O Tempora, O Mores! (September-October, 1993)

Boyz Will Be Boyz

Cerveny Middle School in Detroit is trying to keep its seventh- and eighth-graders out of gangs. Recently, it invited three police officers from the city gang squad to give a talk to 60 youngsters whom teachers thought most likely to go astray.

The students, all boys and all black, started shouting obscenities at the police. One got up and urinated against a wall and then bared his buttocks at a female teacher. Others decided they had heard enough and tried to leave the room. The officers concluded their lecture by arresting 34 of the boys.

Why their view was sought is unclear, but the Detroit chapter of the ACLU criticized the police for directing their talk only to boys thought most likely to join gangs. It also disapproved of the arrests: “Since when do the police enforce discipline within the schools?” asked a spokesman. [L.A. Johnson, Cops book boys after melee stops lecture, Detroit Free Press, April 9, 1993.]

None Dare Call it Discrimination

The Clinton administration still has a few sub-Cabinet positions to fill, and is determined to pack the vacancies with as many non-whites as possible. One staffer explained that “in sifting through resumes, you get to the point where you’re not even looking at white men.” [“Today’s White man, Washington Times, march 29, 1993, p. A6.]

None Dare Call it Obvious . . .

Dale Lick, president of Florida State University, was one of the short-listed candidates for president of Michigan State University until it was learned that he had once had an unacceptable thought. In 1989, when he was president of the University of Maine (Mr. Lick seems to enjoy changing jobs), he told a student reporter that blacks are better basketball players because they can “outjump” whites. When this was revealed in July, it raised such a ruckus in Michigan that Mr. Lick now appears to be out of the running. [Racial Remark Stalls Job Seeker, NYT, July 22, 1993, p. A18.]

. . . Unless He is Black

In the July-August issue of Emerge magazine, there is an article entitled “Why Blacks Join Cults.” It was written by Drew Smith of Indiana University, whose aunt was one of the survivors of the People’s Temple mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Prof. Smith, who is black, writes that just as “you can’t have what could be considered high level basketball without black participation you also can’t have a truly radical movement in the U.S. without black participation (given that blacks epitomize everything that is angry, alienated, and aggrieved within the society).” [James Warren, Magazines, Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1993, p. 2.]

New Federal Youth Outreach Program

In July, the media made much of an alleged plot by a group called the Fourth Reich Skinheads to bomb a black Los Angeles church and to kill Rodney King. It now appears that the most incessant advocates of violence were an FBI agent and an FBI informant, who essentially took effective control of the group.

Christopher Fisher, the 20-year-old who is charged with heading the conspiracy, was apparently the leader of a “white pride” group of about 15 teen-agers. He maintained a “white pride hot line” on which callers could leave sympathetic messages. The informant contacted the group through the hot line, dazzled its members with his weapons collection, and let the group use his weight lifting room.

A man who was introduced as the informant’s “nephew” appears to have been an FBI agent. According to members who have not been arrested, it was the informant and his “nephew” who talked constantly of race war and who urged violent action. They also insisted that the group choose a name, though it is not clear who first proposed the name Fourth Reich Skinheads.

We may never know the whole unfortunate story, but it certainly sounds as though a group of teen-agers were cruelly wronged by their own government. One of the reasons they were so easily led astray is that they knew no sympathetic adults to whom they could turn for guidance and instruction. [Deborah Hastings, Fourth Reich skinheads: just kids or violent supremacists?, Seattle Times, Aug. 2, 1993, p. A4.]

Mother Love

In the black neighborhoods of Chicago, children and teen-agers often die suddenly and violently. Penniless relatives sometimes cannot afford to pay for a funeral, which is an embarrassment in a community that puts great store on a proper send off. For many, burial insurance is the answer. For a modest monthly fee, mothers and grandmothers can be sure that an insurance company will pay funeral expenses should the need arise.

Mittie Durham, a school custodian, spends about $80 a month on policies for herself, four children, and three grandchildren. Another grandmother spends a like amount on policies for six children and six grandchildren. “If anything happens, I want them to be put away decent,” she explains. [Robert Blau, Children who live with death, Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1993, p. 1.]

