March 2002
| American Renaissance magazine | |
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| Vol. 13, No. 3 | March 2002 |
| CONTENTS |
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Race and Teenage Pregnancy
Neo-Con Games
The Great Refusal
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters from Readers
| COVER STORY |
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Race and Teenage Pregnancy
The “crisis” is hardly the same for all races.
Credit Image: © Chicago Tribune / TNS / ZUMAPRESS.com
The media, teachers and public health officials have devoted enormous attention in recent years to the “teen pregnancy crisis.” But is there a crisis? And if so, for whom? It is a mistake to treat all teenage child births the same. A child born to a married 19-year-old has very different prospects from one born to an unmarried 14-year-old. Also, teenage motherhood follows the racial and ethnic patterns that pervade our society. Current anti-pregnancy campaigns largely ignore important distinctions of this kind, and are directed indiscriminately at all American teenagers. They therefore miss many of their intended targets and have the effect of discouraging childbirth among whites, who are the only group that is losing demographic ground while all others gain.
As the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics show, teenage motherhood is disproportionately black and Hispanic, with these two minority groups accounting for more than half of all teenage births. Although whites (what the census bureau calls “non-Hispanic whites”) are 60.9 percent of the American population age 17 and younger, in 1999 whites accounted for just 44.3 percent — a minority — of births to females 19 and younger. Tables 1 and 2 show the percentages for blacks and Hispanics. Non-white teenagers are more than twice as likely as whites to have children, and more than one in five babies (20.8 percent) born to American blacks in 1999 were born to teenage mothers. Any health program or education project aimed at reducing teenage births will therefore yield greater results if it targets blacks and Hispanics.
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What the authorities persist in calling a crisis of teenage pregnancy is in fact a crisis — or absence — of marriage. Teenage birth rates have not gone up in the past several decades; they have gone down. The teenage birth rate in 1999 of 49 per 1,000 teenage girls is only 60 percent of the 1950 rate of 82 per 1,000 teenage girls. The reason the 1950 rate was not a crisis is that most of those teenage mothers were married, whereas today they are not. In 1950, only about 13 percent of births to women in the 15-19 age group were out of wedlock, whereas the figure was 79 percent in 1999. What this means is that teenage birth rates declined substantially in the past 50 years, but marriage virtually disappeared. Indeed, we find that in 1950 a 14-year-old mother was more likely to be married than is a 19-year-old mother today.
This is due in part to the fact that Americans now marry later than they used to; the median age at first marriage has risen by more than four years since 1950. Fifty years ago, about half of American women who were going to marry had done so by age 21, and that figure remained essentially the same until 1970. By 2000, the median age had crept up to 24.5 (see Table 3). This increase in the age at first marriage has been accompanied by sharp drops in the percentages of younger women who are married (see Table 4). The age group 20-24 is particularly striking, with 70 percent of women married by that age in 1950 but only 27 percent in 1995. For females aged 15-19, 16.7 percent were married in 1950, compared to only 3.2 percent in 1995 — an 80 percent drop.
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Whether teenage motherhood per se constitutes a crisis, defining all births to mothers under age 20 as social pathology misses important differences between older teenagers (18 and 19) and minor girls 17 and younger. An 18-or 19-year-old girl is at least a legal adult who can sign a lease or open a bank account. She is more likely to have finished high school, and is eligible for full-time employment unconstrained by child labor laws.
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At the same time, marriage, although still the exception, is more common among older teenage mothers (second part of Table 6), with mothers in the 18-19 group six times more likely to be married than mothers 15 and under. More than 30 percent of births to Hispanic and white females 18-19 are to married women, compared to single-digit percentages for those 15 and under.
For blacks, the likelihood of marriage increases only slightly for older teenage mothers. This simply reflects the general disappearance of marriage for blacks of all ages. In 1999, 69 percent of all births to blacks were to single women. This rate of illegitimacy for the entire black population is higher than the illegitimacy rate for 18 — and 19-year-old whites and Hispanics.
Even if it is misleading to include married women 18 and older in statistics about the “teen pregnancy crisis,” very young teenagers (those 15 and under) are almost certainly ill-prepared for motherhood. They are just girls, mostly still in middle school. The overwhelming majority are unmarried (indeed, most states prohibit marriage before age 16), and young teenagers are prohibited by law from full-time employment. These very young mothers are a real public concern. Their numbers are relatively few (31,950 births to girls 15 and younger in 1999 out of a total of nearly four million births), but “children having children” is the disturbing image that drives anti-pregnancy campaigns.
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An analysis of teenage motherhood by age reveals striking racial differences (Table 7). Nearly 70 percent of white teenage mothers are 18 or 19, and whites account for just 28 percent of births to girls 15 and under. In 1999, “only” 9,011 births were to white girls of that age group. Meanwhile, nearly 40 percent of births to girls 15 and under were to black mothers, while Hispanics accounted for 31.3 percent of 15-and-under births. This means that although the actual number of births is relatively low, a black girl 15 or younger is 5.4 times more likely to have a child than a white girl of that age group, and young teenage Hispanics are 3.9 times more likely. The majority of teenage mothers of all ages are non-white, and this is overwhelmingly true for the youngest mothers. In 1999 blacks and Hispanics accounted for no fewer than 71 percent of births to girls 15 and under.
Interestingly, the overall teenage illegitimacy rate is actually slightly lower for Hispanics than for whites (67.3 percent v. 67.5 percent for 18 — and 19-year-olds — see lower part of Table 6). However, when illegitimacy is expressed in terms of the rate of unwed births to unmarried teenagers, Hispanics are more than twice as likely as whites to have illegitimate children (107.8 per thousand 18 — and 19-year-olds as opposed to 42.8 — see upper part of Table 6).
To explain this odd finding in round numbers, imagine that for every 1,000 white 18 — and 19-year-olds there were 63 births, 43 of which were illegitimate. For Hispanics, there were 159 births, 108 of which were illegitimate. The illegitimacy rates are very similar, but at 108 illegitimate births to teenagers, Hispanic teenagers are two-and-a-half times more likely to have illegitimate births than are white teenagers, for whom the illegitimacy rate is 43 per thousand teenagers. For that matter, Hispanic teenagers are also two-and-a-half times more likely than whites to have legitimate children. Hispanics simply show far higher fertility, both for legitimate and illegitimate babies, during the teenage years.
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To summarize:
- While blacks and Hispanics account for fewer than 30 percent of the teenage population, they account for more than 50 percent of births to teenagers.
- These same minorities account for 58 percent of births to minors (girls 17 and younger) and 71 percent of the most “at risk” births, to girls 15 and younger.
- The overwhelming majority of teenage mothers are unmarried. By ages 18 and 19, some 32 percent of white and Hispanic teenage mothers are married, but only about six percent of blacks are, reflecting the virtual disappearance of marriage for blacks of all ages.
- Teenage motherhood is relatively uncommon among whites, with births to minors accounting for fewer than 3 percent of all white births. Among the youngest teenage mothers (15 and younger) there were 9,011 births to whites in 1999.
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This is not, however, the picture of teenage motherhood suggested by the media and by activist groups, which routinely ignore racial differences. On Nov. 28, 2001, the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) — the research affiliate of Planned Parenthood — released a study comparing teenage birth rates in the United States with rates in Canada, Great Britain, France and Sweden. Predictably, AGI concluded that these nations had lower teenage birth rates because of “social expectations . . . that teenage partners should use contraceptives to avoid pregnancy and to prevent STDs.” AGI’s press release announcing the study did not even mention race, although none of the other nations has large black or Hispanic populations. The “executive summary” of the study refers to race only to point out that “the birthrate among non-Hispanic white teenagers (36 per 1,000) is higher than overall rates in the other study countries.” So it is, but 36 per 1,000 is very close to 33 and 35 for Britain and New Zealand, and not that different from Canada’s 27 (Table 9). The Guttmacher Institute cannot bring itself to point out that it is blacks and Hispanics who raise the overall US rate to 64 per 1,000 — nearly twice the rate of the next highest country, New Zealand — and that without high non-white teenage pregnancy rates, there would be little drama in the study at all. It is silly to claim that the international differences are due to “social expectations” about contraception when the main reasons are racial.
