A Man Out of Time

The United States of America is no longer the nation that is depicted in the film Captain America: The First Avenger. One of the most beloved characters in all of comics, and arguably just as iconic as Superman himself, Captain America has always been considered a “Man of out Time,” as in all the contemporary telling of the story (this latest movie included), he is presumed “killed-in-action” during World War II, only to be found in a state of suspended animation, frozen in a block of ice during our time.

Most people know the origin of Captain America: the story of the 4-F Steve Rogers volunteering for a super-soldier serum (yikes, eugenics!), which eventually turns him into the Sentinel of Liberty so he can go and fight Nazis and make the world safe for democracy.

The film, starring Chris Evans, will be no different. With a much bigger budget then Marvel’s failed 1990 attempt to bring the character to the big screen, this Captain America story is a period piece that sets the stage for the 2012 Avengers film, which will combine the Iron Man, Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America movies.

The question we must ask ourselves is how does a blond haired, blue-eyed, genetically engineered super solider like Steve Rogers call himself “Captain America” in 2011, a nation where the majority of the births—for the first time ever—are to non-whites mothers? How does a character who exudes so much whiteness—at a time when major academic conferences are held to combat the identity and “when treason to whiteness is known as loyalty to humanity?”—dare claim to represent U.S.?

Coming from a time and place when Whites were 90 percent of the American population; the United States military was segregated; and the Civil Rights Revolution had yet to achieve total, if any, victory—one wonders what Steve Rogers hopes to accomplish as Captain America.

Since Captain America went into his Rip Van Winkle sleep in 1944, the United States has witnessed the collapse of formerly great cities like Detroit, Los Angeles, Birmingham; watched as its industrial might, once the envy of the world, was dismantled and shipped overseas, replaced by $8-per-hour service industry; welcomed millions of immigrants—largely illegal from Mexico; and witnessed such events as Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, which ushered in an era of Black empowerment of which the Haitians of 1802 would be envious.

Captain America: The First Avenger won’t address the situation faced by Steve Rogers when he encounters the world 2011, but two recent comics have tried to do just that, Mark Millar’s Ultimate Avengers and Mark Waid’s Man Out of Time.

In Millar’s Ultimate Avengers story—on which the Marvel movies have been loosely based—Captain America is basically portrayed as neocon. In his book Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero, Jackson Sutliff describes Millar’s Rogers as “The Ultimate American”:

Ultimate Captain America is less of an inspiration than an action hero; instead of John Adams, he’s Sylvester Stallone. He’s here to wear the American flag and kick ass, all in the heavily marketed name of Nick Fury’s supergroup. Teammate Henry Pym comments that it’s like playing with his old G.I. Joe’s again. Whereas the Cap of the traditional Marvel Universe is known for his stirring orations, this version of Steve Rogers isn’t one for speeches. Snappy one-liners are more this style.

The best example of the divide one can look to is also one of the most famous. There’s a well known page from the blockbuster miniseries: Captain America, enraged at the suggestion of surrender, goes ballistic and bellows, “You think this letter on my head stands for France?” (Millar The Ultimates 12 Vol. 1 22)…

This version of Steve Rogers is something terrifying, charming and deserving of pity all rolled into one. If Captain America represents the American dream, then his Ultimate counterpart is its obituary.

It’s worth noting that Millar’s Ultimate Avengers stories have been the influence behind the Iron Man movies, so one is left wondering what type of hero Captain America will be portrayed in the 2012 Avengers film. Millar wrote this story in the early 2000s, at a time when deriding France during the buildup to the United States “War on Terror” was highly fashionable among those in self-styled conservative circles.

If the Captain America we find in the Avengers is like the one in Man Out of Time, we could find ourselves watching the first Southern Poverty Law Center approved superhero on screen.

In Waid’s Man Out of Time story (henceforth MOT), Steve Rogers is unfrozen in a world similar to 2011 America and brought back to his native New York City by the Avengers. There, he successfully breaks up a mugging of a blond-haired, blue-eyed White girl—by three Black guys –only to be shot by the White girl in the process. The muggings are, of course, consistent with urban racial crime patterns, but the shooting of Captain America by the thankless White girl makes little sense, save in the world of comics.

Waking up in a hospital to be treated by a Black female doctor—in a hilarious panel, Rogers mistakenly calls her a “nurse”—Captain America walks into the waiting room to the shocking sight of absolutely no European-Americans. The drawing of Captain America, upon viewing this scene, is priceless, as the artist does a close-up of his blue eyes staring out into a room of Africans, Muslims, Asians, Mexicans, and Blacks, all speaking different languages and looking absolutely miserable.

Leaving the hospital, Captain America glances back with a melancholy look on his face as an Asian family—speaking in Chinese—take their grandmother into the makeshift United Nations that doubles as a waiting room.

Quite the departure from the Irish, WASPS, Italians, Germans, and any other wWhite ethnics that comprised the New York City of Rogers's youth.

Later in the story, Captain America relocates with the Avengers, who run tests on him to confirm his true identity, the long-lost Steve Rogers from World War II. The billionaire Tony Stark—Iron Man for those comically challenged—updates Rogers on all that has changed since he went into his state of suspended animation:

Stark: Short version: there is no more U.S.S.R

Rogers: You’re joking.

Stark: Nope. Russia’s a shadow of the superpower you know. Today, China and India play on the big board, and it’s all about tech. God, you missed so much. Polio? Gone. G-O-N-E. Cancer? Treatable. Organ transplants. Pacemakers for ailing hearts. Disease immunization—all things we take for granted.

Stark doesn’t tell Rogers anything about the massive racial transformation of America, nor how all of the diseases cured and advances in medical technology came from that racial group which is being dispossessed. The one scene from the hospital waiting room is the only time the truth of America’s racial transformation is discussed in MOT.

Following this quick update on America’s scientific marvels, Stark takes Roger’s to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (which is basically a monument to White people’s advances in aviation) and discusses the moon landing, space shuttle missions, and the building of the space station (and other things the U.S. government is no longer capable of pursuing). Captain America sees a picture of the Challenger crew and notices a Black face among the astronauts, leading to this exchange of dialogue:

Rogers: See. What impresses isn’t the technology, Tony. Your phones and your computers and so forth… they’re definitely mad-scientist gizmos, but they’re not the real achievement.

It’s society itself. The freedom of the people. All people regardless of their race or their gender. That’s what I can’t get enough of. Introduce me to the man who brought that about.

Stark: Glad to.

The next scene of MOT shows Stark and Rogers watching a clip of Martin Luther King's 1963 “I have a Dream” speech, with Rogers completely spellbound in his oration:

King (on a television screen): 1963 is not an end. But a beginning. [He was right about that!] Now is the time lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Rogers: Were…were you there? For this moment?

Stark: No. But a quarter-million other Americans were. They filled that mall outside to hear the greatest speech of all time. Seventeen minutes changed the world. Wait until you hear about Woodstock. [...]

I hope I’m making my point: I think… I know… that, together we Americans raised one hell of a century from the ashes of a world war. Everything you ever wanted for this country Steve… It’s either come true or it’s around the corner. I truly believe that.

Is the “around the corner” line from Stark a reference to the momentous day when Anglo-Saxons will be just another minority in the land that Captain America still remembers like it was yesterday (and for him, it was yesterday)?

Incidentally, MOT fails to mention how that ideal of racial brotherhood never came true, that the primary achievement from Black people in the 20th century was the fostering of White guilt among Americans for past transgressions and the lowering of every conceivable standard imaginable so that Blacks wouldn’t be left behind.

Though Tony Stark paints a powerful picture of an idealized version of what America has become, it’s when Steve Rogers visits the only person alive that he knew from the 1940s—a now 90-year-old General Jacob Simon—that MOT becomes incredibly confusing.

After the initial shock of seeing an un-aged Rogers, Simon (who lives in a nursing home) proceeds to tell Captain America about all the unsavory changes in America:

Simon (gesturing towards a baseball game on television)--They’re all on drugs these days. That garbage is everywhere now. It’s in the schools. It’s in the streets. Can you believe that?

On another visit, Simon is being checked by a nurse, but has time to state:

Simon: Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight lives lost to a terrorist attack on American soil. This country’s lousy with militias and hate groups. It’s disgusting.

One wonders if the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote the script for this comic, as if Marvel and Teaching Tolerance combined to create the ultimate Captain America story. No mention of the fact that the majority of those selling drugs and arrested for drug possession and drug-related violence are non-Whites from General Simon, who seems more intent on placing the blame for America’s degeneration on “hate groups.”

It’s here that the conversation between Simon and Rogers takes a strange turn that serves as a painful reminder that, though we presumably achieved racial brotherhood, America is royally screwed:

Simon: (coughing and nearing death) …used to make things in this country. You’d have the service. Get education with the G.I. Bill, then settle down to a good union job. No more steelwork. Pittsburgh’s collapsed and Detroit’ll be a ghost town soon enough.

No mention of how the unions helped ruin the manufacturing capacity in these cities, or how Black riots in 1967—and subsequent white flight—helped turn Detroit into the laughing stock of the entire world. This idealized version of America that General Simon waxes whimsically about is clearly that which preceded the 1965 Immigration Act and America's various forays into globalism and “free-trade.”

General Simon's best quotes are saved for last:

(As Simon and Rogers play chess)

Simon: You say Stark showed you the “I have a Dream” speech?

Rogers: It was incredible.

Simon: It truly was. It moved a nation.

Simon: Did he tell you what happened to the man who gave it?

Rogers: (Dejected) ...No...

Rogers: Bucky [Captain America’s World War II partner]… Bucky once asked me what I wanted to do after the war. I didn’t have an answer for him. Sixty years later, I still don’t.

In the next panel, Simon and Rogers watch television and a commercial for a sex hotline is playing.

Rogers: All I know is that this isn’t what I thought we were building.

Simon: This is what Captain America stands for now. Phone sex and an 18th-place educational system.

Rogers: It seemed worth fighting for.

Simon: It’s easy to fight when you’re winning.

So wait…wasn’t the world of equality that Captain America was so impressed with when he was speaking to Tony Stark so wonderful? These scenes with General Simon seem to invalidate that glorious world he thought existed. American history seems to stop with “I Have a Dream,” as few people dare point out what a nightmare the country is turning into.

And what of the so-called 18th-place educational system? Steve Sailer has shown that when you remove the Hispanic and Black test scores from the mix, America’s educational system is doing quite well, thank you (based on the international PISA test results):

• White Americans students outperformed the national average in every one of the 37 historically white countries tested, except Finland (which is, perhaps not coincidentally, an immigration restrictionist nation where whites make up about 99 percent of the population).

• Hispanic Americans beat all eight Latin American countries. African Americans would likely have outscored any sub-Saharan country, if any had bothered to compete. The closest thing to a black country out of PISA’s 65 participants is the fairly prosperous oil-refining Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago, which is roughly evenly divided between blacks and South Asians. African Americans outscored Trinidadians by 25 points.

It is because of that massive immigration (and Black test scores) that America has such a lowly rated, “18th-place education system.” General Simon. Why don’t you tell this to Steve Rogers?

The most revealing section of the MOT comes after General Simon has passed away and his caretaker, a Hispanic, tells Steve Rogers she’ll have to go home soon:

Hispanic nurse: It’s immigration law. I do some cleaning work, but that’s unofficial.

Rogers: Is it really so bad where you’re from?

Hispanic nurse: There is family. We hadn’t much money. But the countryside is beautiful and I am loved there. I do miss it.

Rogers: And yet you’re willing to scrub toilets to stay here?

Hispanic nurse: It is America.

MOT doesn’t tell us that a disproportionate percentage of immigrants are on welfare and EBT/food stamps in America, all paid for by the United States taxpayer. Yes they scrub our toilets, but they have arrived in such massive numbers to turn America into what Victor Davis Hanson called Two California’s.

What in the world does a gringo Captain America mean to Mexicans who cheered on their national soccer team in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum over the U.S. squad? All that Captain America means—when espousing virtues such as tolerance, freedom, and justice—is that nothing will be done to curb the rising tide of color that threatens to make Steve Rogers a minority in his own land.

What is obvious from MOT is that Captain America is incredibly malleable and can be made to fit the Zeitgeist.

If we are in an age where Communism and the Red Menace is the enemy, turn Captain America into a hero espousing McCarthyism (but be sure to change the story when McCarthy falls out of favor with the America, as Marvel did in Captain America 153-156, back in 1972). In our time period, have Steve Rogers espousing egalitarianism and discuss abstractions like freedom, justice and tolerance, and you have the perfect embodiment of 2011 America, certified fresh by the SPLC.

Salon.com ran a historical piece in 2010 (updated on July 20, 2011) that deserves to be quoted at length:

After the July 22 release of the summer blockbuster "Captain America: the First Avenger," we'll probably see even more Captain Americas waving placards at protests for all parts of the political spectrum. The Red, White and Blue Avenger is and always has been a potent political image, but whose side would Captain America be on? Would he be a New Deal Democrat slinging his mighty shield for new public works programs or would he be rallying with the Tea Party to lower taxes on billionaires and gut Medicare? Whose Captain America is he anyway?

