strong box was kept. Since the strong box existed only in the imaginations of these sadists, they took out their disappointment on the young woman, whom they raped repeatedly before the eyes of her helpless mother.

Two of these torturers were arrested on Feb. 12. Their leader is none other than Landry Mahoukou, known as Landry Doc Mahoukou, who stars in the Congolese rap group 2Bal. He recently participated in the collaborative album “Bisso na Bisso,” now constantly touted on M6 [commercial television] and of which specialists in rap predicted even before it went on sale that it would win a gold disk.

A particularly odious detail: It was the very day of the savage little jaunt in Lagny that Mahoukou began the promotion campaign for his disk, just before flying off to the Ivory Coast to shoot the promo clip now running on M6. At no moment in the clip does he appear to be affected in the slightest by the agonies he had just inflicted on the two unfortunate women. But after all, they were only babtou or white women, that is to say, nothing at all, as we learned in the case of another famous rapper, Joey Starr, who was charged with beating up an Air France stewardess. In English, “rap” is just one letter shy of “rape.”

We will be curious to see when M6 decides to banish the charming Doc Mahoukou from the screen or whether FNAC [a chain of large record and book stores] will dare to put the 2Bal CD on sale — a group whose name, the reader who sent us the clippings from Le Parisien suggests, might well be changed to 2Bullets . . . in the head. (Claude Lorne, Chronicles of Off-the-Shelf Thinking, Rivarol, Feb. 19, 1999, p. 7.)

Bills Coming Due

The bill for years of anti-white discrimination is finally coming due. In San Francisco, a university lecturer won a $2.75 million judgment because he was denied tenure and then had his teaching schedule cut because he is white. In 1996 Howard McNier applied for tenure at San Francisco State University business school only to be told by a black dean that “the university will not approve the hiring of another male Caucasian” (the dean denies saying this). Instead, the job went to Hailin Qu from China. The jury awarded Mr. McNier $2.75 million in damages for discrimination and another $2.2 million because of the university’s “retaliation” in cutting his schedule, but there had been a pretrial agreement between the two sides limiting the award to the higher of the two amounts. (Jonathan Curiel, White Lecturer Wins Bias Suit Against SFSU, San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 1999.)

A woman has won a $708,000 award against the city of Wilmington, Delaware, which fired her because she is white. A federal jury ordered Wilmington mayor James Wills and city personnel director Wayne Crosse — both black — to pay equal portions of the award to Paula Manolakos but the city will indemnify them. The mayor’s big mistake was to lose his temper during a discussion with city officials about staff cuts, in which he roared that he wouldn’t lay off any more minorities and that whites were going to have to go. Mayor Wills now says this was anger, not “racism.”

The lawyer for the city told the jury that “to accuse Mayor Sills of racial discrimination flies in the face of everything he’s stood for,” and pointed out that the mayor was born in the segregated South — as if that somehow made him incapable of mistreating whites. (Jim DeSouza, White Woman Wins Racial Bias Case Against City, Delaware Law Weekly, March 23, 1999.)

The Beloved Country

It has been a bad month for anti-Apartheid heroes. Allan Boesak was once the darling of white liberals, circling the globe to drum up support for “the struggle.” Now the former preacher is getting six years in jail for stealing the money he raised. He reportedly pilfered $400,000, mostly from his Foundation for Peace and Justice, to which the singer Paul Simon and the Swedish government had contributed. (Anti-Apartheid Hero Boesak Gets 6 Years for Theft of Funds, Miami Herald, March 25, 1996, p. 19A.)

Mzwakhe Mbuli, known as “the people’s poet” for his doggerel about white rule, is also on his way to the pokey. He and two bodyguards have been convicted of robbing a Pretoria bank of 15,000 rand ($2,500), and will be sentenced April 22. Mr. Mbuli claimed he was framed by high officials in the ANC who were afraid he would denounce them. “I have no doubt that the people behind my arrest are politicians who are involved in the drug trade,” he says, though he will not name names. The magistrate, who got death threats for prosecuting the popular Mr. Mbuli, disbelieved the defendant.

Mr. Mbuli began his career in the early 1980s, when he started reciting poems at funerals. He made records, some of which were banned, and he also spent time in jail. He became famous, and was the chief praise-singer at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration. Mr. Mbuli has been held without bail since his arrest in late 1997, and has composed lines about his current life behind bars which, he says, is no better than it was under the white regime:

Is this a ‘New South Africa?’
Is this the ‘Rainbow Nation?’
My intelligence is beyond humiliation
My resilience is beyond malicious allegations
My spirit cannot be broken
I am vulgar-proof . . .

