O Tempora, O Mores! (August, 1994)

Small Victory

The California legislature has passed a law requiring the state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to deny drivers’ licenses to applicants who are illegal aliens. Until now, the DMV has ignored immigrant status, and a driver’s license is one of the most common forms of identification for welfare and free medicine. The law has no provision for checking the immigrant status of people who already have licenses. [Jerry Gillam, DMV, INS to check new license applicants, LA Times, 6/22/94, p. A3.]

Larger Victory

California is one of 23 states that allow citizens to pass legislation by referendum. A group of disgruntled whites is trying to get the following proposition, known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, on the 1996 ballot:

Neither the State of California nor any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system of public employment, public education or public contracting.

This initiative has been reported in National Review and in the Wall Street Journal, and may be a harbinger for rising white consciousness. The people behind the initiative are asking for donations and volunteers. They can be reached at CCRI, Box 11795, Berkeley, Calif., 94701.

White Man’s Burden

Max Frankel was, until recently, executive editor of the New York Times. He was a tireless advocate of race-based hiring preferences and was especially famous for decreeing that Times editors must hire a black for every white they employed. In a recent television interview, he admitted to having established this rule but denied that it was a quota. [Daniel Seligman, Keeping Up, Fortune, May 16, 1994, p. 153.]

Hypocrisy in High Places

A year and a half into his term of office, President Clinton has still not appointed a chairman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He has floated the names of three candidates — all Hispanic — but each was pronounced unfit by “civil rights” groups. It has become particularly important for President Clinton to find a Hispanic for the job, because two other high-profile jobs that are off-limits to whites — chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights — have gone to blacks. Needless to say, by looking only for Hispanics, President Clinton is violating the very laws that the EEOC is supposed to enforce. [Ronald Brownstein, EEOC suffers amid minority debate over next leader, Houston Chron, 5/22/94, p. 12A.]

Fiesta Latina

In the spring of 1991, Hispanics had their first riot in Washington, DC. A black policewoman shot a drunken Latino, and the Mount Pleasant area had a jolly evening of arson and looting. This resulted in the usual tribute: expressions of concern and infusions of cash. This year, something called “Congresso Latino” commemorated the riot with a week-long fiesta called “Empowerment Through Participation.” There were voter registration drives, seminars on how to milk Medicaid and welfare, demonstrations for immigrants’ rights, and a day-long soccer tournament. [Lisa Leff, Week of events to mark Mt. Pleasant disturbances, Wash Post, 4/30/94, p. B2.]

Serial Diner

Gangaram Mahes is an immigrant from Guyana. He has found that life in prison, with a dry bed and three meals a day, is better than anything he can manage on the outside. He is a gentle fellow, though, and does not want to hurt anyone in order to get out of the rain. Instead, he goes to a Manhattan restaurant, eats a $50 meal, and then tells the waiter he cannot pay. He usually gets 90 days in jail. It costs taxpayers $162 a day to board Mr. Mahes at Rikers Island prison, so a 90-day stay costs $14,580.

Mr. Mahes is usually out on the streets for only a few days before he gets hungry and patronizes another nice restaurant. He has committed the same crime at least 31 times. Christina Swarns, a young Legal Aid lawyer who has defended Mr. Mahes, says, “It’s a very sad thing. How bad is it, his life, that he would prefer prison?” [Rick Bragg, “Serial diner’ breaks in to prison with a knife and fork, Miami Herald, 6/5/94, p. 6A.]

Miss Swarns got it wrong. How pleasant must prison be, and how impervious to ordinary punishment must Mr. Mahes be, to prefer living in jail.

Land of the Free

Texas has an Adopt-a-Highway program, in which groups may put up small advertising signs along a stretch of road that they promise to keep clean. Nearly 4,000 groups have been allowed to adopt highways, including bands of homosexuals, nudist colonies, jail inmate groups [aren’t they made to pick up litter?], and The Homeless Men and Women of Corpus Christi. In the program’s eight-year history, only one group has been forbidden to adopt a highway and to put up signs: the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan wanted a stretch of highway near Vidor, Texas, where the federal government has been busily integrating heretofore-all-white public housing. Judge Joe Fisher ruled that Texas’ interest in promoting integration outweighed the Klan’s right to free speech. [Wendy Benjaminson, Klan hits a dead end in effort to adopt road, Houston Chron, 5/8/94, p. 1D.] A federal judge thereby restricted a right that is explicitly defended in the Constitution in favor of a “right” on which the Constitution is silent.

Brave New Africa

The April 25 issue of U.S. News & World Report recounts a conversation with a group of beer-drinking, reefer-smoking black township gangsters in South Africa:

“’Nzakes,’” 24, explains what it’s like to kill. “You get a little bit of a scream, you get them begging for their life, ‘Please, please don’t shoot me, please don’t kill me,’” he says in a falsetto voice that sends his friends into convulsions of stoned laughter. ‘Panache,’ 22, says that when burgling homes in Johannesburg’s white suburbs he often kills the family pet and leaves it baking in the oven for the owners to find on coming home. “If you find your little dog roasted, you’re going to be hurt,’ he says.” [US N & W Report, 4/25/94, p. 46.]