"He's not just a guy in a flag suit," former "Captain America" writer Steve Englehart says as he takes a break from signing copies of his latest fantasy-action novel, at the Big Wow ComicFest in San Jose, Calif.

"The problem comes from, I think, when people do say, 'Well, he's a guy in a flag suit,'" Englehart adds. "But he sort of transcends. He stands for America as an ideal, not America as it's practiced."

Englehart, a conscientious objector who was honorably discharged from the Army, took over the writing of "Captain American and the Falcon" in 1972 in the midst of the Vietnam War. To make the comic's star-spangled superhero appeal to an antiwar youth audience, Englehart took on the duality and contradictions not only of the comic book superhero, but of America itself. During his first four issues (Nos. 153-156), the original Captain America, who was frozen in a block of ice at the end of the Roosevelt years and then thawed during the Johnson administration, battles a raging McCarthyite Cap from the paranoid 1950s. The ideological struggle between these alternate versions of the hero isn't all that different from what might happen if the Rally to Restore Sanity and the Tea Party Caps came to actual blows with their plastic shields.

With the Watergate hearings underway, Englehart had Steve Rogers hang up his Captain America persona altogether in "Captain America and the Falcon" No. 176, a comic book dated August 1974—the same month that Nixon resigned from the White House.

"He had thought that the ideal and the reality were the same thing, and finding out that it wasn't threw him off and that was the basis for the whole story," Englehart says, explaining the story line where Rogers took off the red, white and blue and became a darkly clad hero called Nomad for several issues, ending with No. 183 in 1975.

"He stood for something," Englehart continues. "When what he stood for seemed not to exist or seemed to have been damaged, he couldn't go out and stand for that anymore. Again, in my story, he eventually decided that having a Captain America was better than not having a Captain America, whatever was going on with America per se."

Looking at the very first issue of "Captain America," it's easy to dismiss it as a piece of jingoistic wartime propaganda. After all, the cover has our hero leaping into a war room and punching out Hitler while Nazi goons fire their Lugers and machine guns at him. However, "Captain America" No. 1 hit stands in December 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II. While Captain America fit perfectly into the mood of the war effort once it got underway, co-creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon originally forged the character as a protest vehicle to stir a stubbornly isolationist America to action.

"To me, the times were screaming war," Jack Kirby recalled during a 1989 or 1990 radio interview on "Hour 25" that can now be found at Kirbymuseum.org. "To me the enemy was Hitler. The enemy was growing and growing, and I didn't know where it was going to end, but every day something new would happen, and it was really scary. This was the kind of event that I felt was ruling our times and I felt it inside of me and it had to come out in some way."

When Eisner Award-winning writer Ed Brubaker depicted a Tea Party protest in a slightly negative light in "Captain America" No. 602 in 2010, the right-wing blogosphere and Fox News cranked up their outrage machine, griping that Marvel was "making patriotic Americans" into "its newest super villains." With a $140 million "Captain America" movie only a year away, Marvel had more to lose than back when it was just selling magazines. The company promised to remove the material that wounded the Tea Party's sensibilities from future reprints of the series.

Joe Simon may have put it best when he said, "Things are far more complex than they were in the days when Captain America could punch Hitler in the jaw," but the broad appeal of Captain America appears undiminished by recent controversies. In between Captain America's appearances at the rallies to restore sanity and shut down the government, Mexican American pro-wrestler Rey Mysterio wore a Captain America costume during his match at WrestleMania XXVII in Atlanta. Mysterio's outfit had a Mayan motif in place of the star on Cap's chest, making the character more Meso-American than merely Norte Americano. It seems that Captain America may be the only thing that can bring this fractured country together, if we could only agree on who he is.

Rey Mysterio modified the Captain America costume to ensure a distinctly Mexican flavor to the ensemble, a harbinger of things to come in the United States when Steve Rogers alter-ego only stands for the defense of the country as a proposition nation.

It’s wise to recall the words from the late Samuel Francis, who understood the dilemma at the heart of America, a ciountry defined by a people and culture, but which began to represent everyone, and thus no one:

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in…

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction. Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals for preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.

A trip to Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Detroit would reveal, once the people who look like Captain America leave, those left behind in positions of power quickly erect a civilization that is completely different from the one that was bequeathed to them.

The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a world where the ignorant, unwashed masses had yet to be baptized in the racial holy water of Martin Luther King’s oratory and reborn into a world universal brotherhood. The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a world where military segregation existed. The Captain America that will debut in theaters today will be living in a nation that was essentially 90 percent White. Steve Rogers, that 4-F reject, still volunteered to become a Captain America in that world, defending that America.

In the 21st century, “The First Avenger,” is truly a man out of time.

A Whimper and a Bang

Byron M. Roth, The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature. Washington Summit Publishers, 2010, 577 pages.

Dr. Byron Roth, Professor Emeritus of psychology at Dowling College on Long Island, has written an important book on the damage that has been done to the United States and Europe by the large scale immigration of non-European peoples that has taken place in recent decades.

Roth begins The Perils of Diversity by documenting how elite opinion-makers in academia and the mainstream media almost all assume that the peoples of all races are similar, and therefore that they can all be accommodated in the United States and Europe. The principal “debate” is between those who advocate assimilation and those who advocate multiculturalism. While acknowledging that different racial groups can sometimes be in conflict, assimilationists argue that these ethnic problems can be solved through “the magic of assimilation,” in which all races and religions are gradually transformed into Americans or Europeans. The multiculturalists argue that we should let the immigrants keep their culture, beliefs, and practices; this can be accomplished, they say, peacefully, and different communities can live in social harmony. They blame the intolerant attitudes of the host populations in the United States and Europe for the discord that is frequently present: It is the fault of the indigenous American and European peoples, who do not do enough to accommodate immigrants.

Roth argues that both the assimilationists and the multiculturalists fail to understand human nature.

Assimilationists believe that all races have the intelligence and values required to maintain Western civilization, while multiculturalists believe that all races and cultures can live together in social harmony. These beliefs are, Roth argues, seriously incorrect in the light of historical experience and scientific evidence.

To sustain these beliefs, the academy, the legal profession, and philanthropic foundations ignore and suppress the scientific evidence that has shown that genes have a major impact on both individual and racial differences. But academics who state that there are genetic racial differences come in for tremendous criticism and punishment—they are deemed “racists” are run out of the academy. Dr Roth describes the fate of Chris Brand, who was fired from the University of Edinburgh, as well the attacks on Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago, and on James Watson, who was forced to resign from the research institute at Cold Springs Harbour. All of these scientists were punished for suggesting that there are race differences in IQ.

Discussion of these issues is further suppressed in a number of countries by “hate speech” laws that prohibit public debate on race and intelligence. It is effectively illegal to publish a book criticizing immigration on these grounds in Canada, and publishers are highly reluctant to do so in Europe.

Philanthropic foundations sponsor publications and conferences on race, but do not invite anyone who might make the case for genetic racial differences. They also give huge sums for studies of “racism” to pro-immigration groups, including The National Council of La Raza, as well as Hispanic lobbies that have advocated the return of the southern states to Mexico.

Roth notes the vested interests of many of those that favor mass immigration. Business leaders often like open borders because immigrants provide cheap labor. Liberals and leftists favor mass immigration because they care little about the preservation of Western civilization and have adopted a form of racialized Marxism, in which Whites have effectively taken the place of Marx’s bourgeoisie and non-Whites, the proletariat. They regard the Europeans as the oppressors and non-Europeans as the oppressed.

In making his case, Dr. Roth outlines human evolutionary history—that is, “Big History” of the past tens of thousands of years. Early man lived in bands of some 50 to 100 close relatives. These bands were, in many ways, altruistic, and each member participated in reciprocal co-operation (what is often called “inclusive fitness.”) On the other hand, each band typically had relations with outside bands in varying degrees of hostility. This in-group/out-group dual code, as the British sociologist Herbert Spencer described it in the 19th century, has evolved as human nature. The remaining hunter-gatherers that survive in the Amazon basin and elsewhere typically make frequent attacks on neighboring bands; the victors pass on their genes for hostility to out-groups.

In multiracial societies, the integration of ethnic groups is hard enough when the groups have the same abilities; the strains on social harmony are much greater when the abilities of the groups differ widely. Dr Roth has three chapters explaining racial differences in ability and the effect that climate has had on selecting for intelligence. He summarizes the numerous studies that have shown the existence of race differences in intelligence. The essential facts are that with the average European IQ set at 100, the North East Asians have an average IQ of approximately 105, Hispanics have an average IQ of approximately 89, South Asians and North Africans, an average IQ of approximately 84, and sub-Saharan Africans, an average IQ of approximately 70. These racial differences present difficulties for multiracial societies.

Furthermore, because (apart from small numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) the immigrants into the United States and Europe have lower average IQs than the European peoples, the IQs of the populations will decline. As their numbers increase by further immigration and higher fertility, the average IQ in the United States and Europe will fall further and this will seriously impair the economic and intellectual world leadership of the European peoples.

Additional problems are that all multiracial societies are stratified by ability such that the more intelligent races achieve more power and wealth. The groups with lower IQs resent this and lobby for legislation and “affirmative action” to redress the perceived inequity. In Indonesia, for example, the ethnic Chinese have an average IQ of approximately 105, while Indonesians average around 87. The Chinese are approximately 3 percent of the population but control about 70 percent of the private economy. This generated resentment among the Indonesians, who in 1998, killed about 2,000 Chinese and looted and burned their homes and businesses.

Roth gives an account of how it has come about that non-European immigrants have flooded into the United States and Europe in the last few decades. The first American immigrants came mainly from Northwest Europe. Between 1881 and the early 1920s, larger numbers came from Southern and Eastern Europe, particularly Italians, Poles and Jews. In 1924, an immigration act was passed that imposed quotas restricting the numbers from Southern and Eastern Europe, in order to preserve that the Northwest European ethnic identity and culture. There were no restrictions on immigration from Latin America, but at this time few Latin Americans arrived.

By the 1960s, the American elites viewed immigration restriction as what Roth describes as “morally compromised” and “inconsistent with American ideals.” The Immigration Act of 1965 was passed that abolished national preferences favoring Northwest Europeans. The act set a total limit of 290,000 admissions per year, but also admitted immigrants’extended families outside the quota. It was this act that opened the floodgates of non-European immigrants, who, together with Blacks, are projected to become a majority of the population by around the year 2042. From 1965 onwards, numerous illegal immigrants entered the United States. In 1986, amnesty was granted to 3.1 million illegal aliens who had arrived in the country before 1982. By this time, about 600,000 people were entering the United States legally every year, so in 1990 Congress raised the quota to 700,000.

The flow continued to increase, reaching approximately one million a year in the 1990s. Only about 16 percent of the immigrants were now coming from Europe or Canada.

Roth documents similar mass immigration of non-Europeans into Western Europe after the Second World War. The two main reasons for this were the shortage of manual labor and immigration from former European colonies.

Germany brought in large numbers of mainly Turkish “guest workers” to help rebuild the country in the 1950s. Many of these workers brought in their families, and there are now over three million Muslims in Germany (most of them being Turks.) These newcomers do not do well by any social measure, and a government survey in 2004 found that they are becoming increasingly alienated from German society. Mosque attendance is rising, and a survey [PDF] has shown that a bout 40 percent consider “the use of physical violence as a reaction to the threat presented to Islam by the West is legitimate.”

Nearly two-thirds of those aged 14 to 18 report having few or no German friends. Immigrants from former colonies have come in large numbers to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal. In France, Muslims from Africa are estimated at 5.7 percent of the population.

Muslims have high rates of crime throughout Western Europe. In Britain they are overrepresented in jails by a factor of 3.67; in France by four to five, and in Germany by six to seven. In Denmark, where they constitute only 4 percent of the population, Muslims have been convicted for more than half the rapes, and these are almost always of non-Muslim women.

In the last chapter Roth discusses the likely future of the West and the world. He estimates that the average American IQ will decline from 98 to 95 by mid-century. This may seem a small drop, but it will have dire effects for elites, because the percentage of Americans with an IQ of at least 120 will fall from 7.1 to 4.8. In the United States and Western Europe, there will likely emerge a rich White-and-Asian elite and a Black-and-Brown majority. This demographic transformation will profoundly impair their economic and military strength and their intellectual world leadership.

China will likely emerge as the new world superpower. Over the next 40 years, the number of well-trained Chinese with IQs over 120 will outnumber their American counterparts by about eight to one. Roth writes, “The upshot is that the gap in the potential for innovation and economic growth between China and the U.S. will grow enormously and begin to have its effects in the very near future.”

