October 1999
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol 10, No. 10 | October 1999 |
| CONTENTS |
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The Biological Reality of Race
Book Review: The Sacred Ties of Blood
Notes on the Japanese
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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The Biological Reality of Race
Choice data are accumulating in a neglected field.
Race is a fascinating scientific subject. Unfortunately, for more than half of this century there has been a huge propaganda campaign to drive it completely out of the sciences. And even though most of the race-deniers’ claims are nonsense or wildly spun half-truths, the vast majority of serious scientists have been taught their lesson. For a youngster, to deal with race from a scientific perspective and risk the label “scientific racist” could be career suicide. Most of my scientific colleagues leave race alone, at least in public.
These days, in the genetic and biological sciences there are so many things that are unknown, and so many new and exciting techniques, that a scientist can easily have a productive career without ever mentioning race. But one of the consequences of the absence of work in this field is that there is a gold mine of data about the biological realities of race. Actually a gold mine is probably the wrong image because it implies one must dig and work to collect the prize. It’s really more like a riverbed strewn with gold nuggets. Race biology data have accumulated all around us and are lying there waiting to be picked up and publicized.
This article introduces a few of the many nuggets of information about the biological reality of race. I will not cover intelligence differences — everyone knows about that. But from bone thickness to brain size, there are many biological realities of race besides differences in intelligence.
I should first explain my definition of “race.” In biological tradition the word race is simply synonymous with the terms “subspecies” or “variety.” The basic unit of classification in modern taxonomy is the species. A species is usually said to consist of a set of individuals capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. If the offspring are not healthy and fertile, then the parent types are considered separate species. Mules are usually sterile so horses and donkeys are thought to be separate species.
However, in biology things are often fuzzy around the edges, and so it is with species. Sometimes what are considered to be separate species in nature can and will freely interbreed when brought together by man. Sometimes their hybrid offspring are partially or fully fertile. As one example of the fuzziness of species, consider Canis familiaris, the common dog, and Canis lupus, the Eurasian wolf. They are considered to be separate species because their habitats and life-styles are different. Within the dog species itself there are many varieties that are quite different in physiology and behavior. The tiny Mexican Chihuahua, would have a hard time mating with an Irish Wolfhound, but they are considered to be of the same species.
When wolves encounter dogs, they usually eat them. But sometimes they mate with them. When they mate it is almost always the male wolf with the female dog. The reverse is rare — male dogs are almost never able to mate with female wolves. The hybrid puppies are usually fully fertile, so by this definition Canis lupus and Canis familiaris are not different species. The point is that species and races are concepts of classification that often blur around the edges. This is because of the very nature of biological reality.
These days humans are thought to constitute one species — Homo sapiens. Humans are in many respects typical of geographically widespread mammalian species in that we are polymorphic (meaning we have “many forms”). This is what appears to us as individual differences. The bell-curve distribution of so many traits — height, weight, strength, intelligence, and the like — illustrates polymorphic traits. We are also typical among widespread mammals in being a polytypic species. Polytypic means “many types;” it is simply a fact of biological reality that not all different groups of humans are the same. Naturally occurring polytypic groups within a species are called varieties, subspecies, or races.
Starting With the Genes
Nowadays biological reality starts with genes, so that is what we will consider first. Genetic surveys have been done that identify many genes for many human populations all around the world. Some surveys have tried to concentrate on so-called “native populations,” that is, people who today are still living where their ancestors were before 1500 AD — before Columbus and the age of European expansion around the globe. When worldwide gene surveys are done of native populations, the results in broad outline are clear and consistent and can be replicated from one study to the next.
The most solid and remarkable finding is that genetically, the people from Sub-Saharan Africa are the most different from all other living humans. I will therefore concentrate mainly on Africans, but will quickly consider the rest of the world.
The illustration below shows the results from one large genetic survey with the lengths of the lines indicating the degrees of genetic difference between groups. Please note that Africans are far different from everybody else.
After Africans-versus-everybody-else, the next most different racial grouping is Australian Aborigines and similar peoples in New Guinea and surrounding areas. The famous anthropologist William Howells described them as follows:
“Australian aboriginals proper, [are] primitive men with a primitive hunting culture, lacking even the bows and arrows of the Negritos of other parts. They are dark skinned but hairy, with thick, ridged, poorly filled skulls and heavy, though fully sapiens, brow ridges; and with broad noses, short projecting faces, large teeth and receding chins. In every way they conform to a picture of Homo sapiens at his most backward, before racial specialization and before a final lightening of brows, reduction of teeth, and expansion of brain.” (W. Howells, Mankind in the Making, 1959, p. 326.)
If we return to the illustration on this page we see that the other major racial groupings are Caucasians, South Asians, and a cluster containing Northern Mongoloids and American Indians. About the only surprise from this worldwide gene survey is the degree of difference between Northeast and Southeast Asia. Even within China there are substantial average genetic differences between north and south. The racial/genetic differentiation within China is a fascinating topic for another day.
Let me turn now to the largest of genetic differences among humans, that between Africans and everyone else. Some people in the scientific literature argue that it is a vast oversimplification to think of “Africans” as a single race — they emphasize that there is tremendous genetic differentiation, and resultant biological differences, among the native inhabitants of Africa. And that is correct, up to a point. After all, the continent of Africa is a big place; it is the second-largest continent, with much environmental variation. It contains some of the driest and some of the most humid habitats on earth. Also some of the hottest. It has lowlands and highlands, sea level jungles and snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro. So it should come as no surprise that largely primitive people, still divided into tribes, show lots of genetic differentiation. This is a typically primitive condition of humanity. Thousands of years ago when Europeans were still largely tribal breeding groups there was also more genetic difference between different groups — though the different races of European Caucasians are still evident to some extent. The fact remains that although there is genetic difference among Africans, as a group they hang together and are relatively very different from everyone else.
Genetic distance between any two groups is represented by the total length
of the lines separating them.
It is useful, however, to separate North Africa from what is usually called Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara desert is a serious geographical barrier. North of the desert, all across the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the inhabitants are largely Caucasian. In the main we know where they came from, and often we know when. For instance the Phoenicians, ancestors of modern Lebanese, colonized sections of the coast. Later, Germanic tribes from Europe invaded and settled. The Arabs swept through. So today a hybrid, largely Caucasian population with some Negroid admixture, inhabits North Africa. The illustration on the previous page that shows the large split between Africans and all other groups is based on Sub-Saharan Africans.
