Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage - the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character or actions, but by the character and actions of a collective of ancestors.
- W.E.B. Du Bois
Everybody has asked the question ... "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
- The Council of Negro Education hails the Supreme Court 'Brown' ruling in 1954.
I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment
Race is real. Nope,
it's not just a "social construct" or a fig newton of your imagination.
Races really exist; and they differ from each other in numerous ways, most
of which are not visible to the eye. Watch the finals of the Olympic mens'
100-meter dash.
- John Derbyshire, National Review.
"It doesn't matter
if a cat is black or white. If it catches mice, it is a good cat."
- Deng Xiaoping
"I am free of all prejudices.
I hate everyone equally."
- WC Fields.
"Diversity — what is
it good for? I think we need homogeneity. Probably the greatest desire
of humanity other than getting sex is avoiding diversity. Mostly, people
can't stand each other. I respect their judgement. Diversity causes nothing
but trouble. Think about it. Do old people want to hang around young people?
No. Do young people want to hang around old people? Generally they would
rather take poison."
- Fred Reed
"If we had to take
a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them
up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause
less problems for the people of Virginia?"
- Pat Buchanan
Clarence Page seems
to accept the outdated "one drop" rule without protest. He told me, "You
and I have been African Americans all our lives; it is too late to change
now." In truth, we have been sequentially "colored," "Negro," "black,"
"African American," and, now, "persons of color." If we were able to navigate
those sociopolitical changes in our identity, dropping the classifications
altogether is not only possible, but also inevitable.
- Ward Connerly
An Ibo may be an Owerri
Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos,
he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an
African. The increasing interactions among peoples of different civilizations
enhance the increased civilisation-consciousness of people that which,
in turn, invigorates invigorates differences and animosities stretching,
or thought to stretch, back deep into history.
- Samuel P Huntingdon, "The Clash of Civilizations"
Fighting racism is
about targets. Not achieving them. Choosing them. Quotas of black people,
as in the South African rugby team, miss the mark. Sport will only be free
of racism when nobody notices ethnic composition. The ideal would be your
record collection. Do you know the precise ratio of black to white music?
Of course not. Positive discrimination is not required because we play
and buy what we want, without thinking or seeing colour. That is true equality.
Witch-hunts of old
men, too entrenched in a bygone era to change their ways, are another dead
end. The goal should be intellectual evolution: to be more tolerant than
the previous generation. It is a forlorn hope that a 65-year-old raised
before mass immigration will think about race with the same sensitivity
as a young person brought up in multicultural Britain.
- Martin Samuel, "The Times"
In America, however
high obstacles may seem, there really is a chance (for minorities) to reach
the top. The availability of role models in the highest places is crucial
in lifting others out of despair. It is not just a few sporting icons who
have achieved that. There is a black woman Secretary of State, there was
recently a black man as head of the armed forces, an African-American serves
on the Supreme Court, another is head of one of Wall Street's most blue-blooded
of firms. And there is a black man with a real shot at becoming president
next year. These are not tokens but real indications of progress. While
Europeans may believe they have fairer societies, how many similar role
models do ethnic minorities have? How many black coaches are there among
Premiership teams? How many black senior judges? Is there any member of
an ethnic minority who has as good a chance in the next few years of becoming
head of a European government as Barack Obama does of becoming US president?
It is only in America, it seems, that racial minorities are really pushing
back the barriers to achievement.
- Gerard Baker, "Super Bowl breakthrough as another colour bar falls",
"The Times" (Feb'07)
What I also felt, however,
was the reality of the Nazi sickness, which has been distanced and diluted
by so many movies with so many Nazi villains that it has become more like
a plot device than a reality. As we regard this broken and pathetic Hitler,
we realize that he did not alone create the Third Reich, but was the focus
for a spontaneous uprising by many of the German people, fueled by racism,
xenophobia, grandiosity and fear. He was skilled in the ways he exploited
that feeling, and surrounded himself by gifted strategists and propagandists,
but he was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable
evil. It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and
fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does
not inoculate us against others.
- Roger Ebert, from his review of "Downfall", "Chicago Sun Times"
White guilt, as Dr.
Shelby Steele defines it, is the "vacuum of moral authority" that resulted
when global white supremacy ended in the period after World War II. In
the context of U.S. politics, Steele cited legislation such as the Civil
Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) as white America's acknowledgement
of the racism it had practiced and its promise to give it up. However,
he argues this very admission of guilt caused white people to be "stigmatized
as racists." White people's attempts to dissociate themselves from this
stigma have resulted in concepts and policies like diversity, welfare,
and affirmative action, which according to Steele validate the nation's
moral authority but do not necessarily effect real change. The concept
of diversity, he claimed, exists for only to allow white people to dissociate
themselves from racism. By including black people, white institutions prove
that they are not racist... Affirmative action, Steele argued, is a system
that sets black people up for failure by putting on them on a higher level
than they ought to be, stigmatizing them as inferior and unable to compete
on their own. It also encourages black people to "trade on race, not talent
or ability," he said. Despite this tendency, Steele said, white guilt does
not apply in certain areas: sports, music, and entertainment. In these
areas, he said, black people settle for nothing less than excellence. Here,
he argued, black people have taken the responsibility for success into
their own hands and worked hard to achieve. This is the kind of work ethic
Steele portrayed as a step toward bridging the gap between white and black
professional performance in the United States.