Roth also predicts an American fiscal disaster that will produce high inflation and an inability to fund social programs. This will lead to a political conflict between the productive, mostly White part of the population threatened by inflation, and the less productive, mostly non-White part threatened by the loss of welfare handouts.

Roth is even more pessimistic about Europe. He regards the European Union leaders as left-wing authoritarians who aim to turn the European Union into a centrally controlled unified state. The higher fertility rates of Muslims will likely produce Islamic majorities throughout Western Europe by the end of the present century.

Byron Roth has done a terrific job setting out his gloomy but indisputable analysis of the future of the European peoples in his closely argued book. When we reach the end of book, we can only reflect that we are living in a unique moment in human history, in which the European peoples are complacent about the destruction of their genetic and cultural heritage brought about by the invasion of alien peoples.

One is reminded of the Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times.”

Mismeasuring Man

Never underestimate man's willingness to lie for a good cause. 

Stephen Jay Gould mismeasured skulls in racial records dispute

By Dan Vergano

USA TODAY

9 June 2011

The late scientific icon, Stephen Jay Gould, botched and perhaps faked his critique of a racist 19th-Century scientist's skull collection, suggests a second look at his efforts.

CAPTION

UPenn

In a 1978 Science paper, Gould (1941 - 2002) , reported that the Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), "a prominent Philadelphia physician," had mis-measured the cranial capacities of his 1,000-skull "American Golgotha" collection gathered from around the world, to suit his racist beliefs. The finding led to one of Gould's best-known books, The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of scientific racism.

"Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data?," asks a PLoS Biology study led by anthropologist Jason Lewis of Stanford University. "Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted?"

So, the study team remeasured the skulls collected by Morton, now owned largely by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Overall, they find, Morton did make mistakes in measuring skull capacity (he first stuffed them with seeds, and later lead shot to measure their brain size). But the mistakes were random. The random mistakes didn't favor any racial theory of larger brain sizes for white people over others.

"Given how long Gould's work has been criticized in this arena, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for the work to be done to write this article," says the University of Texas's David Prindle, author of Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. "People who dislike Gould's work will likely go on disliking him even more after this article. People who are fans of his writing will likely go on supporting his views."

Today, researchers know that larger average skull size is largely a function of cold weather:

In reevaluating Morton and Gould, we do not dispute that racist views were unfortunately common in 19th-century science or that bias has inappropriately influenced research in some cases. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or ''racial,'' and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations. In particular, cranial capacity variation in human populations appears to be largely a function of climate, so, for example, the full range of average capacities is seen in Native American groups, as they historically occupied the full range of latitudes, say the study authors.

Yes! Head size is correlated with cold weather...but then so is IQ.

From Lynn, Race Differences in Behavior

The article continues:

Morton neither manipulated his skull samples, unfairly selected which data to report, skewed results by gender, or ignored his mistakes to favor racist interpretations of his skulls, the PLoS Biology study authors conclude -- all charges made by Gould against the long-dead physician.

What's more, the researchers found Gould made some mistakes in his re-analysis of Morton. "Our analysis of Gould's claims reveals that most of Gould's criticisms are poorly supported or falsified," they conclude:

Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that ''unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth''. This view has since achieved substantial popularity in ''science studies''. But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.

This is hardly the first time an anthropologist has lied in the name of equality: 

Franz Boas – Liberal Icon, Scientific Fraud

By Sam Francis

VDARE.com

14 October 2002

Two of the major superstitions of our time are the notion that man is merely a blank slate whose behavior is merely the product of the social environment and its sister, that race doesn't exist. Yet one by one, the pseudo-scientific sources of these myths are being discredited by serious scientists, and last week, one of the biggest sources of all took a nose dive.

Franz Boas, often called the grandfather of modern anthropology and a pioneer pusher of the idea that race is not a very meaningful concept, merely a "social construct" not found in nature, probably ranks with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age. As a Columbia professor from 1899 to 1942, he virtually created modern anthropology, and the students he trained—among them, Margaret Mead and some of the most famous names in the field—dominated the discipline until only a few years ago.

One of Boas' favorite targets was so-called "scientific racism," and much of his own writing was intended to combat what he saw—sometimes rightly—as unscientific or simply false thinking about race.

But it now turns out that Boas himself was guilty of no small degree of unscientific blunder—and maybe even fraud.

In 1912, Boas published what became a classic study that claimed to show that the skull shapes ("cranial forms") of the descendants of European immigrants to the United States altered from those of the original immigrants. Boas offered no explanation for why the changes took place, but if they were real, his finding pretty much wiped out the idea that different racial and ethnic types differ in fixed physical characteristics.

Boas's study, write Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble in their popular history of anthropology, They Studied Man, [pay archive]

"did much to establish the notion in human genetics that what are transmitted in the germ plasm are not fixed characters but potentialities ... dependent upon the environment for the particular form they will assume. The 'nature-nurture' controversy was largely obviated by this alternative."

In political terms, if human beings have few or no "fixed characters" and are shaped by the social environment, then what we know as modern liberalism is in business. So is communism, which also assumes that human beings can be transformed by manipulating the social environment.

It's no accident that Boas was a lifelong sympathizer of Marxism.

Unfortunately, for the social and human engineers, the study has now been shown to be invalid. Last week in the New York Times Science section, science reporter Nicholas Wade reported on an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by anthropologists Corey Sparks and Richard L. Jantz that took another look at Boas's study and methods. The effects of the new environment on the skulls of the immigrants' descendants, they found, are "insignificant," and the difference between the European and American born children were "negligible in comparison to the differentiation betweenethnic groups." [“A New Look at Old Data May Discredit a Theory on Race” By Nicholas Wade, NYT.Oct 8, 2002]

Moreover, as Dr. Jantz told the Times, Boas

"was intent on showing that the scientific racism of the day had no basis, but he did have to shade his data some to make it come out that way."

In other words, Boas decided what his conclusions would be before he finished the research and then "shaded"—i.e., cheated on—the data to make them support the conclusion he wanted.

This is not science; it's fraud -- and modern liberalism is founded on it.

Oh No, He Di'int!

HBD Chick relates, in uncapitalized, sparseley punctuated blogspeak, a story of a naive sociobiologist who, in the search for truth, offended a protected minority. 

you prolly heard by now that satoshi kanazawa says black women are ugly.

of course, he didn’t really, but who cares about silly little ol’ details like that.

what happened was kanazawa got some “attractiveness” data from add health. the evaluations were made “three times by three different interviewers over seven years” (during waves i – iii). the data showed that, consistently, black females scored lower in attractiveness than white, asian, or native american women; this did not happen in the case of black males.

andrew over @

“At this point, we have no idea who the interviewers who rated the students were. The attractiveness ratings would have been altered by varying degrees of prior familiarity between the individuals… whether the interviewers were of a certain age… the same sex or opposite sex breakdown… ingroup/outgroup… interviewer race… et cetera. There are simply a lot of variables that bring the reliability of attractiveness data into question. Perhaps this information is available, but it wasn’t in Kanazawa’s article, and I couldn’t find it on the study’s website.”

well, add health (a university of south carolina entity) apparently outsourced its fieldwork positions to both the national opinion research center (norc) of the university of chicago (waves i and ii) and rti international (wave iii).

fieldworkers seem to be part-time, contract workers, afaics. with the connection to the unversity of south carolina and the university of chicago, i was guessing that the fieldworkers were likely college students — maybe grad students interested in the field — sociology or whatever the heck it is (i’m talking about the interviewers here — i realize that the add health people are in the medical field). and, who winds up in sociology? mostly white women, with perhaps a few asian women thrown in. so, i was thinking that a lot of the interviewers might’ve been young white college women — and they might not find black women to be very attractive.

however, on the norc website, there are some videos of field interviewers explaining why they love their job, etc., etc., and they’re all older folks, i.e. not college students. of course, i’m sure this group is a pc-selected group — they’ve got almost all the races included there. but, still, three out of the five are white folks. if that is at all representative, then, yeah — there could, again, very well be some bias introduced here.

it’s still interesting that black women were consistently evaluated as the least attractive, but who were the evaluators? if they had been all black men, perhaps the results would’ve been different.

what i think is even more interesting is that blacks — both men and women — consistently rated themselves as attractive or highly attractive, more than members of the other races. black and proud! good for them!:

Paul Kersey continues the tale:

The author of the now censored study describing why Black females are the least attractive, Satoshi Kanazawa, also wrote this fantastic article for Psychology Today (which is still available) that describes 10 politically incorrect truths of human nature. No. 1 is a worth repeating:

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Long before TV—in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago—women were dying their hair blond. A recent study shows that in Iran, where exposure to Western media and culture is limited, women are actually more concerned with their body image, and want to lose more weight, than their American counterparts. It is difficult to ascribe the preferences and desires of women in 15th-century Italy and 21st-century Iran to socialization by media.

Women's desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.

Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman's health status.

Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are healthier and more fertile than other women; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Alternatively, men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason they prefer women with small waists. A new study of Polish women shows that women with large breasts and tight waists have the greatest fecundity, indicated by their levels of two reproductive hormones (estradiol and progesterone).

Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.

Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females. One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest indicator of interest and attraction. And the size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not.

Now what exactly did the study state and what did Kanazawa conclude in his blog post that got Black women everywhere (whom, if trends continue, will all be considered morbidly obese in 30 years) upset and had them rushing to a beauty salon to get weaves and hair that looks white? Well, it said this:

What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women? Black women are on average much heavier than nonblack women. The mean body-mass index (BMI) at Wave III is 28.5 among black women and 26.1 among nonblack women. (Black and nonblack men do not differ in BMI: 27.0 vs. 26.9.) However, this is not the reason black women are less physically attractive than nonblack women. Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI. Nor can the race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women. Black women are still less physically attractive than nonblack women net of BMI and intelligence. Net of intelligence, black men are significantly more physically attractive than nonblack men.

There are many biological and genetic differences between the races. However, such race differences usually exist in equal measure for both men and women. For example, because they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race differences in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.

It’s a well known fact that Black women have less success at online dating and lower rates of marriage, but is it due to higher rates of testosterone? Not being an evolutionary psychologist, we’ll leave the questions raised by Kanazawa to be answered by professionals.

The London School of Economics, where Professor Kanazawa is employed, is now "investigating" whether it should take action against the HBD menace. 

LSE investigates lecturer's blog over race row

The London School of Economics is investigating a blog post by one of its lecturers, which sparked anger by discussing "why black women are less physically attractive".

Satoshi Kanazawa cited the findings of a University of North Carolina survey in which he said interviewers rated the "physical attractiveness" of subjects.

The post was removed from Psychology Today as critics accused him of causing offence and demanded his sacking.

The LSE said his views were his own.

Dr Kanazawa, a reader in the management department at the LSE, could not be reached for comment.

He is on sabbatical, but normally lectures on evolutionary psychology and management science.

Although the posting was removed, cached versions are available elsewhere on the internet.

According to those, the blog said that in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), black women were, on average, rated to be less attractive than women of other races, while black men were not rated less attractive than men of other races.

Dr Kanazawa suggested, but then rejected, that this may be because of higher body mass index or increased genetic mutations, but said that it might be because of higher testosterone levels.

He did not detail the social or ethnic backgrounds of the interviewers, or the criteria on which they had based their judgements of "physical attractiveness".

Jared Taylor's New Book

It's just been released. 

Here's advanced praise from Peter Brimelow, J.P. Rushton, and Richard Lynn:

Jared Taylor is arguably the most brilliant of the leaders of what is sometimes called the “Alternative Right,” the intellectual movement focused on emergent issues that are now systematically suppressed in America’s purblind public debate. This book, the long-awaited sequel to his seminal Paved With Good Intentions, will eventually be seen as a decisive step forward on the historic American nation’s road to recovery from the paralyzing curse of Political Correctness.

Peter Brimelow, Editor of VDARE.com and author of Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster

The work of an insightful, well-tempered, and above all, demandingly honest mind, White Identity is especially timely as the white population of America comes under intensifying demographic, political, cultural, and economic pressure from both within and without. Jared Taylor deserves our deep gratitude for declaring that whites must find a way to stand up for themselves in a world in which they are becoming a shrinking minority, even in their own once white-majority countries.

Prof. J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario

Jared Taylor documents the dire consequences of demographic change in the United States. He warns of the deterioration that will follow when and if whites become a minority, and sounds a much needed wake-up call for whites to regain their sense of racial consciousness.

Dr. Richard Lynn, Professor emeritus of psychology, University of Ulster

Duke's Unbearable Whiteness

I’m proud to announce that one of my more popular articles at AltRight, “White Devils” (27 March 2011), has been reposted at the Huffington Post under the less euphonious title “The Racial Biases of Duke Hating” (23 March 2011).

Oh wait—HuffPo didn’t repost my article; it had it rewritten by a liberal journalist, Rob Kirkpatrick, who softened its edges. (I thank STDV for bringing this to my attention.)