Columnist Mary McGrory seems to think that with Nelson Mandela in power, all such viciousness will be washed away. Her May 12th column in the Washington Post, demonstrates how ridiculous liberals can be:

Mandela is going to give South Africa a government with a mandate for forgiveness. It will be the first time a country has an official policy that is nothing less than applied Christianity.

Nelson Mandela has won what the [Washington] Post calls ‘one of history’s sweetest victories over racial subjugation’ and he is going to keep it clean and beautiful so that newspaper readers will think they are reading scripture when they read dispatches from South Africa that cannot be read except through tears. [Mary McGrory, South Africa is Twice Blessed, Wash Post, 5/12/94.]

A New Frankness

Whites are speaking more frankly about race — and the media are reporting their views without comment. A recent Wall Street Journal article quotes John Devivo who left Southern California to live in Utah. In California, he explains, “minorities are always in your face, always hassling you.” Utah is a pleasant change: “People speak English and say “thank you.’”

His wife, Frankie, says, “We wanted to be sealed off from the blacks, the Hispanics, the Vietnamese. That’s a big reason I came.” [Tony Horwitz, Californians flood in and tension is rising in small towns in Utah, WSJ, 4/29/94, p. 1.]

Even the New York Times Magazine is now reporting racial candor without comment. A May 29, 1994 article about the consequences of school integration in a Chicago suburb quotes a sociology teacher at some length:

I have run into problems now that I have a lot of black kids. They won’t shut up.

There are some days I come in, I don’t want to see anyone black. I’ve just had it.

The conduct of some of these black males is incredibly immature — the yelling, the screaming, the way they hit girls.

This teacher says white students may drop classes if there are too many blacks in them. He reports that one former teacher retired to an island so that he would never have to see another black face.

White students say the following:

I cannot stand the race. I’ll never date anyone who isn’t white.

[The typical black student is] ignorant and scum, a lot of poverty, self-righteousness, you owe me that, you owe me this, gimme, gimme, gimme.

One white junior, who could have gone to a private school, went to the integrated public school because she and her parents thought it was the right thing to do. “You don’t start out as racist,” she says. “We’re all racist now.” [H.G. Bissinger, “We’re all racist now,’ NYT Magazine, 5/29/94, p. 27.]

Harmony Turns Dissonant

In June, the city of Oakland, California had a three-day festival to celebrate multicultural harmony. It ended in a riot, in which 69 people [race unspecified] were arrested and 16 were injured. [Michelle Locke, Probe of Oakland festival riot promised, Contra Costa Times, (Walnut Creek, Ca), 6/7/94.]

The Africa Within

The Agency for International Development (AID) is America’s primary foreign aid bureaucracy. It has begun to dawn on the officials who run it that many of the problems they have been trying to solve in underdeveloped countries can be found in the black neighborhoods of American cities. For example, with AID help, countries like the Philippines and Sri Lanka now manage to immunize more than 70 percent of all two-year-olds against measles. In American black ghettos, the rate is around 40 percent.

When AID director, Brian Atwood publicly offered to make his agency’s services available to American cities, Baltimore was the first to ask. The Baltimore Sun greeted the news with a headline that read “Baltimore to Try Third World Remedies,” but cities are so desperate for help that they do not mind being compared to Bangladesh.

Baltimore has plenty of “social services,” but many people never find out about them because 20 percent of the population is illiterate. AID designs many of its programs for countries where illiteracy is taken for granted, so Baltimore has found its methods instructive.

In foreign countries, AID also makes small loans to people it calls “microentrepreneurs.” A woman might use the money to buy a sewing machine, for example, and start working at home. Baltimore officials think this approach could help lift welfare mothers out of idleness — as if they were just one sewing machine away from self-employment and prosperity. [Thomas Friedman, Foreign-aid agency shifts to problems back home, NYT, 6/26/94, p. A1.]

Although “foreign aid” for Harlem or East St. Louis is likely to do no more good than it has done for Zaire or Upper Volta, it is just as well for our government to recognize that third-world people create third-world problems wherever they live.

Army Regulations

The U.S. Army posts detailed notices about how uniforms should be worn. The regimental crest, for example, is to be worn 1/8 inch above the top of the pocket flap. The notices include large photographs of models wearing the uniforms. The model for the women’s uniform is black. The model for the men’s uniform is Hispanic.

White Man’s Burden

Djibouti is an African “nation” about the size of Vermont, located on the Red Sea coast. It was colonized by France in 1862 as a fueling stop for ships bound for Saigon and Madagascar. When Djibouti was granted independence in 1977, only three of its 320,000 citizens were college graduates, and its only manufactured product was Coca-Cola.

