One would think that a blogger at SF Weekly would be well disposed to locals protesting a movie that exalts populist racial violence and presents crude stereotypes of their ethnic group. But not, of course, when the protestors are White (in this case, AltRight's friend Andrew Yeoman). That doesn't fit the script.
A group of white nationalists will protest the new Robert Rodriguez movie Machete -- which depicts a Mexican renegade attempting to assassinate an anti-immigrant senator played by Robert DeNiro -- at Bay Area cinemas this week. This gets even more interesting: The protesters will show up "armed" with machetes. Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan, beware.
Frequent readers of this site may recall the Bay Area National Anarchists -- BANA for short -- the white nationalist group that showed up at the May Day immigration reform rally at Civic Center Plaza to instead show support of the Arizona "papers please" SB 1070 immigration law. BANA founder Andrew Yeoman and two other members were allegedly beaten while leaving the rally by black bloc anarchists, two of whom are now charged with misdemeanor assault.
BANA is also known for showing up to protest the Folsom Street Fair. But they will be doing a warmup act from Friday to Sunday at movie theaters showing the slasher film in the city, North Bay and East Bay, Yeoman says, "along with like-minded individuals and grassroots organizations nationwide." He even started a Facebook page to promote the protest.
"We feel that this is an explicit threat to white folks," Yeoman wrote on the far-right blog Occidental Dissent, "and that it is necessary to send a message to moviegoers and the producers of this film that threatening people because they happen to be white is unacceptable."
Ms. Smiley treats all this as ridiculous or beneath her (the story is captioned "The nationalist doth protest too much, methinks..."). The thing is, despite a cleaned-up trailer, Machete is very much about an angry Mexican taking his revenge, and leading a violent Latino uprising, against Perfidious Albion. According to Alex Jones, who was leaked a script, Machete includes scenes of gringos crucifying Mexican Catholic priests and Mestizo mobs worshipping Machete as their savior.
It's worth noting that Machete was produced, in part, with tax-payer funds, via the Texas Film Commission, which operates out of Gov. Rick Perry's office. Lest Texas Whites subsidize their own slaughter, let's hope that the scenes depicted in Machete remain on celluloid.
Larry Auster articulates the consciousness of the Whites who attended Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally so well that I've momentarily forgotten all the bad things he's said about me.
"Commenters who think that there is some implied racial conservatism in the Beck followers that has the potential of emerging are, I fear, kidding themselves."
The attendees at Beck's rally were eager to show their non-racist bona fides, as in this picture:
And these efforts win them no points with leftists. The liberals at Pandagon, where I found this photo, are tearing these guys apart for being racist--who but a racist would carry around a sign asking "Do We Look Racist?"
L[arry]A[uster] replies:
That is one of the most pathetic sights I've seen. But how can we blame them? The whole society, or at least the right half of the society, sends out the message that this is the way for whites to behave. George W. Bush would literally say, "How can I be a racist, since Condi, my National Security Advisor / Secretary of State, is black?", while Condi, as clueless, tone-deaf, and lacking in taste as her boss, participated in the idiocy. And in addition to being pathetic and weak from a conservative point of view, these eagerly non-racist whites, whether Bush or the white men in the photo, don't see how offensive it is from a liberal or just a human point of view---how condescending it is to use a black person as a prop to demonstrate one's own virtue. So these whites degrade both their own dignity and that of the black people whom they treat as badges, while the blacks who willingly join in the charade, whether Condoleezza Rice or the black man in the photo, are blind or indifferent to how they are degrading their own dignity. That's what right-liberalism does to people--it takes away their humanity and makes them see themselves as symbolic abstractions.
In this local news report on recent attacks at the Iowa State Fair, a White police officer ponders whether "Beat Whitey Night" might have had racial motivations...
Conservatives might not want to think about race, but race is thinking about them.
At any rate, it's looking like race riots will become a permanent fixture throughout America's economic collapse.
I was unaware of Laura Schlessinger's existence until just recently, when she surfaced in the news in connection with a recent edition of her radio show. It seems an Afro-American caller, seeking advise with her mixed marriage, was offended because she had to hear Schlessinger use the word 'nigger' while the latter commented on the language often found in Afro-American television shows. Of course, the incident is being tediously reported as a "racist outburst," and Schlessinger, who is product of a mixed Jewish/Italian marriage, has since apologised for using the vocable, claiming to have felt mortified by what she now views as an erroneously articulated point of philosophy. Having listened to the audio, however, I find the apology (as I usually do with these types of incident) both amusing and contemnible. During the offending segment Schlessinger is undoubtedly arrogant and obnoxious, showing a proclivity, more appropriate for an opinionated comedian than for a marriage advisor, to interrupt abrasively and talk over her caller. But the points she makes are true.
Firstly, Afro-Americans are indeed over-sensitive and they have indeed been agitated by a smattering of race hate organisations. Everyone with sense knows this. And, certainly, the Afro-American with the chip on the shoulder, ready to take offence and detonate with aggrieved racial rhetoric at the slightest perceived infraction has become a subject of mockery, indeed a cliché, on this side of the Atlantic. (Having said this, Afro-Caribbean and other dark-skinned citizens here are rapidly learning from their North American muses.)
And secondly, Whites in the United States are indeed so non-racist generally, that they, like the Whites in the rest of the Western world, are prepared to act against their own best interests in order to prove their own virtue (mostly to themselves) and satisfy their own abstract conceptions of justice: Schlessinger mentions their having elected a Black man for president -- a Black man, by the way (although she does not say this), with a Muslim father, possibly not even born within the United States’ jurisdiction, who for 20 years sat in the pews of a church predicated on anti-White racial hatred, listening to bizarre anti-White diatribes, which he condoned and approved, offering even generous financial patronage; Schlessinger mentions the election of a Black president, not needing perhaps also to mention White support over the past half century for innumerable anti-racist initiatives, programmes, policies, and legislation -- or the fact that today, when a White person commits even a minor social infraction (by, for example, using a disfavoured vocable), the ensuing White condemnation and apologies take apocalyptic proportions, often evincing a pathological self-hatred.
A sane person in Schlessinger's place (it seems too much to ask in her particular case) would have apologised for a lack of manners, but otherwise iterated the above points even more forcefully, attacking the race hate agitators without quarter, and demanding the opprobrium of the citizenry as well as the immediate cessation of government support for the minority race hate organisations.
The Schlessinger incident reminds me of the 2006 "Niggergate" involving another entertainer, Michael Richards, of Seinfield fame. As will be remembered, Richards, frustrated by uncouth and obstreperous Afro-Americans during a stand-up comedy routine at The Laugh Factory, exploded with a fiery tirade, which included liberal use of the forbidden term, "nigger." Richards subsequently crawled into a hole and wished the Earth would swallow him up, and even telephoned Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson (!), to beg them on his knees for forgiveness. Suppressed frustration, heated for decades in the pressure cooker of political correctness, ruptured its containment and blew out with a piercing hiss, until the relief in pressure permitted the fissure to be sealed.
Such incidents highlight that even politically correct citizens are internally stressed by their own political correctness. As time passes, and ill-conceived historical redresses morph into calculated excesses, the stress might eventually prove unendurable for some, and cause not just occasional vocabulary malfunctions but permanent defections. Even so, I am convinced that most ordinary politically correct Whites will sooner endure any humiliation rather than risk being ostracised, and will only abandon their negative identity when faced with a counter-cultural bandwagon speeding towards them and about to run them over.
Tomislav Sunic has in recent years made an important observation about former Communists in Eastern Europe: once Communism came crashing down, almost overnight the Communists "recycled" themselves as free-market capitalists. Sunic has suggested that we are likely to see an analogous phenomenon in the West at some future point: when the system of multiculturalism and political correctness finally implodes, its former supporters will likely recycle themselves as its most vehement opponents, and will probably emphatically assert that they never believed in it in the first place.
According to FOX News, the Democrats' “Divide and Conquer Strategy” has “Backfire[d]” and Sen. Harry Reid’s “racially-charged campaign comment” has elicited nothing short of a media “uproar.”
The obscene remark in question was uttered by Reid at a Hispanic gathering promoting English education; it reads as follows:
I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK?