Let us now look at genetic distances within the African cluster, which is shown in a slightly different perspective in the illustration below. Here again, the lengths of the lines indicate relative genetic distance. The top four groups — labeled Pygmy, W. African, Bantu, and Elongate (also known as Nilotic) are the Negro race of traditional anthropology and are referred to below as blacks. There is substantial gene flow among them but also racial differentiation as indicated by the genetic distances.
Somewhat different from the blacks are the Ethiopian and Hottentot peoples. They are more brownish and yellow than black in skin color and are thought by some to be remnants of an ancient pre-Negroid population. The recent expansion of blacks, mostly Bantus and Elongates, has exterminated most of these people. Their genes remain concentrated in the Horn of Africa — Ethiopia and Somalia, and as a dwindling remnant in Southern Africa. The Ethiopians are today a hybrid population, with substantial Negroid and Semitic gene admixture.
What I have here labeled Hottentot are often referred to as the Khoids, or Khoisanids, which means Hottentots and Bushman. The remaining Bushman are desert gleaners while the Hottentots herd cattle. The Hottentot race is almost all gone today, replaced and exterminated in recent times by the invading blacks. There was some inter-mating, however; enough so that even in America you can sometimes see the results of Hottentot genes.
In many characteristics Hottentots are biologically specialized for life in a hot and dry climate. One of these distinctive adaptations is steatopygia, which literally means “fat buttocks.” This is a solution to the problem of how to store fat in preparation for times of little food and still be able to shed body heat in a hot climate. Most of the fat is bundled in one place — the buttocks — leaving the rest of the body lean so as to make it easy to lose heat. It is the human equivalent of the camel’s hump. By contrast, Eurasian women put on a layer of subcutaneous fat all over the body. It is better than a fur coat in providing insulation against the arctic cold but makes it harder to lose heat in a hot climate. These differences in fat storage strategies are biological realities of race. Another biological peculiarity of the Hottentots is what is delicately called the “Hottentot apron” — four-and-a-half inches of dangling labia. This, too, is a biological reality.
A related biological reality is the difference in resting metabolic rate between black women and white women, which has been found in America. A lower metabolism generates less body heat, which is a useful trait in a hot climate. However, it means that in a place like America, which has a plentiful food supply, blacks are more likely to become obese.
Mating between Hottentots and Negroid blacks generally followed a pattern that is worth noting. Even though it was unusual, most of the crosses were of Hottentot women with black men. The hybrid children were raised as blacks, so most of the gene flow was from Hottentot to blacks. This pattern is common among humans and among mammals generally, like the wolves and dogs mentioned earlier: When populations mix, it is usually males of the dominant group that take up with women from the subordinate group. Women are attracted to socially dominant males. In this instance, the dominant blacks have been acquiring the land, the property, and the women of the Hottentot race that they are replacing.
As an aside, one might note that by many traditional anthropological criteria African-Americans are now one of the dominant social groups in America — at least they are clearly dominant over whites. There is a tremendous and continuing transfer of property, land, and women from the subordinate race to the dominant race. When it comes to personal property, blacks have a tendency to take what they want. The July issue of AR points out that blacks commit robbery at a rate nine or ten times higher than whites and that they are about 50 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa. In many cases, what they do not take themselves, the government takes and redistributes for them. As for land, blacks have literally forced whites out of many of our major cities, the crown jewels of any civilization.
At the same time, there are four times as many marriages between black men and white women than between white men and black women. Like any conquering group, the winners are taking the property, the land, and the women. But perhaps the most incontrovertible evidence of dominance is the fact that blacks can work openly for black empowerment. They can complain about whites and get a sympathetic reception. Whites, on the other hand, are not permitted to discuss their own dispossession.
To return to the four African sub-races that are members of the black Negro race, this group contains the tallest and the shortest of all humans. The shortest are the Pygmies of the African Forests. Adult males of some tribes average about 4-3/4 feet in height. There are many biological reasons for small size; one is a poorly-understood substance called Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). In Pygmies the genetic control of IGF-1 is different from that of other groups. Pygmies were kept as pets by some ancient Egyptian Pharaohs — they were prized for their size and rhythmic dancing ability.
Small size in humans, as in other mammalian species like the tiny deer found in the south of Florida, is thought to be an adaptation to hot, humid climates. Small size also helps in moving through the thick jungles where Pygmies hunt and collect food. To this day the Pygmies have not taken well to agriculture. Some work as irregular and unreliable laborers for their black masters. There is also some inter-mating, again mostly subordinate pygmy women being taken as wives by the dominant blacks.
Rates of Maturation
On the subject of size, it is widely know that black babies tend to be born smaller than white babies but that black babies develop more rapidly in coordination and motor skills. Pygmies have been reported to mature especially quickly; babies sometimes walk and even run at six months of age, a developmental milestone reached on average by Caucasians at age 12 months. Our nearest non-human relatives, the apes, mature in motor skills considerably more quickly than any human group.
The next three groups, the West African, the Bantu, and the Elongate sub-populations are actually quite close genetically. The term Bantu originally referred to a group of closely related languages. The many different Bantu-speaking tribes are mainly the ones that in recent centuries greatly increased their range, invading East and South Africa. The Bantus and the West African groups were mostly planters, practicing primitive slash-and-burn agriculture.
The Elongates, on the other hand, were mostly pastoralists, herders of cattle. Because they had no horses, they herded cattle on foot. Among the Elongates are found the tallest humans. Height can be thought of as an evolutionary pre-adaptation for the modern American game of basketball.
The Elongate physique, slim and long, is thought to be an adaptation for survival in hot and dry climates. A popular theory is that the Elongates evolved in the Sahara region during the thousands of years the Sahara was slowly changing from a grassland to dry desert.
The historically pastoral Elongate tribes now live among the historically agricultural W. African and Bantu tribes. Usually the Elongates have been warrior rulers over the Bantus, though sometimes the Bantus revolt against their Elongate rulers. For example, the Hutu are a Bantu race while the Tutsi (Watusi) are Elongates. Their genocidal conflicts are well known. Much of the warfare currently ravaging Africa is conflict between genetically different groups.
Another interesting biological reality involves long-distance running. At the present time long-distance men’s running events are dominated by blacks from the Elongate groups. This may not be so difficult to understand, since their ancestors have been tending cattle on foot for thousands of years. Kenyans dominate long-distance events, and about three quarters of Kenya’s top runners come from just one tribe, the Kalenjin, who are only about ten percent of the population of Kenya. About 40 percent of the top runners in men’s medium and long-distance events come from just this one tribe.