Black Humor

Comic books have joined the racial propaganda war. Milestone Media, a black-owned publisher, has introduced a series of what it calls “more realistic multicultural heroes.” Curtis Metcalf, for example, hero of Hardware comics, is an inventor with seven college degrees, who is engaged in a secret campaign against his corrupt white boss.

Milestone has been so successful that four independent black publishers have banded together under the ANIA label to publish more black-oriented comics. One of their titles is Zwanna, Son of Zulu, which the company describes thus:

Zwanna is exiled from Africa to the U.S. after his father, the King, is killed by white supremacists. He mutates into a superhero when he sees racism and injustice.

Not all black comics are anti-white cliches. One of Milestone’s titles, Icon, is described thus:

Augustus Freeman, survivor of an exploded alien starship lands on a 1839 Deep South plantation. By 1992, he’s a lawyer and conservative Republican. He uses his strength and near-invulnerability to promote middle-class values.

Immigration Update

Until 1990, when the ban was lifted, homosexuals were not allowed to immigrate to the United States. Now, activists are trying to persuade the government that all homosexuals who live in countries where homosexuality is illegal should be considered asylum seekers and granted automatic entry. Three homosexual immigrants are now pursuing this argument through the courts in what activists hope will pave the way to a massive influx of foreign homosexuals. [Wade Lambert, INS Urged to grant asylum over gay bias, WSJ, May 28, 1993, p. B6.]

To grant asylum to homosexuals is no more fanciful than to grant it to Chinese because of their nation’s one-child-only population control policy. After the Tienanmen Square killings in 1989, President Bush paraded his sympathy for democracy by ordering the Immigration and Naturalization Service to give “enhanced consideration” to Chinese who claimed to be escaping the one-child policy. As a result, not one of the more than 1,500 Chinese illegals who have made it to this country over the last two years has been sent back to China. President Bush’s policy is unpopular with INS agents. “It gets to be a farce,” says one; “The irony is that most [illegal Chinese immigrants] are young men and unmarried.” [U.S. allows illegal Chinese immigrants to stay, Chicago Tribune, may 27, 1993, p. 4.]

Non-white immigration is having an effect on American housing: During the 1980s, overcrowding increased after dropping for 50 years. Defined as occupancy by more than one person per room, the percentage of overcrowded American housing units rose from 4 percent in 1980 to 4.5 percent in 1990. The increase was concentrated in rented apartments, where overcrowding rose from 7 to 9 percent. The Census Bureau freely concedes that the change is due to Asian and Hispanic immigrants from “close-contact societies that prefer living in large family groups.” [Crowding in Housing Turned up in ’80s, Wall Street Journal, 7/20,93.]

Donald Huddle, a professor of economics at Rice University in Houston, has just completed a study of how much it costs America to play host to immigrants. Expenses include all the tax money that pours into the welfare, medicaid, criminal processing, education and social security that immigrants — legal and illegal — consume. Income is the taxes they pay, whether federal, state, property, sales or excise. The net result is that in 1992, the 11.8 million resident legal immigrants and estimated 4.8 million illegals absorbed $45 billion more in public money than they paid in taxes. This works out to an average cost of $2,700 per immigrant per year.

Even our elected officials are beginning to take notice. Heretofore, the two lady senators from California, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, could be relied on to say only the most conventionally idiotic things about immigration. Now Miss Feinstein has proposed a one-dollar border-crossing charge to pay for more INS agents and better equipment. She wants them to have all-terrain vehicles, night vision goggles, and helicopters, and to have authority to make deportation decisions on the spot. She also wants to build a wall along the 100-mile stretch of the Mexican border where most illegals cross. [Pat Buchanan, An issue up for grabs, Wash Times, July 12, 1993.]

Miss Boxer would like the National Guard to conduct maneuvers along the Mexican border. She says that since weekend warriors are paid to bivouac anyway, it might as well be where they can do something useful like catch illegals. [Pamela Burdman & Greg Lucas, Box Wants National Guard to Patrol Border, SF Chron, 7/30/93.]

We Have Been Warned

Paul Mooney is a black comedian with a message. In a recent performance at a San Francisco area comedy club, he had this to say:

“White people are scared, because minorities are taking over. White people are worried because they can’t out-f*** the Mexicans — minorities in numbers alone are taking over, and white folks are scared because they are afraid that we are going to do to them exactly what they’ve done to us.