At the same time, as Table 9 suggests, populations do not generally show high overall fertility rates without a relatively high rate of teenage motherhood — as was true of the United States during the Baby Boom. Demographers point out that fertility delayed is fertility denied. In modern societies with birth control, unless some substantial number of women begin having children before age 20, fertility is likely to drop below replacement level.
Table 9 shows that while the US has higher teenage birth rates than other industrialized countries, it is also the only one that has a total fertility rate that is near replacement level. Indeed, there seems to be an almost direct correlation between teenage birthrates and a nation’s overall fertility. Disastrously low fertility rates in countries like Japan, Spain and Italy are cause for great concern, as the prospect of a shrinking, aging population threatens to bankrupt old-age pension systems and disrupt society. High teenage birthrates and higher overall fertility mean the US does not face the same problems, but these high rates are due exclusively to high non-white fertility.
Young whites are being bombarded with scare-propaganda about teenage pregnancy when, in fact, they are considerably less “at risk” for this outcome than minority children. This propaganda may foster a general anti-natal mentality among whites, and an aversion to having children that persists beyond the teenage years, and contributes to sub-replacement fertility for whites. For while overall American fertility rates are the highest in the advanced industrialized nations, white fertility is considerably lower (Table 10).
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There is yet another racial difference in fertility patterns. In America, the decline in births to teenage mothers has been accompanied by an increase in the median age of first child-bearing (Table 11), but the increase has not been the same for blacks and whites. Early childbearing has been traditional for blacks: In 1960, half of all black mothers had their first child when they were teenagers, while the median age for whites was 22. The typical first-time white mother in 1960 was 2.4 years older than her black counterpart, but by 1997 that gap had increased to 3.8 years. The message to defer — and in some cases deny — childbearing has had a greater impact on whites than on blacks. By the time the typical white woman has her first child, the typical black woman’s first child is nearly four years old. This delay in childbearing lowers white fertility, while it stretches out the span of years between white generations, further contributing to population decline.
White women would have to give birth to 13.5 percent more babies every year in order for the white population just to maintain its current size. Meanwhile, Hispanic and black fertility rates are 62 and 20 percent higher than the white rate, and ensure growing populations while the white population declines. One might well wonder about indiscriminate anti-natalist propaganda when some groups in the country are already below replacement-level fertility. The “success” of such propaganda only accelerates the decline of the white population. If crusaders against teenage motherhood were serious, they would concentrate on the black and Hispanic girls who account for more than half of teenage births. Targeting whites as part of a general campaign is yet another form of racial suicide. We should encourage whites to have children within marriage; instead they are encouraged only to use contraceptives, whether married or single.
Burke Dabney is the Internet pen-name of a writer based in Washington, DC. He has four children.
| ARTICLE |
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Neo-Con Games
What Beltway conservatives say about immigration.
On January 29, a group of mainstream, self-styled “conservatives” met in Washington, DC, to present a series of panels under the general rubric, “Immigration and National Security — Post 9/11/2001.” The meeting was sponsored by David Horowitz, ex-communist and current president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. The panels were an instructive indicator — sometimes encouraging, sometimes not — of how far “conservatives” are prepared to go in opposing the come-one-come-all orthodoxy.
This orthodoxy is so firmly rooted that nearly every one of the dozen or so speakers felt obliged to genuflect before the idea that America is a polyglot wonder, vastly enriched by newcomers from all parts of the world. America, they told us, is unlike other countries. Foreigners cannot go to France and become Frenchmen, but anyone can become an American. Needless to say, no one was prepared even to hint at the association between race and nationhood. Having therefore accepted the premises of their opponents, these “conservatives” mainly want to devise methods to keep out terrorists, and some even flirted with the idea of keeping all Muslims out of the country. Some realize that admitting large numbers of immigrants poses more than just security problems, but the primary refrain was the need to cut down on the intake and do a better job of assimilation.
The first speaker was Edwin Meese, US Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan. After reminding us “we are a nation of immigrants,” and that our democracy does not permit racial profiling, his main concern was what to do about immigrants in time of war. He pointed out that during past wars, foreigners have been subject to special scrutiny. He expressed revulsion for the Asian exclusion zones and relocation camps of the Second World War, but said there was good reason to register aliens. He called for a massive database of all the world’s potential bad guys, to be used by police and the visa-granting arm of the State Department. This could be combined with a much better system of tracking foreigners so we can be sure who hasn’t left the country when he should.
Mr. Meese also said we need “biometric documents,” or fool-proof identity papers based on biological characteristics. There is much resistance to the use of a national ID but he suggested we now have a de facto national ID, in the form of state drivers’ licenses. He said there should be more uniformity in licenses and that they should be made impossible to counterfeit. He also said employers and universities that apply for visas and sponsor immigrants must be made to keep tabs on people they have brought over, and certify that visa terms are not being violated. He opposes California’s recent decision to let illegals pay in-state tuition at universities, and thinks colleges should be punished for knowingly accepting illegal aliens.
Mr. Meese appeared to have no quarrel with legal immigration, opposing only illegal immigrants, criminals, and terrorists — precisely the point of view of an attorney general. The measures he recommended would make it easier to keep tabs on foreigners, and — if the country took them seriously — sniff out illegals. However, Mr. Meese never talked about immigration in general or the need to establish criteria for admission. He even concluded by saying that although immigration was now a matter of national security, we must not let policy be hijacked by people who have “a warped notion of what the country should look like.”
I asked Mr. Meese why we ban weapons exports to China but permit more than 50,000 Chinese to study at American universities, where they can learn enough aeronautics and nuclear physics to invent what we won’t sell them. He said the students will go home and liberalize China, but that it still might make sense to keep them out of advanced degrees in certain sensitive disciplines.
A panel on borders and citizenship brought the only really lively exchange of opinions. Michael Barone, who writes for U.S. News and World Report, claimed immigration is “more of an opportunity for us than a problem,” arguing only that it might be good to promote more of a sense of common citizenship. “As a practical matter,” he said, “immigration cannot be stopped,” adding that it naturally adjusts itself to the demands of the American labor market and that it would be “economically disastrous” to stop it. He did endorse a policy of “zero visas for certain Middle-East countries,” but assured us Mexican prune-pickers are an asset to the country. He thinks the current level of about a million immigrants a year is fine and is convinced “we can interweave immigrants into the fabric of American society,” if we teach them English and give them civics classes.
He sees no threat in the Mexican Reconquista movement, claiming it is nothing more than a few lefty college professors with no constituency. He applauded Mexico’s 1998 decision to permit dual nationality, saying America and Mexico should have a “benign competition” of citizenship that would let Mexicans live in whichever country they found congenial. In any case, so long as we successfully stimulate growth and stability in the hemisphere, we can turn Mexico and Guatemala into such happy places no one will want to leave. He hardly seemed to belong at a conference that was billed as a conservative appraisal of immigration.
Mr. Barone was immediately followed by John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, who blasted just about everything Mr. Barone had said. He scorned the idea of dual citizenship, pointing out that the oath of naturalization rightly requires renunciation of competing loyalties. He said last year three naturalized American citizens ran in elections for mayor of various Mexican cities, and called this an insult to American citizenship. He said that the more education Mexican-Americans get the less American they reportedly feel, and that immigration has been good for the United States only to the extent that immigrants have assimilated. He said learning English and holding a job are not enough, and that without “patriotic assimilation” we risk balkanization. He did not mouth sentimental platitudes about immigration, instead asserting that “the principle goal of immigration policy should be the national interests of the United States.” Mr. Fonte, who called for a sharp reduction in immigration of all kinds, was one of the strongest restrictionists on the program, and gave the impression he might veer into outright thought crime in private.
During the question period, I congratulated Mr. Fonte on his demolition of Mr. Barone, pointing out that the presence of 15 million Mexicans means it is probably impossible seriously to assert our national interests against Mexico. I predicted that if there were ever a sharp conflict with Mexico, there would be no question of “benign competition” for loyalty; millions of American citizens would act like patriotic Mexicans. I also pointed out that although the panel was about citizenship, no one had mentioned birthright citizenship. Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, who moderated the panel, agreed this was an awful thing, and pointed out that huge numbers of pregnant illegals come to America specifically to produce citizens.
