Spring Cleaning
Joseph Walker is a black playwright who won Tony and Obie awards for his play, “River Niger.” He is also chairmen of the theater department of the Camden, New Jersey campus of Rutgers University, and is reportedly trying to cleanse the department of inferiors. Thomas Behrens, who is white, was recently removed by Mr. Walker from his job as the department’s technical director. Mr. Behrens claims that Mr. Walker has told other employees that Africans are a superior race and that he intends to rid the department of all whites.
Into the Lead
Washington, DC, which has for years been the murder capital of the nation, has lost that distinction to Gary, Indiana. In 1993, the city of 119,125 had 110 killings, which gives it a rate of 93 per 100,000. Washington has only about 75 murders per 100,000. What makes Gary so dangerous? According to the 1990 census, its population was 80 percent black, whereas that of the nation’s capital was only 66 percent black. Gary’s blacks are approaching the unhappy distinction of killing off one of every thousand inhabitants every year.
It is instructive to compare the murder rates of these two cities with that of the nation as a whole, which is about 9.5 per 100,000. It is even more instructive to compare them with rates for areas that are still overwhelmingly white. Iowa (96 percent white) and New hampshire (98 percent white) both had murder rates in 1992 of 1.6 per 100,000.
In the province of Ontario, Canada, police forces are under orders from the provincial government to mirror the proportions of non-whites, women, and disabled people (!) in the general population. At least three jurisdictions have decided that the quickest way to accomplish this is to stop hiring white men. Advertisements for new police recruits now warn, “This competition is open to women and aboriginal persons only.” Brian Charlton, an official in the province’s ruling New Democratic Party, explains that in order to meet diversity goals, it may be necessary to keep white men out of government jobs for as long as 15 years. “It’s fair,” he explains, “because it eliminates a discrimination that has been going on
U.S. in Hot Pursuit
The Los Angeles Fire Department is eagerly wooing non-whites but forbids whites to apply for jobs. As many as 10,000 whites may have been prevented from taking the most recent employment exam, so that the city can be sure to hire more non-whites. The department is under a 1981 court order to diversify, and has tried everything — “non-biased” exams, different grading schemes for different races, advertising for vacancies only in ethnic publications, fudging the scores of non-whites — but to no avail. The only way to keep those annoying white people from being the best qualified is to prevent them from taking the test.
Northwestern High School in Dade County, Florida is crumbling and is to be replaced. The school board has decided to accept construction bids from black-owned firms only. The contract, which is expected to be for more than $40 million, could be the largest ever awarded to a black-owned company.
The Texas legislature recently passed a law that establishes new requirements for trucking companies that seek licenses to operate on new routes within the state. Owners who are women or non-white need only demonstrate that they are capable of operating the new route. White-owned companies must show, in addition, that there is a market demand for their services. For the time being, the law has been set aside by a judge but non-white truckers will appeal the ruling.
Novel Asylum Claim
In many African countries, it is common to mutilate the genitals of young girls. The procedure usually involves removal of the clitoris and labia minora and is ordinarily done without anesthetic, using a razor blade or a piece of glass. The purpose of the operation is to keep women from taking pleasure in sex, thereby ensuring virginity until marriage and faithfulness thereafter. Many African men think that unmutilated women are no better than prostitutes, and refuse to marry them. The tradition is therefore carried on by tribal women who want to make sure their daughters are marriageable.
Now, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria has won asylum in the United States, claiming that if she is sent home her five- and six-year-old daughters will be forced to undergo the procedure. The mother, Lydia Oluloro, says it was done to her by female relatives at about age four, and she wants to spare her daughters. They “are American girls,” she explains. Mrs. Oluloro’s former husband, also Nigerian, thinks her opposition to the traditional practice is bogus. He says she was always in favor of genital mutilation and had a change of heart only when the U.S. government started deportation proceedings.
Mrs. Oluloro is the first person to have gained asylum on these grounds. This decision sets a significant precedent: Illegal immigrants from the world’s most barbaric countries have an inside track on asylum claims if deportation would subject them to the traditional practices of their homelands.