I’m, of course, relieved to learn that the Democrats have been foiled in their attemtps to stereotype Mestizos, but it appears that the only people who’ve expressed “outrage” at Reid have been White Republican operatives and FOX News celebrities. In a Google news search, I was unable to find a notable Hispanic who was insulted by Reid’s comments and who also wasn’t Florida senatorial hopeful Marco Rubio.
As the GOP has become the White People’s Party demographically, its various spokesmen have become ever more fearful of pointing out what’s in front of their eyes and ever more eager to play the great game of accusing one’s opponent of “racism.”
Appearing on “Hannity,” Bill Bennett even promised FOX’s viewers that the GOP leadership would soon be even less representative of the people who actually vote for it: This is a “different Republican Party,” a “very diverse group of people”
While scouring the Internet for outrage, I did come across this short blog by a young, White female conservative, Jenny Erikson, which seems particularly revealing:
Well, I don't know how anyone can vote based on identity politics. No one should vote for one party or another because they're Mexican, black, female, or a circus carnie.
I'm not a Republican because I'm a blonde California mom that drinks too much Coke Zero. To say that is to say that Republicans treat my kind of people and other minorities differently than they treat other groups.
The fact is that every single person in the United States is a minority, and impossible to fit into a little box. Statistically speaking, I'm young and a woman, so I should vote Democrat. On the other hand, I'm pro-life and a homeowner, so I should vote Republican.
Democrats love women, but hate anyone against abortion. Democrats say they want kids to get a great education, but then deny the access to it by not allowing school vouchers. How is one supposed to align themselves with a party based on identity politics, when every person is a unique individual made up of a little of this and a little of that?
Republicans don't play identity politics because they don't need to. The truth is, Republican Party values are better for everyone, not just select groups of people.
So, Mrs. Erickson, who from all appearances seems to be a bright and thoughtful young woman, is ...
pro-life,
devoutly Christian,
Internet savvy,
dedicated to raising her children,
married to a decent guy who pays his mortgage,
interested in free-market solutions to national education problems,
not acquainted with anyone who votes on the basis of identity politics, …
Jenny is an individual, to be sure, but she’s deluding herself if she doesn’t recognize that she’s also very, very, very White. Saying things equivalent to, “I’m a Republican, but then I also play golf and enjoy the novels of Jane Austen,” proves the opposite of what is intended.
Now, one could legitimately criticize Harry Reid for the factual inaccuracy of his remarks: regardless of whether Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or John McCain were in office, mass amnesty would be pursued in Congress and La Raza would be federally funded.
What I don’t understand is how anyone of European heritage would think that the Republican Party supports them. Ok?
Watch the latest video at <a href="http://video.foxnews.com">video.foxnews.com</a>
Omar Thornton had so internalized the typical Leftist critique of Western society that only moments after committing his crime, he was already interpreting it as a righteous outburst against omnipresent Institutional Racism.
Dispatcher: State Police.
Thornton: Is this 911?
Dispatcher: Yeah, can I help you?
Thornton: This is Omar Thornton, the, uh, the shooter over in Manchester.
Dispatcher: Yes, where are you, sir?
Thornton: I'm in the building. Uh, you probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up. This place here is a racist place.
Dispatcher: Yup, I understand that
Thornton: They treat me bad over here, and they treat all the other black employees bad over here too, so I just take it into my own hands and I handled the problem — I wish I coulda got more of the people.
Dispatcher: Yeah. Are you armed, sir? Do you have a weapon with you?
Thornton: Oh yeah, I'm armed.
Dispatcher: How many guns do you have with you?
Thornton: I got one now, there's one out, one out in the uh, the uh, factory there.
Dispatcher: Yup. OK, sir.
Thornton: I'm not gonna kill nobody else, though.
Dispatcher: Yeah, we're gonna have to have you surrender yourself somehow here, not make the situation any worse, you know what I mean?
Thornton: These cops are gonna kill me.
Dispatcher: No they're not. We're just gonna have to get you to relax
Thornton: I'm relaxed, just calm down.
Dispatcher: … to have you, you know, turn yourself over.
Thornton: We're just talking, you're gonna play something on the news, you know I'm gonna be popular, right [inaudible] the right thing. SWAT team just rolled by in army gear. You don't know where I'm at, but, I don't know, maybe you can trace it from this phone call. But, yeah, these people here are crazy, they treat me bad from the start here, racist company. They treat me bad, I'm the only black driver they got here. They treat me bad over here, they treat me bad all the time.
Dispatcher: This is a horrible situation, I understand that…
Thornton: You don't need to calm me down, I'm already calmed down. I'm not gonna kill nobody else — I just want to tell my story so that you can play it back.
Dispatcher: You're gonna help me get you out of the building, OK?
Thornton: All right, I'm a, I get — don't worry about that, I got that taken care of, I don't need anybody to talk me into getting me out. …
Dispatcher: Where in the building are you, Omar?
Thornton: I'm not gonna tell you that. Where they find me, that's when everything will be over.
Dispatcher: Yeah, just, you know, where are you located, are you up in the offices?
Thornton: Where they fired me, everything be all right. … Manchester itself is a racist place.
I recently read James Edward’s book, Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the 'R' Word to Push the Obama Agenda. I was quite interested in it because in his three-hour weekly radio show, The Political Cesspool, James’ treatment of the racism smear is not dissimilar to my own.
The book is – as you might expect from its author – a short, easy, and especially funny read, being comprised mostly of James’ witty commentary on the last few years’ worth of news stories covering alleged White racism. Said stories are discussed very much like in James’ show, and an abundance of internet sources are provided to facilitate independent investigation. Needless to say that the stories are absolutely ridiculous, defying belief in some cases, even for someone whose inbox is flooded daily with the reports of White ‘racism’ collected by Google’s news alerts. A reader can expect to roll his eyes, shake his head, and / or find his trachea rippling with laughter practically on every page.
There is the case, why not, of the federal hate crime investigation triggered by a ham sandwich; and there is the case of a mayor’s lengthy written apology to a Black citizen for allowing police officers to eat bananas in public. There are also several examples of White so-called conservatives being far more paranoid, obnoxious, and vociferous in their denunciations of supposed White racism than the usual liberal suspects. I was astounded to read, for example, that in at least one case, said conservatives even complained about their not being condemned vigorously enough in the liberal media; and that a conservative radio talk show host branded high gasoline prices racist because they encouraged farmers to use corn for the production ethanol, when that corn could be going to feed African children.
There is also, however, a serious message beneath this bestiary of political correctness; and it boils down to five simple theses:
1. Modern mainstream culture in America defines a racist as a White person; and a White person as a racist, everywhere and always, forever and constantly;
2. Those who peddle accusations of racism hate Whites and seek to gain advantages at the expense of Whites; anti-racists, even White ones, are anti-White, always and everywhere;
3. Modern Whites are cowards, who have allowed themselves to be imprisoned by a word;
4. When accused of racism, it is pointless for a White person to argue, deny, rebut, or explain: he is a racist, end of discussion;
5. The only appropriate response when accused or racism is derision.
Points four and five I have argued myself, most recently in my article for The Occidental Observer, where I discuss the anti-A3P smears in the New York Daily News and the Huffington Post. Points one to three, although beyond argument to anyone who has been paying attention, are home truths sadly yet to be recognized by most White folk on either side of the Atlantic. For this reason, because recognition is a necessary precondition for dismantling the anti-White culture of guilt, apologies, and reparations, James has pitched his book beyond his immediate constituency: its welcome purpose is to enlighten the benighted, not just preach to the converted.
No doubt James’ clean conscience, sunny disposition, and lighthearted disregard for matching his views and opinions to those approved by race relations professionals are proving an exasperating irritant for both them and adepts of the anti-racist egalitarian cult, so popular among smelly underachieving Molotov-hurling Marxist youths. Already we are seeing an escalation of attacks against James and his show. To my mind this only confirms the correctness of his approach. As Finnish nationalist Kai Murros, author of Revolution – And How to Do It in a Modern Society, wrote to me last year:
The ruling elite is afraid of our laughter, because it is the one thing they cannot control and laughter is a sure sign that people are already in process of signing off their loyalty to the system.