Very little has changed since independence. Were it not for the presence of about 6,000 French civilians and 4,000 soldiers, Djibouti would cease to exist as a country. Its only exports are goats and sheep, which are marched off on the hoof to Saudi Arabia and the gulf states. French aid and business account for 60 percent of Djibouti’s gross national product. [David Lamb, In Djibouti, independence has brought little change, LA Times, 6/29/94, p. A8.]

In some other parts of Africa, where the European presence is less pervasive, societies have completely collapsed and people are kept alive on international charity. The United Nations estimates that one in every 30 Africans is a refugee, either in his own or in a neighboring country.

In places like Sudan, Angola, Zaire, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia, there is essentially no government, and there is little distinction between crime and warfare. Young men with guns but with no apparent leaders or loyalty spread terror entirely as they please. This is why many of the approximately 22 million Africans who have fled their homes are afraid to go back even after “peace accords” end the official fighting. [John Darnton, Crisis-torn Africa becomes Continent of refugees, NYT, 5/23/94.]

Another obstacle to normal life is the huge number of mines that warring factions have scattered across each others’ territories. Mine sweeping, even with modern equipment is difficult and expensive. Often, farmers and children discover old mines with their bare feet.

Welfare for Workers

The city is the employer of last resort for New Yorkers. Nearly a quarter of the working white men work for it, and almost a third of the working black men. Only one fifth of the working white women are city employees but one half of all the black women who work in New York City work for city government. [Stats of the City, Our Town, 4/29/94, p. 3.]

Chickens and Ducks

Most people want to live with people like themselves. A study done by the University of California at Los Angeles found that, on average, white Angelenos tell a poll-taker they want neighborhoods that are 76 percent white and 24 percent black, or 79 percent white and 21 percent Hispanic.

Hispanics want a neighborhood that is 88 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black or 62 percent Hispanic and 38 percent white — a clear preference for white neighbors over black. Blacks show the same preference for whites. On average, they want a 50-50 mix if the other race is white, but they want a 62-38 majority if the other race is Hispanic. [AP, People prefer neighbors of the same race, Orange County Register, 11/29/92, p. B8.]

Retrograde

At Harvard University, 43 percent of all grades are As, twice as many as were granted 30 years ago. At Princeton, 40 percent are As, and at Brown, Ds and Fs are never recorded.

At Stanford, 91 percent of all grades are As and Bs. The school lets students take the same course as often as they like, and records only the last grade. Stanford students may also drop a course at any time, up to the day before the final exam. Failing grades do not appear on transcripts, so if students think they have done poorly on an exam, they may tearfully beg the teacher to fail them so they will not get a dreaded C or D.

Many Stanford students and professors defend the system in the belief that students should be nurtured with a “positive record of success.” High grades make parents happy, too. Another reason to give high grades is that some non-whites have filed racial discrimination suits when they did not get what they wanted. [Carol Jouzaitis, Easy college A’s become rampant, Chicago Tribune, 5/4/94, p.1.]

Tenured Criminals

Jay Duber, a special education teacher in New York City went to prison in 1990 for selling $7,000 worth of cocaine to an undercover policeman. The city school board tried to fire him but could not, because he has tenure. The board has spent five years and nearly $200,000 trying to get rid of Mr. Duber — who is white — but to no avail. Mr. Duber has continued to collect his teacher’s salary, even while he was in jail. He now has a non-teaching job. [Sam Dillon, Teacher Tenure: Rights vs. Discipline, NYT, 6/28/94, p. A1.] A city that cannot even fire jail birds is unlikely to be able to discipline the merely incompetent.

AIDS in Prison

From 1992 to 1993, the number of Illinois prison inmates with AIDS increased seven-fold, from 25 to 177. That year, 23 inmates died of AIDS, putting the disease ahead of cancer and heart attacks as the leading cause of inmate death.

In a study done in 1988 and 1989, a group of 2,392 new inmates in Joliet Prison were tested for AIDS and 95 were found to have the virus. A year later, the same prisoners were tested and seven more were HIV positive, suggesting that they caught the disease in prison. [Jerry Thomas, AIDS is top killer in state prisons, Chi Tribune, 5/2/94.]

Abandoned at Birth

Every year, about 22,000 mothers abandon their infants in hospitals after they give birth. They show up in labor, give false names and family contacts, and leave as soon as they can. Seventy-four percent of the abandoned infants are black, 12 percent are white, and eight percent are Hispanic. It costs about $600 a day to keep an infant in the hospital, and about a quarter stay for at least three weeks. [John Ritter, “Babies will keep coming,’ USA Today, 12/2/93, p. 1.]

Human Nature

An experimental program that was supposed to persuade welfare mothers not to have more children has been a complete failure. Participants in the New Chance program had to be 16 to 22 years old, and to have given birth as teenagers. Most were high school dropouts. Two thousand three hundred women in ten different states were stuffed with education, training, counseling, and advice on birth-control. Eighteen months later, half were pregnant again — about the same rate as similar women who did not get the uplift treatment. [Virginia Ellis, Welfare mother plan fails to halt pregnancy trend, LA Times, 6/22/94, A3.]