When Will They Learn?

The headline of a recent story in the Detroit Free Press (April 9, 1993) is almost a perfect summation of the problems we face and why we face them: “Black Students Score Lower on Math Test: Educators Blame Poor Resources.”

Dire Threats at MSU

At Michigan State University in Lansing, minority students have discovered a new way to get the administration to bow to their demands: They have threatened to change their official registration to “white.” They know that MSU, like all other American universities is under tremendous pressure to recruit more non-whites. [MSU Students Threaten to Yank Minority Status, Detroit News, 4/18/93.] The possibility that they may refuse to let themselves be counted for affirmative action purposes strikes fear in the hearts of bean-counting administrators.

The Price of Diversity

Texas courts used to call on registered voters to serve as jurors. Now the state is encouraging courts to send jury summonses to anyone with a driver’s license, since registered voters tend to be disproportionately white, and not enough non-whites were getting on juries.

The change has been met with a collective groan of annoyance from the state’s judicial system. Jurors used to be law-abiding, English-speaking citizens who respected the courts and were reasonably well informed. Now, many potential jurors have criminal records, speak no English, are not citizens, and have no idea how the adversarial justice system works. Also, they are less likely to answer the call for jury duty. Harris County, for example, found that in order to get enough jurors, it had to increase the number of weekly summonses from 8,000 to 13,000. [John Makeig, “Disorder in the Court,” Houston Chronicle, 4/13/93, p. 9A.]

Discriminating to the Bone

Recently a Chicago woman who is a frequent blood donor decided to register as a potential bone marrow donor. She learned that she had to pay $75.00 as part of the registration process, but that if she had not been white, the federal government would have picked up the tab.

The human body is very finicky about whose marrow it will accept, and cross racial transplants almost always fail. Very few non-whites volunteer as marrow donors (or as blood or organ donors) so the government encourages them by discriminating in their favor. [Donor Questions, Letters, Chicago Tribune, 5/3/93.]

Discrimination Starts Young

Although it is fashionable to claim that people must be taught to notice racial differences, a recent study by Lawrence Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan confirms that most children are well aware of race by age three. He showed children of various races a drawing of a fat black child and a drawing of a fat white man, a normal white man, and a normal black man. He then asked the children which of the adults was the father of the fat child. A few three-year-olds guessed it might be the fat white man, but 65 percent chose the black man. By age four, 75 percent chose the black man and by age seven 100 percent did so. Dr. Hirschfeld also found that children of all races think that children with one black and one white parent are black. [Elizabeth Atkins, “Kids Influenced by race at early age, study says,” Detroit News, 3-26-93, p. 1B.]

Here They Come

Since September 1991, when Haiti’s President Jean Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a military coup, 40,000 Haitians have fled their country, mainly to the United States. There are several countries closer to Haiti and it has a land border with the Dominican Republic, but the U.S., with its easy welfare and free medical care, is the favorite destination.

Most of the latest wave of boat people were returned to Haiti after their claims of political persecution were found to be false. However, 138 were in legal limbo for as long as 20 months because they were thought to have valid refugee claims but were infected with the AIDS virus. The law says that anyone with a valid fear of persecution cannot be returned to his country but the law also says that HIV carriers cannot be admitted. The Haitians were therefore lodged at the Guantanamo naval base while America pondered their dilemma.

It is not as though there was no solution. The government could presumably have tried to find some other country to take them, but there is no indication that it tried. In June, District Court Judge Sterling Johnson ruled that the 138 sick Haitians had to be brought to the United States, and they were duly admitted. All are paupers and are expected to go on welfare. It costs $100,000 to care for an AIDS patient from the time he is diagnosed until he dies. Judge Johnson is black.

To their credit, 41 U.S. Congressmen were unhappy enough about Judge Johnson’s decision to write President Clinton, asking him to order the Justice Department to appeal the ruling. The President has done nothing. [Jerry Seper, Clinton urged to appeal ruling on HIV Haitians, Wash Times, 6/16/93, p. A3.]

African Plea Bargain

A young boy recently died in the remote Ivory Coast village of Gahatou. A woman who had been caring for him accused Helene Manou of killing him with witchcraft. Miss Manou went to the police to complain of slander. She denied killing the boy, but admitted that she ate the corpse. She, and two other women who, between them, had reportedly eaten four people, were sentenced to five years in jail for cannibalism. [3 cannibals jailed in Ivory Coast, Memphis Commercial Appeal, 4/27/93.]

It’s a Black Thing . . .