To see what I mean, take Kirkpatrick’s opening paragraphs:

First, a disclosure: I'm a Duke Blue Devils fan. I didn't attend the university, and I've been told by someone from the South that I would have fit in better with the student body on the rival Chapel Hill campus than I would have with the one in Durham. (I think she meant that as a compliment, and as a lifelong state-school guy, I take it as such.) But I can't help it; I simply enjoy watching Mike Krzyzewski's team win year after year by playing disciplined, fundamentally strong basketball while avoiding the showboating and individual-over-team play, not to mention the NCAA violations, that often mar the college game.

And as a Duke fan, I've become quite familiar with Duke Hating, a favorite pastime of fans of pretty much every other college team in the country. I've heard all the reasons why we should hate Duke: Duke is to be hated for its success -- though, for some reason, we need not hate other winning programs like UCLA or North Carolina. Duke is to be hated because it's a private school -- though, for some reason, not other private schools like Syracuse or Wake Forest. Or the four-time national champions are to be hated because they're perpetually "overrated" and "get all the calls" -- something that has yet to be quantified, but which seems to stem from a fuzzy conspiracy involving the referees, the Selection Committee, Dick Vitale, and, I think, Oswald's ghost. (For a good piece on the history of Duke hating, see Mike Kline's column for Bleacher Report.)

Duke has been this generation's most successful men's college team, so haters come with the territory. But what's increasingly disconcerting is the racial element that often seems to be at the heart of antipathy toward Duke. Over the past two decades of Duke dominance, the haters have had one thing conspicuously in common: The slick-dishing Bobby Hurley? Hustling overachiever Steve Wojciechowski? Sharp shooter J.J. Reddick? Duke haters especially hated these guys. Yet you almost never heard the haters go after a Grant Hill or a Chris Carrawell or a Nolan Smith. It's been the white players at Duke who've usually drawn the most venom... especially from white fans.

Now read my opener:

There is no college basketball team more hated and reviled than the Duke University Blue Devils. Books have been written on the subject; websites are devoted to it. Simply mentioning the names "Christian Laettner," "Bobby Hurley," "J.J. Redick," or "Danny Ferry" in the wrong place evokes sneers, jokes about high shorts, claims by some that they could take each of these men in a fight, and crude accusations of homosexuality.

It's hard to imagine another college team generating multiple Top Ten Most Hated Players lists, or being trashed on the Gawker family of websites. Even the cloying and sleazy John Edwards was willing to announce publicly during his first presidential campaign, "I hate Duke Basketball."  

Duke can inspire love, too, of course, and a large fan base made up mostly of people who have no real connection to the school. (Up until I actually attended grad school at Duke, I was one of these, having been a quiet but sincere fan since watching Christian Laettner sink "The Shot" against Kentucky in the '92 NCAA regional finals.) ESPN's generous coverage of the Blue Devils speaks to these vicarious Dukies, but also to the millions who love to hate.   

For me, the source of Duke Hate has always been rather obvious ... and unmentionable.

Yes, it has a lot to do with the team's famed "Tobacco Road" rivalry with the formidable North Carolina Tar Heels, whose Chapel Hill stomping grounds is a mere 15-minute drive on 15-501 from Duke's faux-Gothic campus. While UNC is a genuinely Southern place (or at least used to be), Duke is an institution for transplants, a school mockingly known as the "University of New Jersey at Durham." And while Chapel Hill is full of wine-and-cheese liberals, Duke undergrads are imaged as an army of mini-Gordon Geckos and overachievers... a stereotype that's not altogether inaccurate. In the only event of its kind I've ever heard of, after Duke lost the 1999 Championship Game to Connecticut, tens of thousands of Carolina fans poured out onto Chapel Hill's Franklin St. to celebrate and get drunk. This rivalry is intense, to be sure, but Duke Hate is much bigger.

Certainly, a lot of Duke Hate derives from Coach Mike Krzyzewski's success, his three National Titles and winning percentage over .750. Whenever Duke loses a regular season game on the road, more often than not, the opposing fans flood the court as they'd just won a title. But resentment alone can't explain the intensity of Duke Hate. Few people truly loathed UNC's legendary coach Dean Smith, whose exploits equal Krzyzewski's.    

A lot of Duke Hate, no doubt, comes from a certain "preppiness" associated with its players... a quality that was put into stark relief in the '92 Championship Game, when clean-cut Duke went up again Michigan's "Fab Five" freshman, who had pioneered the hip-hop look of bald heads, baggy shorts, black sneakers and socks, and street-ball style.  Laettner would latter describe them as "real loosy-goosy," which they were.

But this "preppiness" charge has alwats seemed to me like a euphemism for what really bothers people about the Blue Devils -- during Coach K's tenure, his teams have been majority white, and with some notable exceptions like Grant Hill and Johnny Dawkins, Duke's most beloved/hated players have been Euro-Americans. People love to hate the Dukies because they stand as a flagrant violation of the trajectory of college and professional basketball over the past 30 years. Duke is white, they play white, and they win.

The two articles are strikingly similar in tone and rhetoric.

Now, I’m not making plagiarism accusations. I don’t believe in the concept of “idea theft,” at least in the context of journalism (on some level, we are all second-hand dealers in ideas.) And Kirkpatrick develops these ideas on his own (though, in my opinion, in an inferior fashion); he also adds some anecdotes from the past year that support the general thesis.

That said, when I googled “Whiteness” + “Duke Basketball” today, "White Devils" is the first and third listings on the front page. “White” + “Duke Basketball” puts my article second and fifth.  Sure, Kirkpatrick could have come up with these ideas on his own… But it’s highly likely that he would encounter my article while doing even cursory research; and quite frankly, it’s dishonest of him not to link to it. I guess that’s life, when you’re among The Damned.

Steve Sailer has had similar experiences reading the editorial page of the New York Times:

One of the eerier feelings for me is to start reading a New York Times op-ed and realize partway through that the columnist is engaging in an argument with me, even though I'm not named. That happens several times per year with David Brooks's NYT columns. (I've been told on trustworthy authority that he is a regular reader, so I'm not just being paranoid here.)

A moderate amount of his stuff seems to be either echoing or arguing with me, (The last time Brooks mentioned my name in the NYT back in 2004, he got a lot of grief from the commissars about it.)

Without the Secret Decoder Ring, it's often hard to figure out what Brooks is talking about. … [H]is September 2007 column on "The Waning of IQ" … makes no sense at all except under the presumption that NYT subscribers are regular iSteve readers who are almost persuaded by my work. …

My impression is that Brooks finds my work highly persuasive, but also highly troubling, both from an ideological and career perspective. So, he sometimes seems to be groping around for some way to refute me, but all without mentioning my name. Thus you end up with weird columns that are structured like this:

1.    The conventional wisdom is [something that only iSteve readers would dare imagine].

2. But, the latest research actually shows that this [utter heresy] isn't quite the sure thing everybody [i.e., my readers, not NYT subscribers] assume, and the reality is [pretty much what politically correct people everywhere assumed all along it was].

As I mentioned, Kirkpatrick adds some interesting details to the mix, including a couple that make one believe that Duke Basketball is, most definitely, Stuff Black People Don’t Like. (Indeed, White basketball players might fall into this category.):

The day after last year's classic championship game between Duke and Butler, ESPN's Rob Parker and Skip Bayless spoke about the unusual number of white players in the game, which boasted (gasp!) five white starters. The Hated vs. The Hoosiers had more than lived up to its billing in showcasing two teams playing tough, smart basketball in a closely fought battle that came down to the last shot as Duke squeaked out a 61-59 victory. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best title games of all time. The nation's First Fan, President Obama, was inspired to call both teams in their locker rooms to congratulate them. But in the context of this discussion of the game's "whiteness," Parker labeled this one-for-the-ages final as being one of the worst NCAA championships ever. Not content with that statement, he added that if Butler -- the mid-major team with two Academic All-Americans that had captured the hearts of every non-Duke fan along with at least one Duke fan in yours truly -- had won the game, they would have been the worst championship team ever.

His synopsis seemed a pretty clear code for racial preference: Parker didn't like how these white guys played the game.

In “White Devils,” I mentioned that in the early ‘90s, Duke’s clashes with UNLV and Michigan were almost civilizational: Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley battled “the Forces of Darkness,” as Will Blythe put it—two teams that were all Black, that featured players laden with NCAA-rules violations and suspect academic records, and that pioneered the angry, thuggish, baggy-shorts, shaved-head, street-ball style that has come to define the college and professional games.

As Paul Kersey notes in his retrospective on Michigan’s “Fab Five,” the NCAA’s and NBA’s collective decision to go “all in” on Black players has been a pyrrhic victory. In their time, the Fab Five, and other gangsta athletes, made college basketball “cool.”  Over the long term, the preponderance of tattooed and surly freaks on the court has made the professional game all but unwatchable for White fans. (The NFL has always benefited from the fact that its players wear helmets and face-masks.) The NBA was some 370 million dollars in the red in 2009-10 and has lost over a billion dollars in the past five years. In a desperate attempt to increase revenue, the league is now going after the Hispanic market, doing things like putting “los” in front of the team’s nicknames.

At any rate, Kirkpatrick notes that the in the early ‘90s, the players were well aware of—indeed, motivated by—the racial aspects of the Duke vs. UNLV and Duke vs. Michigan match-ups.

In his self-produced documentary for ESPN on his old "Fab Five" team at Michigan, Jalen Rose made a pointed statement about the team that drubbed his Wolverines by 20 points in the 1992 title game: "I hated Duke and I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms."

When later pressed to expand upon his comments, Rose explained, "Certain schools recruit a typical kind of player whether the world admits it or not. And Duke is one of those schools. They recruit black players from polished families, accomplished families. And that's fine. That's OK. But when you're an inner-city kid playing in a public school league, you know that certain schools aren't going to recruit you. That's one. And I'm OK with it. That's how I felt as an 18-year-old kid."

In a response published in the New York Times, former Duke and current NBA star Grant Hill effectively rebuked Rose's words: "In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only 'black players that were 'Uncle Toms,' Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families."

What interests me more than all this is the asymmetry one sees across college basketball: White college basketball fans who cheer on Black teams. Discomfort over this, in my view, is the origin of Duke Hate. Put simply, White fans hate and resent Duke because, deep down, they wish their team looked like the Blue Devils.

Whether I’m right about this or not, it is sad to report that there’s reason to believe the grand Laettner-Hurley-Ferry-Reddick-Wojo tradition might be coming to an end. Duke’s current freshman class is three-fourths Black, as is its 2012 recruiting class.

Could it be that in the wake of the Lacrosse case—or rather in the wake of the administration’s creation of various “anti-racism” initiatives in respond to a hoax—might someone have pressured Coach K to change the complexion of Duke Basketball? This is pure speculation, on my part, though it’d hardly be out of character for today’s academic establishment. Only time will tell.

And there’s always BYU!

Quiet Riot

Yesterday afternoon, Lew Rockwell blogged the following:

One Thing the Japanese Disaster Shows

Posted by Lew Rockwell, March 20, 2011

Just how strong, brave, resourceful, and dignified the Japanese people are under horrific stress. Far smaller disasters have offered us a very different picture of the Americans.

I, too, have been inspired by Japanese stoicism and courage; however, is the distinction that Lew is trying to make really between the Japanese and “the Americans”? Were all Americans—or a certain segment of them—looting and causing havoc during the Katrina disaster? Was it, in fact, “the Americans” who were rioting and looting in Haiti last winter? Or have we stumbled upon an instance of cultural decay for which America’s welfare state and overseas empire aren’t solely to blame?

In the summer of 2008, the Upper Mississippi flooded, leaving much of Iowa under water: property was destroyed; farmland, ruined; and the local economy was brought to a halt. Residents exclaimed that the natural disaster amounted to “Iowa’s Katrina.”

Well, “Iowa’s Katrina” was a lot different than New Orleans’s Katrina.  As Christopher Roach remarked at the time:

I’m sure we can expect Iowans to start looting, raping one another, and acting like animals on account of the recent flooding.  I mean, this is what flooding–and the incompetent response of President George W. Bush–do to communities, you know.  There’s no other factors of note that make people rape one another, shoot at rescue helicopters, and the like.

When liberals see these two distinct responses to similarly unfortunate and stressful situations, to what do they attribute it, I wonder.  When in doubt, flush it down the memory hole, I guess.

It’s worth speculating how Murray Rothbard—or, say, Lew Rockwell 15 years ago–would have reacted to the stark contrast between the Haitian and Japanese earthquakes.

Thankfully, we have Jared Taylor:

As Japan’s agony grinds on, more and more foreign observers are marveling at the disciplined, orderly behavior of the victims of one of the greatest natural disasters of our time. Homeless Japanese patiently stand in line for food and water. They huddle uncomplainingly in cramped shelters. They do not loot. Why is the aftermath of catastrophe in Japan so unlike that in Haiti or Chile or New Orleans?

