Newark (NJ) has the highest rate of auto theft in the country. Most of the thieves are black, teen-age boys. Sometimes they strip the cars of valuable parts, which they sell to auto parts dealers, but most of the time they steal cars just for thrills.
Almost every night, young car thieves — many of them too young even to hold a legal license — gather with their trophies at the parking lot of Harold Wilson School on Mohammed Ali Avenue. There they imitate car chase scenes from movies, rolling and smashing other people’s late model cars. There is likewise great fun to be had from “riding ghost” (driving at night without headlights) and “chase to kill” (automobile tag on city streets).
At one time, the Newark police worked very hard to catch these young criminals. However, after several inexperienced drivers were badly injured in high-speed chases, the police were forbidden to pursue them. The thieves quickly learned about the new restrictions, and have taken to ramming patrol cars in the hope of provoking an illegal chase. Now it is the police who must run away from criminals so as to avoid injury, or damage to their patrol cars.
For the thieves, wrecking cars is an essential part of the fun. As one 15-year-old explains, “I drive, crash a couple of them, dump them and go get some more.” A 13-year-old, who has been known to steal as many as five cars in 12 hours, explains that “it just makes you be happy.” These youngsters feel no remorse for what they do because, as another 13-year-old explains, “we take from other races.”
White Man on the War Path
Salamanca (NY) is the only town in the nation that is completely surrounded by an Indian reservation. Salamanca was founded in the early 1800s, before the Seneca Indian reservation was established. Ownership of the land was then transferred to the Indians, but in 1892, they signed 99-year leases with the townspeople.
Now the leases are coming up for renewal, and the Seneca smell blood. They have put up prices by an average of 1,200 percent and are offering terms of no more than 40 years. They also claim that any improvements to the land — houses, farms, electricity, plumbing — belong to them.
Salamanca residents are furious. Last fall, they voted out the old City Council that had meekly agreed to the new arrangements, and put in a completely new slate of fighters. One resident had his house put up on jacks and moved it out of the reservation. Fifty others have received permission to blow up their houses with dynamite rather than hand them over to Indians. The city has sued the state and the Indian tribe. This promises not to be the usual capitulation but a real fight.
Good Sense Prevails
The federal Department of Education has finally ordered a university to stop discriminating against white applicants. In September, the department told the law school of the University of California at Berkeley that it could no longer hold open approximately one quarter of each class for minorities and admit them with qualifications well below those of whites.
This is the first time any university or graduate school has been found to be in violation of civil rights laws because of discrimination against whites (and against Asians). Ironically, the Assistant Secretary of Education who put a stop to Berkeley’s formal program of discrimination is a black named Michael Williams. In today’s topsy-turvy America, it takes a black man to order white people to stop discriminating against whites. If discrimination against blacks or Hispanics had been discovered, Berkeley law school would surely have been ordered to find the rejected applicants and offer them compensation. No such effort will be made for whites and Asians.
The way the University of California at Berkeley has handled race-exclusive scholarships over the years is almost a capsule history of America’s confusion about race.
Up until the mid-1960s, Berkeley was happy to accept money that was earmarked for students of a specific race. Most but not all such gifts were for white students. In 1964, Berkeley got nervous about race-specific scholarships, and although it continued to administer the ones it had, it announced that it would accept no more. Five years later, it got even more nervous and announced that it would violate the wishes of earlier donors and would remove racial restrictions on all scholarship money.
Berkeley actually held firm to this rule for a while, and in the name of consistency it turned down $10 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that was to go to poor, non-white, lady medical students. In 1977, however, the university got the affirmative action bug and started accepting money earmarked for non-whites. It turned up its nose at anyone who proposed to give money for whites.
This year, Berkeley returned to the pre-Civil Rights era. In September, the board of regents voted unanimously to accept $500,000 from a women who specified that the money be given to “very poor American Caucasian academic scholars.” Berkeley’s chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien, explained that the gift “would not have any impact on the number of minorities on campus.”
Hoist by Their Own Petard
Walter E. Kimm is a white man who began to wonder why he could never even get an interview for a job at Brookdale Community College, near Asbury Park (NJ). In Dec. 1989 he decided to find out. He applied twice for a job as an admissions officer, once using his own name and once using the fictitious name of Suzy Ming Cheng. The résumé he concocted for Miss Cheng was essentially the same as his own.
Sure enough, Mr. Kimm was not offered an interview but Miss Cheng was. Mr. Kimm showed up for Miss Cheng’s appointment and explained the situation to a startled admissions committee. The committee reluctantly interviewed him but ranked him last out of 19 candidates and gave the job to a non-white. Not surprisingly, Mr. Kimm was the only white man to be interviewed.
Administrative Law Judge Daniel B. McKeown has, mirabile dictu, ruled that Brookdale Community College discriminated against Mr. Kimm. He has ordered the college to pay Mr. Kimm $500 and to pay a fine of $2,000.
Brookdale is impenitent and has appealed the ruling to the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights. Martin Barger, the school’s lawyer, has no regrets about what was done to Mr. Kimm. “Not only do we not deny it,” he says, “we are proud of it.” As Mr. Barger implicitly points out, affirmative action depends on discrimination against whites. “If we are stuck going through the straight resume process . . . [h]ow is any minority going to get a job at Brookdale?” he asks.