The latest fashion among young urban blacks is gang jewelry. These are rings, necklaces, and earrings with elaborate initials like BD for Black Disciples or GD for their Chicago rival, the Gangster Disciples. Other popular designs are gleaming, miniature Uzis, AK-47s, and Tec-9s, which customers ask for by model and caliber. Earrings are often shaped like daggers, dollar signs, or marijuana leaves.

Customers walk into jewelry stores with fat wads of 20-dollar bills and pay cash. One store owner reports that some buyers are so young they cannot count into the hundreds; they just spread a wad of bills across the counter and tell the owner to take the right amount.

Some stores do custom work, such as setting diamond chips into gang logos or making one-off pieces from crude drawings brought in by customers. “If you have some [of this jewelry] on, girls notice you,” explains a high-school age buyer; “You shine a little bit and people want to be with you.”

Most of the jewelry, however, is made of 10-carat gold, which jewelers consider second-rate. Customers do not seem to mind. “Tomorrow is not necessarily going to come for them,” explains one Chicago dealer, “so a piece that will last tomorrow is not important.” [Robert Blau & David Jackson, Jewelry to die for, Chicago Tribune, 5/22/93, p. 1.]

Jewelry makers can look forward to younger and younger customers. Teachers in slum schools report that boys are already members of violent proto-gangs by the third or fourth grade, and second-graders turn in gang insignia as art assignments. John West, principal of one South Chicago school, says that in a fourth-grade science class, he asked students for examples of machines. The first reply was “machine gun.” In January, Mr. West joined a first grade class that was watching President Clinton’s inauguration. Some of the children told him they were watching the funeral of what must have been a very high-ranking gang member. [Louise Kiernan, Gangs getting younger, but no less deadly,Chi Tribune, 5/27/93, p. 1.]

Another Black Thing . . .

In June, the Chicago Bulls won its third straight professional basketball championship, and blacks celebrated in what has come to be their usual style. They looted and rioted, took shots at police officers and killed two people. The city spent several million dollars on police overtime, and put four times as many officers on the street as on an ordinary night. Mike Royko reports in the June 22 Chicago Tribune that this lowered the over-all crime rate for the evening:

There were so many cops on duty and visible that the gangbangers, muggers, head-busters, porch-climbers and window-crawlers were unable to engage in their usual hot summer night activities.

He concludes, tongue in cheek, that 700 arrests during the celebration is an encouragingly small fraction of the population of a city of seven million. [Mike Royko, Bulls’ celebration ought to be a gas,’ Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1993, Sec. 1.]

It’s a Korean Thing . . .

Darow Han and Ha-Nan Che are two suburbia-reared Korean Americans, who met while they were studying at Columbia University. Model minorities? Not exactly. They have formed a rap duo called Fists of Fury. Here is a sample of their “lyrics:”

The AsAm Nation’ll go blow to blow
With any white racist
honkytonk motherf***er
Maybe get a maggot like the
stupid-ass trucker —
Reginald Denny —
And now I’m in a frenzy,
If I see a pale face I don’t
feel friendly

[Gerard Lim, Fists of fury take to the streets with rap’s invective and vision, AsianWeek, April 30, 1993, p. 10.]

It’s a Hmong Thing . . .

The Hmong are among the most primitive people ever to have immigrated to this country. They are Laotian hill tribesmen who had no written language until 30 years ago, when missionaries devised one for them. Boatloads of Hmong came to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, along with other South East Asian refugees. Of the 125,000 who now live in America, 62 percent are on welfare.

The Hmong have brought their quaint marriage practices with them to America. There is a common saying among Hmong men that if a man marries a woman his own age, by the time she has given him all the children he wants she will look twice his age. To avoid that problem, the men take brides as young as age 12 and 13. Hmong mothers then go on to have an average of 9.5 children each.

Snatching the girl by force is a time-honored courtship practice. The man abducts the girl, takes her to his family’s home, and stops on the doorstep. The groom’s father blesses the couple with a live chicken in a 30-second ritual and the bride becomes part of the family. The bride’s parents ordinarily do not learn of the ceremony until it is over. Then the elders of each family sit down together over a bottle of whiskey and work out a bride price-usually $2,000 to $5,000 in cash.

In California, where many Hmong live, sex with a girl not yet 15 is a felony, and a girl under 18 must get court permission in order to marry. The Hmong simply ignore the law; an estimated 70 percent of Hmong girls marry before age 17. [Mark Arax, California’s Child Brides, SF Examiner & Chronicle, 5/16/93, p. 4.] There have been a few attempted prosecutions for rape and abduction, but convictions are almost impossible to get because the victims refuse to testify against their husbands.