Of course, the system is predicated on fear – it needs to be, as it is otherwise too fragile to be sustainable. Its weakness becomes ever more apparent as it commits ever more of its resources to extinguishing laugher outside its designated ‘safe’ zones. In as much as ridicule is a projection of power, therefore, we will recognize the erosion of establishment power whenever its smug ridiculing of Whiteness gives way to obstreperous denunciations of, and vehement over-reactions against, assertions of White power.
But these are only humor’s destructive properties. Humor also has decisively constructive ones, which must not be overlooked. Firstly, it is associated with relaxation, and thus tends to convey among observers the sense that a person is in control of a situation – people tend to follow whomever appears to be in control of a situation. Secondly, it is associated with youth, and thus imbues anything positively linked to it with a sense of vitality and dynamism – this is how the Left won the young, and cast itself as a forward-looking movement. And, finally, it is both associated with and has the capacity to generate among observers a sense of well-being and good will, which is always preferable to nay-saying and prophecies of doom. Therefore, I think James' friendly and easy-going tone is more likely to make the non-ideological part of his audience more receptive to his message than the mass of demographic projections and crime statistics upon whose dissemination the racialist Right has so far based much of its political strategy. The projections and the statistics are necessary to inform intellectual arguments without a doubt, but, politically, they cannot achieve the revolution in consciousness that precedes fundamental change, because the anti-White culture is not founded on reason or rational data, but on irrational emotions, urges, and aspirations.
The true value of Racism, Schmacism, then, is its demonstration of the tone, attitude, and approach that need to become integral to pro-White campaigning.
This is not to say that the cultural war will be won by laughing and cracking jokes; the cultural war remains serious business. This is to say, rather, that pro-White campaigning will not be successful without its first becoming user-friendly.
Finally, I need to mention that there is scope here for a follow-up. Passing mention is made somewhere of the need to twin derision for the racism smear with an aggressive counter-attack. This is an important point that needs detailed treatment, because while humor can work miracles, there are times when seriousness is required in order to be taken seriously. Yet, when there is no point responding to an accusation of racism with denials and explanations, when said denials and explanations are, in fact, the accuser’s desired response (because it wastes time and energy counterproductively), one needs to target the accuser, not his accusation.
This is what I had James do in Mister, where he makes a fiery appearance in a not-too-distant future as the governor of Tennesssee. Unfortunately, he is also targeted for an assassination attempt, but for now he needs not worry about that, as the friendly folk at the $PLC are still content with just savaging him in their magazine. Let us wish James good health and fortune so he may continue to fight the forces of political correctness with the same valour and gallantry he has displayed so far.
James Edwards, host of The Political Cesspool radio program and author of the new book Racism, Schmacism, joins me to discuss the dreaded R-word and much more.
You can subcribe the the AltRight podcast for free here.
Peter Brimelow's review of Racism, Schmacism for VDARE can be found here.
When the Labour Party lost the May 2010 election, I did not exactly share their sadness. This was not because I saw the incoming government as representing fundamental change; rather, this was because the Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already proven so fantastically destructive that it was difficult to imagine anything topping five more years of Labour inferno.
The electoral repulsion of Gordon Brown triggered a leadership contest within this wretched party, an event about which Derek Turner has already written very amusingly for Taki’s Magazine. Absent evidence of complete disarray, crisis, depression, despair, tiffs, quarrels, clashes, faction, division, schism, disunity, schizophrenia, paranoia, catatonia, paralysis, and radical soul-searching, a Labour leadership election is a potent soporific. Who wants to listen to a freak show of fossilized Marxists pontificating about fairness and equality? Life is too short.
But when the electorate holds back from crushing them into oblivion, when the government ends up being a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, the prospect of a Labour comeback cannot be dismissed: their next leader might well end up being our future Prime Minister.
What, then, is Labour offering its supporters? At one end of the spectrum stands the current favourite, David Miliband, the former Foreign Secretary. He is followed by a succession of yawns. At the other end is the outsider candidate, Diane Abbott, the MP for the London borough of Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
David Miliband is the son of Ralph Miliband. The elder Miliband, born in Belgium, immigrated to Britain in 1940 to escape the Nazis, and went on to become, during the 1960s and 1970s, “one of Britain’s most celebrated intellectual disciples of Karl Marx.” He was an iconic figure of the Labour Left, “who famously frowned on the concept of ‘private property,’” and “whose writings influenced two generations of Socialist leaders.” Based in the highly fashionable London district of Primrose Hill, “once a popular haunt with radical intellectuals,” which “hosted a strong community of Jewish émigrés,” David is the classic Champagne socialist, a species that sees no contradiction between applying a Robin Hood ethos with other people’s money and indulging a personal lifestyle of Oriental opulence: the 22 April 2007 article in the Daily Mail, "How David Miliband Avoided Inheritance Tax on Marxist Father’s £1.5million House," provides an educational overview of the Milibands’ attitude to property and taxes. (Hint: they are not entirely harmonious with what they prescribe for you and me.)
Also (arguably) educational were claims made in the Russian newspaper Tvoi Den in 2007, when David Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, angered Putin’s government through his handling of the Alexander Litvinenko affair.
The newspaper said that in the Twenties the Foreign Secretary's grandfather, Samuel, then Shimon, Miliband, a native of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, had fought under the command of Trotsky ‘eliminating’ white Russians opposed to Communism.
Miliband’s tenure as Foreign Secretary was indeed stellar. Among the various examples of his genius as Britain's top diplomat, we must include his relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who came to afford Miliband the full benefit of his industrial-strength candor: it was reported by the British press on one occasion that during a telephone conversation between the two men, Lavrov asked Miliband, “Who the fuck are you to lecture me?” Miliband experienced a lengthy tirade, it seems, complete with a generous sprinking of four-letter words, in response to comments about Russia’s operations in Georgia. Miliband’s visit to Russia a year later was similarly a resounding diplomatic success.
Thus, we have some indications as to how Britain’s prestige in the world would be elevated under a possible David Miliband premiership later in the decade.
Yet, before we can relax, we need to take a look at the "outsider" contestant: Diane Abbott, the main topic of this article. With bookies assessing her chances of victory at 50/1, an Abbott premiership might seem a distant possibility. But if you dismiss her out of hand you have already forgotten that at one point in the not too distant past there was one Barack Obama, who appeared out of nowhere and transitioned from non-entity to world leader in a matter of months. Not unlike Ms. Abbott, he added colour to an otherwise dreadfully vanilla selection of candidates, and was said to represent fundamental change -– a profound and historical transformation of the political landscape. Ms. Abbott has sustained some criticism in the media, where she has earned accolades such as “the stupidest woman in Britain,” but it is particularly auspicious for the Black MP that her entering the leadership contest afforded immense relief to the lilly-white consciences of her fellow party members: these worthy servants of the people, you see, were very uncomfortable with the (until-then) uniformly fair complexion and monotonous maleness of the contestants. (Hint: this might have resulted in accusations of racism and sexism, and therefore of hypocrisy and Champagne socialism.)
Born of Jamaican parents in 1953, Diane Abbott earned her place in the history books by happening to be Black and female in 1987, when she was elected Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom. Since then she has remained popular with her constituents, who have re-elected her with comfortable majorities on every election. Her borough is ethnically diverse (25% Black, 41% non-White in 2006) and one of the most economically deprived in the country, occupying the bottom 5% nationwide. Jo Dillon of the Independent on Sunday has described her as “an icon of the Left”.
Her various campaigns, outlined on her website, cover wide range of issues. A common denominator in not a few of them, however, is a strong identification, combined with an acute preoccupation, with the interests and concerns of her racial brethren: both foreign and British-born Blacks (also known here as “West Indians,” or “Afro-Caribbeans”). Witness, for example, Ms. Abbott’s motive for opposing the changes in Air Passenger Duty introduced by the last Labour government:
Government proposals within the Bill are to charge passengers higher Air Passenger Duty the further the distance they fly out of the UK. But rather than being based on the exact destination the passenger is flying to, the Duty will be based on the capital city of the country the passenger is flying to. This means that flying to the Caribbean will always incur a higher Air Passenger Duty than flying to the USA, even though many places in the USA are further away from London than the Caribbean is.
Or her reasons for being active in the civil liberties campaign:
When I first came to Parliament in 1987 I spoke out against Stop and Search laws which infringed on the civil liberties of young Black men. [...]
I am concerned that anti-terror laws brought in since the September 11th attacks will have the same detrimental effect on relations between the police and Muslim communities.