Why are the Kalenjin such exceptional runners? There is some speculation that it may be because the tribe specialized in cattle thievery. Anyone who can run a great distance and get away with the stolen cattle will have enough wealth to meet the high bride price of a good spouse. Because the Kalenjin were polygamous, a really successful cattle thief could afford to buy many wives and make many little runners. This is a good story, anyway, and it might even be true. Of course, racial biology is a taboo subject, even when differences in athletic ability could not be clearer. There is a book being written about race and sports. It’s working title is simply Taboo.
Many of these race differences are particularly clear in a multi-racial country like the United States. Compared to whites, African-Americans are born earlier and smaller, but they mature more quickly. Their bones are denser, and have a higher mineral content. Denser bones are found even in fetuses before birth, and this difference in density continues throughout life. For this reason osteoporosis among the elderly is less common in blacks than in whites.
Blacks have more lean body mass than whites, and they soon grow taller and heavier than whites. Black children begin their growth spurts two to as much as five years earlier than white children. Young black males outpace whites in muscle mass by age seven. By about age 12, when white boys are beginning their growth spurt, black boys are already much more physically developed. For girls, the growth spurt begins about age six for black girls but not until age eight or nine for white girls. Also black children mature sexually about three years sooner than white children.
There are differences in hormones, body composition, bones, brains, developmental rates, and these differences persist in adulthood. These are all biological realities of race that have many consequences for society.
Let us consider a completely different biological reality: bullet holes. The figures below are based on hospitalizations for gunshot wounds in California. There is a substantial race difference in these data. As expected, the rate for young males is much higher than for older folks. However, the more significant variable is race rather than age. Notice that the rate for the oldest age range of blacks is still as high as the most dangerous range for whites.
| Males | Black | White |
|---|---|---|
| Age 15-24 | 450 | 25 |
| Over Age 55 | 25 | 5 |
There are many other physical and social variables that differ substantially between whites and blacks. The recent excellent books by Phil Rushton and Michael Levin present hundreds of pages of differences and discussion.
Hybrid Vigor
If we turn now to the Eurasian land mass, the various human tribes and races on that continent have been traveling and mixing for a long time. Recent finds have added to the evidence that there were Nordic Caucasians in Bronze-age China, at the very beginning of Chinese civilization. At the same time there have been repeated incursions of Mongols into Europe. These people in their travels and conquests may not have always inter-mated, but often they did, and genetic crosses between closely related races can lead to improvement of populations. Everyone has heard of hybrid vigor.
Madison Grant thought that hybrid vigor played an important role in the development of European civilization. He points out that the Golden Age of ancient Greece was just a few generations after the invasion and mixing of Germanic tribes. Others have suggested that much of the miracle of American development was the result of hybrid vigor resulting from the melting pot of previously more separated European populations. There is modern evidence of hybrid vigor for intelligence among the children of marriages between whites and East Asians in Hawaii.
While hybrid vigor is a biological reality, so are hybrid incompatibilities. Some crosses, particularly between genetically distant races, can lead to mixes that don’t work very well. Until quite recently there was much scientific concern over hybrid incompatibilities between blacks and whites, and remember from recent evidence the Africans are genetically most different from all others. Before about 1950 the scientific literature openly discussed the problem of what Madison Grant called “disharmonious combinations”. After the 1950s, concern over miscegenation almost completely disappeared from mainstream scientific literature. The only thing that had changed was the politics, not the data.
I would like to suggest that modern data, those gold nuggets laying about, contain much that is suggestive of hybrid incompatibilities between blacks and whites. For example, according to the so-called “one drop” rule, hybrids are almost always classified as blacks, so almost all blacks have some white genes. And one of the best reported phenomena in present-day America is that the African-American population suffers a very wide range of health problems. Blacks tend to die sooner and younger from almost every cause but osteoporosis. There are reports that even after all known causes are accounted for there is still “unexplained” poor health among blacks.
This difference is often ascribed to the stresses of “racism,” but this is not a very convincing explanation. Recently, Surgeon General David Satcher appeared on television to point out that in America, black babies are 2½ times more likely than whites to die in the first year of life. It is not clear how infants suffer from the stresses of “racism.” It may simply be that just as blacks mature more rapidly than whites, they succumb to disease more easily and die at younger ages. On the other hand, if there are no inherent racial differences in longevity and resistance to disease, the poor health could be caused by one of the greatest taboos of all: biological, genetic hybrid incompatibility.
Needless to say, there is no research now being done in this field. So long as our rulers refuse even to consider the biological reality of race, this question and many others will remain unanswered.
This article is adapted from remarks given at the 1998 AR conference.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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The Sacred Ties of Blood
The early classical religion of tribe and family.
Family, Kin and City-State: the Racial Underpinning of Ancient Greece and Rome, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and J. Jamieson, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1999, soft-cover, 108 pp., $17.00
reviewed by Thomas Jackson
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) was one of France’s greatest 19th century historians. Perhaps his most influential book was La Cité Antique, written in 1864 and translated into English ten years later as The Ancient City. It is a masterful study of Greece and Rome that stressed the influence of religion on the development of classical institutions. J. Jamieson has now produced an abridged and modernized edition that emphasizes the importance of family and kinship ties in this early religion.
This volume makes clear that the central focus of the ancient faith was reverence for the spirits of ancestors and the purity and continuity of the family. It was a religion that served to bind people together by giving sacred importance to ties of blood. The authors argue that this was central to the extraordinary cohesion, vigor, and continuity of classical society:
The very base of ancient Greek and Roman greatness was in intergenerational dedication to family and kin — qualities they shared with all known Indo-European peoples of their time . . . They saw life not in terms of the present generation only, but as an ongoing succession of the bloodline: the living were the trustees of a sacred heritage which it was their duty to pass on, improved if possible, to their posterity.
This religion of the ancestors predated that of the sky gods such as Zeus and Athena, and coexisted with it without contradiction. The early religion eventually faded, but the authors clearly believe that just as emphasis on family and kinship was a crucial element in the rise to greatness, the loss of a vigorous sense of community made decline inevitable.
The Hearth Fire
From the earliest times, the hearth fire was the symbol of a family’s presence and continuity, and represented the spirits of the ancestors. Ideally it was to burn 24 hours a day, throughout the year. The women of the family tended the fire and the male head of the household was the chief priest. Every meal marked an occasion of reverence to the fire and to the ancestors. The family worshipped only its own forebears, using its own particular prayers and hymns. The authors write, “They [the Greeks and Romans] believed that the dead ancestor accepted no offerings save from his own family; he desired no worship save from his own descendants.” To worship another family’s ancestors was great impiety.
