O Tempora, O Mores! (October 2011)
American Renaissance, October 2011
Researchers led by the University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Ian Deary have finished a study that they say “unequivocally confirm[s] that a substantial proportion of individual differences in intelligence is due to genetic variation.” The team estimates that at least 40 percent of crystallized-type intelligence (measured by tests of acquired knowledge) and at least 51 percent of fluid-type intelligence (measured by tests of problem-solving) are inheritable.
The study involved 3,511 healthy Caucasian adults who were not related to each other, and whose IQs had been thoroughly tested. Each participant’s genome was compared with the others with regard to 549,692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A SNP (pronounced “snip”) is a location on a person’s genome that differs from that of another person by a single nucleotide, or DNA base pair. It reflects the smallest level of genetic difference between two people. Careful correlations between SNPs and measured IQs definitively proved that genetic variation accounts for a significant proportion of individual variation in intelligence.
Before this study, there was very little direct genetic evidence for the heritability of intelligence. The researchers noted that this is the first study to show “biologically and unequivocally” that “purely genetic (SNP) information can be used to predict intelligence.”
The team also found conclusive evidence that intelligence is highly polygenic, that is to say, many genes each have a small effect on overall intelligence. The researchers were unable to pinpoint specific genetic loci that contribute to intelligence, noting that to do so would require a larger sample.
Bell Curve co-author Charles Murray says this is a “landmark” study, and points out that “shelves of books and articles denying or minimizing the heritability of IQ have suddenly become obsolete.” He noted that “those who continue to claim that IQ tests don’t measure anything real inside the brain also have their work cut out for them.” This paper has been largely ignored by the media. [I.J. Deary et al., Genome-wide Association Studies Establish that Human Intelligence Is Highly Heritable and Polygenic, Molecular Psychiatry, August 9, 2011. Charles Murray, The Debate About Heritability of General Intelligence Radically Narrows, American Enterprise Institute, August 11, 2011.]
Elizabeth Wright, RIP
Elizabeth Wright died in August, several months after moving into a hospice for cancer care. She was a black woman who had a piercingly clear understanding of race and wrote in an uncompromising style. She was the editor of Issues and Views, in which she wrote commentaries against racial preferences, and in favor of self-help for blacks. She was adamantly opposed to Third-World immigration, about which she once wrote this:
The new dominant ethnics come to this land with their own sob stories of oppression. Unlike whites, they are hardly likely to fall over one another to apologize for past wrongs. Nor are they likely to spend their time in Congress concocting new laws designed to discriminate against their own sons and daughters in favor of blacks. “Reparations,” did you say? Just wait until the first move is made to un-name and re-name some of those Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards.
Elizabeth Wright fully understood the need for racially conscious whites to organize and to defend their interests, and had nothing but contempt for whites who fawned over blacks. Her comments on the flap over radio host Don Imus were typical. On April 4, 2007, Mr. Imus referred to the largely black Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” He then apologized to everyone in sight and even abased himself to Al Sharpton, but lost his job anyway. Elizabeth Wright wrote this:
So, after all this cringing and groveling, what was accomplished? Nothing more than could have been if Imus had initially said, ‘Take this job and stuff it!’ And how many more white men will feel compelled to prostrate themselves at the feet of blacks? While he was down there, it’s surprising that Imus failed to wash Sharpton’s feet — a practice that actually was performed on the feet of black men by the contrite white members of the ‘Christian’ organization Promise Keepers. What a wonderful set of role models they make.
Elizabeth Wright wrote occasionally for VDare.com, and several of her essays appeared on the AR website. She was a very private person, and though she corresponded with AR editor Jared Taylor, she politely declined when he asked to meet her. She gently deflected questions about her background and personal life, but there can be no doubt that she suffered terribly because of the positions she took.
A woman who could write and think as clearly as Elizabeth Wright could have achieved prominence. Instead, she courageously chose to write what she believed, whatever the consequences. She was a remarkable woman, the like of whom we are not likely to see again.
Needless to say, the champions of “tolerance” and “diversity” hated her. One People’s Project, a self-styled “anti-fascist” website, wrote a brief notice of her death under the headline, “Elizabeth Wright, Rot in Hell.”