Japan expert after Japan expert has been rolled out to give the obligatory one-word answer—culture. But that’s not an explanation. All these experts do is describe the Japanese: they are community-minded, polite, honest, stoical, they care about “face”, etc. We knew that already. Tell us why they are that way.

The implication of this mantra-like repetition of the word “culture” implies that cultures drop out of the sky, that the lucky Japanese got a good one and the Haitians got a bad one. This implies that patterns of behavior are essentially arbitrary and any group can acquire them. If Haitians could live in Japan for a few generations they would behave just like Japanese.

Ordinary people know better than the experts. When Ed West in the London DailyTelegraph wrote a brief article asking why the Japanese weren’t rioting, he got nearly 4,000 comments in three days—and not very many were about culture. [Why is there no looting in Japan? – Telegraph Blogs](The number of comments has begun to shrink as the Daily Telegraph deletes the ones it doesn’t like.)

Commenters generally had two explanations: (1) There must be something about the genetics of the Japanese, and (2) they benefit from homogeneity.

A few days ago, I wrote on my website American Renaissance that the main thing that keeps the Japanese from looting is the fact that they are not black, but that was flip. The question deserves a longer answer.

I am certainly as willing as Daily Telegraph readers to credit genes and homogeneity for all manner of good things, but the experts may not be completely wrong about “culture”,either. It is conceivable that others could acquire some of the traits that help the Japanese deal with a crisis. Let us consider genes, homogeneity, and culture, each in turn.

The crucial genetic contribution to the exemplary behavior of the Japanese is intelligence. Liberals like to pretend that, even if there really is such a thing as intelligence, it has no moral value, and people of low intelligence can be just as “good” as smart people. But, as Michael Levin (Why Race Matters, New Century Books, 2005) and others have pointed out, this is not true. High intelligence is invariably associated with greater law-abidingness.

The House We Live In

Anyone who wants to know how we got to the point of all this Diversity nonsense and multicultural madness, and where it came from, should watch this short film called The House I Live In. Starring Frank Sinatra, it came out in 1945, and was created “to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice.” It was awarded both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in 1946.

The plot’s pretty simple. Sinatra, playing himself, heads outside for a cigarette break in the middle of a recording session, where he happens upon a gang of about a dozen young boys chasing and cornering another kid, getting ready to pummel him. Sinatra intervenes, asking what the trouble is. The ruffians explain that they want to beat the kid up because they don’t like his religion. One tells Sinatra “he’s a dirty -” but Frank cuts him off before he can finish the sentence.

Frank then has a talk with the boys, and shows them how wrong they are. Does he tell them that, while religion is important, going around beating up people with a different religion is not appropriate behavior? Nah, Frank cuts right to the chase. He tells them:

“Look, fellas, religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid.”

Christians like to complain about “modern day” Hollywood denigrating and downplaying Christianity, while insisting that back in the good old days Hollywood respected Christianity. But even back in 1945 Hollywood was giving Oscars to a movie that says that anyone who thinks Christianity is better than other religions is either a Nazi, or stupid.

Sinatra then goes on to explain that we’re all Americans, no matter what we believe, and “prejudice” and “intolerance” are wrong, because even though we all may not see eye to eye on religion, we’ve got to stick together to fight “the Japs.” And, yes, he says “Japs”, repeatedly. The kids then stare wide eyed as Frank breaks into an expurgated rendition of the title song.

The film is based on the song of the same name, The House I Live In. It’s all about America being a multiracial, multicultural Disneyland. But the songwriter was livid that the movie makers cut the verse that explicitly refers to blacks out of the movie. He even got tossed out of a theater for protesting the excision. But the people that made the movie knew that America wasn’t quite ready for a movie promoting that much Diversity just yet. No matter; they had plenty of time, and now they push not only racial integration, but miscegenation non-stop. And it goes without saying that if they were making the movie today, they would no doubt still leave in the line comparing evangelicals to Nazis for thinking religion is important, but they would take out the stuff about “Japs.”

Nowadays, of course, the message of the movie is considered mainstream. Who doesn’t love “tolerance” and “diversity” these days? But back then, the idea that race and religion were meaningless trivialities was only being pushed by radicals, Jews, and Communists. Forced racial integration was considered to be a Communist plot, largely because it was a Communist plot. And if you think I exaggerate, just consult some history books. Christians and conservatives of today love to pretend as if they’ve always stood for and promoted interracial marriage, integrated schools, integrated churches, Civil Rights laws, etc., and that Martin Luther King was the embodiment of Christian conservatism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Conservative evangelical churches in the era between WW 2 and the 1970s railed against racial integration, and opposed all efforts to mix the races. Probably not five white preachers out of a thousand would’ve conducted an interracial marriage in 1964. Conservatives and Christians weren’t “marching with Dr. King”; the non-blacks marching with MLK were Quakers, liberal apostate “Christians”, commies, beatniks, and, overwhelmingly, Jews. (One of the rare exceptions was Billy Graham, and he certainly didn’t take a prominent position in the Civil Rights crusade, because he knew it would kill his ministry. But he did invite King to pray at a New York City revival, and insisted on integrated seating at all his revival meetings. He was widely denounced by conservative Christians for these actions.) Again, just check the history books if you doubt that modern day shibboleths on race were considered far out, dangerous radicalism by Americans up until quite recently, and that the people pushing such things were generally Communists.

But if you don’t have time to read some history books, just watch the credits for this Academy Award winning movie. It’s like a Who’s Who of Hollywood Communism and radicalism. Sinatra was just their front man.

Let’s start with the man who wrote the lyrics to the song on which the movie is based. In the movie he’s credited as “Lewis Allan”, but don’t pay any attention to that. His real name was Abel Meeropol. He also wrote Strange Fruit, the song about lynching in the South which Billie Holiday made famous, and which TIME magazine called the most important song of the 20th century. Holiday claimed she wrote it in her autobiography, but that was a lie. And who was Abel Meeropol? Our good friend Max Blumenthal tells us that he was “a Jewish school teacher”, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Quite a bit more. Remember Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the nice Jewish couple executed for giving our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union? Well, after they were executed, Abel Meeropol adopted their kids. Was that because he took pity on a couple orphans? Possibly. It might also have to do with the fact that the “Jewish school teacher” was an “ardent Communist” himself. Funny how Blumenthal forgot to mention that little fact…

OK, so we’ve seen that the lyricist for the song which inspired the movie was some strange fruit, indeed. What about others? Well, Earl Robinson wrote the music for the song. You remember Earl Robinson, right? He was one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted for refusing to tell Congress whether or not they had ever been members of the Communist Party. Of course, every single one of the Hollywood Ten either was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Most still were. Robinson also wrote the music for other songs, like Ballad For Americans, an anthem all about how race and religion don’t matter. It was performed at the Communist Party national convention of 1940. (They also played it the GOP convention that year, which oughta tell you something.) Robinson also wrote Black and White, a celebration of the Brown vs. Board of Education travesty of jurisprudence. You’ve probably heard a watered down version of Black and White – Three Dog Night had a #1 hit with their less blatantly political form of the song in 1972.

OK, so the guy who wrote the words to the song that inspired the movie was an America hating Communist. And the guy who wrote the music was another Communist. Anyone else? Well, there’s also the guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. His name was Albert Maltz, surprise, surprise, and he, too, “was a man on the rise both inside and outside of the Communist Party.”

Yes, The House I Live In, and its message, was a Communist production through and through. And make no mistake. The message of the movie wasn’t that people shouldn’t go around beating up Jews. We have no problem with that message; we oppose violence against anyone. But that wasn’t the message of the movie. The message was that religion and race are meaningless trivialities, and anyone who disagrees is either “a Nazi” or “stupid.”

In 1945, that was a radical Communist idea. Now, it’s a mainstream view parroted by nearly everyone.

Are Whites Oppressed?

"Are Whites racially oppressed?" is the political question that's a little too "real" to be taken seriously. In the mainstream media, it can only be gestured at ironically by liberal journalists—who are then scolded for "legitimizing" hate and irrational fantasies. James Edwards, on the other hand, is someone who asks this question—and answers it in the affirmative—a regular basis. James joined me to discuss America's dispossessed majority on NPItv this Thursday and requested that I come on his program tonight to further delve into this explosive topic. I hope you listen in at 8PM Central.  

Report for Congress on Military: "Too many white men dying in combat"

Of course, it doesn’t exactly say that …

Report says too many whites, men leading military

Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press

March 7, 2011

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military is too white and too male at the top and needs to change recruiting and promotion policies and lift its ban on women in combat, an independent report for Congress said Monday.

Seventy-seven percent of senior officers in the active-duty military are white, while only 8 percent are black, 5 percent are Hispanic and 16 percent are women, the report by an independent panel said, quoting data from September 2008.

Two decades ago, when the military was at the height of its prestige during the first Gulf War, 7% (I believe) of the generals in the U.S. Army were black. The #1 and #3 generals in the Gulf War (Colin Powell and Calvin Waller) were black.

One barrier that keeps women from the highest ranks is their inability to serve in combat units. Promotion and job opportunities have favored those with battlefield leadership credentials.

The report ordered by Congress in 2009 calls for greater diversity in the military’s leadership so it will better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix in the armed forces and in American society.

Efforts over the years to develop a more equal opportunity military have increased the number of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the ranks of leadership. But, the report said, “despite undeniable successes … the armed forces have not yet succeeded in developing a continuing stream of leaders who are as diverse as the nation they serve.”

“This problem will only become more acute as the racial, ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States continues to change,” said the report from the Military Leadership Diversity Commission …

Indeed.

Having military brass that better mirrors the nation can inspire future recruits and help create trust among the general population, the commission said.

An interesting question that the press has strenuously not interested itself in is: Who has been dying in recent wars? You used to hear all the times that minorities are more likely to get killed in America’s wars, but now you never hear anything about the subject.

When I checked on the Iraq War in 2007, American whites, relative to their share of the young population, were getting killed in combat at 1.86 times the rate of nonwhites.

In Afghanistan through 2009, whites were dying at a rate 2.47 times their share of the population of 20-24 year olds.

I asked then:

How could this statistic be spun so it’s “appropriate” for the mainstream media? Here’s a feasible headline:

Minorities Discriminated Against at VA Cemeteries

Whites Get More Free Burials

The AP article continues:

Because they are technically attached to, but not assigned to, combat units, [women] don’t get credit for being in combat arms, something important for promotion to the most senior ranks.

Through 2006, U.S. women had suffered 2% of the fatalities in Iraq.

The most interesting part of the AP article is this exercise in reading between the lines:

Lyles said the commission consulted a panel of enlisted women on the issue. “I didn’t hear, `Rah, rah, we want to be in combat,’” Lyles said. “But I also didn’t hear, `We don’t want to be in combat.’

In other words, enlisted women don’t want to be in combat. The only women who do are the most promotion-crazed female officers, and the enlisted women aren’t excited about getting themselves killed to help get these officers promoted.

Did Richard Posner Discover HBD?

It sure seems like he did.  The following piece, on the "PISA Rankings and the Role of Schools in Student Performance on Standardized Tests," was posted by Posner on January 1, 2011, at his and Gary Becker's law and economics blog.     

International comparisons are tricky, as Becker points out, but the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), which tests 15-year-olds for proficiency in reading, math, and science by well designed standard tests conducted in thousands of schools all over the world, is a careful and responsible program, the results of which deserve to be taken seriously. The latest results (which are for 2009) reveal among other things that although the United States spends more money per student on secondary school education than any other country except Switzerland and Austria, Americans’ performance on the PISA tests is mediocre. In the latest tests Americans ranked 17 in reading, 24 in science, and 30 in math. 15-year-old kids in East Asian nations (including Australia and New Zealand), along with Finland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada, outperform the United States in all three subjects. Since 2000, when the PISA tests were first given, the United States has fallen in rank in reading and science, and is unchanged in math.

The rankings tend to be interpreted as measures of the quality of a nation’s pre-collegiate school system (primary and secondary education, since primary education influences performance in secondary schools). But this may be a mistake. Schooling is only one, though doubtless an important, input into performance on the PISA tests. Another is IQ. There have been some efforts to compare IQ across countries, notably by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen; see their 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality. Their results cannot be regarded as definitive, given significant limitations in the data, but they are suggestive. The authors find that the East Asian countries, which generally rank highest on the PISA tests (including reading—not just math and sciene), have the highest average IQs; the average IQ of Americans is lower because of our large black and Hispanic populations, which have lower average IQs than whites and Asians.

IQ is understood to reflect both genetic endowment and environmental factors, particularly factors operative very early in a child’s life, including prenatal care, maternal health, the educational level of the parents, family stability, and poverty (all these are correlated, and could of course reflect low IQs of parents as well as causing low IQs in their children). The case for very early intervention in children’s development, powerfully urged by the distinguished University of Chicago economist James Heckman, can be understood as an effort to lift IQs in the black and Hispanic communities and by doing so improve the educational performance of black and Hispanic children, including performance on the PISA tests. It is true that Heckman emphasizes noncognitive skills that facilitate learning, but these skills could also increase performance on IQ tests, indicating a positive effect on IQ.