Or her thoughts on the current approach to the fight against crime:
[G]un crime is not just about tough sentencing. Sadly 80 per cent of gun crime in London is 'black on black,' often involving boys in their teens. As a black woman and the mother of a teenage son this is frightening and wholly unacceptable. A fundamental and persistent problem is the continuing educational underachievement of black boys in particular.
I have campaigned for many years on educational issues. In particular I have researched, organised and spoken out on the way in which the education system fails children of African and Afro-Caribbean descent. In the mid-nineties I began organising events in Hackney under the title “Hackney Schools and the Black Child”. [...]
Most recently I held debates in the House of Commons on the disproportionately high rate of school exclusions of Black boys and the lack of diversity in London teaching workforce.
Or her objections to, and actions against, the proposed reforms to legal aid:
They are aimed at value for money, but in reality mean that many smaller firms will be run out of business by factory-like law firms that can afford to take on legal aid cases for less money. Black and ethnic minority-run firms are more likely to be new or small firms, and are more likely to be dependent on legal aid work and therefore are hugely threatened by the reforms. Whilst I welcome the Government's wish to get value for money in legal aid spending, it is clear that among other flaws the legal aid reform will decimate black and minority ethnic solicitors.
Many black and ethnic minority legal firms were set up as a reaction to the institutional racism that prevented ethnic minority lawyers from progressing in their careers. [...]
In May I tabled a number of written questions to the Ministry of Justice to try and gage what could be done to halt the reforms. Following this I held a Westminster Hall debate arguing that the reforms were indirectly discriminatory against black and ethnic minority solicitors, firms and clients.
Or her issues with the national DNA database, created by Labour, and currently holding 4.5 million profiles:
In 2007, Lady Scotland confirmed that three-quarters of the young black male population would soon be on the DNA database...They had generally been arrested because they fit the physical description of a suspect -- the suspect being described as a young black man.
My, if Ms. Abbott is as sturdy a bulwark for the race-specific interests and concerns of her White constituents -- 59% in her borough -- as she is for those of her Afro-Caribbean voters, I would imagine that they feel no need at all for a party like the BNP. (Well, if they do, the Left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research has an ingenious solution: more immigration.)
Ms. Abbott’s preoccupation with negritude is, like Obama’s, fully integrated with far Left credentials. After Labour came to power in 1997, a secret conspiracy was hatched at the highest levels of government to make Britain more multicultural. This led to previous legal immigration averages to quintuple, reaching figures in excess of a quarter of a million people per year. Most of these came from impoverished, Third World countries. And among them were 1 million Muslims, who added themselves to the 1.5 million accumulated over the previous centuries. According to a questionnaire published in The Guardian newspaper, however, Ms. Abbott disagrees strongly with the statement “[i]mmigration levels are too high” (in the United Kingdom). This is perhaps not entirely surprising, as the former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunket (who is White), said in 2003 that there was “no obvious limit” to the number of immigrants that could settle in the United Kingdom.
Indeed, being a citizen of the world, Ms. Abbott’s generosity extends well beyond this green and pleasant land. The last Labour government transformed the British economy, tripling the national debt, septupling government borrowing, and turning the Conservative’s 3.3 percent economic expansion of 1997 into a 5.0 percent economic contraction in 2009. It also managed to give away 60% of the nation’s gold reserves at $275 an ounce. Eventually, with Britain facing a downgrade in its credit rating, harsh spending cuts and tax rises had to be implemented, including an increase in Value Added Tax (VAT), which is hoped will bring in an extra £13,000 million a year. Ms. Abbott is pleased, however, because the foreign aid budget, which in the 2008/2009 year spent £5,500 million helping the poor in Africa and South Asia, has been increased to £7,800 million for the 2010/2011 year. In fact, even though half of Britons want less money spent on foreign aid and more spent relieving domestic poverty and improving our under-funded public services, she strongly disagreed with the idea that Britain spends too much money on foreign aid. Ms. Abbott must have failed to notice that the VAT increase -- which disproportionately affects the poor, since it increases prices on nearly all goods and services -- could have been cut to less than half by suspending foreign aid.
And as no far Left politician is complete without punitive tax proposals, Abbott has bold plans of her own. On 16 July the BBC reported
As well as introducing a financial transaction tax and increasing the coalition's bank levy, she said she would create a new “wealth tax."
“I am working on the details of it but it would be a wealth tax directed at assets rather than income,” she said.
In other words, if your house is too large, Abbott will ask you please to move out, sell it, and hand a big chunk of your money to the government. And if you are one of those doomsday eccentrics who hoard gold in case of a currency crisis, she will want you to share your stash with the government. So, if you are intelligent and industrious, if you have prospered in life, Diane Abbott has her eye on you.
Of course, none of this represents an electoral barrier to a committed Marxist supporter: they love these political positions, irrespective of race, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation -- and they know how to guilt ordinary people into supporting them, or at least not criticizing them.
There remain, however, a few minor problem areas that would need to go into the memory hole before Diane Abbott is ready to storm into 10 Downing Street.
Firstly, there is the matter of her refusing to pay her own evening taxi fares. Ordinary folk traveling to and from work are expected by their employers to pay for their own transport. But Diane Abbott expects the long-suffering taxpayers to fund hers to the tune of £1,100 per year, even though she already claims £142,000 annually in expenses, and is paid the largest allowable income supplement for living in London.
Secondly, there is the matter of her thinking that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” are unsuitable for working as nurses in the National Health Service, because they “may have never met a Black person before.” Fortunately, however, on this occasion Marc Wadsworth, executive member of the Anti-Racist Alliance, came to the rescue by pointing out that that year’s Miss Finland was Black, of part Nigerian descent. And, all the same, Ms. Abbott still commanded support from fellow Black MPs: Bernie Grant, MP for a neighbouring constituency, said “She is quite right… Scandinavian people don’t know black people -- they probably don’t know how to take their temperature.”
Then there is the matter of her parallel career as a BBC pundit. Instigated by a complaint from a fellow MP, the Committee for Standards and Privileges found in 2004 that Ms. Abbott had failed to declare her earnings (£17,300) from her appearances in the BBC programme This Week in the Register of Members Interests, as per the provisions of the Code of Conduct for Members and paragraph 54 (c) of the Guide to the Rules. Ms. Abbott, who accepted full responsibility, was required to apologize to the House of Commons. Fortunately, however, Ms. Abbott emerged unscathed from the 2009 expenses scandal, where MPs of all stripes were found to have been dipping into the public purse to the tune of many thousands of pounds to fund their lifestyles. Here she has an advantage over her fellow contestant, David Miliband, who was found to have illegitimately claimed £30,000 over five years in repairs, decorations, and furnishings for his private residence (he apologized went found out, but did not return any of the taxpayers' money).
And then there is the question of whether Ms. Abbott will, like Obama, succeed in ushering in a new era of post-racial politics. Statements like the one below, recorded in the Daily Mail, suggest it may be too soon yet to get our hopes up:
I never encountered any overt racism at school, though I do occasionally wonder whether the attempts made to dissuade me from applying for Oxbridge were linked to my colour.
And, finally, there is the matter of her snubbing public education for her son, in favour of a £10,000-per-year selective private school (Note: Marxists are supposedly against private education and selecting students for ability). The matter generated considerable media attention in 2003, not least because our far Left politician had previously savaged Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for also sparing their children from the public school system. It seems she instructed her former husband to keep quiet about her choice, aware that it was “indefensible” and “intellectually incoherent.” Worse still, her explanation (“West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children”) renewed accusations of racism, which for some implied that White mothers loved their children less than Black mothers. Indeed, many found it rather puzzling that Ms. Abbott could take this view yet dread the thought of her child being schooled alongside others raised by West Indian mums, just like her.
We will have to see how this exciting contest unfolds. Will the best man win? Will subterranean racism influence the decision? Is Britain ready to transform its political landscape? For the time being, Ms. Abbott thinks she has fair chance, despite the odds:
I'm not comparing myself to Barack Obama because he’s a once in a life-time figure but two years ago no-one could have imagined a black man as US President. If that was possible in the US, I think people can change their ideas in Britain as well.
Pardon me for reading with a jaundiced eye Jim Webb’s call for government to end the Diversity Industry and start sticking up for white Americans, but I don’t think there’s anything there.