Peter Pan Shot Down
The sixth grade class of Southampton Intermediate School on Long Island will not perform the musical, “Peter Pan,” after all. Despite weeks of rehearsal, the principal decided that the show was demeaning to Indians.
Black Hysteria Month
PepsiCo and Time Warner’s Home Box Office (HBO) joined forces in February to help celebrate black history month. The campaign included distribution of a poster and advertisement with a large picture of the pyramids of Egypt and a smaller one of the sphinx. The poster quotes the lyrics of a song that claims blacks built the pyramids but have been denied proper recognition: “We are the builders of the pyramids, look what you did . . . the truth no longer hid.” PepsiCo and HBO sent the celebratory materials to some 20,000 schools and community groups.
In March, the black South African homeland of Bophuthatswana subsided into chaos over whether to take part in the multi-racial elections that will be held in April. A number of white commandos drove to the assistance of the government, which opposed participation, but by the time they arrived, the government had changed its mind. A number of commandos were killed and wounded in the confused fire fight that ensued, and two wounded men lay in the baking sun surrounded by a dozen white journalists and television cameramen. Grimacing with pain, they told journalists where they were from, and why they had come to fight. They asked for water and for someone to call an ambulance. Instead, a black policemen walked up and shot the two men dead.
One cannot help but be reminded of a similar incident that took place in Saigon during the Vietnam war. As the television cameras rolled, the city’s chief of police dispatched a young communist with a shot in the head. There was much lamentation in the media over the abrupt denial of the young man’s civil rights, and the incident became a symbol for the cruelty and barbarism of the South Vietnamese. There has, of course, been no such outcry over Fanie Uys and Alwyn Walfaardt, who were calmly murdered as they lay in their own blood.
The fate of those two men was at least reported. At about the same period, black gunmen burst into an integrated church service in the South African town of East London. They ordered the three whites in the congregation to line up against a wall and then executed them. This incident was described in the last paragraph of an article on South Africa that appeared on page 72 of the March 15 issue of the Boston Globe.
Third-World Moves a Step Closer
Whatever else goes on in this country, people generally assume that elections are fair. It may no longer be possible to take this for granted. A federal judge has ruled that a Democratic candidate for the Pennsylvania senate won election illegally last November and should be removed from office. William Stinson stole the election from a Republican with an elaborate scheme of voter fraud that involved wide-spread forgery of absentee ballots. The fraud required the cooperation of black and Hispanic residents, who voted by proxy for people who were living in Puerto Rico, were in prison, or were dead.
Two Democrats on the three-member board of elections have confessed that they knew about the fraud but covered it up and hurriedly certified Mr. Stinson as the winner. The court at first ruled that the senate seat should be given to the Republican, Bruce Marks, but a more recent ruling requires that the ballots be recounted. According to a Chicago organization called Legal Elections in All Precincts, absentee ballot fraud is increasingly common in jurisdictions with large numbers of Hispanics.
Disparate Impact
For some time now it has been against the law to set high job standards for employees, if standards are more likely to disqualify non-whites. Harris County, Texas, has been found guilty of racial discrimination because it required jailers to read at the 12th grade level. Sixty percent of black applicants failed the reading test as opposed to 24 percent of whites. The county must now find 200 blacks who were denied jobs because of this racist procedure, make them jailers, and give them each $3,000 in back pay. No such effort will be made for any of the whites who failed the test.
Likewise, the Dayton Power and Light Company must pay $992,000 to 121 non-whites who failed something called the Meter Reading Scale Test. The test was too hard for them but white aspiring meter readers somehow managed to pass it.
Destroy and Try Again
Newark, New Jersey, is following the lead of many American cities and is blowing up high-rise welfare housing. On March 6th, the city set off 3,800 pounds of explosives, destroying four 13-story apartment buildings in the Christopher Columbus Homes. The buildings were evacuated and closed in 1990, after the city decided it could not control crime and degeneracy among the residents. In its account of the demolition, The New York Times (March 7, 1994) blamed the buildings themselves, saying that “tall housing projects were ill-conceived social experiments.”