Ancestors were thought always to be present, and to lend assistance to the living — fighting beside them in battle and comforting them in distress. The spirits led a happy, sentient existence, but only if the dead had living descendants to honor them by performing the family rituals.
In the early days of both Greece and Rome, every family had a tomb, where its dead were buried together. By custom the tomb was located near the house. Euripides explains that this was “in order that the sons, in entering and leaving their dwelling, might always meet their fathers, and might always address to them an invocation.” Each man tended the graves of his ancestors, confident that his sons would continue the ritual of reverence. The ancients believed that if the dead ceased to have male descendants to worship at their tombs their restless spirits would wander the earth in sorrow.
The continuity of the family line was so important that in the early days of Greece celibacy was a crime. As the authors explain, “man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him.” Marriage was permitted only within the tribe or city state, and involved the ceremonial transfer of the bride to the husband’s family. The ceremony took place at the husband’s house and amounted to an initiation of the bride into the ancestral religion of her new home.
The ritual of union acknowledged the importance of what the bride was giving up. First, she would pretend to resist leaving her own house. When she arrived at the groom’s house her attendant kinswomen would feign battle with the groom, who would wrest the bride from their protection and carry her over the threshold as if by force. The marriage ceremony then installed her as a priestess who would thenceforth tend the hearth fires of her new home. Even after the sky gods were established and a hymeneal visit to the temple became customary, this was only a prelude to the real marriage ceremony, which took place in the home.
The authors point out that the joining of families was so important and solemn that it was to take place only once a lifetime. Polygamy and divorce were forbidden. A sterile woman, however, could be divorced since her deficiency thwarted the continuation of the male line. Adoption was an unusual procedure permissible only if a couple could not produce a son, and it was customary to adopt the second son of the husband’s closest kinsman. Because of the importance of lineage, female adultery was punishable by death. A wronged husband did not even have the right to forgive; if he did not demand death he must at least repudiate an unfaithful wife.
Because only sons could properly honor their ancestors, a man who died without a son faced extinction. It was this concern for the male line that governed the selection of the Spartans who were left behind to defend the pass at Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 B.C. Only men who were married and had already produced a son stayed to face the invader.
The land on which the family tended its hearth fire and in which it buried its dead was, itself, sacred. In Sparta and probably in early Roman times it was forbidden for a man to sell his land, because it was owned not by the individual but by the continuing, intergenerational family. An early Roman could pass it on to his children and to no on else; only in later times did it become possible to will land to other than direct descendants.
In some Greek city states the land could not even be divided among children, and primogeniture was one of the causes of Greek expansion. As successful city states outgrew their original territory they established new settlements in other parts of the Mediterranean. When colonists set out it was customary to take with them a clod of earth from the ancestral lands as a symbol of continuity.
City states themselves were composed of tribes of related families, and loyalty to the city came next only to loyalty to the family. Attachment to the city was so deep that life beyond the reach of its customs was unthinkable. Exile was therefore tantamount to death, and it was often offered as an alternative to execution. Under Roman law, exile was considered a form of capital punishment. An exile was no better than a foreigner and could not be buried in the tomb of his fathers.
There was nothing universal about the early religions. A city could have gods of its own who were the even more distant ancestors of all citizens, who had been deified as heroes, but these gods were likewise peculiar to the city. Even the sky gods did not have universalist pretensions but protected and received sacrifice only from their people. As Aeschylus has one of his characters say, “I fear not the gods of your country; I owe them nothing.”
Aliens
The authors point out that aliens had no status at all in early Greek and Roman society. They had no religion, could not become citizens even by marriage, were not protected by law, and in some cases could be killed with impunity. A foreigner could be the guest of a citizen but he was not part of the family or the city-state.
As ancient societies expanded and absorbed aliens, provision had to be made to accommodate them. Slaves, for example, could be accepted as junior members of the family and in some cases were entitled to burial in the family tomb, but in return they gave up their freedom for life.
Like all successful societies, Rome and the Greek city-states eventually attracted large numbers of alien hangers-on. They were not allowed to live within the cities themselves and clustered on the periphery. Eventually, it became necessary to give at least some of them legal status and this gave rise to a system of patronage. An alien could gain certain rights and enter into the commercial life of the city by becoming the recognized client of a citizen. Although it became common in the later Roman Empire, naturalization was extremely rare among the Greeks, and required successive votes of large majorities of citizens.
This volume argues that a burgeoning alien population contributed directly to the decline of Rome. Plebs, or aliens who were not clients of citizens, eventually became so numerous they demanded legal status and even political rights. Their alien customs and uncertain loyalty changed the character of Roman institutions and irreparably weakened the Empire. As the authors explain, “Rome declined because Rome fell short of Romans through constant warfare, and also morally through an excess of wealth and a decline of traditional nationally-oriented and nation-building traditions, mores and religion, and finally through the rise to power of non-Roman elements within the vast cultural empire . . . Rome decayed because it lost both is cultural and its genetic heritage.” This book has an important message for those able to heed the lessons of history.
| ARTICLE |
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Notes on the Japanese
I like Japan. My wife and I have been teaching English here since the 1980s. But Japan is a nation to which you belong only by birthright. If you are a foreigner, you do not belong, even if you are fluent in Japanese or are an expert on Japanese art or history.
When Japanese interact among themselves there are more or less standard procedures to be followed. However, with foreigners Japanese are free to act in almost any manner. A Japanese may treat you as an equal, but he is under no social obligation to do so.
The Japanese opened my eyes to race — theirs and mine — when my Japanese wife and I began looking for an apartment in the Tokyo area in the 1980s. Some realtors told us pointblank they would not rent to a white. Others hemmed and hawed about Japanese not being used to foreigners, or how it would be impossible for me to fit into Japanese society. Eventually we got an apartment near Tokyo.
When we moved to a much smaller city we began looking for a house. We had the same problem with my white skin. We got lectures from bank officials about how hard it would be for me to fit into Japanese society. We had to listen to this even after we told them we had been living in Japan for years already. We finally did get a mortgage but under one condition special for us: We had to put down double the usual down payment.
Less than a week after moving in, we were visited by a member of the unwelcoming committee, a housewife who still lives down the street. She marched up to our front door ready to do battle with the invading white barbarian and the strange woman (my wife) who claims to be Japanese. The visitor made it clear that day, and a few times since then, that she does not appreciate our being in the neighborhood.