Richard Hoste has told us not to read politicians’ words too closely, but just focus on their motives and the moods and effects their language might give rise to. Alright. I think that Webb grasps that, as Pat Buchanan wrote recently, whites are abandoning Obama in droves, and he’s afraid they might leave him, too, when he’s up for reelection in 2012. He wants rural Virginia to vote him; and it might work.
But words do matter -- particularly from a man who was a professional writer and novelist before going into politics. (Though Webb’s writing style here is both cluncky and pretentious: he ends his piece asking his peers to “allow harmony to invade the public mindset.” Unfortunately, Senator, harmony cannot invade anything.)
And, more importantly, Webb doesn’t make any sound arguments for ending affirmative action (not to mention edgy, race-realist ones.) The senator can't even muster the intellectually respectable Classical Liberal case against AA, referencing fairness and meritocracy.
Instead, Webb worries that "[t]hese programs have damaged racial harmony" and haven't adequately "helped African-Americans." Webb even argues that LBJ's original program's were "justifiable and understandable" -- and constitutional, to boot. His concluding line says it all: "Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end." Should we read this as implying that Webb plans to keep all the Diversity programs for people “in need”? One wonders where he’d draw the line.
(Webb is, perhaps, reacting to what Hugh Davis Graham has called "the collision course" between affirmative action and immigration, that is, the prospect that Hispanic immigrants might start pushing poor blacks out of Diversity positions.)
In many ways, the HBD-informed argument against affirmative action is the opposite of the one Webb makes. Webb, like other mainstream conservative and libertarian AA critics, argues that the problem with the Diversity Industry is that poor whites (and Asians) don't benefit from it. (And without question this is unfair.) It’s a search for a victim, whether it be Jennifer Gratz or Webb’s rural constituents.
Such people are victims. But we should understand that the real problem isn't the fact that Johnny didn't get into Harvard Med, but that Jamal did -- and is actually practicing medicine! (Steve Farron’s excellent book The Affirmative Action Hoax details many wrenching stories of blacks who couldn’t pass medical school exit exams, were graduated anyway, and went on to cause great harm to patients and society.)
It’s also worth putting pressure on Webb’s contention that African Americans haven't benefited from AA. It is true that blacks were making strides in the 1950s, as Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have pointed out, often times developing all-black, segregated businesses and local economies. And as someone who is laissez-faire on economic matters, I'm convinced that society as a whole would be dramatically wealthier and better off without our multiculti welfare state.
Still, one is confronted with the fact that so much of the current black middle class is built on employment in the federal Diversity sector. Were the welfare sate to go, this great American success story would all but collapse. The Shirley Sherrods of this world would be out of work and see their living standards plummet, even as society became richer and more productive.
One wonders whether contemporary blacks would be willing to trade a wealthy, free world, in which it'd be demanded of them that they work and produce, for a poorer, Diversity world, in which they have the chance to get a full scholarship to Princeton and one day work at a major law firm or the Equal Opportunities Commission. It's a good question.
Last Saturday, we crossed the border, to watch Othello in the grounds of Tolethorpe Hall in Rutland, England’s smallest and most rural county.
Tolethorpe is a former manor house hidden away down winding, high-hedged lanes in quiet, remote-feeling countryside, yet it is only two miles from the handsome Lincolnshire town of Stamford. The house, which has surviving 15/16th century fleur-de-lys wall decoration, was derelict when it was purchased by the Stamford Shakespeare Company in 1977, and the attractive grounds along the River Gwash have been hosting highly-regarded open-air theatrical productions ever since.
It was a memorable evening, as it always is at Tolethorpe -- especially once the daylight began to fail, and the Romanesque arches of the stage scenery looked ever more authentic and bats dashed desperately after moths just above the heads of the audience.
We were transported first to Venice and thence to Cyprus, following the story of Othello the Moor, his white wife Desdemona, and the Venetian politicians, soldiers and rakes who revolve around their central, controversial relationship.
It is unclear exactly when the play is set, but it was written about 1603 and originally entitled The Moor of Venis. It is an adaptation of a story called “Un Capitano Moro,” by a now obscure Italian writer called Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio (1504-1573). Shakespeare may also have been inspired by seeing Moroccan delegations which visited England at the outset of the 17th century. The play has given us some expressions which have become clichés, such as “wearing my heart upon my sleeve” and “he who steals my purse steals trash.”
For those unacquainted with the plot, Othello is a Moor (an imprecise term, used to refer to anyone who was not white), a general who has proved himself in the service of the Most Serene Republic. One assumes he is a convert to Christianity (this is a subject of debate amongst Shakespearean scholars) but even sincere conversion would obviously not suffice to allay suspicions about his good faith. He has promoted an adjutant called Cassio over the head of the resentful Iago, who therefore determines to destroy both men while posing as their friend. Othello’s elopement with Desdemona, the daughter of Senator Brabantio, has created yet more enemies, including Brabantio (who disowns her) and the dissolute Roderigo, who had planned to marry her.
The action switches to Cyprus, then a Venetian colony, where Othello has been sent to mastermind the defence against the attack of a Turkish fleet. In the event, the fleet is sunk by a storm, but the background danger serves to highlight the cultural-racial tension.
The central characters’ marriage is a love-match, and Iago has to work hard to arouse Othello’s jealousy against the innocent Desdemona. But he eventually makes Othello believe that Desdemona has been having an affair with Cassio. He also incites Roderigo to make a murderous attack on Cassio, which leaves Cassio badly injured and during which Roderigo himself is finished off by Iago to stop him revealing his machinations.
Despite Othello’s essential good nature, and the efforts of Emelia (Iago’s wife but alienated from him, and a staunch friend to Desdemona) Iago eventually succeeds in misleading and inflaming Othello, and there is a melodramatic ending that must have delighted the original working-class London audiences, with Othello smothering his wife, Emelia being killed by Iago and Othello committing suicide. We last see the vile Iago under arrest, and being taken away for torture, which audiences now as much as in 1603 take pleasure in imagining.
The play is controversial even 400 years later, and Othello productions are gererally fenced around with programme-note equivocations and preemptive apologies.
It is controversial not because of the character of Othello who, unlike Shylock, is no villain. The worst one can say about Othello is that he is “egotistical” (F. R. Leavis) or unstable, while other critics (like William Hazlitt) regard him as “noble” and even heroic. The only unsavoury characters are the white men Iago and Roderigo. The reasons for diffidence therefore lie elsewhere.
Part of the cause may lie in the earthy expressions used about the Othello/Desdemona liaison, such as “an old black ram is tupping your white ewe,” “the sooty bosom of such a thing as you” and “thicklips.”
The second reason is more complicated. The central role has been taken by actors like Edmund Kean, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Paul Schofield, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon, and the story has been turned into ballets and operas, including one by Verdi. There have been all-black productions, all-white productions, mixed-race productions (notably Paul Robeson in the title role in New York in 1943, the first time a black man had played with a white cast) and productions in which actors alternate the roles of Othello and Iago. Sir Patrick Stewart mischievously played the part as a white, with the rest of the cast being played by blacks.
But it is presently regarded as infra dig for white actors to ‘black up’ in any circumstances, and in recent major British adaptations, the Moor has been played by black actors, most recently to good effect by Lenny Henry. It is not just in theatre that this tendency is discernible; a recent Disney film, Prince of Persia, was pilloried because the central roles were taken by the white actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Atherton, as has been M. Night Shyamalan’s Airbenders -- while many still fizz with indignation about Mickey Rooney’s Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
But although we are supposed to be uncomfortable to see a white actor playing Othello, we are not supposed to be uncomfortable to see a black actor playing a role we associate with whites. As long ago as 2000, when Nigerian actor David Oyelowo was selected by the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Henry VI, those who said they found this incongruous were accused of prejudice. Now, to cite the Daily Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish, when reviewing a recent Pygmalion featuring a black Eliza Doolittle, theatre critics “almost hesitate to point out” incongruities of casting so as to avoid this imputation.
On the one hand, therefore, we are expected to be race-conscious; on the other, to be race-blind. This apparent inconsistency makes sense only when we realise that the underlying idea is that theatre should be less white and less "elitist" (elitist is a near-synonym for white in this and other contexts).