“And they are absolutely right. When the s*** turns around, we are going to treat you exactly like you’ve treated us: like s***.” [Danyel Smith, Full Moon, The Bay Guardian, 3/3/93.]

Showing His Colors

This spring, New York’s city government published a brochure to encourage young people to join something called the Youth Commission for Human Rights. The brochure’s favorite phrase is “There won’t be peace until . . . .” which can be seen as a gently worded invitation to riot. Peace, it appears, cannot be expected until “New Yorkers stop clutching their bags and crossing the street to get away from black and Latino youth,” or until “police see their role as protecting and serving all New Yorkers . . . including young men of color, instead of running them off their own street corners.” Peace also requires “community control of community businesses,” which is one of the milder slogans used by blacks who boycott Korean groceries.

The brochure calls the 1991 anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights a youth-led “uprising,” says that AIDS has been “ignored,” and recommends “indicting the injustices of the system.” It contends that the message adults are sending to “young people” is: “You have to start a riot . . . to get the changes you need.” The brochure is accompanied by a letter from Mayor David Dinkins urging young readers to join the commission. [Eric Briendel, PC at New York’s City Hall, Washington Times, Feb. 8, 1993.]

NAACP to the Rescue

In July, Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress (ANC) addressed more than 12,000 people at the 1993 NAACP Convention. “We are here today not as guests but as comrades in arms,” he said; “We stand here not as a people from another land but as part of the great family of black people that is found all over the world.”

The NAACP resolved to strengthen its ties with the ANC and promised to send monitors to South Africa to make sure that whites do not steal the all-races election to be held on April 27, 1994. William F. Gibson, chairman of the NAACP’s national board says that black Americans will play a crucial role in nurturing and protecting democracy in the new South Africa. [Trevor Coleman, NAACP, ANC to join forces to fight for freedom, Detroit News, July 11, 1993, p. 14A.]

Mind Over Murder

More than 1,000 practitioners of transcendental meditation have descended on Washington, D.C. in an attempt to lower the crime rate through meditation. They sit and think peaceful thoughts for about four hours every morning and three hours in the afternoon. In the Fall, by which time they expect homicide and robbery rates to have plummeted, they will ask the city government to pay them $20 million a year to keep up the good work. [Lisa Clagett, Putting mind over murder, Washington Times, 6/23/93, p. B1.]

So far, results have been poor. In the six days ending on June 25th, 24 Washingtonians were killed and another 53 were injured in armed attacks, making it the most bloodthirsty week in recent memory. [Brian Reilly, Police open war on D.C. violence, Washington Times, 6/26/93, p. A1.]

Smelling a Rat

Earlier this year, there were news stories about 15 mysterious deaths in the Southwest, mostly on Indian reservations. The Journal of the American Medical Association (July 21, 1993) reports that the mystery is now solved: The Indians died of acute hantavirus infection, a disease that is common in rats and mice. How are people infected?

[P]otentially hazardous exposures include direct aerosolization of urine and other potentially infective rodent body fluids, secondary aerosolization of dried rodent excreta, contamination of food, and direct contact with virus-bearing rodents or their excreta or saliva.

[Update: Outbreak of Hantavirus Infection — Southewestern United States, 1993, JAMA, July 21, 1993, p. 306.]

In other words, don’t let a rat spit on you.

Fiddling While America Burns

The American Symphony Orchestra League has just published a report in which it criticizes American orchestras for not doing enough to combat their image as “exclusive, arrogant, possibly racist.” Orchestras “should reflect more closely the cultural mix, needs and interests of their communities.” How? By hiring more non-whites and by putting more jazz and popular music on their programs. They must also hire consultants to give “diversity sensitivity training.”

Boards of directors should be the typically fashionable mix of non-whites, who should be encouraged not to “assimilate.” Orchestras should come up with measures of diversity so they can give proof “to political leaders, community members and funding sources of the orchestra’s commitment to diversity.” Audiences should be encouraged to clap between movements, and concerts should be accompanied by choreographed images on video screens. In short, if non-whites don’t like classical music, classical music must change.