The 2009 PISA test scores reveal that in American schools in which only a small percentage (no more than 10 percent) of the students receive free lunches or reduced-cost lunches, which are benefits provided to students from poor families, the PISA reading test scores are the highest in the world. But in the many American schools in which 75 percent or more of the students are from poor families, the scores are the second lowest among the 34 countries of the OECD; and the OECD includes such countries as Mexico, Turkey, Portugal, and Slovakia.

If IQ is playing a significant role in America’s mediocre showing on the PISA tests, improvements in secondary school education are unlikely to have dramatic effects. The white and Asian kids in American schools are already doing fine, for the most part; the black and Hispanic kids may not do much better until their early childhood environment is improved to the point at which black and Hispanic IQs are raised significantly.

Richard Posner is, by one estimate, the most frequently cited legal scholar of the 20th century; however one might view his jurisprudence, his willingness to quote approvingly from Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen carries immeasurable weight. 

Dots With Destinies

The best didactic real-life graphic of racial realism I have ever seen are those colored maps that show the racial segregation of American cities. The maps are stark and the colors bring racial segregation to life. Everyone knows that their neighborhoods are racially segregated but most people probably assume that most neighborhoods are not segregated to such an extent. The maps must have felt like a frontal assault on the values of many liberals. Racial segregation is the way multi-racial societies prefer to organize themselves; and if truth be told, the races would probably prefer a bit more buffer between each other too.

Allan C. Park’s recent essay brought those maps to mind. If group loyalty has a biochemical basis, the preference to live amongst one’s own probably does as well. This preference is probably not as directly reducible as group loyalty; it seems like it would be more contingent on intelligence, and the mind is yet an irreducible maze—but it is merely matter. The more we learn, the less room for Free Will we find: The laws of nature govern everything, including our minds. When many different minds act the same way—in this case, choosing to live with people who look familiar—we can safely assume there are laws of nature immediately relevant.

From an objective standpoint, it is appropriate that those maps represent human beings with different colored dots. We are more than dots but you are also basically many dots moving through space in time on a course that could theoretically be predicted exactly. That different colored people live apart cannot be random; that it is the result of considerable deliberation on the part of individuals does not make it conventional, historical, or accidental. The preference is so strong that it overrides conventional values many define themselves by; it is observable throughout history and apparently universal; and what are accidental appear to be the exceptions.

Racial segregation is more salient than racial disparities in income and intelligence. If people preferred to live with their own IQ percentile or income bracket more than with their own race then those maps would look much different than they do. Whites who marry Asians do not prefer to live in Chinatown. Nor is the preference for one’s own culture a sufficient alternative explanation.  Different races have different cultures because they have different genes because they had different environments. As Derbyshire once said to The Goldberg, “‘Culture’ is a sort of phlogiston or luminiferous æther that sounds as if it’s explaining something, but actually isn’t.” Peace Corp White People who toil in The Gambia quickly become intimately aware that they are dealing not merely with a different culture.

Liberalism teaches that racial segregation is not as it seems; that it is not really voluntary; that it is the effect of an evil cause, and if you prefer it you are part of that cause. Of course the act of personally attenuating that effect is unthinkable. The chasm between the preference for racial segregation and the principle of racial integration must be as wide as any chasm between reality and religion has ever been. Liberalism as a religion with racial integration as a tenet is lived less faithfully than the Church’s teaching on contraception. The principle is believed in without preferring that it were true. The good news is that if the chasm got any wider it would disappear; if our elites put into law a significant program of racial integration the masses would ROAR quickly and loudly. Forty-years of school districts being gerrymandered by multiculturalists has not reversed that preference; it may have only reinforced the reasons in our subconscious for resuming racial segregation at lunch time.

White people who enjoy living in cities with lots of minorities do so because it gives them a chance to celebrate diversity without living too close to it—which is why only rich White people enjoy living in cities. But White people who want to raise families do not celebrate diversity at the risk of experiencing its dangers. They moved to the suburbs and now move to the exurbs and buy a cabin in the country for the weekend if they can. The people who are perpetuating the European gene are not the people whose actions suggest that celebrating diversity is a priority—and the bigger the family the further do they dwell from diversity.

If radical traditionalism is seeking First Principles that address immediate exigencies, we should start by looking at empirical facts relating to those exigencies that imply something important about human nature. In American society, perhaps the most salient of those facts is the abiding reality of racial segregation. It is a preference that is natural for the individual and healthy for the family. The survival of our civilization requires its cultivation.

Is Love Colorblind?

JUST three decades ago, Thurgood Marshall was only months away from appointment to the Supreme Court when he suffered an indignity that today seems not just outrageous but almost incomprehensible. He and his wife had found their dream house in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., but could not lawfully live together in that state: he was black and she was East Asian. Fortunately for the Marshalls, in January 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the anti-interracial-marriage laws in Virginia and 18 other states. And in 1967 these laws were not mere leftover scraps from an extinct era. Two years before, at the crest of the civil-rights revolution, a Gallup poll found that 72 per cent of Southern whites and 42 per cent of Northern whites still wanted to ban interracial marriage.

Let's fast-forward to the present and another black - Asian couple: retired Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel Eldrick Woods Sr. and his Thai-born wife, Kultida. They are not hounded by the police -- just by journalists desperate to write more adulatory articles about how well they raised their son Tiger. The colossal popularity of young Tiger Woods and the homage paid his parents are remarkable evidence of white Americans' change in attitude toward what they formerly denounced as ``miscegenation.'' In fact, Tiger's famously mixed ancestry (besides being black and Thai, he's also Chinese, white, and American Indian) is not merely tolerated by golf fans. More than a few seem to envision Tiger as a shining symbol of what America could become in a post-racial age.

Interracial marriage is growing steadily. From the 1960 to the 1990 Census, white - East Asian married couples increased almost tenfold, while black - white couples quadrupled. The reasons are obvious: greater integration and the decline of white racism. More subtly, interracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence. Nor is it surprising that white - Asian marriages outnumber black - white marriages: the social distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the distance between blacks and whites. What's fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites -- especially Asian men and black women -- have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage.

This is a painful topic to explore honestly, so nobody does. Still, it's important because interracial marriages are a leading indicator of what life will be like in the even more diverse and integrated twenty-first century. Intermarriages show that integration can churn up unexpected racial conflicts by spotlighting enduring differences between the races.

For example, probably the most disastrous mistake Marcia Clark made in prosecuting O. J. Simpson was to complacently allow Johnny Cochran to pack the jury with black women. As a feminist, Mrs. Clark smugly assumed that all female jurors would identify with Nicole Simpson. She ignored pretrial research indicating that black women tended to see poor Nicole as The Enemy, one of those beautiful blondes who steal successful black men from their black first wives, and deserve whatever they get.

The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites. 

In the 1990 Census, 72 percent of black - white couples consisted of a black husband and a white wife. In contrast, white - Asian pairs showed the reverse: 72 percent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife.

[For 2000 Census ratios, see my 2003 article "2000 Census: Interracial Marriage Gender Gap Remains Large."]

Sexual relations outside of marriage are less fettered by issues of family approval and long-term practicality, and they appear to be even more skewed. The 1992 Sex in America study of 3,432 people, as authoritative a work as any in a field where reliable data are scarce, found that ten times more single white women than single white men reported that their most recent sex partner was black.

Few whites comprehend the growing impact on minorities of these interracial husband - wife disparities. One reason is that the effect on whites has been balanced. Although white women hunting for husbands, for example, suffer more competition from Asian women, they also enjoy increased access to black men. Further, the weight of numbers dilutes the effect on whites. 

In 1990, 1.46 million Asian women were married, compared to only 1.26 million Asian men. This net drain of 0.20 million white husbands into marriages to Asian women is too small to be noticed by the 75 million white women, except in Los Angeles and a few other cities with large Asian populations and high rates of intermarriage. Yet, this 0.20 million shortage of Asian wives leaves a high proportion of frustrated Asian bachelors in its wake.

Black women's resentment of intermarriage is now a staple of daytime talk shows, hit movies like Waiting to Exhale, and magazine articles. Black novelist Bebe Moore Campbell described her and her tablemates' reactions upon seeing a black actor enter a restaurant with a blonde: ``In unison, we moaned, we groaned, we rolled our eyes heavenward . . . Then we all shook our heads as we lamented for the 10,000th time the perfidy of black men, and cursed trespassing white women who dared to 'take our men.''' Like most guys, though, Asian men are reticent about admitting any frustrations in the mating game. But anger over intermarriage is visible on Internet on-line discussion groups for young Asians. The men, featuring an even-greater-than-normal-for-the-Internet concentration of cranky bachelors, accuse the women of racism for dating white guys. For example, ``This [dating] disparity is a manifestation of a silent conspiracy by the racist white society and self-hating Asian [nasty word for ``women''] to effect the genocide of Asian Americans.'' The women retort that the men are racist and sexist for getting sore about it. All they can agree upon is that Media Stereotypes and/or Low Self-Esteem must somehow be at fault.

LET'S review other facts about intermarriage and how they violate conventional sociological theories.

1. You would normally expect more black women than black men to marry whites because far more black women are in daily contact with whites. First, among blacks aged 20 - 39, there are about 10 per cent more women than men alive. Another tenth of the black men in these prime marrying years are literally locked out of the marriage market by being locked up in jail, and maybe twice that number are on probation or parole. So, there may be nearly 14 young black women for every 10 young black men who are alive and unentangled with the law. Further, black women are far more prevalent than black men in universities (by 80 per cent in grad schools), in corporate offices, and in other places where members of the bourgeoisie, black or white, meet their mates.

Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.

2. Much more practical-sounding advice would be: Since there are so many unmarried Asian men and black women, they should find solace for their loneliness by marrying each other. Yet, when was the last time you saw an Asian man and a black woman together? Black-man/Asian-woman couples are still quite unusual, but Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparably more rare.

Similar patterns appear in other contexts:

3a. Within races: Black men tend to most ardently pursue lighter-skinned, longer-haired black women (e.g., Spike Lee's School Daze). Yet black women today do not generally prefer fairer men.

3b. In other countries: In Britain, 40 per cent of black men are married to or living with a white woman, versus only 21 per cent of black women married to or living with a white man.

3c. In art: Madame Butterfly, a white-man/Asian-woman tragedy, has been packing them in for a century, recently under the name Miss Saigon. The greatest black-man/white-woman story, Othello, has been an endless hit in both Shakespeare's and Verdi's versions. (To update Karl Marx's dictum: Theater always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as opera, and finally as farce, as seen in that recent smash, O.J., The Moor of Brentwood.) Maybe Shakespeare did know a thing or two about humanity: America's leading portrayer of Othello, James Earl Jones, has twice fallen in love with and married the white actress playing opposite him as Desdemona.

4. The civil-rights revolution left husband - wife balances among interracial couples more unequal. Back in 1960 white husbands were seen in 50 per cent of black-white couples (versus only 28 per cent in 1990), and in only 62 per cent of white - Asian couples (versus 72 per cent). 

Why? Discrimination, against black men and Asian women. In the Jim Crow South black men wishing to date white women faced pressures ranging from raised eyebrows to lynch mobs. In contrast, the relatively high proportion of Asian-man/white-woman couples in 1960 was a holdover caused by anti-Asian immigration laws that had prevented women, most notably Chinese women, from joining the largely male pioneer immigrants. As late as 1930 Chinese-Americans were 80 per cent male. So, the limited number of Chinese men who found wives in the mid twentieth century included a relatively high fraction marrying white women. In other words, as legal and social discrimination have lessened, natural inequalities have asserted themselves.

5. Keeping black men and white women apart was the main purpose of Jim Crow. Gunnar Myrdal's landmark 1944 study found that Southern whites generally grasped that keeping blacks down also retarded their own economic progress, but whites felt that was the price they had to pay to make black men less attractive to white women. To the extent that white racism persists, it should limit the proportion of black-man/white-woman couples.

SINCE these inequalities in interracial marriage are so contrary to conventional expectations, what causes them? Academia's and the mass media's preferred reaction has been to ignore husband - wife disproportions entirely. When the subject has raised its ugly head, though, they've typically tossed out arbitrary ideas to explain a single piece of the puzzle, rather than address the entire yin and yang of black - white and white - Asian marriages. For example, a Japanese-American poetry professor in Minnesota has written extensively on his sexual troubles with white women. He blames the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Presumably, the similarity of frustrations of Chinese-American men is just a coincidence caused by, say, China losing the Opium War. And the problems of Vietnamese men stem from winning the Vietnam War, etc. But piecemeal rationalizations are unappealing compared to a theory which might explain all the evidence.

The general pattern to be explained is: blacks are more in demand as husbands than as wives, and vice-versa for Asians. The question is, what accounts for it?