Shakespeare plays are often said to have passed their view-by date, with some educationalists saying they are too ‘difficult’ for today’s children. This is patently false, as one can see from children’s reactions to the plays – and even if it were true, it would be a serious indictment of modern teaching, considering that the plays were written for bear-baiters and night-soil men. The real reason a minority dislikes Shakespeare is because he portrays an England and a Europe that were almost wholly English and European.
Another reason Othello flutters feathers is because implicit in the plot is the unsavoury moral that ethnic proximity often means ethnic conflict. Apart from the still-resonant backdrop of Christian-Muslim warfare (Cyprus is still a kind of frontline), Othello is doomed to disaster simply because of who (or perhaps what) he is. He is an archetype as much as a man. Desdemona, the most ‘post-racial’ character, suffers longest and dies soonest. The progressive/transgressive affaire is both brief and botched.
The ‘miscegenation’ motif makes many people wriggle in atavistic discomfort. There is some evidence that persons of one race automatically treat members of other races differently – for example, Harvard’s Implicit Association Tests, the genetic similarity theory of Frank Salter and J-P Rushton, and more recent studies conducted for the academic journals Current Biology and Experimental Social Psychology, which monitored brain activity in groups watching members of their own and other ethnic groups in different situations. As Salvatore Maria Aglioti, the Italian academic who led the Current Biology study, remarked,
“If you ask people directly if they are racist, most people say no, but a very high percentage show implicit biases."
He then goes on to distance himself from his team's findings by say that racial prejudice is learned rather than inherited. This study and the other studies I have adduced are of course sketchy and speculative, and signify little when viewed in isolation. Yet historically speaking, birds of a feather usually do flock together, and immigration does cause acute if usually unconfessed uneasiness. It seems not implausible that there should be some such artifact of our semi-animal past, when someone whom you did not recognize was likely to be an enemy.
There does appear to be a widespread if regrettable suspicion that those who do not share one’s physicality may not share one’s personality. Even self-described "liberals" tend to talk about diversity rather than actually living their dream; when it comes to ethnic exogamy they may not be that unlike the working-class "racists" they affect to despise. Their "ethnic cringe" evinces itself in "protesting too much" (another Shakespearean expression, from Hamlet) -- sycophancy and overdone considerateness towards non-whites that often come across as hypocrisy and condescension.
In Othello, the fear of interracial intimacy is expressed figuratively by rodomontade about Desdemona being "covered by a Barbary horse," potentially resulting in "coursers for cousins and gennets for germans." The "treason of the blood" so deplored by Brabantio is not just about what he perceives as Desdemona’s ‘disloyalty’ to him as her father, but also about her perceived ‘disloyalty’ to her people.
In recent decades, history has become a hotly contested political battlefield. Those who favour revolutionary social transformation often strive to insert ethnic anachronisms into national narratives as post-facto justifications -- essentially so that they can justify immigrants’ presence in the prickly present. For a few activists, then, Othello is precious evidence that Europe has always been multicultural, that there can be “European Islam” and individual choices may override "constructs." Yet however often it is staged, and whatever ingenious rationales are introduced, Othello will probably always present troubling aspects for the post-modernized. It will be many, many years -- if ever -- before Othello can be viewed with complete equanimity.
As we left the grounds, full of the horror and sadness of the tale, with the light spilling out of the orangery onto the terrace, the sundial and the cedars, I thought how far we are from the world in which Othello was imagined -- yet how much the melodramatic Moor can still tell us about ourselves.
Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.
The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.
This is funny. I once knew a Japanese exchange student who told me that she couldn't take a sip of alcohol without turning red. I had a hard time believing it and tried to convince her that maybe it was in her head. According to the map connected to the story, the gene for alcohol flushiness is found in about 70% of Japanese (or maybe 60 or 80%, I'm bad at reading charts that try to tell you something with slight gradations of color).
I wouldn't be shocked if this is part of the reason for Asian overrepresentation at Ivy League schools. Getting drunk is a gateway into all other kinds of stupid behavior and takes time away from studying and extracurriculars. And even those Asians who don't have the gene will be influenced. Let's say you're a Korean who can get drunk but within your social circle of the same race 50% of your friends can't. You're probably less likely to make drinking a regular habit of the group.
The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.
Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution.
Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
So much natural selection has occurred in the recent past that geneticists have started to look for new ways in which evolution could occur very rapidly. Much of the new evidence for recent evolution has come from methods that allow the force of natural selection to be assessed across the whole human genome. This has been made possible by DNA data derived mostly from the Hap Map, a government project to help uncover the genetic roots of complex disease. The Hap Map contains samples from 11 populations around the world and consists of readings of the DNA at specific sites along the genome where variations are common.
One of the signatures of natural selection is that it disturbs the undergrowth of mutations that are always accumulating along the genome. As a favored version of a gene becomes more common in a population, genomes will look increasingly alike in and around the gene. Because variation is brushed away, the favored gene’s rise in popularity is called a sweep. Geneticists have developed several statistical methods for detecting sweeps, and hence of natural selection in action.
About 21 genome-wide scans for natural selection had been completed by last year, providing evidence that 4,243 genes — 23 percent of the human total — were under natural selection. This is a surprisingly high proportion, since the scans often miss various genes that are known for other reasons to be under selection. Also, the scans can see only recent episodes of selection — probably just those that occurred within the last 5,000 to 25,000 years or so. The reason is that after a favored version of a gene has swept through the population, mutations start building up in its DNA, eroding the uniformity that is evidence of a sweep.
Unfortunately, as Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle, pointed out last year in the journal Genome Research, most of the regions identified as under selection were found in only one scan and ignored by the 20 others. The lack of agreement is “sobering,” as Dr. Akey put it, not least because most of the scans are based on the same Hap Map data.
From this drunken riot of claims, however, Dr. Akey believes that it is reasonable to assume that any region identified in two or more scans is probably under natural selection. By this criterion, 2,465 genes, or 13 percent, have been actively shaped by recent evolution. The genes are involved in many different biological processes, like diet, skin color and the sense of smell.
A new approach to identifying selected genes has been developed by Anna Di Rienzo at the University of Chicago. Instead of looking at the genome and seeing what turns up, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues have started with genes that would be likely to change as people adopted different environments, modes of subsistence and diets, and then checked to see if different populations have responded accordingly.
She found particularly strong signals of selection in populations that live in polar regions, in people who live by foraging, and in people whose diets are rich in roots and tubers. In Eskimo populations, there are signals of selection in genes that help people adapt to cold. Among primitive farming tribes, big eaters of tubers, which contain little folic acid, selection has shaped the genes involved in synthesizing folic acid in the body, Dr. Di Rienzo and colleagues reported in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The fewest signals of selection were seen among people who live in the humid tropics, the ecoregion where the ancestral human population evolved. “One could argue that we are adapted to that and that most signals are seen when people adapt to new environments,” Dr. Di Rienzo said in an interview.
One of the most visible human adaptations is that of skin color. Primates have unpigmented skin beneath their fur. But when humans lost their fur, perhaps because they needed bare skin to sweat efficiently, they developed dark skin to protect against ultraviolet light.
Coloring the skin may sound simple, but nature requires at least 25 different genes to synthesize, package and distribute the melanin pigment that darkens the skin and hair. The system then had to be put into reverse when people penetrated the northern latitudes of Europe and Asia and acquired lighter skin, probably to admit more of the sunlight required to synthesize vitamin D.
Several of the 25 skin genes bear strong signatures of natural selection, but natural selection has taken different paths to lighten people’s skin in Europe and in Asia. A special version of the golden gene, so called because it turns zebrafish a rich yellow color, is found in more than 98 percent of Europeans but is very rare in East Asians. In them, a variant version of a gene called DCT may contribute to light skin. Presumably, different mutations were available in each population for natural selection to work on. The fact that the two populations took independent paths toward developing lighter skin suggests that there was not much gene flow between them.
East Asians have several genetic variants that are rare or absent in Europeans and Africans. Their hair has a thicker shaft. A version of a gene called EDAR is a major determinant of thicker hair, which may have evolved as protection against cold, say a team of geneticists led by Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Japan.