This report may actually get the reception it deserves. Even the New York Times’ music critic called it a “disgrace” — and for the right reasons. [Edward Rothstein, Be Smart as a Lemming, Orchestras are Told,” NYT, 7/11/93.]

Great White Dopes

The Knight-Ridder News Service has been circulating a story that purports to come to the rescue of white men by listing ten positive things about them. Of course, since it is about whites, all ten turn out to be insults. For example, some people are said to like the looks of men “with pale skin and hair that’s light and straight.” The article then goes on to say:

White Guys also tend to have wide hips, flat butts, bulging love handles, fat guts, sunken chests, weak chins, spindly arms, treble voices, red necks and, after a certain age, thinning hair or bald heads. Some may find these anatomical peculiarities appealing, believe it or not . . .

Whites are said to be multicultural: “There’s the gun culture and the car culture and the boat culture and the monster-truck and pro-wrestling cultures, to name just a few.”

In conclusion: “Think of the most obnoxious White Guy you know. Guess what? He’s going to croak . . . you get to watch White Guys die.” The story is written by a white man. [Art Carey, The Great White Dopes, San Jose Mercury News, June 15, 1993.]

Laws of Nature

Whenever a crowd of young American blacks gathers in one place there is likely to be trouble. It makes no difference if they are ghetto thugs or college students; the crowd will behave badly.

Late in July, about 2,000 members of a black college fraternity gathered by car for a beach party in the sleepy, California town of Half Moon Bay. They threw garbage on the highway, urinated in the road, and made lewd gestures at passing cars. Blacks poured into local stores and gas stations, insulted the owners and stole merchandise. One black jumped over the counter at McDonald’s and took $300 out of the cash register. Someone started shooting, and the police eventually closed the highway. Patrol cars were pelted with stones and bottles.

A police spokesman explained that since the officers were vastly outnumbered by rowdies they decided it would be “more prudent not to arrest anyone.” This was the third year in a row that the black fraternity had held its party in the area; police reported that there had been thefts and violence all three years. [Eric Rice, Beach Party turns violent, Half Moon Bay Review, July 28, 1993, p. 1A.]

Brave New World

The state of Missouri has taken a bold step forward in government activism. The new chairman of the state Commission on Human Rights, a black man named Bobby Daniels, says, “I think as a commission, we’re going to have to ferret out cases where apathy, more than anything else, contributed to the violations of human rights. The attitude with apathy is, ‘If it’s not bothering me, I don’t have a need to acknowledge it, although I don’t support it.’” [John Egan, New Rights Panel Leader to target apathy, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 20, 1993, p. 6D.] A new day has indeed dawned when it is possible to violate someone’s rights by doing nothing.

Vote Early and Often

Woodruff Adams, 36, is the first black candidate for mayor of Toledo, Ohio. As it happens, he himself has never cast a ballot. He explained that registering to vote would have made him liable for jury duty, which would have interfered with his consulting business. He does not expect his campaign to be hurt by this disclosure. [Mayoral candidate regrets never voting, Wash Times, July 12, 1993.]

Filing for Dollars

In 1988, a storage tank collapsed and spilled diesel fuel into the Ohio River. Ashland Oil was sued because of the accident, which was well reported in cities down stream. One of those cities was Louisville, Ky., where the accident continues to reverberate in unexpected ways.

A group of black con artists has been distributing forms to blacks, explaining that anyone who files one will get $3,000 in compensation for “water contamination” caused by the fuel spill. There is a $2.00-per-form “notary fee” for filing the forms. Hundreds of blacks heard about the deal and swarmed into makeshift offices to fill in forms. Many paid for forms for everyone in their families.

The con artists told customers that white people would not be allowed to file, and that this was part of a special effort to make sure that blacks got what they deserved. This not only appears to have made the fraud more attractive to blacks, but ensured that it could go on longer without whites — and the authorities — hearing about it.

Hundreds of Louisville blacks signed up for a similar fraud in late 1989. At that time the supposed payoff was to be $7,000. [Andrew Melnykovych and Mark McCormick, Apparent scam plays of lawsuit, targets blacks, Louisville Courier-Journal, 4/24/93, p. A7.]