O Tempora, O Mores! (January, 2012)
American Renaissance, January 2012
Russell Pearce Recalled
In a recent recall election, Arizona Senate President and author of the famous SB 1070 immigration law, Russell Pearce, was ousted by his pro-amnesty Republican challenger Jerry Lewis. Sen. Pearce received 45.3 percent of the vote to Mr. Lewis’ 53.4. Critics of Sen. Pearce were quick to frame the results as a referendum on his immigration efforts, but the truth is more complicated.
Because this was a special recall election, there was no Republican primary, and Democrats threw their support behind Mr. Lewis. Sen. Pearce won the support of seven out of 10 conservatives, so he would probably have won a Republican primary. Since his district leans Republican, if his opponent had been a Democrat, he would have probably won a general election.
In addition, though both candidates are Mormon, Mr. Lewis had the advantage of being a former Mormon bishop running in a district where 34 percent of the electorate is Mormon. Sen. Pearce still won the generally-conservative Latter-day Saints by a 16-point margin, but this was a significant drop from his previous support from the church.
It also didn’t help that various out-of-state groups and ethnic organizations had their sights on the author of SB 1070. The Public Campaign Action Fund (PCAF), an organization “dedicated to improving America’s campaign finance laws,” spent over $47,000 on a direct mail campaign attacking Sen. Pearce for accepting free football tickets — a move that is considered ethical since the tickets were offered to the entire legislature. PCAF ignored dozens of other lawmakers who accepted the tickets, so it appears it targeted Sen. Pearce for reasons other than campaign finance.
Much ado was made about the Hispanic vote, which Fox News Latino called a “key factor” in Sen. Pearce’s loss. In fact, Hispanics were only 13 percent of the recall electorate, and voted against Sen. Pearce only by a three-to-one margin — not much worse than any conservative could expect in an election. This was in spite of Mr. Lewis’ extensive pandering: He went door-to-door in Hispanic neighborhoods, appeared on Hispanic shows, and used his broken Spanish to encourage Hispanics to vote.
Sen. Pearce remains defiant. In an article for Politico, he noted his many accomplishments, including writing bills that successfully restricted benefits for illegal immigrants, controlled voter fraud, and required employers to use E-Verify. He was also the author of a constitutional amendment that denies bail to illegal immigrants who commit serious felonies. Most important, his SB 1070 unleashed a wave of restrictionist energy that culminated in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina passing similar bills.
Sen. Pearce concluded: “I have not yet decided whether I will run again for the State Senate — or another office. I promise you though, that I will not retreat from this fight.” [Ben Smith, Mormon Voters Recalled Pearce over ‘Character,’ Not Immigration, Politico, November 11, 2011. Elizabeth Llorente, Poll: Latinos Were Key Factor in Arizona Recall Vote, Fox News Latino, November 15, 2011. John Papagiannis, Election 2011: Down Goes Russell Pearce! Public Campaign Action Fund, November 9, 2011. Russell Pearce, It Took a Recall to Defeat Me, Politico, November 15, 2011.]
Can’t Stand the Truth
Activists in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests were upset when commentators started noticing the movement’s lack of racial diversity. Advertising analyst Harrison Schultz and Ford Foundation sociologist Hector Cordero-Guzman analyzed data from a survey conducted by Occupy Wall Street supporters, hoping to find, in Dr. Guzman’s words, that “the 99 percent movement comes from and looks like the 99 percent.” It doesn’t: 81.2 percent of protesters were white and only 1.6 percent were black.
When the researchers published a graphic that represented these data, one unnamed female OWS activist was furious: “Eight-one percent white protesters — and you actually made a flyer proudly advertising this lie, in a multicultural city like NYC? You must be crazy and blind.” She also accused Mr. Schultz of “insidious racism” and “white supremacy.” Another organizer said Mr. Schultz should attend “anti-oppression workshops.”
Some liberals have accused the Tea Party movement of racism because their protestors are overwhelmingly white. OWS appears to be terrified of facing the same accusations. [Joel B. Pollack, ‘Racism!’ — Occupy Activists Clash After Internal Survey Reveals Occupy Wall Street 81.2% White, 1.6% Black, Big Government, November 4, 2011.]
In November 2011, racial tension was running so high at Highland High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that police had to be called in to keep the peace. A fight between two boys set blacks and Hispanics at each other’s throats, and police locked down the campus. Rumors that outsiders were going to come on campus and start a “race war” added to the tension, which parents say has been building for months. Two days later the high school was still locked down, and a heavy police presence prevented violence.
One student explained that “all the black people want to fight the Mexicans and all the Mexicans want to fight the black people — it’s as simple as that, that’s as simple as you can put it.”
“Everybody is lined up to go to war basically,” another student said. “It’s just a lot of fear because people are scared for their lives . . . people are crying and running and basically scared to death. I know I was.”
Sgt. Patrick Ficke of the Albuquerque Police Department explained that “the students have almost segregated a little bit into their different racial groups — today there was word that there was going to be a large racial fight.”