In separate remarks Miss Geyer also noted that labor productivity in America has stagnated because of so much cheap, immigrant labor. Mr. Barone scoffed at this, asking “Do you want everyone in the country to be an investment banker?” Miss Geyer also worries about Muslim immigrants, claiming that although she has spent a great deal of time in the Middle-East, she has never met a Muslim who believed in separation of church and state. She said she worries that although people claim “everything has changed” since Sept. 11, if we do not seize this opportunity to change immigration policy we will soon find nothing has changed.
Syndicated columnist Samuel Francis was in the audience and wanted to know whether any of the speakers who had spoken about assimilation had a definition for it. Mr. Barone answered glibly that it is like pornography: he knows it when he sees it. Mr. Fonte gave a serious answer, saying that someone is assimilated “when he adopts the American story as his own.” He offered a specific test: whether a newcomer saw the Mexican-American war as a conflict “our” side won, and not as something dead white people did to Mexicans. By this test, the huge majority of Hispanics can never be assimilated. In fact, many blacks could not be considered assimilated, since many think of themselves as largely outside “the American story.”
Another panel included Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that issues useful reports on such things as dual citizenship, and the economic status of immigrants. He has been arguing for years for reduced legal immigration, and has recently added national security to the reasons for reduction. He said if we are to take seriously the idea of screening out terrorists we have no choice but to reduce the number of people we admit so we can examine them adequately. He pointed out that the Immigration and Naturalization Service has a backlog of about five million applications of various kinds and needs “breathing room.” Reducing the flow would also help solve such problems as multiculturalism and the demand for bilingual education. He also noted that the presence of large communities of immigrants makes it easy for terrorists to blend in. In particular, he argued that “the insularity of the Muslim communities provides cover for terrorists.”
He said that when immigration was reduced in the 1920s, fewer Italians came, which meant the Italians already here were more likely to assimilate. The Mafia was starved of recruits, its members become Americanized, and the mob was easier to crack. He said there would be a temptation to keep out Muslims for similar reasons, but that this might be unconstitutional and was, moreover, a throwback to the dreaded national origins quotas of times past.
In the question period I pointed out that the country had national origins quotas until 1965 and that if they had not been dismantled we would have none of the problems of which Mr. Krikorian complained: multiculturalism, bilingual education, and isolated enclaves of foreigners in which terrorists hide. I also asked why it is wrong for a nation to preserve its cultural, linguistic, religious, and even racial heritage. Virtually every other country does it; why not the United States?
Mr. Krikorian replied that the 1924 immigration restrictions had a good effect for the wrong reasons. He said — incorrectly — that much consideration of head shape, Nordicism, etc., went into the laws, and that this was an improper basis for policies that nevertheless made it possible to assimilate the turn-of-the-century immigrants. He did not explain why it is wrong for a country to preserve its racial makeup.
Daniel Pipes, who heads the Middle East Forum and is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, had only one message: “Militant Islam has declared war on the United States.” Although he did not tell us how to distinguish between militants and moderates, he wants the militants out. He called for a new version of the McCarren-Walters Act that used to keep communists out of the country, and that would establish new ideological filters to keep out today’s enemies.
On the same panel was Grover Norquist, who has been a long-time Republican activist and is president of Americans for Tax Reform. He said he didn’t care for bilingualism or multiculturalism, but that these could be easily done away with through education. If schools would only teach patriotism, anyone could be made into a perfect little American. He said Republicans must shed their image as the white man’s party, and cultivate immigrants and non-whites. He also stressed the importance of cozying up to “new communities of faith,” which presumably include Muslims and practitioners of Voodoo and Santeria. He grew practically teary-eyed in his evocation of an America in which the national essence — whatever that may be — is divorced from race, language, or religion. He sees nothing wrong with either the current levels of immigration or the mix of immigrants, and it was hard to understand why he was on a panel of “conservatives.”
David Keene, who is best known as the sponsor of the annual C-PAC gathering of conservatives, gave a reasonably good overview of the effects of the 1965 immigration law. He reminded us that its sponsors promised it would neither increase the rate of immigration nor change the ethnic mix of the country. He said we would have few immigration-related problems if we had maintained the pre-1965 rates of 300,000 or so rather than trying to stuff 1,000,000 new people into the country every year. He said the country is being balkanized by immigrants who seem to have little desire to assimilate, and who are poorer and less educated than natives. He added that it makes no sense for 70 percent of all legal immigrants to be coming for family reunification rather than because we want them. He said the basic questions should be: How many people do we need, whom do we want, and do they become Americans? It was about as strong a call for restriction as the meeting managed to produce, and was a good introduction for the two other panelists, Congressmen Thomas Tancredo and Lamar Smith.
Both these men take it for granted we are accepting far too many legal immigrants and are doing a pitiful job enforcing immigration laws. They concentrated instead on practical questions of how to build an infrastructure actually to carry out whatever immigration policy the country adopts. Mr. Tancredo (R-Colorado), said it was vital to split the INS into two organizations with separate functions: border control and naturalization. He said the naturalization ethos pervades the agency, and that people with an “immigration social worker” mentality cannot deal vigorously with illegals. He has sponsored legislation to establish a new National Border Security Agency, to be run by flinty-eyed men whose job it would be to keep illegals out. The “immigration social workers” who think foreigners are customers to be served could be hived off in a separate naturalization agency. He reported that Governor Thomas Ridge, now in charge of homeland security, had already made such a proposal to the President, but turf-hungry INS officials shrieked, and nothing came of it.
Mr. Tancredo emphasized that it was all very well to discourse sagely about who we should let in, but it is only hot air unless there is well-oiled machinery to enforce the law. He added that the events of Sept. 11, in which every one of the 19 terrorists entered the country legally, will force Congress to pass legislation that will be touted as the final solution to terrorism. It will, he promised, be a joke. It may sound good, but there will be no real provisions for accomplishing whatever the bill calls for. He said the goal of border control should be to monitor every single crossing, and to know immediately if someone overstays his visa.
Mr. Tancredo said the reason we are unable to enforce laws we already have is that many congressmen seem to believe America should have no borders at all. He says he would love to force a serious floor debate that would put every congressman on record as to whether he thinks national borders should be lines on maps or real bulwarks of national sovereignty. Mr. Tancredo is clearly committed to reducing legal immigration and cracking down on illegals. He is probably the most outspoken and effective restrictionist on Capitol Hill.
Lamar Smith of Texas certainly comes close. He echoed many of Mr. Tancredo’s remarks, once again emphasizing the importance of the practical, law-enforcement aspects of controlling borders. He said he had predicted years ago that something like the Sept. 11 attacks was inevitable if we did not watch the borders. These events have demonstrated what he has said for years, that “immigration is a public safety issue.” He has no patience for police departments that refuse to cooperate with the INS, and expects that the attacks will cut down on this foolishness.
Mr. Smith was sound on larger issues. He pointed out there is a “great mismatch” between the people who are coming to this country and the people the economy needs. Ninety percent of all new jobs, he said, will require a college education, yet huge numbers of immigrants have “no visible education,” and immigrants are twice as likely as natives to be on welfare. He said there should be no sentimentalism about immigration, that it should be exclusively in the interests of the country, and that we have every right to set high admission standards for newcomers.
He, too, thought the INS has fallen into the hands of the “social workers,” and does not have the will to control borders or hunt illegals. He said the Clinton people, who fully understood that immigrants vote Democratic, were largely responsible for this. Like Mr. Tancredo, he wants the INS split into separate enforcement and naturalization agencies, with the functions of the Coast Guard and Customs Service included in the enforcement arm. This way, the people whose job it is to keep things out — whether drugs, Cuban cigars, or people — would all work for the same agency.
Most of the panelists at this conference, with the exception of mistakes like Grover Norquist and Michael Barone, seem to realize that massive, Third-World immigration is not just an immediate security threat to the country. They realize we are importing indigent, uneducated people, many of whom have no desire to become American in any meaningful way. Though not quite so clearly as Patrick Buchanan, they understand there are limits to our ability to assimilate strangers, and that after their numbers reach a critical mass, they demand that we assimilate to them rather than vice versa. To the degree that they understand this, and to the extent they are willing to think seriously about setting criteria for admission or naturalization, they must realize that race is often an insuperable barrier to assimilation. Nevertheless, the speakers are all ambitious men who would never adopt a position they know might force them out of polite society or from the halls of power. Whether they have succeeded in convincing themselves that the racial taboo is legitimate — that whites have no right to maintain a majority-white country — or whether they keep their convictions out of sight, “mainstream” conservatism is defined by its compulsion to adopt positions on race that were revolutionary only 40 years ago.