Most East Asians also have a special form of a gene known as ABCC11, which makes the cells of the ear produce dry earwax. Most Africans and Europeans, on the other hand, possess the ancestral form of the gene, which makes wet earwax. It is hard to see why dry earwax would confer a big survival advantage, so the Asian version of the gene may have been selected for some other property, like making people sweat less, says a team led by Koh-ichiro Yoshiura of Nagasaki University.
Most variation in the human genome is neutral, meaning that it arose not by natural selection but by processes like harmless mutations and the random shuffling of the genome between generations. The amount of this genetic diversity is highest in African populations. Diversity decreases steadily the further a population has migrated from the African homeland, since each group that moved onward carried away only some of the diversity of its parent population. This steady decline in diversity shows no discontinuity between one population and the next, and has offered no clear explanation as to why one population should differ much from another. But selected genes show a different pattern: Evidence from the new genome-wide tests for selection show that most selective pressures are focused on specific populations.
One aspect of this pattern is that there seem to be more genes under recent selection in East Asians and Europeans than in Africans, possibly because the people who left Africa were then forced to adapt to different environments. “It’s a reasonable inference that non-Africans were becoming exposed to a wide variety of novel climates,” says Dr. Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute.
Gee, New York Times, you might as well start publishing Lynn and Rushton. From a strictly scientific perspective, it's a misnomer to say a subspecies is "more evolved" than another as nature doesn't make value judgements. From another view, if non-Africans are more different than our pre-human ancestors the implications are that they have more traits that are distinctively human.
Soft sweeps work on traits affected by many genes, like height. Suppose there are a hundred genes that affect height (about 50 are known already, and many more remain to be found). Each gene exists in a version that enhances height and a version that does not. The average person might inherit the height-enhancing version of 50 of these genes, say, and be of average height as a result.
Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home.
I get the feeling that the author could've used intelligence instead of height to make the same point.
The Times has come a long way from the time they were publishing Stephen Jay Gould. If scientific ideas matter when it comes to policy, and I don't think Gould and the rest of the race deniers would've worked so hard if they didn't, this has to eventually affect educated thinking about issues like affirmative action and third world immigration.
Not long after the Shirley Sherrod controversy broke on BigGovernment.com, the liberals began constructing a counter myth that Sherrod was telling a story about how she learned that helping people through the federal government isn't about black and white but rich and poor. The evil conservatives only let you see the first half of the story, and left out the timeless lesson part. Breitbart & Co. were playing on whites' irrational fears again in order to help the GOP. etc. etc.
After watching more of Sherrod's speech, a few things became clear: 1) the NAACP crowd really loved the idea of sticking it to Whitey; helping out Poor Whitey, not so much; 2) Sherrod actually did refer the hard-on-his-luck farmer to people of "his own kind" to get help; 3) Even though Sherrod claims she believes that class trumps race, she still can't bring herself to say "it's not about race."
Sure, Breitbart is probably doing stuff like this, at least in part, to help the GOP, but Americans seeing images of who actually "governs" America is a very good thing.
In this line, Tom Blumer of the Washington Examineruncovered more about Sherrod, revealing that -- surprise, surprise! -- she has dedicated her life to getting blacks federal goodies and suing people on behalf of blacks, all the while gaining steady employment for herself as a black advocate.
Ms. Sherrod's previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA's agenda may all play a part in explaining her sudden departure from the agency. These matters have not received much scrutiny to this point.
An announcement of Ms. Sherrod's July 2009 appointment to her USDA position at ruraldevelopment.org gives off quite a few clues:
RDLN Graduate and Board Vice Chair Shirley Sherrod was appointed Georgia Director for Rural Development by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on July 25. Only days earlier, she learned that New Communities, a group she founded with her husband and other families (see below) has won a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack.
What?
The news that follows at the link, which appears to pre-date the announcement of Ms. Sherrod's appointment, provides further details:
Minority Farm Settlement
Justice Achieved - Congratulations to Shirley and Charles Sherrod!
We have wonderful news regarding the case of New Communities, Inc., the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960's. At the time, with holdings of almost 6,000 acres, this was the largest tract of black-owned land in the country.
... Over the years, USDA refused to provide loans for farming or irrigation and would not allow New Communities to restructure its loans. Gradually, the group had to fight just to hold on to the land and finally had to wind down operations.
... The cash (settlement) award acknowledges racial discrimination on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the years 1981-85. ... New Communities is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles for pain and suffering). There may also be an unspecified amount in forgiveness of debt. This is the largest award so far in the minority farmers law suit (Pigford vs Vilsack).
The Pigford matter goes back a long way, and to say the least has a checkered history, as this May 27, 2010 item at Agri-Pulse demonstrates (bolds are mine):
As part of a April 14, 1999 class action case settlement, commonly known as the Pigford case, U.S. taxpayers have already provided over $1 billion in cash, non-credit awards and debt relief to almost 16,000 black farmers who claimed that they were discriminated against by USDA officials as they “farmed or attempted to farm.” In addition, USDA’s Farm Service Agency spent over $166 million on salaries and expenses on this case from 1999-2009, according to agency records.
Members of Congress may approve another $1.15 billion this week to settle cases from what some estimate may be an additional 80,000 African-Americans who have also claimed to have been discriminated against by USDA staff.
... Settling this case is clearly a priority for the White House and USDA. Secretary Vilsack described the funding agreement reached between the Administration and advocates for black farmers early this year as “an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good and in achieving finality for this group of farmers with longstanding grievances."
However, confronted with the skyrocketing federal deficit, more officials are taking a critical look at the billion dollars spent thus far and wondering when these discrimination cases will ever end. Already, the number of people who have been paid and are still seeking payment will likely exceed the 26,785 black farmers who were considered to even be operating back in 1997, according to USDA. That’s the year the case initially began as Pigford v. (then Agriculture Secretary) Glickman and sources predicted that, at most, 3,000 might qualify.
At least one source who is extremely familiar with the issue and who asked to remain anonymous because of potential retribution, says there are a number of legitimate cases who have long been denied their payments and will benefit from the additional funding. But many more appear to have been solicited in an attempt to “game” the Pigford system.
What never ceases to amaze me is just how much money hokey left-wing morons are in charge of in the federal bureaucracies. Sherrod has, no doubt, been in the position to deal out billions of other people's money over the course of her career. The fact that the Shirely Sherrods of the world haven't completely destroyed the country is a testament to the inefficiency of bureaucracies and their own incompetence.
If you’ve ever taken a class in the social sciences that isn’t economics, you may have noticed that your teachers are so afraid of human biodiversity that they seek to discredit it from the start while patting themselves on the back over how far their field of studies has come. Oh, around a century ago people explained things by inherent racial differences. Today, of course, we all know better because you know, Martin Luther King. They rarely explain to you when or how the old theories were proven false and they don’t need to. They’ll sometimes pull out the old canard about human races being 99.9 percent similar if they really want to beat racial egalitarianism into your head or the professor is particularly ideological, though for kids raised on the public school system and television even that isn't necessary.
Due to this scholarly environment some of the most interesting and honest case studies about the Third World are those from a century ago or older. Recently a YouTube user put together an impressive video based on an old broadcast of William L. Pierce called “The Lesson of Haiti.” It brought to my attention a volume from 1900 entitled Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti. The author, Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, was thought to be the first white man to cross the interior of the black republic since 1803, the year before Haitian independence was declared. Where Black Rules White was republished earlier this year.
Prichard arrived first at Jacmel, the main Southern port. The British Consular Agent gave him a place to stay for the night, which was a lucky thing considering the city had no restaurants or hotels (there were three of the latter in the entire country of 1.75 million). A few white traders and government representatives inhabited the costal towns, but the population became exclusively dark as one traveled inward. Haiti has very few mulattos and the ones that did exist were widely disliked at the time.
Without having any place to stay, Prichard generally had to live off of the kindness of the natives. This was one thing that didn’t disappoint him:
Of the peasant’s attitude towards the stranger in the more remote districts, I have nothing to say but good. His virtue of hospitality is beautiful. His politeness is beyond reproach. He is Nature’s gentleman in many ways, and though he is poor in worldly goods, he is rich in some of the higher qualities.
Riding through the rural districts you find it hard to obtain anything to eat, but easy enough to get a place in which to sleep. The people cannot give you what they have not, but they do give what they have, and that with both hands.