San Diego, California, is having a hard time with integration. The school district lets parents choose schools for their children. Administrators thought parents would choose “diversity,” but they choose homogeneity instead. For example, Jefferson Elementary is in the North Park part of town, but fewer than half of the students for whom it is the “neighborhood school” attend. The rest go to different schools outside the neighborhood.
Kathy Taylor, a white woman who lives in North Park, planned to send her child to Jefferson — until she took a tour and found that virtually all the students were Hispanic. “Is this really my neighborhood school?” she wondered. Mrs. Taylor expected to find the children of the nice white people who attend outdoor concerts in a nearby park. “I wanted this feeling of community,” she said, but “everybody is sending their kids to other places.” She decided Jefferson Elementary was not for her, either.
Hispanics, on the other hand, like Jefferson. They are using their own school choice options to send their children outside their own neighborhoods to Jefferson so they can be with other Hispanics. [Emily Alpert, The Resegregation of North Park, Voices of San Diego, Aug. 31, 2011.]
Meanwhile, the city’s black and Hispanic homosexuals are upset because they think they were left out of a celebration called San Diego Pride. The festival, which was held on July 16 and 17, had various stages and performance areas, but no “diversity stages” just for blacks or Hispanics. Latin Pride and Ebony Pride used to have their own festivals, and claim they agreed to a joint celebration with San Diego Pride only on the condition that they have their own performance stages. Judi Schaim, co-chairwoman of the board of San Diego Pride says she never heard of this, though such an agreement might have been struck with previous management.
Representatives of Latin Pride and Ebony Pride say they will go back to having segregated festivals if San Diego Pride does not give them segregated “diversity stages.” [Jonathan Young, Pride Criticized for Lacking Diversity, LGBT Weekly (San Diego), August 25, 2011.]
Maybe people in San Diego could have learned something from a $100,000 study just published by the school district of Irving, Texas. The district is 71 percent Hispanic and 12 percent black, and an investigation of black fifth graders found that they don’t like being the minority. A report called “The Skin They’re In” says black children feel “isolated” and “inferior” because they can’t understand anything when Hispanic children speak to each other in Spanish. Black children also think teachers treat Hispanic students more favorably, and they are lonely because classrooms are “full of minority students whose brown mannerisms, style, and language form the dominant culture of Irving’s elementary classrooms.”
Will Irving give black children classes where “black mannerisms, style, and language form the dominant culture?” No. Instead, teachers “have opened up a dialog to encourage equality.” [Debbie Denmon, Irving ISD Study Finds Black Fifth Graders Feel ‘Lonely,’ WFAA (Dallas), August 29, 2011.]
AIDing Strippers
Cornell Jones is a convicted drug trafficker who was later glorified in the Black Entertainment Television series “American Gangster.” He went on to start a non-profit agency called Miracle Hands that was supposed to help Washington, DC, HIV and AIDS carriers. Over the years, he had what is delicately referred to in the press as a “relationship” with Debra Rowe, the head of the district’s HIV/AIDS Administration, and received more than $5.8 million in grants from 2000 through February of this year.
In 2007, Miracle Hands received $329,000 from the HIV/AIDS Administration to turn a derelict warehouse into a job training center for AIDS carriers. The money went into the warehouse, alright, but it did not become a training center. Instead, it opened in March 2010 as the Stadium Club, which claims to offer “Five Star Dining and a Premier Gentleman’s Club Experience.” In plainer terms: a strip joint.
Only now, it appears, is the DC Attorney General getting around to filing charges against Miracle Hands and Mr. Jones, seeking $1 million in damages. [Jeffrey Anderson, D.C. Seeks to Recover Nonprofit Funds Used to Renovate Strip Club, Washington Times, August 30, 2011.]
Facebook Racist
On March 28, Jennifer O’Brien, a first-grade teacher at School 21 in Paterson, New Jersey, wrote on her Facebook page, “I’m not a teacher — I’m a warden for future criminals.” Half her students are black and the other half are Hispanic, so within days, she drew national attention. A small group of parents and “activists” even protested at the school. Miss O’Brien deleted the comment and apologized to her principal. However, on April 1 — just four days after the posting — the school district suspended her without pay and started the procedure to revoke her tenure.