This, of course, is why no one like Samuel Francis, Wayne Lutton, John Vincent or anyone associated with American Renaissance was invited to speak. Within the bounds of “conservatism” we find the Grover Norquist view that current levels of immigration are just fine and that all that is needed is a little more assimilationist effort on our part. That nationhood might have biological roots, that patriotic attachment requires ties of blood — though obvious to any student of history or world events — are ideas not even to be considered. There is less justification for not inviting Dan Stein of FAIR, Roy Beck of Numbers USA, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, Glenn Spencer of Voices of Citizens Together, or even Peter Brimelow of the VDARE web page. All these men would have made strong restrictionist arguments within the artificial limits set by David Horowitz conception of conservatism. Mr. Beck would have been a particularly useful addition to the program, since not one speaker brought up the immigration-driven problems of population growth, urban sprawl, or dependence on imported resources. From a narrowly Republican point of view, these may be mistakenly seen as “liberal” arguments, but they find deep resonance across the political spectrum.
This is not to say men like John Fonte or Tom Tancredo are not doing useful work. They may yet be able to moderate an immigration policy that is choking off the civilization of our ancestors, and orthodoxy is so pervasive they might be less effective if they departed from it more sharply. As Mr. Krikorian said in his reply to my question, sometimes one may approve of the effects of legislation but disapprove of its motives. It may be that restrictive legislation can be passed only by invoking the plight of Mexicans and Haitians who need a chance to “adopt the American story as their own,” free from the anti-assimilationist influence of waves of untamed compatriots. This would be vastly better than nothing.
This conference was probably a representative sample of mainstream “conservative” restrictionist sentiment. Until more vigorous nationalism forces itself up from the grassroots, it was about as much as we can expect.
| BOOK REVIEW |
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The Great Refusal
Can European civilization be saved?
Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, St. Martin’s Press, 2002, 308 pp., ISBN: 0312285485, $25.95.
Since 1998, Patrick J. Buchanan has been writing a series of books dealing in depth with the major themes and issues of both his newspaper column and his seemingly perennial presidential campaigns. The first, The Great Betrayal, dealt with the problems of “free trade” and “economic nationalism”; the second, A Republic, Not An Empire, with foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, especially with the alternatives of “global interventionism” and what Mr. Buchanan called an “enlightened nationalism” that avoids needless overseas entanglements. Both books are of interest to AR readers, but the third and most recent, The Death of the West, should be especially so, since it is mainly in this volume that Mr. Buchanan deals with the issues that most AR readers believe are by far the most important our nation and race are facing.
It is Mr. Buchanan’s thesis that the West — the white, Christian cultures of Europe and America — is facing extinction, in part because of falling birthrates, in part because of massive immigration by non-Western peoples who fail or refuse to assimilate, and in part because of the crisis of belief in Western culture that Western elites harbor and spread. Mr. Buchanan does suggest some practical political and policy options by which the Western nations could reduce the threats they face, but by and large he offers little hope for survival.
The Death of the West should be of particular interest to AR readers not only because so many of the “cultural” issues with which the book deals are really racial issues, but also because of confusion among Mr. Buchanan’s many admirers and supporters about his own personal view of race. Throughout his presidential campaigns, many supporters expressed disappointment that he did not more frequently and consistently raise explicitly racial issues — especially immigration and affirmative action — and faulted him for dwelling on more conventional conservative topics. The disappointment reached a crescendo in August, 2000, when Mr. Buchanan as the presidential nominee of the Reform Party chose as his running mate a black woman, Ezola Foster. Not only was Mrs. Foster obviously unprepared to serve as either a credible vice-presidential candidate or as an actual vice-president — she worked as a typing teacher in a public high school, had never held public office, and soon turned out to carry questionable ethical baggage — but also she had, equally obviously, been selected precisely because of her race. That Pat Buchanan would stoop to this sort of racial pandering dashed the hopes and expectations of many of his racially conscious supporters. More substantially, however, Mrs. Foster’s selection also appeared to be in gross contradiction to many of Mr. Buchanan’s own statements over the years that had suggested he shared the view held by most AR readers: that race is a natural and socially significant reality.
The Death of the West, then, could have served as an excellent opportunity for Mr. Buchanan to clarify his own views of race and the relationship between race and civilization. Alas, although Mr. Buchanan confronts many of the most controversial issues of our time with his customary courage and brilliance, and although the issue of race runs surreptitiously throughout the book, at its end the reader will remain as mystified about what the author thinks about it as he was at the beginning.
Declining Birthrates
The major theme of the early part of the book is the declining birthrates that afflict the white populations of the United States and Europe. “The West,” Mr. Buchanan writes, “is dying:”
“Its nations have ceased to reproduce, and their populations have stopped growing and begun to shrink. Not since the Black Death carried off a third of Europe in the fourteenth century has there been a graver threat to the survival of Western civilization. Today, in seventeen European countries, there are more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.”
The result is not only that the populations of the West are dwindling but that as they cease to bear children, they will grow increasingly older and more burdensome to the remaining young people who will have to care for them directly or through higher taxes. The alternative is the mass immigration from the Third World that is actually taking place; only immigrants can replace dying populations and assume the burdens that the population’s unborn children will not bear. “Either Europe raises taxes and radically downsizes pensions and health benefits for the elderly, or Europe becomes a Third World continent. There is no third way,” Mr. Buchanan writes.
The population decline is for Mr. Buchanan the major indicator of cultural decline, and toward the end of the book he traces it to the decline of religion, specifically Christianity.
But, as Christianity began to die in the West, something else occurred: Western peoples began to stop having children. For the correlation between religious faith and large families is absolute. The more devout a people, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, the higher its birthrate.
Mr. Buchanan fails to support this claim adequately. He complains about and indeed documents what he calls the “deChristianization” of American society, but he also insists, largely correctly, that the decline of Christianity in the United States is mainly the result of what elites have imposed on the country, and he acknowledges that “while America remains a predominantly Christian society and country, her public institutions and popular culture have been thoroughly de-Christianized.” Yet the white birth rate in the United States is 1.85, below replacement level (2.1), while black and Hispanic birthrates are above replacement level (2.21 and 2.99 respectively; it’s interesting that Mr. Buchanan nowhere in the book ever mentions these racial differences in fertility). The implication should be clear: America remains, for most of its population, a Christian country, but the racial group that constitutes most of its population is failing to reproduce itself; it is therefore not the decline of Christianity that accounts for the decline of births — unless Mr. Buchanan wants to argue that blacks and Hispanics are more religious than whites and have more children for that reason.
Moreover, while in the later parts of the book Mr. Buchanan mainly invokes the decline of religion as a cause of the birth dearth, in the early chapters he enumerates several other causes: a socialistic political economy in which government takes care of the elderly, and the young are no longer expected to do so; an economy in which women are expected to work and must work if they and their families are to enjoy middle-class affluence; the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the accompanying transformation of sexual mores and the rise of feminism; what Mr. Buchanan calls the “hysteria” about over-population fostered by ecologists and population planners; the availability of contraceptives; and finally the “collapse of the moral order” that is largely indistinguishable from the aforesaid cultural and sexual revolutions.
Most of these are perfectly plausible explanations of why people choose not to have children, and they more or less apply to non-Western countries like Japan as well. But probably the major reason people don’t have children is the one that several people Mr. Buchanan quotes actually assert: people have a choice between bearing the considerable costs of rearing children, or of not having them at all and spending their money on themselves. It is, in other words, availability of contraceptives and the ideological changes that accompany affluence that account most plausibly for the decline of white fertility. The decline of religion may mask affluence as a cause of declining fertility because affluence tends to be correlated with secularization, modernization, and the whole range of other causes to which Mr. Buchanan points.
Whatever its cause, Mr. Buchanan is entirely correct that the prospect of the disappearance of white populations foretells the death of the civilization they created. He is even more correct than he realizes, because he never bothers to deal with a perfectly logical question that arises from his survey of the decline of fertility among Europeans and the mass immigration of non-Westerners: Why don’t the non-Westerners become Western through cultural assimilation and carry on the civilization? If that were to happen, why would it really matter that the white population is vanishing?