Parents were upset that a police presence and lockdown were necessary. “Why did they let it get this far?” one mother asked. “If they’ve been told by the students, by the children who are there every day that there’s a problem — why did it take this long to do something?”
“They need to make this stop — they really do,” another mother added. “It’s about education not about war and that’s what all these kids feel like — that they have to fight a war.” [Eddie Garcia, Albuquerque Police Monitor Racial Tensions at Highland High, KOB News, November 18, 2011.]
The next week administrators put off an assembly to celebrate cultural diversity. Sophomore Breanna Jarvis, who is black, explained that it was “because there was such tension that was in the school, they were afraid to do it so they had to put it on hold,” adding, “Rumors I’ve heard are there was going to be a race war and they were coming on campus with weapons and they were going to target all the black girls first.” [Eddie Garcia, ‘Race War’ Rumors Postpone Assembly at Highland High, KOB News, November 22, 2011.]
Highland High is 61 percent Hispanic, 14 percent white, 9 percent American Indian, and 7 percent black.
No Different Online
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed data from over one million participants in online dating sites and found that whites prefer to date other whites. This was true even for whites who claim to be indifferent to race. Eighty percent of the potential dates contacted by whites were also white, and only 3 percent were black. Blacks were ten times more likely to contact whites.
The researchers expected to find some white same-race preference, but were surprised that the Internet did not reduce it. “When the constraints of segregation are lifted by technology, what do people do? They don’t act all that differently,” explained Gerald Mendelsohn, an academic who worked on the study. “Segregation remains a state of mind as much as it is a physical reality.”
Black women were the group least likely to be approached for dates, and black men actually contacted more white than black women. Prof. Mendelsohn says this is because, in America, “our notions of feminine attractiveness are based almost entirely on images of white women.” [Chelsea-Lynn Rudder, Study Reveals Racial Segregation in Online Dating, The Grio, November 15, 2011.]
This seems to have no effect on the self-esteem of black women. An Allure magazine survey found that black women are three times as likely as white women to say they are “hot.” [Julee Wilson, Black Women Have Amazing Confidence, Survey Shows, Huffington Post, November 9, 2011.]
All eleven Deep South states, along with Delaware, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, had anti-miscegenation laws that were overturned by the 1967 Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia. Nearly half a century later, miscegenation rates are climbing rapidly in the area.
The US Census Bureau started letting people identify themselves as “multiracial” in the 2000 census, and continued that practice in 2010. During that decade, the number of multiracial Americans who are at least partly white climbed at least eight percent in all 50 states, but of the 10 states that saw the most rapid growth, nine were in the South.
From 2000 to 2010, South Carolina saw a 112 percent increase in the number of whites who were mixed with people of other races, just ahead of North Carolina at 111 percent and Georgia at 93 percent. In South Carolina, the number of white/black mixes jumped 247.7 percent, from 7,890 in 2000 to 27,432 in 2010. Nationally, the number of white/black mixes more than doubled, from 784,764 to 1.8 million.
Mixed-race people of all combinations increased from 2.4 percent of the US population to 2.9 percent. The white population increased by 4 percent. [Frank Bass, Black-White Kids Surge in South Where Mixed Unions Once Banned, Bloomberg, Sept. 30, 2011.]
Bjerke School, a secondary school in Oslo, Norway, has come under fire for segregating its classes in order to curb white flight. “We made the decision because many Norwegian students were moving to other schools because they were in classes with such a high percentage of students from other nations,” explained Gro Flaten, the school’s headmistress. “They seemed to be in a minority.”
Separation was short-lived, however, as Oslo education commissioner Torge Odegaard quickly demanded reintegration. He made the school write a letter to parents saying that “[s]uch a division of the students is not in accordance with the requirements of the Education Act. The school regrets this error.”
Some defended the school. Robert Wright, a Christian Democrat politician and former head of Oslo’s school board, said separate classes kept Norwegians from leaving: “Bjerke School has come up with a radical solution to a real problem,” he argued, “but the politicians have just said ‘no.’ ”
Eighteen-year-old head girl Helena Skagen also defended her school: “They had the best intentions. They just wanted to keep the Norwegian students at the school. But they now know that what they did was wrong because you can’t split the students according to their culture.” She added that “it’s a very emotional discussion because of what happened in July [the Anders Breivik shootings], and for that reason politicians don’t want to enter the discussion at all, because they are afraid.”
A 17-year-old Somali immigrant named Illias Mohamed didn’t like separation. “This is apartheid,” he said. “They do this because I’m from Africa and my father is from Africa. But every one of us is Norwegian.”
Immigration, of course, is the problem. Between 1990 and 2009, no fewer than 420,000 “non-Nordics” moved to Oslo, and they now make up 28 percent of the city’s population. [Richard Orange, Apartheid Row at Norwegian School After It Segregates Ethnic Pupils, Telegraph (London), November 25, 2011.]