Over the years I have seen whites come to Japan with stars in their eyes only to leave with a dark cloud over their heads. This is due to misconceptions about Japan, a misconception particularly common among Westerners. The Chinese, Koreans, and other East Asians, who have their own understanding of the importance of race and nationality, have no illusions about being accepted by the Japanese.
Mr. Tolbert lives in Noboribetsu on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
| IN THE NEWS |
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O Tempora, O Mores!
Pro-Immigrant Hatred
Craig Nelsen is a 39-year-old Nebraska native who has lived for some time in New York City. He taught English in China from 1995 to 1997 and saw overpopulation first-hand. He believes there is too much immigration to the United States, and established a non-profit organization called ProjectUSA to call for reductions. His innovative way of bringing the debate to the public has provoked a response that can only be described as hatred.
ProjectUSA has put up billboards around New York City that say such things as: “Tired of sitting in traffic? Every day 6,000 immigrants arrive. Every day!” Or: “Over 80 percent of Americans support very little or no more immigration. Is anyone listening?” This entirely reasonable attempt to get New Yorkers to talk about immigration has turned the city on its ear. Officials have been holding press conferences to denounce Mr. Nelsen’s “bigotry” and to link it to the recent shooting by a deranged anti-Semite at a Jewish community center in California. City Councilman Guillermo Linares said “this is the type of message that is divisive, that is destructive, that can create the type of atmosphere that we observed when children were shot at because of hate and divisiveness.” City Council Speaker Peter Vallone condemned “the kind of speech that leads to the unbridled violence and hatred and death that we see happening too often in our country.”
A commentary in the New York Daily News brushed aside Mr. Nelsen’s assurance that he is concerned with the number of immigrants, not race. Apparently able to read minds, Edward O’Donnell said that ProjectUSA “cloaks its bigotry in allegedly high-minded concern over population growth, environmental damage or urban sprawl.” Melanie Carroll, writing in the same paper, said Mr. Nelsen is preaching “thinly veiled hatred.”
The city government moved immediately to have the signs taken down. There are thousands of billboards in New York that technically violate zoning regulations, and the authorities suddenly found time to cite Mr. Nelsen’s. He has a web page, www.projectusa.org, through which he is raising money to put up more. (Julian Barnes, Anti-immigrant Ads Exiled, New York Times, Aug. 29, 1999. Melanie Carroll, The Signs of Hate Lead From L.A. to New York, NY Daily News, Aug. 15, 1999. Frank Lombardi, City Plans Curbs on Anti-immigrant Signs, NY Daily News, Aug. 12, 1999. Edward O’Donnell, A New Mask for Old Hatreds, NY Daily News, Aug. 12, 1999.)
It would be hard to think of a more vicious and crazed attempt to stifle debate on a vital question. When liberals insist that any opposition to immigration must really be racial are they perhaps only revealing their own secret convictions — that non-whites really cannot fit into America and that their presence in large numbers is dragging the country into the Third World?
The Hateful Shamrock
Officials of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) want white residents in housing developments to take shamrocks off their doors and windows because non-white residents say they are racially offensive. According to Lydia Argo of the BHA, “There are a number of symbols that have been identified by some of our residents as making them uncomfortable and unwelcome. In response to those concerns, we’re including shamrocks along with swastikas, Confederate flags and other symbols which may give offense.” “There is no written policy,” added Miss Argo. We’re simply asking our residents to avoid public displays of any bias indicators.”
James Kelly, president of the Boston City Council, thinks this reflects the fact that the BHA is run almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics and that whites are a declining minority in the projects. “There’s only a small number of Irish Americans left, mostly elderly on fixed income,” he says. “Having them take down their shamrocks is a hateful way of letting them know their time has passed.” (Jim Smith, Shamrock Under Fire, Irish Echo, July 28 — August 3, 1999, p. 8.)
Spacemen in Georgia
The Yammasee Native American Nuwaubians are building a utopian community on 476 acres in Putnam County, Georgia, near Eatonton. About 100 members live in trailers on the property and another three or four hundred live elsewhere in the county. They are a black group, which moved from New York to Georgia in 1993, after the FBI linked them to a number of crimes, including arson and extortion.
The founder is Dwight York, who now calls himself Malachi Z. York. In the 1960s he did time in New York for assault, resisting arrest, and weapons possession. He claims to be from a galaxy called Illyuwn, and says that in 2003 spaceships will come down from the sky and save 144,000 chosen people. Recently, he has started calling himself Chief Black Eagle, and says he is the reincarnation of a Yammassee Indian chief. Members of the group claim to be descended from the Egyptians and from the Yammassee, a Georgia Indian tribe.
The compound strikes an Egyptian architectural motif. The Nile River Road runs between two rows of statues of Egyptian royalty. Inside a 40-foot high gold pyramid there are shops selling books and clothes. A labyrinth leads to a black pyramid, which serves as a church. Pseudo-Egyptian chanting hums through speakers 24 hours a day.
The group does not get along very well with the county. There was a tense standoff when the sheriff tried to escort building inspectors onto the property. The Nuwaubians complained of “racism” and the Justice Department’s Community Dispute Resolution Unit has been called in to mediate. (Patricia J. Mays, Georgia Sect Alarms Neighbors, AP, July 27, 1999.)
Of Mice and Men
Disbelievers in the power of heredity took another blow in September when scientists reported that by adding a single gene to mouse embryos they could engineer a significantly more intelligent strain of mice, which is able to pass on high intelligence to its offspring. The gene, which is called NR2B, is present in all mammals, and is central to a brain process known as long-term potentiation. This underlies many mental abilities, such as recognizing patterns, remembering locations of things, and recognizing the links between different but related phenomena.
In all mammals, including humans, NR2B becomes less active with age, and this may help explain why mental abilities decline. The genetically engineered mice had an extra copy of the gene, which was programmed to keep working later in the mouse’s life. Drug companies will soon be investigating medications that could keep NR2B active in people as well, and there is no reason to think human embryos could not be improved just like mouse embryos. (Rick Weiss, Mighty Smart Mice, Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1999, p. A1.)
North-South Divide
Each year the United Nations releases a scorecard on living standards in 174 countries. The U.N. considers per capita income, life expectancy, school attendance, adult literacy, and poverty. For the sixth year in a row, Canada ranks first. The rest of the top twenty nations were, in the following order: Norway, United States, Japan, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Netherlands, Iceland, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Italy and Ireland.
The bottom ten (in ascending order) were Sierra Leone, Niger, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Mali and the Central African Republic. All are in Africa. (Leo Rennert, Globalization Widens the Gap in Living Standards, U.N. Says, Washington Times, July 12, 1999, p. A11.)