If, as Mr. Buchanan argues, “Christianity gave birth to the West and undergirds its moral and political order,” and if a large proportion of the Third World immigrants entering the United States are Hispanic Christians, why is immigration a problem for the West rather than its salvation? Why won’t Christian immigrants ignite a Western renaissance? What would Mr. Buchanan say to an educated, upper-middle class, professional non-white immigrant, who may even have converted to Christianity, who tells him, “So what if the white people of the West are disappearing? I and millions like me are coming into this country, and we’ve assimilated or will assimilate, so we’ll carry on the civilization your ancestors founded.” The answer can only be that there is some other factor than religion or simple cultural assimilation — adopting the language, dress, and mores of the host country — that defines the West, and that factor is the Great Unmentionable: race.
Mr. Buchanan is aware of race and the difference it makes. He offers several reasons why massive immigration from Mexico is such a cultural problem for America, and one reason is that “Mexicans not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race. History and experience teach us that different races are far more difficult to assimilate. The sixty million Americans who claim German ancestry are fully assimilated, while millions from Africa and Asia are still not full participants in American society.”
To be fair, then, Mr. Buchanan does acknowledge that race is of some significance. Nor does he shrink from blasting the enemies of the Confederate flag (white or black, Republican or Democrat), rehearsing the facts about race and crime (and favorably citing both Jared Taylor and the New Century Foundation’s study, The Color of Crime), and quoting with contempt the blatantly anti-white shriekings of such racial demagogues as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Mario Obledo. Mr. Buchanan is clearly on the side of his own race, as well as that of his own faith and nation and civilization.
Nevertheless, at least in the case of race, it is not at all clear that he knows that it’s race with which he’s dealing, or that he grasps why he should be on one side rather than another. He never explains why race is significant or why it is that “different races are far more difficult to assimilate” — is it due to the biology of race or simply that racial differences are more visible than most cultural differences? — nor does he seem quite to grasp that the West and America are, virtually by definition, white. Even if some non-whites do adopt the cultural trappings of the West and even if they share the same cognitive abilities as whites, they will always remain aliens because of their race. “Assimilation,” while perhaps better than non-assimilation and the kind of cultural hatred that many immigrants exhibit toward the West, in the end is not really what’s important, because race is the ultimate foundation of culture. This is the crucial insight that escapes Mr. Buchanan.
Indeed, as he recounts the many different controversies over issues like the Confederate flag, the removal of various national or racial or religious monuments, the re-writing of history, and the long march of “political correctness” through the institutions, the reader begins to notice that he seldom if ever really engages with his enemies. One gets the impression that Mr. Buchanan is writing his book almost entirely for a 60-year-old white, Southern, Roman Catholic — a reader who can be expected to share his beliefs and values and his outrage at witnessing them being spat upon by racial, religious, and national foes, while the cowards, frauds, and fools among the conservatives and Republicans who are supposed to defend them fail to do so. But hardly anywhere in the book does Mr. Buchanan offer a principled, informed defense of any of his beliefs and values. He writes very little that might persuade an opponent who does not share his assumptions, or who might attack his beliefs and values as “racism,” “xenophobia,” “chauvinism,” etc.
Nor does Mr. Buchanan ever offer a very convincing explanation as to why the West is in decline. The decline of religion is at best only a partial explanation. Why has religion declined? Why can’t Christianity resurrect itself, or why doesn’t some other religion replace it if Christianity is failing to serve basic needs? Mr. Buchanan places great emphasis on the role of elites — the long campaign of Marxist-Freudian subversion sponsored by the Frankfurt School and its disciples, the justices of the Supreme Court, the elites of Hollywood and other cultural centers. He is undoubtedly correct that the main locus of cultural decadence and the main source of its spread lie in elites, but he never explains why the elites hate the civilization over which they preside, why they are determined to subvert it, or why they harbor anti — Western, anti-Christian, anti-white, and anti-American ideologies.
Why does Susan Sontag insist that the “white race is the cancer of human history”? Why did John Lennon moan on about his self-appointed mission to abolish religion, country, and possessions? Why does an entire class of academics and intellectuals subscribe to the milkish poison of the Humanist Manifesto? And, perhaps most important of all, why does almost everyone who doesn’t believe this stuff nevertheless tolerate it, submit to it, and fear to challenge it? Mr. Buchanan never offers much of an answer to these crucial questions, but perhaps it’s asking too much to insist on it. After all, who else has offered convincing answers?
Toward the end of the book, he tells us:
But America and the West face four clear and present dangers. The first is a dying population. Second is the mass immigration of peoples of different colors, creeds, and cultures, changing the character of the West forever. The third is the rise to dominance of an anti — Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, which has already sundered the West. The fourth is the breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government whose rise entails the end of nations.
There can be no disagreement with this catalogue of threats, but with the exception of the fourth, every one of them is directly related to race. The population decline is a problem only because the population in question is white, and no other race can replace it. Mass immigration is a problem because the immigrants are non-white and therefore largely unable to assimilate to or carry on the civilization created by whites. The rise of an “anti-Western culture” is largely driven and almost entirely accelerated by mass non-Western immigration itself, allied with the propensity of Western intellectuals and other elites, for whatever reason, to subvert their own race and civilization.
It would seem, then, that even by the terms of his own arguments Mr. Buchanan should have given a good deal more attention to race than he does, and it would have been extremely useful for him to have explained to his readers that the West and America are white societies that could not have existed in the absence of white majority populations and cannot continue to exist if their populations cease to be mainly white. It is quite true that Christianity, as well as science and various literary and artistic achievements and certain kinds of political and social arrangements, are all essential to the Western identity, but none of these institutions has ever come into existence among non-whites, and there is no evidence that anyone except whites can produce or maintain them.
In place of race, Mr. Buchanan argues (as quoted above) that “Christianity gave birth to the West and undergirds its moral and political order” and suggests religion as “the unifying principle” and “the source of moral authority that holds the West together.” He is probably right that Christianity has served that function for the last two millennia. He is also correct that it is ceasing to do so, and he rightly asks what new “unifying principle” can replace it:
Some say racial solidarity. But the past five hundred years have been an endless chronicle of European peoples slaughtering one another, with World Wars I and II as climax to the horrors. And during that past half-millennium, the great enemies of Western faith, culture, and civilization have come out of the West. Moreover, America is a multiethnic, multiracial nation today, and the nations of Europe will be tomorrow.
Yes, but the intra-European conflicts of the past 500 years were in no small part incited by religion, as in the Thirty Years War, the bloodiest conflict in European history until the 20th century. The white race of Europe has been no more divided against itself than the Christians of Europe have been at odds with each other, and even before the religious conflicts of the Reformation era, Christians fought Christians regardless of doctrinal unity. Religious solidarity is no better and no more enduring a unifying principle than race has been. Moreover, when Europeans have faced challenges from other races, as with the Mongols of the 13th century or with Arabic Muslims in the Crusades or (not always, but for the most part) with Indians, Africans, and Asians in the era of empire, whites have generally stood together.
As for the “multiethnic, multiracial” character of modern America, Mr. Buchanan is right, but that in itself is due to recent historical shifts in the composition of our population, and there is no reason why it cannot shift back to what it used to be — especially with a little government assistance.
The fact that race has not always served as an effective social and political bond in the past does not mean that it cannot so serve in the future, or that other forces such as national or credal identity will prevail over racial bonds. It is arguable that the most important achievement of the second half of the 20th century, both in science and in social and political affairs, was the rediscovery of race as a natural reality as well as a meaningful social and political force; that does not mean race necessarily will serve as an adequate bond or “unifying principle,” but certainly there is no reason to assume that it won’t or can’t.
Moreover it is also arguable that as religion has declined, racial consciousness has risen. Until recent years, few Europeans had any experience or knowledge of non-whites, and there was little racial consciousness among them. Today, with non-white immigrants pouring into the continent, white Europeans may not go to church much, but almost every nation has an explicitly racially conscious political party that opposes immigration and is gaining votes because of it. Americans by contrast have always had a racial consciousness considerably stronger than that of most Europeans simply because they have had to deal with Indians, blacks, and Asian immigrants. American history, as the anti-white left keeps preaching, is replete with white racial consciousness; there is every reason to expect it to revive as the confrontation with non-white immigrants escalates. Yet Mr. Buchanan quite simply refuses either to consider that possibility or evaluate its desirability. Far from dismissing racial solidarity, he should have examined its possibilities as a national “unifying principle” much more deeply.