The usual sociological explanations for who marries whom (e.g., availability, class, and social approval) never work simultaneously for blacks and Asians. This isn't surprising because these social-compatibility factors influence the total number of black - white or white - Asian marriages more than the husband - wife proportions within intermarriages.

By emphasizing how society encourages us to marry people like ourselves, sociologists miss half the picture: by definition, heterosexual attraction thrives on differences. Although Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering are so compatible that they break into song about it (``Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?''), Higgins falls in love with Eliza Doolittle. Opposites attract. And certain race/sex pairings seem to be more opposite than others. The force driving these skewed husband - wife proportions appears to be differences in perceived sexual attractiveness. On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.

Obviously, these are gross generalizations about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports Illustrated swimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences.

So, what makes blacks more masculine-seeming and Asians more feminine-seeming? Media stereotypes are sometimes invoked. TV constantly shows black men slam-dunking, while it seems the only way an Asian man can get some coverage is to discover a cure for AIDS. Yet try channel-surfing for minority women. You'll see black women dancing, singing, joking, and romancing. If, however, you even see an Asian woman, she'll probably be newscasting -- not the most alluring of roles.

Conventional wisdom sometimes cites social conditioning as well. But while this is not implausible for American-born blacks, who come from a somewhat homogeneous culture, it's insensitive to the diversity of cultures in which Asians are raised. Contrast Koreans and Filipinos and Cambodian refugees and fifth-generation Japanese-Americans. It's not clear they have much in common culturally other than that in the West their women are more in demand as spouses than their men.

One reasonable cultural explanation for the sexual attractiveness of black men today is the hypermasculinization of black life over the last few decades. To cite a benign aspect of this trend, if you've followed the Olympics on TV since the 1960s you've seen sprinters' victory celebrations evolve from genteel exercises in restraint into orgies of fist-pumping, trash-talking black machismo. This showy masculinization of black behavior may be in part a delayed reaction to the long campaign by Southern white males to portray themselves as ``The Man'' and the black man as a ``boy.'' But let's not be content to stop our analysis here. Why did Jim Crow whites try so hard to demean black manhood? As we've seen, the chief reason was to prevent black men from impregnating white women.

So, did all racist whites a century ago make keeping minorities away from their women their highest priority? No. As noted earlier, the anti-Asian immigration laws kept Asian women out, forcing many Asian immigrant bachelors to look for white women (with mixed success). While white men were certainly not crazy about this side effect, it seemed an acceptable tradeoff, since they feared Asian immigrants more as economic than as sexual competitors. But why did whites historically dread the masculine charms of blacks more than those of Asians? Merely asking this question points out that social conditioning is ultimately a superficial explanation of the differences among peoples. Yes, society socializes individuals, but what socializes society?

There are only three fundamental causes for the myriad ways groups differ. The first is unsatisfying but no doubt important: random flukes of history. The second, the favorite of Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond, is differences in geography and climate. The third is human biodiversity. Let's look at three physical differences between the races. 1) Asian men tend to be shorter than white and black men. Does this matter in the mating game? One of America's leading hands-on researchers into this question, 7'1", 280-pound basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, reports that in his ample experience being tall and strong never hurt. Biological anthropologists confirm this, finding that taller tends to be better in the eyes of most women in just about all cultures. Like most traits, height is determined by the interaction of genetic and social factors (e.g., nutrition). For example, the L.A. Dodgers' flamethrowing pitcher Hideo Nomo is listed as 6'2", an almost unheard-of height for any Japanese man fifty years ago, owing to the near-starvation diets of the era. While the height gap between Japanese and whites narrowed significantly after World War II, this trend has slowed in recent years as well-fed Japanese began bumping up against genetic limits. Furthermore, it can be rather cold comfort to a 5'7" Asian who is competing for dates with white and black guys averaging 5'11" to hear, ``Your sons will grow up on average a couple of inches taller than you, assuming, of course, that you ever meet a girl and have any kids.'' In contrast, consider a 5'1" Asian coed. Although she'd be happy with a 5'7" boyfriend if she were in an all-Asian school, at UCLA she finds lots of boys temptingly much taller than that, but few are Asian.

2. This general principle -- the more racial integration there is, the more important become physical differences among the races -- can also be seen with regard to hair length. The ability to grow long hair is a useful indicator of youth and good health. (Ask anybody on chemotherapy.) Since women do not go bald and can generally grow longer hair than men, most cultures associate longer hair with femininity. Although blacks' hair doesn't grow as long as whites' or Asians' hair, that's not a problem for black women in all-black societies. After integration, though, hair often becomes an intense concern for black women competing with longer-haired women of other races. While intellectuals in black-studies departments' ebony towers denounce ``Eurocentric standards of beauty,'' most black women respond more pragmatically. They one-up white women by buying straight from the source of the longest hair: the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the booming business in furnishing African-American women with ``weaves'' and ``extensions'' harvested from the follicularly gifted women of China.

3. Muscularity may most sharply differentiate the races in terms of sexual attractiveness. Women like men who are stronger than they; men like women who are rounder and softer. The ending of segregation in sports has made racial differences in muscularity harder to ignore. Although the men's 100-meter dash is among the world's most widely contested events, in the last four Olympics all 32 finalists have been blacks of West African descent.

Is muscularity quantifiable? PBS fitness expert Covert Bailey finds that he needs to recommend different goals -- in terms of percentage of body fat -- to his clients of different races. The standard goal for adult black men is 12 per cent body fat, versus 18 per cent for Asian men. The goals for women are 7 points higher than for men of the same race.

For interracial couples, their ``gender gaps'' in body-fat goals correlate uncannily with their husband - wife proportions in the 1990 Census. The goal for black men (12 per cent) is 10 points lower than the goal for white women (22 per cent), while the goal for white men (15 per cent) is only 4 points lower than the goal for black women (19 per cent). This 10:4 ratio is almost identical to the 72:28 ratio seen in the Census. This correlates just as well for white - Asian couples, too. Apparently, men want women who make them feel more like men, and vice versa for women.

Understanding the impact of genetic racial differences on American life is a necessity for anybody who wants to understand our increasingly complex society. For example, the sense of betrayal felt by Asian men certainly makes sense. After all, they tend to surpass the national average in those long-term virtues -- industry, self-restraint, law-abidingness -- that society used to train young women to look for in a husband. Yet, now that discrimination has finally declined enough for Asian men to expect to reap the rewards for fulfilling traditional American standards of manliness, our culture has largely lost interest in indoctrinating young women to prize those qualities.

The frustrations of Asian men are a warning sign. When, in the names of freedom and feminism, young women listen less to the hard-earned wisdom of older women about how to pick Mr. Right, they listen even more to their hormones. This allows cruder measures of a man's worth -- like the size of his muscles -- to return to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia, but a society in which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with acting like Mr. Wrong.

George Orwell noted, "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.'' We can no longer afford to have our public policy governed by fashionable philosophies which insists upon ignoring the obvious. The realities of interracial marriage, like those of professional sports, show that diversity and integration turn out in practice to be fatal to the reigning assumption of racial uniformity. The courageous individuals in interracial marriages have moved farthest past old hostilities. Yet, they've discovered not the featureless landscape of utter equality that was predicted by progressive pundits, but a landscape rich with fascinating racial patterns. Intellectuals should stop dreading the ever-increasing evidence of human biodiversity and start delighting in it.

This essay was originally published in 1997. 

Mixing It Up

Some nine percent of marriages in the United States are between people of different races and ethnicities. This rate, which has nearly doubled over the past 30 years, was announced with no small amount of fanfare by the New York Times in its latest Sunday edition. An accompanying video, “Young and Mixed in America,” profiles undergraduates at the University of Maryland who are “on the forefront of a demographic shift.” The Times seems to be claiming that one day all Americans will look like this. And that's a good thing, judging by the Times’s descriptions of the bright young people who are “rejecting the color line” and moving “beyond” black-and-white, towards an über-tolerant, identity-less utopia.

Dashing the Times’s great hope for post-racialism is the reality that mixing the races simply creates… more races. In the American context, most mulattos have been identified—and chosen to identify themselves—as Black. Our current president, for instance, adheres to the “one drop rule.” But there’s no reason to believe that this will continue indefinitely, especially when so many new admixtures are present and particular admixtures are becoming prominent. “Harvard Happa,” a society for half-Asians/half-Caucasians at America’s most prestigious university, speaks to hybrids’ quite natural desire to identify themselves as a people. More important, the “Raza” of Latino-nationalist lore is not one of the three Great Races (White, Yellow, and Black) but an admixture—or rather, various admixtures—of European, African, and Central and South American Indian genes.

And the Times should hesitate before suggesting that miscegenation leads to better social relations. In Haiti, every generation or two, one hears calls to “kill the mulattos!” I don’t think anything like this will happen to Ivy League “Happas,” but as America’s economy continues to decline, many mixed-race people will, no doubt, be caught in the middle of racial conflict.

And the Times is also fooling itself in thinking that the new American melting pot will be random and indiscriminate. To the contrary, people “mix it up” in well established patterns, the most obvious deriving from the special attraction between Asian females and White males.  This issue was given definitive treatment by Steve Sailer in his classic essay “Is Love Colorblind?” which I’ve elected to re-post.

Attacking AmRen

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Jared Taylor’s 2011 American Renaissance conference has been thrown into jeopardy. Last year, it was former (current?) FBI agent Jeffrey Imm who provided the intel and various Internet “anti-fascists” who provided the bomb threats that scuttled the biannual event and led to a much-reduced rump AmRen gathering in Northern Virginia.

This time around, it was the Obama of Mecklenburg County, Charlotte City Council member and mayor pro tem Patrick Cannon, who browbeat the Airport Sheraton Hotel into reneging on its contract with Jared and AmRen. I doubt there will ever be justice for our side on this matter, but Cannon’s actions appear to amount to a flagrant abuse of his status as an elected official, if not an outright First Amendment violation. The antifa can’t believe that they didn’t have to lift a finger, as an elected official eagerly did their dirty work!

(My interview with Jared about the 2010 fiasco can be heard here. Matt Parrott has a wrap up of this year’s debacle here.)

I’ve recently become the executive director of The National Policy Institute. My first project was to create NPITV.com, which will web-stream events, like the AmRen conference, of interest to conscious European-Americans, as well as offer other programming that’s too hot for the mainstream media. NPITV was to debut by web-streaming AmRen 2011.

Everything’s up in the air at the moment, but I can assure you that, 1) I will be in Charlotte come hell, high water, and anti-fascists throwing bricks, and 2) NPI will make every effort to web-stream the conference, even if that entails broadcasting from an “undisclosed location.”

I recently issued a press release to this regard, and instead of repeating myself further, I’ll reproduce it below.

Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing that our side is being attacked. When David Frum’s underlings went after AltRight during the first week of its existence, I was positive that we had struck a nerve and that the website would gain a wide audience.  It was a sign of their irrelevance when the paleocons begin to be tolerated as cranks and sentimentalists or else harmless pontificators on organic cuisine and girl’s softball leagues. The alternative Right needs to bring to the fore our fundamental divergence with America’s egalitarian establishment. Doing so will inevitably bring about active suppression.

Or in other words, bring it on.

* * *

From The National Policy Institute

The Airport Sheraton Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, has capitulated to the self-professed defenders of freedom who have dedicated themselves to silencing open and honest discussion of racial differences and the threats to Western civilization. The Sheraton reneged on its contractual obligation to make available its conference facilities and lodging rooms for the biannual American Renaissance conference, put on by The New Century Foundation.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but one can imagine the media firestorm and throngs of civil-rights lawyers that would appear if a hotel broke a contract with an African-American group under pressure from White conservatives.

At the moment, American Renaissance is actively attempting to find an alternate venue. The National Policy Institute is confident AR will succeed in this endeavor and that the various “anti-racists” and “liberals” will fail to squelch free expression.

That said, since the event has been put into jeopardy, NPI would like to make the following statement to those who have already paid to access the live web-stream and digital downloads, as well as those considering making such a purchase.

• As of this writing, all AR speakers are set to arrive in Charlotte next week. Thus, come hell, high water, and brick-throwing “anti-fascists,” NPI will make every effort to web-stream all scheduled speeches, even if broadcasts must take place in an  “undisclosed location.”

• In the unlikely event that the AR conference is cancelled, NPI will offer a full refund to those who have purchased web-stream access.

Standing up to violent agitators and totalitarian wannabes is of the utmost importance. If in the face of censorship, our voices in defense of the West can be heard, this next weekend might mark AR and NPITV’s finest hours.

It’s also worth noting that 25 percent of all revenue from NPITV’s webcast will go directly to AR. Thus, watching the web-stream would be an educational and entertaining way of supporting organizations that defend our people and civilization.