Ethnic Cleansing
Columnist Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote:
In effect, native-born U.S. citizens are being ‘ethnically cleansed,’ not by violence but by their own immigration policy. With the United States taking in 1.2 million immigrants annually, and with that number again entering illegally, cultural homogeneity has been the casualty . . .
One downside to the massive non-European immigration is that, thanks to the liberals’ civil rights policies, every one of these immigrants enters the United States as a ‘preferred minority,’ with legal privileges that native-born citizens of European-origin do not have . . .
People on whom legal privileges are conferred eventually feel like a privileged class and begin acting like one.
Does this lack of good will toward ‘white culture’ mean the portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will be removed from our currency and their historic homes, Mount Vernon and Monticello, closed? If mass immigration means the extinction of American culture, we had best rethink it. (Paul Craig Roberts, The Ethnic Cleansing of European-Americans, Washington Times Weekly Edition, Commentary, June 21-27, 1999.)
Another White Plot
Baffour Ankomah is a London-based Ghanaian who publishes a glossy magazine called New African. With a circulation of 32,000 in 40 countries it is one of Africa’s most respected publications, and articles from it are reprinted across the continent. One of the magazine’s missions is to convince Africans that “what we call AIDS is actually U.S. biological warfare gone wrong.”
“Africa is the target of the world AIDS cartel,” says Mr. Ankomah. “They want to pin it on us, to destroy us with it.” He says that AIDS is a money-making hoax carried out by the UN at Africa’s expense, and is only the latest outrage by the white man. He scoffs at the AIDS death tolls reported for Africa and claims that if people are dying it is from some kind of sinister Western plot invented to rid the world of Africans. New African editorials urge readers to ignore health warnings and not to use condoms. Medical workers say the magazine’s campaign is a big obstacle to controlling the disease on a continent that last year accounted for 83 percent of the world’s AIDS deaths.
El Hadj Sy, a Senegalese United Nations AIDS worker, explains the popularity of Mr. Ankomah’s theories: “People are desperate to find something to blame rather than their own behavior. They want to believe that something this evil must be inflicted upon our continent by outsiders.” But some white UN workers are so sensitive to African feelings that they temper their criticism. Lisa Jacobs, a spokeswoman for the UN AIDS program in Geneva says: “It’s important we don’t just dismiss these theories as rantings in Africa, because many of the problems they point out have valid roots.” (Neely Tucker, AIDS Denial Ravages Africa, Detroit News and Free Press, Aug. 14, 1999, p. 1A.)
President Clinton has issued an executive order creating a government-wide commission and a White House initiative to “improve the quality of life of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders through increased participation in federal programs where they may be underserved.” Translation: more big government and racial preferences. The White House will look for problems in “health, human services, education, housing, labor, transportation, and economic and community development.” Do Asians really have a transportation problem?
By many measures Asians are better off than any other racial group. They have the highest percentage of adults with bachelors degrees (42 percent), their divorce rate is half the white rate, their health is the best of any group, and aside from recent immigrants from South East Asia they have higher incomes than whites. “Clinton is just trying to buy off Asian political support by setting up something,” said John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley.
Other minority groups will probably want the same treatment. Lisa Navarette of the National Council of La Raza said Hispanics could well ask for a commission, and the NAACP is thinking about it, too. But Asian activist Angela Oh, who took part in the President’s fizzled race initiative, doesn’t want anyone else clamoring for special treatment. “I think it would be very unhealthy for all these different ethnic groups to start demanding a commission like this. I think this one is unique.” She says the government needs more information about Asians and that her community felt “stereotyped” by Chinese espionage and Clinton campaign-money scandals. (Josh Gerstein, Clinton Courts Asian-Americans, ABCNews.com, August, 16, 1999.)
Hard Time
In the heavily Hispanic prisons of San Antonio, Texas, Latino gang warfare seems to cause as much bloodshed as racial violence. In just one week, Hispanics attacked each other twice and blacks once. The first riot was at the Dominguez prison, where 21 members of the “Mexican Mafia” attacked six members of a gang called “Raza Unida.” Several apparently coordinated assaults took place just a few minutes apart in five separate housing units. No one was seriously hurt, but guards ordered an indefinite system-wide lockdown.
Just three days later — during the lockdown — several dozen Hispanics used everything from steel-toed boots to trash cans to attack a smaller number of blacks. “Everybody was just swinging,” said Antonio Vega, a 19-year-old Hispanic. “The blacks were in another corner. They were boxed in. They couldn’t go nowhere . . . At that time, all I could think about was hurting (the blacks) as best I could.” Guards threw chemical agents into two dormitories to quiet 108 rioters.
Two days later, there was another Mexican Mafia-Raza Unida rumble at a different lockup called the Torres prison. Eight inmates were hospitalized with stab wounds — three had to be airlifted — after guards used pepper spray to stop the mayhem.
Prison officials say they will not segregate prisoners by race or gang affiliation. “They’re going to have to learn to live together,” said Capt. Don Dalton of the Dominguez jail. (Lisa Sandberg and Bill Hendricks, Jail Officials Expecting More Inmate Flare-ups, San Antonio Express News, August 11, 1999.)
Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the NAACP recently commissioned a poll to learn what “generation X” thinks about race. The most prominently reported finding is that about half of 18- to 29-year-olds agree with the statement that “it’s OK if the races are basically separate from one another as long as everyone has equal opportunity.” The figure for whites was 52.4 percent and that for blacks was 40.1 percent. An even larger number, 74.6 percent, say blacks should work their way up “without any special favors” just as others have. The figures for whites and blacks were 76.2 percent and 66.3 percent. Fully a third of “gen-Xers” think the government should not concern itself with how private employers treat blacks and an equal number think it is not the government’s job to ensure blacks and whites go to the same schools.
As for overall race relations in America, 2.8 percent say they are “excellent,” 18.7 percent say “good,” 57.9 percent say “fair,” and 19.4 percent say “poor.” Blacks are slightly less happy about race relations than whites. Just under half of both groups thought race relations were getting better, with a small majority saying they are getting worse or staying the same. Thirty-eight percent of blacks think white cops will treat them unfairly, but only 8.9 percent of whites think a black cop will be unfair. (Hamilton College & Zogby International & NAACP, Confronting the Color Line in the 21st Century: Racial Attitudes of Young Americans, 1999.)
The media have been wringing their hands over the insufficient liberalism of the answers, especially the view that there is nothing wrong with racial separation. It is encouraging to see common sense persist in the face of years of indoctrination.