For the last two decades and especially in the last ten years, Pat Buchanan has been one of white America’s foremost heroes — a man who has not hesitated to say what others fear to say about immigration, the economy, culture, foreign policy, and even occasionally about some aspects of race itself, a man who has risked his career — and perhaps even his life — to make Americans see what many don’t want to see and what their leaders do their best to prevent them from seeing. It is a disappointment that he seems to have avoided in this latest book and indeed in most of his career the kind of consistent and ruthless analysis of race he has brought to bear on almost every other subject he has approached.
While The Death of the West is a flawed book — flawed by the author’s refusal to pursue certain questions and issues to their logical conclusion and perhaps by his failure to recognize such questions and issues at all — it is by no means without merit; it offers an avalanche of facts and quotations to substantiate its claims, and it is well worth buying simply as a compendium and as an introduction to the crisis that these facts present. Most Americans, and especially most conservatives, would profit from reading it carefully and thinking hard about the unpleasant realities it documents, and it is probably the most forthright book on the mortal threat of population decline, immigration, and political, cultural — and racial — displacement now in print. Yet if Mr. Buchanan had confronted the truth about race head on, he would have written a much stronger book and a book that could have served as a manual of political and cultural warfare in a white (as well as a Christian) reconquest of America and the West. As it is, The Death of the West is by no means as forthright as it could have been or as it needed to be if the West is to be pulled back from the precipice on which it now stands.
Dwight Frye is a writer based in the Washington, D.C. area.
| IN THE NEWS |
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O Tempora, O Mores!
Muslims Rule
British Muslims in the West Midlands town of Upper Gornal have decorated the side of a pub with a spray-painted picture of an airplane crashing into two towers. Just in case the message was not clear, they added the words “Muslims Rule.” Ken Finch of the local council says he is trying to get money for video surveillance that might catch the artists in action next time. [Attacks Daubed on Wall, Wolverhampton Express & Star, Feb. 5, 2002.]
With a racial candor difficult to imagine in the United States, the British Home Office has just released a report on theft of cell phones that describes the crime as overwhelmingly black on white. The report estimates more than 700,000 cell phones were stolen last year, and finds that in London 71 percent of the thieves were black. Young white men were by far the most frequent victims, followed by Asians. Black robbers have told police they deliberately hunt white men, saying it is beneath them to steal from women. In the London area, two thirds of the offenders were under age 18. They say the best time to steal a cell phone is when the victim is using it and not paying attention to his surroundings. There is much demand in Britain for stolen phones, which can sell for as much as $80.00 on the black market. [Richard Ford, Black Gangs Prowl for Mobiles, Times (London), Jan. 8, 2002.]
The Jersey Journal is the daily newspaper of Jersey City, the second largest city in New Jersey. It is a city institution, with an office building in the center of town with an address — Journal Square — named after the paper. Now, after 135 years in business, the Jersey Journal is dying, with circulation down from 100,000 to 40,000 in the last 25 years. The reason? So few people in the county speak English any more.
The Journal flourished in the early part of the century despite waves of immigrants, because everyone learned English. Now, its market has been fragmented into Spanish-, Urdu-, Tagalog-, and Arabic-speaking enclaves. There are papers in all these languages, full of ethnic and immigrant news, but none covers the school districts, the politics, the crime, and the corruption scandals of Hudson County — New Jersey’s most populous. No ethnic paper has the staff to cover this kind of news, and ethnic readers are not much interested in it anyway. If the Journal folds, it will be a clear example of what used to be a unifying institution being driven out by diversity. [Michael Powell, Jersey City’s English Voice May Be Dying, Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2002, p. A3.]
Early in January, the Virginia state legislature voted unanimously to begin each day’s session by reciting the official state pledge to the Virginia flag: “I salute the flag of Virginia, with reverence and patriotic devotion to the ‘Mother of States and Statesmen,’ which it represents — the ‘Old Dominion,’ where liberty and independence were born.” One week later, black legislators were up in arms against the pledge they had voted for, when they learned it was written in 1946 by a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a club for women descended from Confederate soldiers. It is said that the Virginia chapters of the UDC actually recite the pledge at their meetings.
The state adopted the pledge back in 1954, but this is no solace to blacks, because segregation was still legal at that time. “I don’t want to affirm a time when Virginia was exclusive and not inclusive,” says Delegate Dwight Jones of Richmond. “I feel like I’m affirming the past and the mood of the state at the time [when I recite the pledge].” Several black legislators have stopped saying the pledge, and are considering an attempt to block the daily recitation. [Michael Shear, Flag Ode Has Black Delegates Speechless, Washington Post, Jan. 17, 2002. p. B1.]
By this logic, they should vote to abolish the flag, which was adopted in 1861 at the beginning of The War Between the States. The flag has a blue field and the state seal, which was adopted on July 5, 1776, and shows a Roman goddess standing with one foot on Tyranny’s chest along with the state motto: Sic semper tyrannis (Thus always to tyrants).
Borderline Insanity
In the 1960s, as a commemoration of the centennial of the War Between the States, South Carolina began flying the Confederate Battle Flag over the statehouse dome. In the 1990s, blacks began protesting this tribute to “racism,” and on Jan. 1, 2000 the NAACP declared a “boycott” of the state that was to last until the flag came down. Despite much resistance from white South Carolinians, the state legislature voted to remove the flag and fly it instead over a Confederate memorial on the state house grounds. After a brief celebration of this triumph, blacks decided it was not enough. The NAACP has refused to lift the “boycott,” and now insists that the hated banner be stripped from the memorial as well. In January, in an intensification of the “boycott,” the NAACP announced it would post people along the state line with signs and leaflets asking visitors to spend as little money as possible. South Carolina’s 20 or so welcome centers are the most likely targets for demonstrations. The “boycott” has had almost no detectable impact on the state’s $9 billion tourism industry, and the small number of groups that stayed away have returned since the flag was moved. [Steve Miller, NAACP to Post ‘Border Patrols,’ Washington Times, Jan. 16, 2002.]
When black congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas first came to Washington, she railed against the privileges of the elite. The American people, she said in her maiden floor speech, “want to know that the days of free meals and free trips and special privileges are over . . . As Members of Congress, we should not be using public office for private gain.”
That was back in 1995. Now, although she lives perhaps 200 paces from the Capitol, Miss Lee has herself driven to work in a government car chauffeured by a government employee. Sometimes the car waits in front of her apartment building 20 or 30 minutes, blocking traffic, while she gets ready. The trip is so short she sometimes doesn’t bother with a seat belt, but when she is in a hurry, she has the driver put on hazard lights and run through stop lights. House regulations forbid the use of government transport for commuting. Congressmen are allowed to run red lights if they are likely to be late for a floor vote, but Miss Lee has been known to do it more than an hour before the next vote. It remains to be seen whether the House Ethics Committee will investigate.
The congresswoman has also made such a pest of herself with Continental Airlines they refuse to do business with her. She used to reserve several flights at different times on the same day, and just take the one that suited her, not bothering to cancel the others. She was also rude to the flight attendants. Once, after boarding a plane she suddenly became convinced she had left her purse in the boarding area. She ran back to get it, but the plane pushed back from the gate before she could get back on. She demanded that it come back for her, and when officials told her FAA regulations do not permit a return to the gate, she shouted about racism and demanded to see a supervisor. On another occasion, when her seafood special did not appear at mealtime, she screamed at the top of her lungs: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Where is my seafood meal? I know it was ordered!” Apparently, this went on for a full minute, to the astonishment of her fellow passengers. This was too much for Continental, which mailed her a copy of the Delta schedule.
Miss Lee is not popular with her staff. Since 1995, 85 full-time employees have left her office. One, who lasted a month and a half, reports that after a mishap Miss Lee bellowed: “You don’t understand. I am a queen, and I demand to be treated like a queen.” [Sam Dealey, Sheila Jackson Lee, Limousine Liberal: Does She Think the Ethics Rules Don’t Apply to Her? Weekly Standard, Feb. 11, 2002.]