Miss O’Brien is now in a fight for her job. In August, she attended a two-day hearing before an administrative law judge, who will recommend whether Miss O’Brien be fired. She told the judge that she wrote the posts out of frustration because six or seven unruly students kept disrupting her lessons and distracting children who wanted to learn. She added that some students had stolen a box of stickers she used as prizes, and that one had hit another child. One had even attacked Miss O’Brien and, as she explained, “If you’re hitting your teacher at 6 or 7 years old, that’s not a good path.”
Rev. Kenneth Clayton, president of the Paterson branch of the NAACP said Miss O’Brien should be fired. He said her comment “helps us realize again that racism has not been erased from our country,” adding that “if a teacher or any adult leader could look at children like that in the first grade and think that, then the children are doomed.” A lawyer for the school district agreed, saying it was especially painful for Miss O’Brien to have described her students as future criminals because many live in high-crime areas.
Capt. James Smith, executive director of security for Paterson schools, testified on behalf of Miss O’Brien. He said that police got 9,000 calls for service during the past year for the School-21 neighborhood. Among these calls were 41 for fights with weapons, 29 for robberies, and hundreds for gang activity, drugs and other “quality-of-life issues.”
The principal of the school testified that he saw no evidence that Miss O’Brien had a low opinion of her first graders, and no one could think of an occasion when she had said anything inappropriate about her students since she joined the school district in 1998.
The judge will accept briefs from both sides on Oct. 10, and will then have 45 days to issue an opinion on whether Miss O’Brien should keep her $60,000-a-year-job. Curiously, the education bureaucrats can then ignore the opinion if they want. [Leslie Brody, Paterson Teacher Who Called Students ‘Future Criminals’ in Facebook Post Defends Herself in Hearing, The Record, Aug. 25, 2011].
For decades, Ivy League schools have been trying to admit fewer white students. This year, at both Dartmouth and University of Pennsylvania the freshman class is 44 percent non-white. Harvard and Brown did not cite figures but said there were fewer whites in their freshman classes than ever. (They didn’t put it that way — they said there were record levels of “diversity.”)
Blacks are still beefing. They say too many of the black faces at the Ivies are immigrants. They cite a 2007 study at Princeton and Penn that found that although African immigrants are less than 1 percent of the US population, they accounted for 41 percent of the black students in the Ivy League. This means they are over four times more likely than American blacks to be admitted. (These figures do not include black Caribbean immigrants, who are also much more likely than American blacks to attend top schools.) Forty-four percent of adult African immigrants are college graduates whereas only 18 percent of American blacks are.
African immigrants are richer than US blacks. In 2000 they had a median household income of $45,000 compared to a median figure of $30,000 for American blacks. They are also more likely to grow up in two-parent homes.
Joy Cooper is a black woman who graduated from Harvard in 2006. “There was an overrepresentation of Africans,” she says, “and specifically Nigerians.” She does not think Africans are any smarter than American blacks. Their advantage is that their desire to succeed has not been crushed out of them by centuries of oppression. “Honestly, I believe it’s difficult to strive for better when you already live in what people name the American dream, but what you have lived is a nightmare,” she says. [Cord Jefferson, Ivy League Fooled: How America’s Top Colleges Avoid Real Diversity, Good Education, August 31, 2011.]
Education for Illegals
In October 2010, the Georgia Board of Regents voted to bar the admission of illegal immigrants to Georgia’s main state universities: University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, and Georgia College & State University.
Now, a group of professors from the University of Georgia who want to teach illegals has announced what it calls Freedom University, which is accepting applications. Classes will meet once a week and will be geared towards illegals who have graduated from Georgia high schools but are barred from state universities. The classes will not use university facilities.
Courses will be non-credit but will give students the experience of college-level work. Freedom University hopes for eventual accreditation, which would mean that students could take credits with them if they enroll in a real college. The first class, American Civilization I, was set to start on September 8. [Carla Caldwell, Five UGA Professors Teach Banned Illegal Immigrants, Atlanta Business Chronicle, August 26, 2011.]