(Ron Sakolsky and Sheila Nopper, Apartheid Justice, Village Voice, Jan 6-12, 1999. Daniel Wakin, S. African Poet Fights Robbery Charge, AP, March 8, 1999. Donald McNeil, People’s Poet, Denying Crime, is Convicted in South Africa, NY Times, March 30, 1999, p. E1.)

Yet another symbol of the glory days has fallen on hard times. When it was run by whites, Fort Hare University in Eastern Cape Province was an excellent school for blacks. Nelson Mandela was a student, and says that blacks thought of it as “Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one.” Now it is so corruptly and badly run it is on the verge of bankruptcy. A recent report says that staff hardly do any work and take sabbaticals at full pay for up to five years. Students can’t or won’t pay their fees, but phantom employees get paychecks.

The personal security for the registrar is “comparable to a head of state” — but maybe he needs it. In 1995 two profs were killed under mysterious circumstances and rumor has it that they knew too much about where the money was going. The vice-chancellor, Mbulelo Mzamane, is a celebrated writer who has lately been accused of plagiarism. Contrary to university rules, Fort Hare has been paying most of the bills of Mr. Mzamane’s daughter — who attends Boston University.

The school is millions of dollars overdrawn on its bank, and teachers recently went on strike because their checks were late. Some people believe the only solution is to shut the place down. (Anton La Guardia, Mandela’s University Faces Closure over £7m Debt, Daily Telegraph (London), March 15, 1999.)

Finally, a shooting that took place in April, 1998, has proceeded to sentencing. Nicholas Steyn, who farms near Johannesburg, fired warning shots at a group of blacks on his property and killed an infant who was being carried in the arms of her 11-year-old cousin. The death prompted demonstrations, denunciations, and even considerable coverage in the United States. In March, Mr. Steyn received a five-year suspended sentence and was put on probation. The light sentence set black spectators chanting “Kill the farmer! Kill the Boer!” advice that some blacks have recently taken to heart. A bit of evidence only recently reported in the United States is that Mr. Steyn aimed well away from the blacks and the bullet that killed the child ricocheted off a telephone pole. (Susan Fox, S. Africa Farmer Gets Probation, AP, March 23, 1999.)

Black Magic

Traditional Nigerian rainmakers are supposed to be able to keep storms away as well as whistle them up. In the Southwestern part of the country, a family hired a rainmaker to chase away a storm that was threatening a burial party. The magician climbed up on a roof and started appealing to Sango, the Yoruba god of thunder. He was immediately struck and killed by a bolt of lightning. (Lightning Kills Rainmaker, Telegraph (London), March 19, 1999.)

What Mitch Wrought

When Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America last October it gave millions of people one more reason to want to come to the United States. The temptation became irresistible when the INS announced that as a “humanitarian measure” it would not expel illegals from the worst-hit countries. Because there is no more detention space, illegals from Honduras and Guatemala get a court date — which they can ignore — and are then turned loose on American soil.

The result has been a tidal wave of people from the south that has swamped Mexico’s ramshackle border patrol. Aggressive Central Americans have mobbed and beaten Mexican agents, who have almost no training and little equipment other than a green T-shirt. The invaders occasionally commandeer border-crossing freight trains and simply refuse to get off. They know the Mexican government has forbidden agents to shoot at illegals, and the agents don’t have guns anyway.

The United States has reportedly had secret discussions with Mexico about donating equipment, offering training, and even sending American agents to act as “advisors,” but neither government can openly acknowledge the talks. Mexico’s official position is that American efforts to guard its own border against Mexicans are misguided, so it can hardly appear to be taking advice or getting help from perfidious gringos.

Meanwhile, the Mexican agents cannot hold the line. They are embarrassed by newspaper stories about their failures, and in private some even call themselves “little dwarfs in green.” “Every time I come to work, I feel humiliated,” says a member of the border patrol — but it is the United States that will eventually suffer most from his humiliation. (S. Lynne Walker, Human Tide Swamping Mexican Agents, San Diego Union-Tribune, March 14, 1999.)

Texans Against Quotas

The Houston-based Campaign for a Colorblind America is leading an effort to end racial preferences in Texas. The group is behind a bill that would prohibit state and local governments from asking the race of job seekers or college applicants. A spokesman for the campaign says this will thwart affirmative action “since those making the decisions about admissions and hiring will not even know the race or ethnicity of the applicants.”

Democrats are united against the bill, and many Republicans are afraid to support it, since opponents of affirmative action in Texas face open hostility. When a bill to end preferences was introduced in the legislature a few years ago, black representative Ron Wilson implied that one of the sponsors was a Klansman, and physically attacked another representative who supported the bill. (Campaign for a Colorblind America, News Release, March 18, 1999.)