Whites Win Bias Award
Eight white librarians who worked in the main Atlanta public library have been awarded nearly $25 million in compensation for race-based transfers to smaller branch libraries. Their lawyers were able to find a library official who had complained about “too many white managers” in the downtown branch. Two-thirds of the award was punitive damages, meaning the jury decided the Atlanta-Fulton County Library System had deliberately acted against the white librarians. This is the fourth time the county has been found guilty of discrimination against whites. [Librarians Win Discrimination Suit, Las Vegas Sun, Jan. 17, 2002. David Pendered, $25M Reverse Discrimination Award in Atlanta, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 16, 2002.]
Kansas City Cannibal
A black 22-year-old Kansas City man has been arrested for murder and cannibalism. Marc V. Sappington told police that when he was on drugs he heard voices telling him to eat people. Last year, over a period of months, he killed four people, though he cooked and ate part of only one. When arrested, he said he planned to freeze the rest to eat later. Mr. Sappington has been found competent to stand trial and is being held on $1 million bail. [Man Bound Over in Cannibalism Killings, Kansas City Star, Jan. 25, 2002.]
Reading, Writing, Raping
Child rape is common in South Africa, where many men believe sex with a virgin will cure them of AIDS. Much rape, however, appears to be strictly opportunistic. According to a new study by the South African Medical Research Council, teachers commit one-third of the rapes of girls under the age of 15. In comparison, 21 percent of child rapes are committed by relatives, with similar numbers committed by strangers and acquaintances. Half of all child rapes, in other words are committed by teachers or relatives, and only one fifth by strangers.
“Our findings confirm that rape of girls, especially in school, is a substantial public health problem in South Africa,” says Dr. Rachel Jewkes of the research council. “There is a view that raping women is not a very serious thing to do. This is reflected in the fact that until recently school teachers who had sex with girls didn’t have any action taken against them.”
Last year, 21,000 cases of child rape were reported to police, but the real number is unknown because so many go unreported. [Patricia Reaney, Teachers Commit Many S. Africa Child Rapes — Study, Reuters, Jan. 24, 2002.]
The Black Pledge
Visitors to Oklahoma City’s Millwood public school district’s website find two pledges of allegiance — the familiar one to the American flag, the other to the red, black and green flag of the black nationalist movement. The Black Pledge of Allegiance was written by black Marxist militant and convicted felon Maulena Ron Karenga, who also founded the ersatz “holiday” Kwanzaa. Here are its words:
We pledge allegiance to the red, black and green
Our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain
One nation of Black people, with one God for us all
Totally united in the struggle for Black Love, Black Freedom, and Black Determination
Gloria Griffin, superintendent of the 99-percent-black, three-school, 1050-student district has no plans to take down the pledge despite critics who say it is separatist. “When I read it, I focus on the words ‘united in love, freedom and determination.’” she says. “If you look at history, there is a great need for African-Americans to love. It is very important that we appreciate freedom. And it is very, very important to have self-determination, and I don’t mean that in a sense of separatism.”
According to the Afrocentric website www.melanet.com, the red, black and green flag is openly separatist: It “has become the symbol of devotion for African people in America to establish an independent African nation on the North American continent.” [Ellen Sorokin, ‘Black Pledge’ Posted on School Website, Washington Times, Jan. 28, 2002, p. A4.]
Fear of WASPS
Below are excerpts from Jamie Glazov’s recent column for FrontPage Mag.com about Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West:
For some reason, Buchanan’s warning has yet to force me into a fetal position under my bed covers. To be truthful, my own personal nightmare is to be stuck living in a homogeneous society — where there exists only one kind of people. I would simply die of boredom. That is why I love living in a metropolitan city, since one is exposed to the richness and magic of all kinds of cultures and ethnic groups. Having come from Russia, I have always craved the energy and intensity that exists in many ethnic communities, whether they be Greek, Italian, Hispanic or Vietnamese. Few things frighten me more than the thought of being stuck in a room consisting only of WASPs who talk in monotone voices about stocks and golf for hours on end.
Dr. Glazov lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, a city rapidly becoming an Asian colony. [Jamie Glazov, Pat Buchanan and The Death of the West, FrontPageMagazine.com, Jan. 23, 2002.]
Mike Tyson Fan?
On Jan. 29, 16-year-old Jason Smith, who is white, was filling up at a gas station near Gadsen, South Carolina, when he was approached by two black men, one of whom asked him for five dollars. When he told the man he didn’t have the money, the man threw him to the ground and bit off the left side of his nose. Michael Dewayne Jackson, 22, was charged with first-degree assault, but Etowah County Sheriff James Hayes says he will ask the FBI to investigate the attack as a hate crime. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This is atrocious.”
Mr. Jackson says his victim triggered the assault by making a racist remark, but Mr. Smith and other witnesses deny this. Mr. Smith must undergo a series of surgeries to reconstruct his nose. [Lisa Rogers, FBI Asked to Probe Nose-Biting Assault as Hate Crime, Gadsen Times (South Carolina), Feb. 2, 2002.]
Stern Measures
Malaysia is one of the richest Southeast Asian countries, with a per capita GNP of more than $3,600 — which means it attracts illegal immigrants. The economy has been in a slump lately, so the authorities have decided on a stern new punishment for both illegals and the people who hire them: whipping. Neighboring Singapore has a system of caning for certain infractions, and although Malaysian human rights groups have thwarted similar plans in the past, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi says this time the government means business. There are an estimated one million illegals in the country out of a population of 23 million, and police deport about 500 of them every day. [Jalil Hamid, Malaysia Says Will Whip Illegal Immigrants, Reuters, Feb. 5, 2002.]
No Whites or Asians
The American Economic Association is offering a special program this summer at the University of Colorado at Denver for college juniors and seniors who want to do graduate work in economics. They will get free tuition, room and board, books, health benefits, and $1,600 in spending money. Applicants must be US citizens or permanent residents who are black, Hispanic, or American Indian. The application deadline is April 2, 2002. Please call (303) 556-6872 for information. [American Economic Association, Minority Scholarship Program announcement.]
Just the People We Need
The Mushunguli are a Bantu people who originally lived in Southeast Africa. In the 19th century, Arab slave traders caught them and took them to what is now Somalia. They look different from the native Cushite Somalis, and after the official end of slavery eked out a marginal living in the Juba River valley of southern Somalia. After the fall of the Siad Barre regime in 1991, the country fell into factional fighting. The Mushunguli, whose name means “descendents of slaves,” were despised by the warlords and none gave them protection. In the ensuing lawlessness, gangs of bandits ran them off their land, and some 12,000 fled to neighboring Kenya.
There they came to the attention of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), who tried to resettle them in Mozambique and Tanzania, which are the countries now found in the part of Africa from which they originally came. Both refused to accept their kinsmen, claiming they have problems of their own. Who should then step into the breach but the United States, finding that the Mushunguli have “a genuine fear of persecution” back in Somalia. The 12,000 Mushunguli have now gone through the first phase of refugee screening, and the US Embassy in Nairobi estimates that after the fakes are weeded out, about 8,500 will qualify as refugees. The Mushunguli will be resettled across the country in groups of 15.
A total of some 70,000 refugees are likely to be admitted this year, one third of them from Africa. In 2000 and 2001 about 3,800 Sudanese living in Kenya — mostly teenage male orphans — came to the United States under the same program. “They [the Mushunguli] are simple and uneducated people, who view their repatriation to Somalia as a return to continued persecution,” explains the UNHCR representative in Kenya, who no doubt believes these illiterate Muslims will thrive on affirmative action programs and fit in beautifully in the United States. [Juma Kwayera, US to Resettle Thousands of Somalis, East African (Kenya), Jan. 28, 2001.]
Changing Times
Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, was published in 1905 and became the inspiration for the D. W. Griffith movie, Birth of a Nation. In one scene, two men discuss the prospects for educating the blacks who are to have positions of power in the Reconstruction South. The language is harsh, but the passage is an instructive example of what could once, but can no longer, be put into print:
“Education, sir, is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the Continent of Africa — rich beyond the dream of the poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrow-head worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surfaces ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail! He lived as his fathers lived — stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, dance, and sport as the ape!
“And this creature, half-child, half-animal, the sport of impulse, whim and conceit, ‘pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,’ a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger — they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people — ” [The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Jr., New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905, pp. 292-293.]