Trail of Tears
Thousands of blacks may soon be walking a Trail of Tears now that the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court has upheld a decision to withdraw tribal membership from the descendants of black slaves who were owned by Cherokees. Many slaves made the infamous westward trek with their Indian masters in 1838. After the slaves were freed, the Cherokees voted to admit the so-called “Freedmen” into the tribe, but had a change of heart in 2007, when 77 percent voted to define membership by blood.
With roughly 250,000 members, the Cherokee are the second-largest Indian tribe in the US, after the Navajo at 300,000. The expulsion order removed 2,800 blacks and put a stop to pending applications from 3,500 more. Freedmen leader Marilyn Vann says as many as 25,000 more could have been eligible for membership. The ousted blacks will no longer get tribal benefits, such as free medical care and advantages in education. “This is racism and apartheid in the 21st Century,” says Miss Vann.
Some black members of Congress are upset, but it is unclear whether they will do anything. A federal lawsuit challenging the removal is pending in Washington. The tribe argues that as a sovereign nation it has the right to amend its membership rules. [Steve Olafson, Second-Largest U.S. Indian Tribe Expels Slave Descendants, Reuters, August 23, 2011. Cherokees Eject Slave Descendants, BBC News, March 4, 2007.]
Reactions to the Riots
Britain is searching for answers in the wake of the mid-August rioting and looting that resulted in more than 3,000 arrests and an estimated £200 million in property damage. Reactions have run the predictable gamut from cowardice and mendacity to flashes of boldness.
Though he ignored the racial aspects of the riots, David Cameron came close to the mark when he declared the rioting “criminality pure and simple,” and said of the thugs’ motivation, “This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.” The Prime Minister called the riots a wake-up call, asking, “Do we have the determination to confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of this country in the past few generations?” Mr. Cameron encouraged local authorities and landlords to evict rioters from public housing. [UK Riots: Text of David Cameron’s Address to Commons, Telegraph (London), Aug. 11, 2011. Cameron: Riot-Hit U.K. Must Reverse ‘Moral Collapse,’ National Public Radio, Aug. 14, 2011.]
Labour opposition leader David Miliband rejected Mr. Cameron’s “pure criminality” argument, saying it is wrong to “dismiss the importance of opportunity and hope.” He said thousands of Britons pillaged their own neighborhoods because of problems that need “deep rooted, lasting solutions,” which could come only from a “genuine national conversation” that “must start with the communities affected.” [Full Transcript: Ed Miliband Speech on the Riots, New Statesman, Aug. 15, 2011.]
Ordinary Britons had a concrete solution. An Internet petition calling for convicted rioters to lose all government benefits gathered 220,000 signatures, far more than the 100,000 required to trigger a Commons debate. The website got so much traffic it crashed. This proposal goes beyond current rules that require only that anyone who goes to jail be denied benefits. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith supported the proposal, agreeing that convicted rioters should lose benefits even if they are not incarcerated. [UK Riots: Rioters Could Lose All Benefits, Iain Duncan Smith Says, Telegraph (London), August 15, 2011. Jack Doyle, Riot Boy’s Family is Kicked out of Home, Daily Mail (London), August 13, 2011.]
Television historian David Starkey noted that he had reread Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, adding: “His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber didn’t foam with blood, but flames lambent wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham.” He blamed the riots on a “violent, destructive, nihilistic” gang culture, adding that many white people had embraced a gangster ethos and had “now become black.”
A group of more than 100 leading historians responded by signing an open letter claiming that Mr. Starkey’s “crass generalizations about black culture and white culture as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first-year history undergraduate.” [David Starkey’s Race Comments After the Riots ‘Disgraced the Academic World’, Daily Mail (London), August 26, 2011.]
The prize for the most limp-wristed response to the riots goes to Prince Charles, who said that a “lack of self-confidence and self-worth” caused Britain’s social ills, and that when teenagers join gangs it is a “cry for help.” The Duchess of Cornwall was also sympathetic. She patted a black woman on the arm and said, “The next few months will be hard but stick together. Show that spirit of true Britishness that is so important.” [Rebecca English, ‘A Cry for Help’, Daily Mail (London), August 18, 2011.]