The buildings worked perfectly well so long as most of the occupants were white. They went up in 1956 as an inexpensive way to house workers who moved North after the Second World War. Tall housing projects became an “ill-conceived social experiment” only after welfare-dependent blacks began living in them. Even some former residents realize that the problem was not architectural. “It’s not a bad idea [high-rise buildings],” said one; “It’s a bad idea when the Housing Authority doesn’t screen the families moving in.”
Newark, like many other cities, has decided that underclass blacks can be saved if they are sprinkled lightly through middle-class and white neighborhoods. One problem with this strategy is that Newark already has a large black population and that moving the underclass into the remaining pleasant neighborhoods, is sure to drive away taxpayers.
Folly Knows No Bounds
The state of New York tests all newborn babies for the HIV virus, but it does not report the results to the mothers. The purpose of anonymous testing is solely to track the progress of the disease, and not even the doctors and nurses know which babies are infected.
A bill in the state assembly would require that mothers be told the results of the test, but the state’s AIDS Advisory Council has rejected this plan. Its argument is that a newborn can have the virus only if the mother does, and telling her the baby is infected is tantamount to testing and informing the mother without her consent. So, are infected mother and child to be left in the dark? No, the Advisory Council wants to continue with anonymous testing, but to fund a program that would counsel all new mothers voluntarily to have themselves and their babies tested for AIDS.
To recapitulate: The state already tests all babies. The AIDS Council wants to pay for counseling to persuade mothers voluntarily to be retested so they can learn the results of a test that has already been done. This would not only require doing the work twice, but would mean that mothers with practically no chance of having AIDS must be badgered with horror stories so that they will take the test. The irresponsible mothers most likely to have AIDS will still be free to live in ignorance of the fact that they can give the virus to their sex partners or their next children.
Shark is a white-owned company that makes a popular brand of black hair products called African Pride. When a black-owned company launched a line of similar products, Shark sued to protect its trademarks. Black activists denounced the law suit and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition persuaded one Birmingham drug store chain to stop carrying Shark products in its 350 stores. Shark promptly decided to stop defending its trademark. It took out newspaper ads, apologizing for the law suit and stressed that 76 percent of its employees are black.
Fact or Fiction?
On Jan. 14th, white police officers in Texarkana, Texas shot and killed a black woman who had opened fire on them. On March 11, the case was duly taken before the grand jury, even though the killing seemed entirely justified to everyone but blacks. It was widely expected that the grand jury would find no reason to indict the officers, and word quickly spread that blacks were going to riot. With memories of Los Angeles still fresh, many whites believed rumors that busloads of black gang members were on their way from the West Coast to help the locals tear up the town and kill whites.
For a few days, many whites stayed home from school and did not go shopping or to restaurants. The only businesses that boomed were gun dealers. One Wal-Mart store completely sold out of bullets. The area’s popular Central Mall was deserted; according to rumors, it had been burned to the ground. As expected, the grand jury failed to indict, but blacks did not riot. Now they are accusing whites of racism for fearing that they would.
Citizen Outrage
One of the latest schemes by blacks to get money from whites is to try to pass laws that would make the government pay reparations for slavery (see AR cover stories, June and July, 1993). In a letter to the editor of The San Francisco Chronicle of Feb. 24th, a reader reacted with refreshing outrage:
No! No! No! No! Yet another attempt by the black ‘community’ to levy, by coercion, a guilt tax on the rest of us! Yet another attempt by underachieving, separatist blacks to obtain, by legal fiat, what they are incapable of achieving through honest hard work . . .
Someone had better explain to them that when the internal parasite becomes too greedy, it kills its host and thereby commits suicide.
When in God’s name, is enough, finally enough?
Like Tenpins
Earlier this year, a black 18-year-old named Calvin Settle found a discarded bowling ball and decided to drop it from a Jersey City overpass onto the cars below. The ball bounced off the bumper of an 18-wheel truck, smashed through the windshield of an oncoming station wagon and went out through a rear window. When the shocked driver pulled over to inspect the damage, he found that the bowling ball had struck and killed his eight-month-old daughter.