The Patron Saint of White Guilt

Today the American media, politicians of all stripes, and public educators will invariably fall into rapturous tones describing the black leader whose birthday is being celebrated, namely, Martin Luther King (1929-1968). King’s birthday is the only national holiday devoted to an individual American whose public observance has been commanded by Congress, and in 1983, this honor was accorded, with more or less bipartisan support. The same tribute is no longer extended to the founder of our country George Washington, or to our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, who is still widely honored for ending black slavery. Washington and Lincoln both now share a generic President’s Day that is wedged in between their two birthdays in February. The gallant Southern leader Robert E. Lee, whose birthday coincides with King’s and who after 1983 was to be co-celebrated in Southern states along with the black civil rights leader, has now fallen upon exceedingly hard times. Lee has become a non-person or even worse, someone identified with Southern slavery, although there is nothing to suggest that this Christian gentleman favored that institution or that he led the Confederate forces in Virginia for any reason other than the one he gave upon turning down an invitation to command the Union army—to protect his ancestral state against invasion.

There is a very clear relation to be drawn between these two recent developments, as my longtime friend Sam Francis delighted in pointing out. The replacement of Lee and Washington, who were related through Washington’s wife Martha, by King as the center of a public cult signaled a true “iconic revolution” in our country. Nor was this revolution in consciousness likely to end with the congressional enshrinement of King or with the public acknowledgement of his birthday. Every January, there takes place an orgy of guilt-tripping and pseudo-Christian penance, one that seems to become shriller and more robotized with the passing of time. There is also in the U.S. a relation between the downplaying of Christmas, which is being reduced here no less than in Britain to a “holiday season,” and King’s birthday in mid-January, which is followed by Black History Month, formerly know as Febuary. What the new liturgical season highlights is King’s martyrdom in 1968, when he was assassinated while leading a garbage employees’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the need for national atonement for our country’s long embedded white racism. This penance, which is a post-Christian form of Lent, goes on through Black History Month and is then resumed for another putative victim group during Women’s Month. Although the establishment Right (that is, GOP operatives and neoconservative journalists) and the Left disagree on how this sacral calendar is to be observed, they all see eye-to-eye on its contents.

The dispute here resembles nothing so much as the councils of the early Church that were devoted to clarifying the nature of Christ. Instead of the strife released over whether the concept of homoousia or that of homoiousia properly described the nexus between the first two members of the Trinity, we now have a more timely question: Did Martin Luther King, by his suffering and death, release our country from further atonement for racism or must this atonement become even more frenzied because of how his “unfinished mission for racial justice” ended?

Although the Heritage Foundation proclaimed King to be a “Christian theologian” as well as a “great conservative thinker,” the reality is exactly the opposite: this now beatified figure was a self-proclaimed social radical, who provided the god figure of a post-Christian religion, albeit one that is parasitic on Christian narratives. He is living proof of the continuity between Christian images and a now victorious leftist ideology.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to my subject, let me stress that he was not really responsible for this glorification. As far as I know, King could never have imagined how he would be used after his death, any more than Karl Marx could have imagined that his ideas would be cited to justify Soviet tyranny. He might even have had the decency to blush if he had heard our “conservative” presidential candidate John McCain apologizing last spring in Memphis for having not supported the King public holiday soon enough. McCain characterized this failure as “the single biggest mistake in my political life.”

Moreover, there is much about King’s life that should command our respect, and particularly his personal courage. During his crusade against segregation in the Deep South and in his fight for black voting rights in the same region, he stood up against threats to his life. These went on from his participation in the boycott of segregated public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 down to his voting rights march in Selma in 1965. Throughout this period, and actually down to his violent death, King had to deal with hostile opponents, who threatened danger to him and his family. Not surprisingly, he was arrested and put in jail in Birmingham in 1963 for his violation of municipal ordinances. But King also made clear that while he was breaking laws that he found to be unjust, he was also willing to pay the penalty. And in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” penned in 1963, he shows as an ordained Protestant minister at least some acquaintance with theological sources that could be cited, however selectively, to legitimate his stand.

There is also much to object to about racial segregation. In its heyday it was extended to a plethora of public and private institutions, and, from what I recall, Jim Crow made few exceptions for worthy black would-be users of libraries and decent state universities. And Southern whites could have cleaned up this act for generations—before it became a cause célèbre for the Left and government social engineers. While no one comes in second to me in lamenting the effects of the Civil Rights revolution and especially its excesses, it would be foolish to deny that it began with a just cause. The same is of course equally true of other political disasters such as the French Revolution.

As someone whose family suffered grievously under the treaties ending World War One and later under the Nazi regime, it seems to me that complaints about the first were justified even if vicious people later exploited them. And there is no need to believe that by criticizing civil rights activists, one is expressing approval for what they sometimes correctly brought to public attention. Forcing some elderly black lady to sit in the back of a bus because of her skin color is not only degrading. It also provided a moral excuse to get federal bureaucrats and judges into the never-ending enterprise of reconstructing American society—an experiment that has now been extended to every aspect of our communal and commercial lives.

I would even surmise that had the issue of racial segregation not become a major national moral concern, with considerable media assistance, King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would not have been able to move as easily as they did, with broad national endorsement, into mobilizing black voters. Our Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, with disproportionate support from the Republican Party, to ensure federal supervision of areas in the South in which blacks had been kept or were suspected of having been kept from voting. Such steps contributed considerably toward moving our electorate toward the social Left, where about 99% of the black electorate can now be found. The leftward lunge in our presidential politics—represented by the recent victory of social leftist and, as Steve Sailer has revealed, black nationalist, Barack Obama—has been made possible by the changes accompanying the civil rights revolution, namely a large black electorate on the left that supports, with few exceptions, Obama and a white population that has been relentlessly instilled with a sense of racial guilt. Quite possibly, if the South had voluntarily desegregated its institutions, or had displayed more flexibility about race relations, some of this radicalization could have been avoided. By creating an eyesore, Southern whites contributed to the storm that later erupted.

It not hard to show King was a badly flawed public figure. But one can no longer do that in the US without being suspected of being a “rightwing extremist”—often by self-described “conservatives” in the press. King’s frequent acts of plagiarism, extending from his doctoral dissertation to his renowned “I Have a Dream” Speech delivered at the Washington Mall on August 28, 1963, have long been matters of record. One diligent scholar, Theodore Pappas, has devoted an entire work, Plagiarism and the Cultural Wars, to identifying King’s borrowed sources. Pappas proves to what extent King as an orator and author engaged in “voice-dubbing” and “textual borrowing,” as the mainstream media have referred to his frequent verbal thefts.

He was also a notorious philanderer who was not above using his pastoral activities to “counsel” young, voluptuous women. Some of his own advisors complained that his amorous activities got in the way of his political activities, although in his defense it might be argued that he had plenty of time for both. His connection to Communist friends, and most notoriously from 1957 onward to veteran CP activist Stanley Levison, and the pop Marxist phrases that laced his political commentary suggest that King was something other than the “Christian” idealist whom the GOP have discovered in his biography.

In his defense it is questionable whether King would have had anything but contempt for those “conservative” publicists who have tried to turn him into an advocate of free market economics, meritocracy, and war-mongering American patriotism. King already in the 1950s had called for government-introduced racial quotas in employment; he was also demonstrably a socialist with Marxist overtones in economics, and he famously denounced the Vietnam War as a struggle that hurt blacks by delaying their quest for equality. Although King had indeed just grievances, at least in the beginning of his career, his politics quickly descended into those of his disciple Jesse Jackson.

But my purpose is not to run him down. It is rather to stress his unsuitability for the role into which he was thrust after his death. I still recall standing in line to buy stamps in a post office in 1983 when a mother was explaining to her son who was looking at a newly minted stamp: “No, that’s not the famous Martin Luther. It’s a monk who was born five-hundred years ago, somewhere in Europe.” This woman had, if anything, understated King’s rising value, which was not to replace the father of the Protestant Reformation but Luther’s savior. For this is certainly what King has become, a martyred deity, in today’s American political culture.

The De-Niggering of Huck Finn

Much is made in the mainstream media of the alleged perfidy of certain revisionist historians on the Right, whom they accuse of falsifying documents, whitewashing, and distorting history to suit a political agenda. Yet, alert students of history know well enough that the Left is not above revisionism. Indeed, in Leftists we find yet another example of accusers who are guilty of doing similar things they accuse others of doing, and who, in fact, do it on a much wider scale. Leftist revisionism is not limited to history, but extends even to classic works of literature. The latest example of politically motivated revisionism was reported by the BBC earlier today:  

Furore over 'censored' edition of Huckleberry Finn

A new edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is causing controversy because of the removal of a racially offensive word.

Twain scholar Alan Gribben says the use of the word "nigger" had prompted many US schools to stop teaching the classic.

In his edition, Professor Gribben replaces the word with "slave" [219 times] and also changes "injun" to "Indian".

. . .

Two days ago, the publisher, New South Books, posted this on their website:

In a bold move compassionately advocated by Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben and embraced by NewSouth, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn also replaces two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words, this intended to counter the “preemptive censorship” that Dr. Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists nationwide.

According to the BBC, the publisher has received dozens of telephone calls and hundreds of emails protesting the falsification of Mark Twain’s work. Noteworthy is the fact that the act of censorship is being presented as the well-intentioned exact opposite. Could it be that Professor Gribben was so frustrated by the self-censorship pervading centres of learning that he saw his revision of the original text as making the best of a bad job? The Irish Times reports:

“Let’s get one thing straight,” says Gribben, an Aubern University professor who has been vilified by both the left and right. “Mark Twain was a notoriously commercial and populist author. If he was alive today and all he had to do was change one word to get his book into every schoolhouse in America, he couldn’t change it fast enough.”

To which the Irish Times reporter repliers:

But he isn’t here and he can’t answer for himself. Maybe Twain would have screamed in indignation that his work was being robbed of its original meaning.

Indeed, Mark Twain was sensitive about his prose. The BBC again:

Mark Twain did not take kindly to editing.

He is quoted as saying that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter".

And when a printer made punctuation changes to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain wrote later that he had "given orders for the typesetter to be shot without giving him time to pray".

More egregiously, the self-censorship Professor Gribben is attempting to work around appears driven mainly by spineless White lecturers, not by angry Black students. The Irish Times article highlights this quite well:

Gribben, a likeable straight talker, is adamant that he is not robbing Twain of anything, merely making a small change so that English teachers are no longer embarrassed to read out loud in class.

. . .

I wondered what other black people thought of the N word and whether removing it from Twain would help bury a painful past or save white America from confronting its own history. I was pondering all on the subway on the way home when I heard two black teenagers talking. “Hey nigga, what’s up with you?” said one. The reply was instant “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me nigga, something wrong with you though.”

Enter white Irish reporter with a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a massive avalanche of awkwardness. I stutter through an explanation of my article and show them a few of Mark Twain’s offending passages.

The first, 17-year-old Laurence Johnson, picks up the book, studies it for a moment and shuts it suddenly.

“So he said ‘nigger’. So what? People think slave owners called us African-Americans?” he says loudly. His friend laughs, so do some middle-aged black women sitting nearby, all of whom nod in agreement. Johnson, who is in his final year of high school in Brooklyn, puts himself in the place of a slave owner counting his slaves.

“One, two, three, four . . . damn, we got an African-American escaped up north!”

More laughter, some of the women are clapping their hands. “It’s about the timing,” says one of them, Katicha Spencer, a 42-year-old dental nurse from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. “If some white person said that word to me, I’d be mad as hell. But if it’s from 100 years ago, and it’s someone trying to get the flavour of what people are saying, then that’s what people said. You can’t sugarcoat the past of this country, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen.” Her friends nod in agreement. “Mark Twain’s alright,” says one. “He’s not my boss.” Katicha gives her a high five and they laugh as they leave the train.

Another problem is that similar falsifications are also being effected with minor works of literature, where the arguments given to justify the bowdlerisation of Mark Twain cannot possibly apply. In 2002, Deodant Publishers, printed an edition of Bram Stokers’ Lair of the White Worm, with some. . . cosmetic alterations. An Amazon reviewer noted:

this Deodand version is not the original. It has been edited. One word has been changed throughout the book, but only in specific places: The 'good guys' do not say the "N" word, they say "native." The 'bad guys' use the "N" word.  

I do not remember any public debate triggered by the bowdlerisation of this book, which makes me wonder about the extensiveness of this practice, and whether we can trust modern editions of pre-PC literature by classic authors any longer. How many have been quietly edited in this way? How many more will they falsify, whitewash, or distort to suit, conform, or respond to the Left’s political agenda?

It reminds of the Stalinist practice of erasing inconvenient individuals from official photographs, following the individuals’ politically motivated murder. It seems old habits die hard…

Perhaps readers would like to share their views on this subject, in a polite and civilised fashion, with Prof. Alan Gribben (email: agribben@aum.edu).

Similarly, because businesses understand no other language but the once mighty Dollar, you may wish to give the publishers of Prof. Gribben’s revised Twain editions (due out in February) an idea of how enthusiastically you will be rushing to buy your copies: info@newsouthbooks.com.