Religious Freedom
Santeria is an African-Cuban cult that is a mixture of voodoo, Christianity, and animism. Immigration has brought it to the United States and it is flourishing in Florida and California. One of the central practices of Santeria is animal sacrifice, often conducted in the presence of children.
In San Francisco, where at least 500 sheep, dogs, snakes, roosters, and turtles are killed in Santeria rituals every year, a movement is afoot to ban animal sacrifice. Santeria cultists claim this would violate their freedom of religion.
Los Angeles and Hialeah (FL) have already passed local ordinances forbidding Santeria sacrifices. Priests of the cult have challenged the ordinances, which are now before the Supreme Court.
Texas Train Wreck
Last month we reported that one of Governor Ann Richards’ Hispanic political protégés, Lena Guerrero, was under fire for having lied about her academic record. She has since resigned from her appointed position on the Texas Railroad Commission, but the governor is standing by her. Miss Guerrero has decided to run for election to the Commission, and Gov. Richards spoke at a fund-raising event for her. She also hosted a reception for Miss Guerrero at the governor’s mansion.
Hispanics do not seem to understand what the fuss was about. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) “applauds and supports” Miss Guerrero and calls her a “tremendous role model for the Hispanic community.”
Regicide at Memphis
Racial friction has killed off the tradition of the homecoming queen at Memphis State University. The school has a large number of black students and in both 1989 and 1990, the homecoming queens were black. When the university crowned a white queen in 1991, blacks repudiated her. The outgoing queen defied tradition and refused to crown the new queen. The university sees no way out of the problem and has decided to end the tradition of homecoming queens.
Notes From the Underground
The New Republic of Oct. 5 reports on some of the more lurid doings of today’s feminists. At a recent conference, a black lesbian spoke of how much pain it had caused her when her “lesbian support group” broke up along racial lines. The New Republic continues:
Tension then developed in her black group between those whose lovers were black and those whose lovers were white. Those of us in the group who had white lovers were immediately targeted. . . It turned into a horrible mess. . . I ended up leaving that group for self-protection.
Even liberals have a hard time being liberal.
The Wormy Apple
Last year, a 6-year-old Brooklyn boy had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors thought he had a brain tumor and scheduled him for surgery. Just in time, a pediatrician discovered the real problem — tape worms had attacked the boy’s brain.
The ordinary way to get tape worm is to eat the undercooked meat of infected pigs. However, the pork sold in America is almost never infected, and the Brooklyn boy’s family kept a kosher diet, which forbids pork. How did the boy get tape worms?
As it happens, the family had employed several Central Americans to work as cooks and baby sitters. Many Central Americans are infected with tape worms and excrete worm eggs in their feces. If they have bad sanitary habits, some of this egg-laced feces can get into the food they prepare. The unfortunate 6-year-old probably ingested tape worm eggs along with contaminated food.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, which conducted a formal tape worm investigation in Brooklyn, hundreds of Jewish families have employed Central Americans who carried tape worms. There have been at least three other cases of Orthodox Jews who have gotten tape worm from infected servants.
The People Speak
On November 3, Americans rejected George Bush and Ross Perot, and elected Bill Clinton as President. None of the three candidates was ever likely to do very much about the problems this country faces because none understands them.
Nevertheless, for white Americans, Bill Clinton is certainly the worst of the three. Non-whites, whose sense of their own racial interests is highly developed, understood this very well. Blacks voted for Gov. Clinton over President Bush at a rate of 7.5 to one, and Hispanics did likewise at a rate of 2.5 to one. Black women voted for Gov. Clinton at a rate of nearly ten to one.
Whites, who have only a dim sense of their racial interests, nevertheless voted — by a small majority — for George Bush. That is to say, if the electorate had been all white the incumbent would have been reelected. The vote among white women was split evenly, whereas four percent more white men voted Republican than Democrat.
Interestingly, Asians preferred Pres. Bush over Gov. Clinton by a margin of nearly two to one. Asians have a better sense of their racial interests than whites do. At the same time, they are now beginning to face affirmative action discrimination just like whites, and are much more willing to complain about it. Jews, as they generally do, voted heavily Democratic. Their 6.5 to one preference for Gov. Clinton was nearly as lopsided as the black preference.
New racially gerrymandered congressional districts ensured a sharp increase in non-white legislators. There will be 38 blacks in the new House — an increase of 13 — and 17 Hispanics, an increase of ten. Only one black and three Hispanics are Republican. California elected the first-ever Asian congressman: a Korean-American named Jay Kim, who is Republican. Congress will also get its first American Indian in 60 years; Ben Nighthorse Campbell won in a Colorado district. One of the most astonishing non-white successes was Illinois’ election of a black woman, Carol Braun, to the Senate. The state is only 15 percent black.
The rise in the number of non-white officials, along with the inevitable band of non-whites and liberals that Gov. Clinton will appoint in his administration and to the Federal courts, means that government-sanctioned racial discrimination against whites will become more entrenched. “Diversity” will be the watchword in everything from immigration policy to the selection of models for clothing ads. These policies will boost increasing racial consciousness among whites.
Whether they know it or not, the Republicans have a choice. Either they can appeal explicitly to the white majority and put political issues in increasingly racial terms or they can imitate the Democrats and try to appeal to marginals and outsiders. They could win with the first strategy; they will lose with the second.