What was supposed to be a shining example of black empowerment in South Africa has come to a humiliating end. New Africa Investments, Ltd., which was established as a major black-owned insurer in 1993, has responded to an investor revolt and will restructure in a way that ends black ownership.
The company was founded just before the 1994 elections that brought the ANC to power. The South Africa Life Insurance company decided it would curry favor with the new rulers-to-be by spinning off 30 percent of Metropolitan Life, its subsidiary that wrote policies for blacks, and turning it over to black control. It larded the board of directors with ANC favorites and appointed as chairman Nthato Motlana, an old friend and personal doctor of Nelson Mandela. Although the directors owned a minority of the stock, theirs were the only voting shares, while white-owned companies and investors held the far larger number of non-voting shares — a dual control system rather like apartheid in reverse.
The company has gone downhill, with its stock losing half its value since early 1998. Nothing daunted, the black directors decided to vote themselves $20 million worth of stock options and to dilute the non-voting shareholders further by increasing the number of that class of stock by 50 percent. In April, outraged non-voting stockholders finally forced the directors to reorganize the company along conventional lines and let all investors vote their shares. Dr. Motlana has resigned as chairman, and whites will pick up the pieces.
This is only the latest “black empowerment” scheme to go south. The 100-year-old mining house JCI, Ltd. was broken up after its black chairman, Mzilikazi Khumalo, was booted for insider-trading. Another conglomerate is still headed by Cyril Ramaphosa, a former General Secretary of the ANC, but it no longer tries to run anything; it just holds shares in other companies. (Donald G. McNeil, Major Black Empowerment Company Restructures, Returning Control to Whites, New York Times, Aug. 6, 1999.)
One wonders what white businessmen now think about the misguided faith they put in blacks to run companies. This was the commercial version of the same faith with which they turned the country itself over to Africans, who will no doubt behave exactly as their business counterparts did, voting themselves fat benefits even as they run South Africa into the ground. Of course, the republic cannot be broken up and liquidated when it hits bottom, nor is it ever likely to be handed back to people who can actually run it.
Oops
Roger Russel of South African started out on a marathon walk from Cape Town to Johannesburg and back to call attention to his country’s frightening crime rates. Just 12 miles into his walk he was robbed at gunpoint of everything except the clothes he was wearing. (Reuters, Crime Awareness Activist Gets Mugged, Aug. 25, 1999.)
Give Us Your Poor
The Center for Immigration Studies has released a report that describes how immigration is swelling the ranks of the poor. Between 1979 and 1997 the number of poor people living in immigrant-headed families tripled from 2.7 million to 7.7 million. During that time the number of immigrant households increased 68 percent but the number of immigrant households in poverty increased 123 percent. Two decades ago 15.5 percent of immigrants were poor but now 21.8 percent are. The percentage of poor natives has held steady at about 12 percent. Twenty years ago, fewer than ten percent of America’s poor were immigrants; now more than 20 percent are immigrants.
The report, called “Importing Poverty,” notes that if current trends continue, another 10 million immigrants will come during the next decade. They will continue to be poorly educated, have large families, and swell the ranks of the poor. The full report is available here. (Michael Fletcher, Immigrants’ Growing Role in U.S. Poverty Cited, Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1999, p. A2. AP, More Immigrants Are Staying Poor, Sept. 2, 1999.)
Hispanics, in particular, do not pull themselves out of poverty the way European immigrants did. A study released last month by the California Senate found that Hispanic workers in that state lag far behind all other groups in wages and education, even through the third generation. At that point there is still a $5,400 gap between the median wage of Hispanics and everyone else. In 1998, only about ten percent of California’s third-generation Hispanics had a college education, compared to 30 percent for other groups. About 17 percent of third-generation Hispanics were high school dropouts, whereas only 6.7 percent of non-Hispanics were dropouts. (Nancy Cleeland, Latinos’ Economic Gap Persists Over Time, LA Times, Aug. 19, 1999.)
Quota-Crazy Californians
California Democrats have established quotas for their delegation to the year 2000 national convention where the presidential candidate will be chosen. Of the 432 delegates, 26 percent are to be Hispanic, 16 percent black, 10 percent disabled, nine percent Asian-Pacific Islander, five percent male homosexual, five percent lesbian and one percent Indian. Half are to be men, and half women. Even if all the homosexuals and disabled people are white, whites will still be a minority in the delegation. (AP, Calif. Democrats Set Delegate Goals, Aug. 11, 1999.)
Is Secession Next?
The Texas town of El Cenizo has made Spanish its official language and has declared itself a safe haven for illegal immigrants. Mayor Rafael Rodriguez says that he and most of the 7,800 townspeople speak only Spanish, so it makes no sense to conduct city business in English. He is a former illegal alien who became an amnestied US citizen, and the safe haven ordinance means city employees will not cooperate with the INS. An estimated 1,000 residents of the border town, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, are illegals. As Roberto Heredia, professor of linguistic psychology at Texas A&M International University in Laredo explains, the people of El Cenizo “do not feel like they are part of this country.” (Reuters, Texas Town Adopts Spanish as Official Language, Aug. 13, 1999. Dane Schiller, War of Words Over Spanish Rule, Express-News, Aug. 13, 1999.)
Self Improvement
Many of Jamaica’s poor and some of its wealthy are risking permanent skin damage by using steroid creams to lighten their dark skin and become “brownin’s.” Over the last three years demand for skin-lighteners has risen to record levels and even men are using them. Women claim the effect is immediate. “When I walk on the streets you can hear people say ‘Hey, check out the brownin’,’ explains 17-year-old Latoya Reid. “When you are lighter people pay more attention to you. It makes you more important.” Sheri Roth, 22, understands the dangers but plans to become a brownin’ too: “I am poor and bored and being whiter would make me happier . . . I want to walk into dance halls and feel like a movie star, a white one.”
The creams are made in Europe for treating certain skin conditions but it is illegal to import them into Jamaica. Health officials warn about consequences like severe acne, stretch marks, and increased risk of skin cancer. Still, demand has prompted a thriving smuggling business and the creams are so widely available it is not uncommon to see women with slathered faces passing time in the streets or doing chores. Government officials denounce this fascination with whiteness but cannot stop it. (Serge Kovaleski, Lure of Lighter Skin Creates Identity Crisis in Jamaica, Plain Dealer (Kansas City), Aug. 7, 1999, p. 7A.)