Haiti Unchanged

Since the U.S. military led the “restoration” of democracy in 1994, American taxpayers have spent $2.2 billion on Haiti. Things have only gotten worse. The per capita annual income is $225, down from $260 in 1994. Much-heralded economic and structural reforms, such as selling off state-owned industries and building new roads, have gone nowhere. The latest elections in April 1997 — widely viewed as fraudulent — drew only five percent of the electorate, and Haiti is again a dictatorship; President Rene Preval dissolved parliament in January.

Much of the country is living off foreign aid. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) feeds 500,000 school children every day. This does, however, keep some Haitians in Haiti. The number of north-bound “refugees” has dropped from 24,917 in 1994 to 1,206 in 1998, but the cost is high: Haiti gets 20 percent of all U.S. aid for Latin America and the Caribbean even though it has only two percent of the region’s population. Distributing aid is complicated because the government cannot be trusted, and 90 percent of the money goes through private organizations. The World Bank will no longer deal with Haiti because loans for infrastructure disappear into private pockets.

Congressmen have started wondering why we should spend money on a pest-hole that has no economic or military value. Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) who chairs the House Intelligence Committee says “we’ve been ripped off in Haiti and I don’t see why we should put any more money into it. There’s so much corruption that the only way to make sure aid gets to the people is to fly down there yourself with some food, hand it to a Haitian, and watch him eat it in your presence.” If things fall apart any more, virtually all eight million Haitians are potential boat people. (Shelly Emling, Billions of U.S. Dollars Later, Haiti No Better Off, Washington Times, March 23, 1999, p. A16.)

Black Pride

A reader reports that when his wife taught at a virtually all-black Georgia public school in 1990, the children recited the following two pledges before class every day:

African American Pledge:

I am a proud African American Child.
I came from great people who expect great things.
I want to be a good thinker and a great leader.
I love my hair and skin and myself from deep within.
I love my sister and my brother because we both must struggle.
I promise to be the best I can in all I do.

Black Heritage Pledge:

I pledge my respect to the flag of the Black Americans and to the people it represents. I shall remain aware of the color red, being ever mindful that it represents the blood shed by our forefathers. The color black gives me pride and identity. I shall always remain true to the American ideal that all men are created equal.

Congress v. C of CC

Nearly 150 members of Congress have sponsored a House Resolution (HR-35) denouncing the Council of Conservative Citizens (C of CC). This is a grass-roots conservative organization, which AR editor Jared Taylor serves as a member of its board of directors. The resolution has not been voted out of committee but could come up for a vote any time after Congress reconvenes in mid-April.

The text of the resolution says that the C of CC “provides access to, and opportunities for the promotion of, extremist neo-Nazi ideology and propaganda that incite hate crimes and violence . . .” It is supported mainly by black and Democratic house members, but there are a few Republicans sponsors. At a March 18 press conference held at the Capitol, the resolution’s original co-sponsors Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and James Clyburn (D-Ga.) denounced the C of CC and read passages from its publications and web site. “Conservative” columnist Arianna Huffington also spoke, urging Republicans to show good faith toward minorities by supporting the resolution. A number of Washington-area C of CC members attended the conference and caught the congressmen by surprise with their pointed questions.

Republicans are uncomfortable with the resolution because some of them — most notably Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) — have spoken at council meetings. J.C. Watts, the only black Republican in Congress, tried to derail the resolution by introducing one that condemned all groups that promote “bigotry and racism” but that did not mention the C of CC. It failed to get the two-thirds majority that the rules prevailing at that time required for passage. The floor debate presented the unusual spectacle of Democrats voting against a condemnation of “racism.” They wanted the C of CC’s scalp or nothing. As John Conyers (D-Mich.) explained, “This [alternative] bill is a cheap ruse that is totally characteristic of Republicans who want civil rights on the cheap.”

The C of CC is fighting the resolution. Gordon Baum, CEO of the council, has appeared frequently on radio and television to defend the organization. Jared Taylor and Samuel Francis, who is also a board member, have challenged Reps. Wexler and Clyburn to a public debate on the resolution. Mr. Wexler’s office indicates that the two will reply formally to the challenge when Congress reconvenes. (Mary Jacoby, Lawmaker Grabs Spotlight to Attack Racist Fringe, St. Petersburg Times, March 19, 1999. Jim Abrams, Resolution Condemning Bigotry Divides House, CNN.com, March 23, 1999.)

Texaco Goes Loco

A California-based investment manager and advisor with clients who own stock in Texaco was disturbed by a company press releases claiming that 69 percent of the people Texaco hired in 1998 were non-whites and women. He thought that such openly quota-minded employment policies would jeopardize his clients’ investments.