Fit to Print

In May, two 25-year-old white women were raped, sodomized, beaten, robbed, and terrorized for two hours in their swish New York apartment house. The New York Post described the suspect thus: “A muscular black man, 5-10 to 6-feet tall, wearing a red sweatshirt and dark pants.” This was the New York Times’ version: “The attacker is estimated to be between 25 and 30 years old, muscular and 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall. He was wearing a red long-sleeve sweatshirt, the police say.” [Larry Celona & Sandy Gonzalez, 2 women in rape nightmare, NY Post, 5/27/93, p. 2. Man rapes and robs 2 women in Chelsea, NYT, 5/27/93, p. B4.]

Awkward Facts

Blacks in Little Rock, Ark. have been complaining about police racism, pointing out that although blacks are one third of the population they account for two thirds of the arrests. Police Chief Louie Caudell then ordered a survey to find out if the races of the criminals who get away are the same as those who are caught. He chose to study robbery, assault and battery, and rape, because the victim almost always gets a good enough look at the perpetrator to know what his race is. He found that blacks commit 93 percent of Little Rock’s robberies, 81 percent of the rapes, and 75 percent of the assaults and batteries. A survey of witnesses suggests that blacks also commit 83 percent of the murders. Black leaders have attacked the report as biased. [Olivier Uyttebrouck, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 4/14/93.]

Power of Suggestion

The Denny’s restaurant chain has lately been accused of discrimination against black customers. Since initial charges were filed, there have been thousands of similar claims made against the chain. All of these plaintiffs are to be represented in a class-action law suit.

This brings to mind another corporation that has recently been in the news. People in at least 23 states claim to have found hypodermic needles, bullets, and other strange things in cans of Pepsi Cola. The initial claim may have been a genuine mistake, but all subsequent ones appear to be false accusations prompted by the publicity given to the first one. [Ronald Ostrow & Eric Malnic, Feds report no evidence of nationwide tampering, LA Times, 6/18/93. Jerry Urban, Denny’s again accused of bias, Houston Chronicle, 6/18/93.]

Another Churchill in the News

Winston Churchill, grandson of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, is a Tory party member of parliament. Late in May, he drew the ire of the orthodox by saying publicly what many Britons feel privately: that the British way of life is threatened by a “relentless flow of immigrants.” Even the current Tory Prime Minister, John Major, joined in the criticism.

Mr. Churchill is unrepentant. He claims that despite the widespread public condemnation, many colleagues, including government ministers, have privately expressed their agreement. [William Schmidt, A Churchill Draws Fire With Remark on Race,” NYT, June 6, 1993]

Tried and Convicted

Students at the University of California at Berkeley have held a mock trial of “the American consciousness” and have found it guilty of “apathy towards the oppression of people.” The verdict came after more than two hours of testimony from students enrolled in a “course” called “Martin and Malcolm: Flipsides of the Same Black Revolutionary Coin.”

Whites were accused of all the usual sins, but a student who represented the voice of Martin Luther King did take time out to mount a defense of “the American consciousness.” The audience of 400 greeted him with hisses and boos. After the verdict was in, black senior Rochelle Brock closed with the words, “Wait and do nothing, America, and you will burn.” [J. Yentsun Tseng, Class puts America on Trial, Daily Californian, April 26, 1993, p. 4.]

Books We Missed

The May issue of the “Book of the Month Club News” is offering readers a book called Negrophobia, described as follows:

A racist blond teenager falls under a voodoo spell and becomes ‘Alice in Negroland’ in this outrageous and controversial debut, ‘by far the best novel to emerge from New York’s Lower East Side literary scene.’(Kirkus Reviews)

A Lyrical Defense

Ronald Howard is a member of the Houston gang called the Five Deuce Hoover Crips, which requires that members commit murder as part of their initiation. He killed a state trooper, was arrested, and has been convicted of murder. During his trial, the defense argued that Mr. Howard was brain washed by violent anti-police rap “lyrics” and was therefore not fully responsible for his crime. To sway the jury, the lawyer played a recording of the sort of thing Mr. Howard listens to and turned the volume up loud enough to make windows rattle. Reporters noted that Mr. Howard, who had been impassive throughout the trial, nodded his head in time to the beat. [Ross Ramsey, “Violent lyrics swayed teen, defense says,” Houston Chronicle, 6/15/93, p. 15.A.]