The Supreme Court of Norway has ruled that it is legal to use phrases like “foreigners not wanted,” “whites only,” or “only for Norwegians with regular jobs” in real estate advertising. The court ruled unanimously that although Norway has an anti-discrimination law it does not apply to real estate transactions. (AP, Court Oks Real Estate Discrimination, Aug. 27, 1999.) Norwegians therefore continue to enjoy freedoms denied to Americans.
A new survey by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., shows that world population will pass the 6 billion mark this year. It was less than 2 billion in 1900, and most of the growth comes from the Third World. “No matter what happens, Europe’s population looks set to remain at best perfectly flat while there will be heavy population growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Political power could very well shift,” says Carl Haub, co-author of the study.
Fertility rates in most white countries are about 1.5 children per woman, which is below replacement level. By contrast, most of the Third World averages around 3.8 children, with sub-Saharan African women averaging 5.8 children.
Ten of the eleven countries with the highest birth rates are in Africa. In descending order the countries are Niger, Oman, Ethiopia, Uganda, Angola, Somalia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Yemen, Chad and the Congo.
These are some of the poorest, most miserable places on earth. The countries with the lowest birthrates are all European: Bulgaria, Latvia, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The United States has a fertility rate of 2.03 which is inflated by immigrants. The white birthrate is below replacement level. (Middle American News, Global Political Power Shift Seen as World Population Grows, August 1999, p. 7.)
The family of a white 12-year-old, Mark Connelly, moved to the south side of Chicago this year, so Mark became a student at mostly-black Sherman Elementary School. After just a few days, he got into an argument with one of the black students, who was later heard saying he would “beat that white boy.” After school let out, a group of blacks knocked him to the ground and kicked him unconscious. Three black students, aged 10, 13, and 14, have been suspended for 10 days and face juvenile petitions for battery and a hate crime. Mark continues to attend Sherman Elementary. (Monica Davey and Bradley Keoun, City Schools Begin Probe Into Beating of Pupil, 12, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 3, 1999.)
| NCF IN THE NEWS |
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Walter Williams on The Color of Crime
Economist and syndicated columnist Walter Williams has written a column on the New Century Foundation’s study The Color of Crime. Mr. Williams verifies the accuracy of the report and takes the media to task for ignoring it. He also points out the consistently biased way the media report interracial crime. We have included a copy of his column along with this issue.
On August 13th, Mr. Williams was guest host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. He spoke favorably about the report for nearly 10 minutes. The Rush Limbaugh program reaches over 20 million listeners, and 165 newspapers carry Mr. Williams’ column.
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — Your September report on the media reaction to The Color of Crime was very interesting but left out an important point. “Conservative” publications were no more likely than any others to cover the report. This should tell us something about conservatism. In the early 1990s, National Review and Human Events used to denounce multiculturalism and racial double standards. Now it seems mainstream conservatives have made peace with multiculturalism and accept liberal dominance on most racial matters. You will have to do a report on tax cuts or the flag-burning amendment to get the attention of the lap-dog opposition.
Name Withheld, Cheshire, Conn.
Sir — I was gratified to see that Accuracy in Media devoted their July “AIM Report” to The Color of Crime.
Robert Nattkemper, Kamuela, Hawaii
Sir — I enjoyed your comprehensive review of Prof. Raymond Wolters’ Right Turn. It is good to know that in darkest academe there are still a few rays of light.
I would point out, though, that Mr. Jackson did not go far enough in his criticism of the 1954 Brown decision. He suggests that if schools were to be desegregated it was Congress’ business and not the court’s. In fact, as he should know, it is only the most strained reading of the Constitution that gives Congress power to regulate schools operated by the states. Had there not been the steady usurpation of states’ powers by the federal government we would still have the system of competing experiments the Founders envisaged. Such matters as abortion, “civil rights,” schooling, and virtually all regulatory matters would be in state hands. We would then have a chance to see what works rather than let Washington force its policies on the whole country. As Prof. Wolters implies, our public schools have suffered grievously from federal meddling.
Tom Ericson, Mussel Shoals, Ala.
Sir — In the review of Right Turn we learn that Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status, at least in part, because of a ban on interracial dating. Since such a ban by a private university applied to all races, how did it violate anti-discrimination law?
Conrad Schmidt, Rumson, N.J.
It didn’t. It violated only the sensibilities of Supreme Court Justices. Robert Detlefsen has a good discussion of this case in Civil Rights Under Reagan (ICS Press, 1991), in which he points out that despite much blather about the wickedness of racial discrimination, “the Court completely ignored the reality of Bob Jones University.” Mr. Detlefsen calls the decision “yet another perfect example of result-oriented jurisprudence, in that it virtually ignores the statute it is supposed to be construing . . .” — Editor
Sir — Reading between the lines of the September issue, I noticed a thread running through several of the stories. In “The Law is an Ass”, we learn that the one Supreme Court Justice who supported the Kansas City school desegregation fiasco was Ruth Bader Ginsberg. In the article about Arthur Jensen, I note that the three “politically driven liars” who speak with “forked tongues” in their criticism of Prof. Jensen, are Marcus Feldman, Steven Jay Gould, and Leon Kamin. More mild critics, as mentioned in the AR article, include Robert Sternberg and Alan Kaufman. Finally, in the “California Voters Scorned” piece, we read that Mariana Pfaelzer was the judge instrumental in overturning Proposition 187.
This heavy concentration of Jewish individuals carrying forward an agenda contrary to our interests reflects the ethno-political reality of today’s America, and serves as confirmation of Kevin MacDonald’s masterful Culture of Critique. This is a topic AR readers may not want to face, but it seems to percolate out of story after story.
Ted Sallis, Tampa, Fla.
Sir — In your mention of the special issue of Intelligence you quoted Douglas Detterman as saying Prof. Jensen would be glad to know the truth even if it proved him wrong. I would not have thought to put it this way, but I am sure it is true.
I once had the pleasure of hearing Prof. Jensen speak to a university audience. I had expected him to be combative and defensive but he was charming and soft-spoken. I know that most of the audience was hostile to him, but I could tell that many were won over by his erudition and obvious love of the truth.
Thank God for Arthur Jensen.
Sarah Carpenter, Austin, Tex.
Rally ’Round the FlagThe NAACP and other black groups have announced a tourist and convention boycott of South Carolina in an attempt to persuade state officials to remove the Confederate flag from atop the state capitol. In response to the boycott, the Council of Conservative Citizens is sponsoring a “Save the Flag” rally in Columbia at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 9th at the capitol. For information telephone Frances Bell at (803) 648-3661. The C of CC helped keep the flag flying in 1996 by organizing resistance when then-Governor David Beasley tried to take it down. |