The media have finally discovered the October 2001 AR article by University of Vermont professor Robert S. Griffin, “Rearing Honorable White Children.” The University student newspaper began with a January 22 story (“UVM Professor Publishes Controversial Article on Raising White Children”), which was followed by a piece in the Burlington Free Press and local television and radio coverage. Professor Griffin was quoted as saying that while his purpose in the article was to describe, not prescribe, he agrees with the view of the parents he studied that their race and heritage are under siege, and thinks they have every right to bring up their children in a way consistent with their traditions.
An ADL source was quoted calling American Renaissance “a polite racist organization,” and a representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center is reported to have said it is at “the intellectual-racist end of things.” Jared Taylor was quoted as saying, “To call something racist is essentially name-calling.” Professor Griffin noted that “ ‘Racist’ is a club to put people on the defensive, intimidate, marginalize, and demonize them.” Prof. Griffin, who holds a tenured position, is sticking to his guns. He says he will talk to anyone about the ideas in his article, and if anyone attacks him or white people in general he will “counterattack.”
Asians, Too
Most Asians — certainly those on college campuses — are well behaved, but there are exceptions. On November 30, University of Colorado was celebrating the Big 12 football championship. At one off-campus party in Boulder, two Asians got into a scuffle with some whites, but left when the fight was broken up. Later the Asians returned with reinforcements. An estimated 20 to 25 attacked whites, stabbing three and kicking and punching at least three more. There were no deaths, but one of the whites required 30 stitches to repair tendon damage in his hand. [Sandra Fish, Students Stabbed Outside Party, Daily Camera (Boulder, Colorado), Dec. 3, 2001.]
Noelle Has a Bad Day
Jeb Bush, brother of the President and governor of Florida, is married to a Mexican-born woman named Columba, who has not yet got the hang of the gringo way of doing things. Some years ago on her return from a trip to France, she told a customs agent she had nothing to declare. She had forgotten she stuffed the receipts from her Paris shopping spree into her passport case, where the agent found them. The agent asked again if she had anything to declare and she again said no. A search produced thousands of dollars of dutiable merchandise and resulted in a stiff fine.
Now her daughter Noelle, President Bush’s niece, is in trouble for a fraudulent attempt to get prescription drugs. She was let out of jail without having to pay a $1,000 bond and was eligible for pre-trial release because she claimed to have no criminal record. Now it appears that when she was attending an up-scale boarding school in Flagstaff, Arizona, she paid a $305 fine for shoplifting underwear at JC Penny’s. Failing to recall her Arizona record may make things a little tougher for her with the Florida authorities. [Did Bush Niece Have Flag Arrest? Daily Sun (Arizona), Jan. 31, 2002.]
Educating Illegals
On Oct. 25 last year, the Anaheim, California, school board voted 4 to 1 to shelve a proposal that would have required students to show proof of US citizenship or legal residency or be turned over to the INS. Fifty percent of the district’s students are Hispanic, and angry Mexicans flooded the school board meeting to oppose the measure. “It smacks of racial profiling. It divides the community,” said Navito Lopez, executive director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a “civil rights” organization. Seventeen-year-old Alex Rosaeles was offended by the very idea. “I don’t have papers,” he admits. “Does that mean I don’t deserve an education?” [Chelsea Carter, Calif. School Drops Citizenship Plan, AP, Oct. 26, 2001.]
Last October, someone put leaflets full of racial slurs and threats of violence on school buses and in the mailboxes of black school bus drivers for the Grandview School District in Kansas City. It turns out the perpetrator was one of their own — black school bus driver Lee Hooker-Medlock. On Dec. 12, 2001, Mrs. Hooker-Medlock plead guilty to one count of misdemeanor harassment in exchange for probation and mental counseling. Her attorney, Paul Katz, blamed the incident on depression. “She didn’t really know what was she was doing,” he said. Depressed or not, Mrs. Hooker-Medlock was rational enough to cover her tracks. She sent leaflets to herself and her husband. [Linda Man, Woman Pleads Guilty to Harassing Other Black School Bus Drivers, Kansas City Star, Dec. 12, 2001.]
| LETTERS FROM READERS |
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Sir — The October, 2001, article on rearing white children mentions a home schooling father who teaches his children Latin. He is right to do so. Many of the Founding Fathers understood Latin and were well acquainted with Roman history. They could distinguish between a republic, a democracy, and an empire, and could not have imagined their descendants would be ignorant of the language that nourished Western civilization for over 2,000 years. What warning could now be more appropriate than Curemus ne civitatem eis tradamus qui se patriae anteponant (Let us take care not to surrender the state to those who would put themselves before the country.)? From Woodrow Wilson to William Clinton, leadership was given to men who put self-aggrandizement before principle, and the acquisition of power before upholding the Constitution and the interests of their own race. This must stop if we are to survive as a nation. For guidance we must relearn the lessons of our history, rely on the wisdom of our race, and seek the aid of Providence.
John W. Altman, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Sir — The Trask Racial Classification System published in the January issue is almost as flawed as the system used by the US government. In his system, Dr. Trask proposes to classify whites as members of either one of three groups: “Nordic,” “Slavic,” and “Mediterranean.” This is quite different from the classifications developed by linguists and biological anthropologists. According to these, the native population of Europe consists of the following groups: Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Latin, Hellenic, Mediterranean and Finno-Ugric.
Every internationally recognized state in today’s Europe can be classified as a member of one of these groups, as can all native European languages. Of these groups, all but the last two are of Indo-Aryan origins. The Mediterraneans — who include the Basques and the Georgians — are remnants of an ancient people that populated much of Southern Europe before the arrival of Aryans. The Finno-Ugrians — represented by the Hungarians, Finns and Estonians — have been traced to the Eastern edges of Europe, and settled in their current homelands sometime during the first millennium. They and their languages have no connection with the Mediterraneans.
The Jews, whom Dr. Trask classifies as Mediterraneans consist of at least three groups, none of whom has anything to do with the Mediterraneans. Ashkenazic Jews are roughly half Aryan and half Semitic, Sephardic Jews are entirely Semitic and the black skinned Ethiopian Jews are mostly Negroid with only traces of Semitic ancestry. If these peoples, who have never possessed a recognized state in Europe and are not culturally connected to European Christianity can be categorized as white, then why not the Turks and Gypsies who have also lived in Europe for centuries?
Another problem with the Trask Racial Classification System is that few whites are unmixed representatives of one group. For example, Northern Italy had been heavily Germanized by the Lombards; German and Slavic genes are mixed throughout Prussia, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia; and many Englishmen have some Celtic ancestry and vice versa. Perhaps it would be best to use the simple system of “White,” and “Colored.” It has worked in the past.
Daniel Attila, New York, N.Y.
Sir — Having majored in physical anthropology before political correctness took over, perhaps I can help elucidate the government’s confusion regarding the taxonomy of our species. There are six major divisions of mankind. Each of these (better called sub-species than races) is composed of two or more races, sub-races, and local forms. The Europid sub-species contains fourteen races, four of which are those we call “white.” Using Eickstadt and Peters nomenclature, they are Alpinid, Dinarid, Nordid and Ost-europid. The government classifies all fourteen Europid races as white, probably on the basis of older nomenclature that named the Europid sub-species as Homo Sapiens Albus. Albus is Latin for white. Hence the confusion. The Arabs, Middle-Easterners, etc. are Europids — but not white.
The best book I have found on the subject is John R. Baker’s Race. He wrote it for the layman, and it is fascinating and edifying. It will clear up any confusion and provide a better understanding of the facts of our biology.
Dax Crockett Stewart, Purmela, Texas
Sir — Each issue of AR is usually riveting, informative reading from beginning to end, but your book review of Democracy: The God that Failed in the January issue was quite dull — like most things Libertarian. Your joy that Libertarian author Hans-Hermann Hoppe is not a typical open-borders enthusiast is understandable, but it hardly merits a three-page (!) review. Libertarianism is basically anarchism, with an occasional nuance. All it really has to say is that government doesn’t work. A sure cure for insomnia is listening to or reading a Libertarian. I hope that’s the last review or commentary on Libertarianism I see in AR.
Kenneth Reynolds, Bronx, N.Y.
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