Haiti had been a rich and productive nation when run by the French. In fact, the main buildings that remained were built by the Europeans. And on paper all indications of civilization remained, though in reality nothing worked as it was supposed to. The President was in theory limited in power, but in practice Haiti was ruled by a succession of strongmen who were overthrown and shot every couple of years. (When Prichard visited, there hadn’t been a revolution in eleven years, which was a long time[1]). There were courts of law, but the winners are those with the most money or guns. There are civilized prison regulations, but men are picked up at random off the street, beaten over the head and thrown into a prison with no food or medical care so some police officer can earn a commission.
Even religion isn’t what it seems. The country is nominally Roman Catholic, but voodoo is the real faith. A white Catholic priest was once present at an offering to the gods of a “goat without horns,” i.e. human child. The author describes one ritual he attended were seven cocks were slaughtered and a priestess drank the blood before using it to make the sign of the cross on the foreheads of her followers. The Christian God is simply one deity among several to satisfy. After observing the bloodletting in the sea of chanting and dancing blacks a nauseous Prichard had to step outside and marvel that this was to go on for a few more days!
Poisoning is common on the island and one attempt was even made on the life of our brave journeyer. Prichard had left a bottle of rum and water at a hut and went back to get it. When he thought it a good time to offer the natives a drink they all refused. This aroused his suspicion, and he later found that the bottle had been poisoned. Prichard believes it may have been because he petted a fat child, which is considered unlucky.
One of the most entertaining parts of the book is the chapter on the Haitian military and its generals. Every man aspires to this position so he can own a little piece of the island. In Jacmel there were 500 soldiers, of whom 200 were generals. Each revolution brings forth a new group and there was even a rumor that a president made a man a general after beating him at checkers.
There is was proverb on the island: “In Haiti there are only three classes who work: the white man, the black woman and the ass.” This appears to be universal pattern among blacks. As Steve Sailer wrote before quoting a figure showing 80 percent of the work on the dark continent (excluding the Semitic North I presume) was done by women, “African feminists complain not that men won't let women work, but that men won't work.” In the U.S. the fact that successful African-American women have a hard time finding males of their own race at their own level has become a cliché.
One is equally struck by the laziness of the Haitians. The fields are the most fertile of the Caribbean, but the natives are content to pick off mangoes and bananas growing on their own. There was something of a de-agriculturization as the blacks fed on wild crops descended from those which had been domesticated. Prichard found the hellacious jails laughably easy to escape from, but even under those conditions blacks lacked enterprise.
The last chapter of the book is called “Can the Negro Rule Himself?”
The present condition of Hayti gives the best possible answer to the question, and, considering the experiment has lasted for a century, perhaps also a conclusive one. For a century the answer has been working itself out there in flesh and blood. The negro has had his chance, a fair field and no favour. He has had the most fertile and beautiful of the Carribbees for his own; he has had the advantage of excellent French laws; he inherited a made country, with Cap Haytien for its Paris, “Little Paris,” as it was called. Here was a wide land sown with prosperity, a land of wood, water, towns, and plantations, and in the midst of it the Black Man was turned loose to work out his own salvation.
We must remember that at the time Haiti was a country which distrusted all outsiders and even forbade foreigners to own land. To bring up Barbados or Botswana would be to miss the point. The question is whether a country that is of purely sub-Saharan African descent can provide all the merchants, farmers, teachers and government officials it needs for it to be a decent enough place to live, and another century after Prichard, the answer to the question is still negative. The Dominican Republic, the mulatto country to the East of Haiti, doesn’t approach the living standards of the West, but is considered an indubitable success when compared to the nation it borders.
There is one more issue that we must consider that observers of the first black republic rarely bring up. Though its failures get a lot of attention because of its historical connections to France and location in the new world, Haiti is by no means a failure by black standards. The IMF lists its GDP per capita as $1,339 a year, which puts it ahead of 20 sub-Saharan African countries. Haiti has a literacy rate of 54.8%, which bests 15 other black states. A Haitian can expect to live 60.9 years, longer than the inhabitants of 38 other countries that have the same racial majority.
The biggest enemies of the Black Man are not Klansmen or multinational corporations, but the liberals who have prevented an honest appraisal of his abilities and filled his head with myths about equality and national autarky (which is also an economic fallacy to boot). Lying about human biodiversity ruined a century of what could’ve been fascinating and practical scholarship on the success and failures of nations, while it hurts those it seeks to protect more than anyone else. For those looking for interesting and honest observations on what black-run countries and its people are like, and what we can expect from South Africa’s future as the country continues to take on the characteristics of the majority of its population, one would do best by ignoring anything published recently and starting with Where Black Rules White.
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Notes:
1 -- Since 1859 there have been 54 different presidential regimes, which averages to a ruler being overthrown or dying about every three years.
We've had some back and forths on Glenn Beck, but stories like this give him a soft spot in my heart.
WASHINGTON — A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.
Shirley Sherrod, appointed last July to be the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have.
Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."
The video was posted Monday on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the "tea party" movement of having "racist elements."
But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first black man to occupy the White House practices racism in reverse.
The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments, particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers, was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign.
Both Vilsack and an official at the Obama White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone.
Vilsack said early today that the USDA will reconsider the ousting of Sherrod and will "conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts."
In Sherrod's account, her firing had been driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle — and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."
Sherrod added, "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth."
What this story shows is that the Obama Administration is absolutely scared to death of anything that can be perceived as anti-white racism. It's a battle they don't want to fight anywhere or under any circumstances. And they're also afraid of Glenn Beck. If he forces the White House to spend an extra two hours each day watching his show and worrying about its image, giving it less time to think of new "civil rights violators" to go after or work on amnesty, he's doing an invaluable service to this country.
Richard Hoste seems to differ from my view that the Right (used, of course, in a very broad sense) could in no way benefit from misrepresenting MLK as a small-government conservative. Richard believes that if we continue to tell blacks the noble lie, which the neoconservatives and Glenn Beck have worked so hard to spread, we may be able to neutralize all the race-hustling black leaders.
There are at least three problems with this argument that come readily to mind. One, the lie is so transparent that until now only movement conservatives have bought it; and in this case we are dealing with people who are so incredibly gullible or so thoroughly bribed that they’ll say anything they’re told to say by those who move their strings. I myself have never met a movement conservative or GOP hack who actually thought that King was a “conservative theologian” or an exponent of Thomistic natural law. Rather I’ve encountered dolts who read NR or Weekly Standard and who have told me “we should say this because that’s what we have to say.” Of course the same humanoids have proclaimed Joe Lieberman to be a conservative “because he’s good on the war.”
Two, nobody, including blacks, could possibly believe the crass lie that Richard wishes to see propagated. There is overwhelming evidence, plus media treatment of King’s life and influence, that would keep anybody with even room temperature intelligence (which may exclude most movement conservatives) from buying the proffered snake oil. Watching Beck go nuts (that is more nuts than he usually seems) because a black celebrity described King as a socialist, I had the definite feeling of being on Mars. Does anyone on this planet with even a grade school education not know that King was a left-leaning socialist, who favored special rights for his race? One can quote until the cows come home that banal line about judging people by “the content of their character.” But this does not change the rest of King’s politics, which are an open book, even for blacks.
Three, the cult of King is intertwined with a political purpose, from which it cannot be dislodged. It is a replacement theology for a now mostly moribund Christianity, which incorporates certain older religious themes but places them in a multicultural context. King is the suffering Redeemer, whose birthday comes a few weeks after the traditional date for celebrating the Christian Redeemer; and his death was expiatory, like that of Christ, although, unlike Christ’s kingdom, that of the black socialist savior is situated in this world. King’s mission began the process of cleansing white America of its original sin of racism. But this redemption did not work all at once when he died. Further sacrifice is demanded of the sinner in the form of the demands that the fallen Redeemer laid upon us, that is, more socialism, more set-asides, more rites of atonement, etc. To try to change this powerful symbolism by reconstructing King into something he clearly was not, perhaps a precursor of Glenn Beck or David Horowitz, is a fool’s errand. King was exactly what he was. That he has become the replacement Deity in a post-Christian public theology may strike some of us as laughable. But that elevation is connected to what he said and did. The cult of MLK reflects a certain reality, while Richard’s counter-narrative builds on nothing more than a neocon lie.