He telephoned Texaco, and the company’s vice president for investor relations Elizabeth Smith confirmed the figure. She also reportedly told him that “white males are only hired by default,” and went on to call him “a racist and a bigot.” The astonished investment manager told this to a reporter, who also telephoned Texaco. She said she called him “a racist and a chauvinist, not a bigot,” and that she felt threatened by his tone and comments, which she called “totally disgusting.” She denied saying that white men were hired only by default but confirmed that the company had set aside $1 billion to spend on women- and minorities-owned businesses from 1997 to 2001.

A Texaco PR lady added that the company “is proud of our diversity programs, and we feel it is very important and good business.” (Jon E. Dougherty, White Males Need Not Apply at Texaco, WorldNetDaily.com, March 31, 1999.)

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — “INS Surrenders” in the April issue reminded me of how different things were in 1953, when my wife and I immigrated to the United States from Canada. We came from a very similar cultural and ethnic background and fit easily into American life. Even so, the immigration procedure required several successive steps, and each had to be completed satisfactorily before the next could be started. The process took more than four months, much to the exasperation of my new American employer. If we had failed at any point, we would have been denied entry.

The first step was to fill out a very long application form that probed every facet of our lives. It took much time and effort to dig up the data required, including photos, notarized birth certificates, marriage license, etc. Once these data were gathered we were required to affirm, under oath, that we had never belonged to any of a long list of subversive organizations. Then came personal finances. We had to prove that we could support ourselves so as not to add to the welfare burden. An employer’s affidavit was required. Next came complete physical examinations, including blood tests and X-rays. The INS seemed especially interested in knowing if we had communicable sexual diseases. My wife, a fine Christian lady, was insulted and embarrassed to have to affirm that she had never been a prostitute. Finally, we needed police certificates from every place in Canada in which we had lived, showing that we did not have criminal records. We also had to supply fingerprints taken by the Canadian police.

How times have changed! Today the Clinton administration offers a warm welcome to Mexican immigrants who are subject to very little in the way of official scrutiny — certainly nothing like what we Canadians went through back in the 1950s.

Dr. Alfred G. Ratz, Bend, Or.

Sir — Your review of the anti-white teacher-training textbook was grim enough, but I’m not sure the schools even need a book like that. By the time they graduate from high school, most Americans are as ignorant and as indoctrinated as they would be if their education were entirely in the hands of the authors of the book. The anti-racists’ goals have already been achieved.

Carol Whitley, Kenosha, Wis.

Sir — I read with interest Jared Taylor’s article, “America up for Grabs,” about the lecture by Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). I agree with Mr. Potok that the disintegration of the concept of America as an integral nation-state has created a situation of psychological flux that could be used by Euro-American activists. We do indeed live in an era of unprecedented opportunity for activism; also, the end of the cold war has created a situation in which an international pan-European movement is possible.

However, I strongly disagree with Mr. Potok’s characterization of the leadership of the Euro-American movement as having done “very good organizing work” for “over 30 years.” Mr. Potok is either trying to scare gullible liberals into contributing even more money to the SPLC’s already overflowing coffers, or he is trying to make a bad joke. The sad reality is that the Euro-American “movement” has been characterized by three decades of failure and ineptness. There have been too many ineffective groups with bizarre ideologies and divisive philosophies, too many do-nothing procrastinators and con-men, too many dead ends and bitter disappointments. By contrast, organizations like the SPLC itself have been professional, successful, and above all, serious. As we enter the 21st century, Euro-American activism will have either to mature quickly, or find that the window of opportunity has closed.

Mike, Connecticut

Sir — I was interested to read Mr. Lubinskas’ account of early black separatist movements, but I believe it gives a false impression. It may be attractive to AR readers to think that there is a natural and historic desire on the part of blacks to distance themselves from whites just as whites have distanced themselves from backs, but this is not true. The early black separatists were mainly escaping from white oppression. Free blacks faced many obstacles in white society and knew they were unwelcome. Separation was attractive only because the burdens of segregation and Jim Crow were so heavy. Even the Garveyites were fleeing second-class citizenship as much as they were asserting black pride. And do even the Black Muslims really want to cut themselves off from whites? As Mr. Lubinskas suggests, they talk openly about separation only if they think it will make whites beg them to stay.

No white nationalist should expect help from blacks in any kind of separatist endeavor. Because of the most fantastic combination of historical accidents, American blacks find themselves in ideal circumstances. They live as official equals — sometimes even as designated beneficiaries — in a society vastly more advanced than any they could create, and they reap the psychological and material tribute of a majority population that takes responsibility for their every shortcoming. The American experience is so staggeringly superior to anything blacks could ever arrange for themselves that only crackpots would think of giving it up.

Conrad Schmidt, Rumson, N.J.