- Carla Dash, "Tufts Daily" on a Steele lecture
The more Western elites
ignore their own laws, allow unassimilated ethnic ghettos, and profit from
an exploitive labor market, the more their own nations will begin to resemble
the very places immigrants fled from.
- Victor Davis Hanson, "National Review"
PARTY POLITICS
The British and Irish
media left you with the idea that, compared with Clinton, Bush was some
kind of deep-south bigot. That turns truth on its head. In his eight years
at the White House, Clinton never promoted a single black person to high
office. But in his first 48 hours, Bush appointed two blacks to the two
highest offices in the country. Colin Powell is secretary of state, and
Condoleeza Rice is national security adviser.
However, I don't want
to match this left-wing bigotry by claiming that Clinton is a closet racist.
I believe he is happier with blacks when they conform to the white liberal
stereotype of what a black should be, while Bush wants to surround himself
with blacks who are smart, successful and spit in your eye, Clinton prefers
blacks who are poor, victims or behaving badly.
- Eoghan Harris
This is a circus. It
is a national disgrace... a high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks who in
any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different
ideas, and it is a message that, unless you kow-tow to an old order, this
is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured
by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.
- Clarence Thomas, Testimony before Senate Judiciary Committee, 1991.
Americans are becoming
more tolerant of everybody, except the people they disagree with... Ideological
movements used to reinforce racial, ethnic, or class bigotries. For the
last 50 years they've increasingly transcended them. This is an upside
of living in an ideological age — or a downside, depending on how you see
things. And those who bemoan the current polarization need to ask themselves
whether polarization isn't the natural order of things. And, if it is —
and I think it is — isn't this sort of polarization preferable to most
of the other options?
- Jonah Goldberg, "Bowling with the Like-Minded Communities of Tolerance",
"National Review"
"Please do let us know
why it is that my friend Cathy is an ‘out and out racist. I mean in the
dictionary sense of the word ‘racist,’ not in the ‘conservative I dislike’
sense of the word ‘racist.’"
- Eugene Volokh, responding to user remarks on his forum
DISCRIMINATION
Even if it were proved - which it is not - that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevent to one's judgment of him. A genius is still a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race.
- BBC Ceefax 'Facts of the Week'
The brotherhood of men doen not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking in 1967
President Truman freely
used the word 'nigger' among his Southern friends, but when some returning
black GIs were beaten up he made the first move in a chain of legislation
that eventually led (under President Johnson, who was not without prejudice
either) to voter registration by blacks in the South. There have always
been people with prejudice who have nevertheless served justice, whether
out of a supervening idealism, out of expediency, or out of a simple wish
not to be thought provincial by more sophisticated peers. In other words,
there is prejudice and there is prejudice.
- Clive James, from his essay "Hitler's Unwilling Exculpators"
Fifteen years ago,
on April 29, 1992, there occurred the Los Angeles riots, remembered by
most Americans for Rodney King’s plaintive question (May 1, 1992): “Can’t
we all just get along?”
...On a personal level,
we surely can. Most of us have individual colleagues, neighbors, or acquaintances
across the black-white divide whom we like and respect. We get on just
fine with them. Often we date them. Increasingly, according to a recent
survey, we marry them.
The trouble is that
this amity doesn’t scale up. One black person can get on cheerfully and
happily with one white person. Unfortunately that does not get us very
far with America’s problem, which is: Can 36 million black persons get
along with 224 million white persons? That is a different question, about
different things, and it has a different answer.
Numbers, numbers.
A self-conscious, easily identifiable collection of a million people is
not just one person multiplied by a million, appealing as that notion may
be to an individualistic nation like ours. As with any large aggregation
of atomic objects, it has emergent properties that are by no means easy
to deduce from the properties of the individual component atoms. It has
broad statistical features, which the human brain, employing that statistical
computer that is one of its most potent and remarkable means for assuring
the survival of its host organism, renders as stereotypes. It has a culture.
And the statistical features that differentiate one culture from another
may do so in troublesome ways.
- John Derbyshire, "National Review"
An average black American
adult male is 7.4 times more likely to be in jail than his white counterpart.
Why? The Social Science model offers poverty and racism as answers, with
the racism of policemen and judges especially salient. As with the education
gap, these explanations have an exhausted appearance. They were certainly
plausible 40 years ago, when there were few black judges and policemen.
Now entire cities — judges, policemen, and all — are run by black Americans.
Those cities turn out to have the worst black-crime statistics of all!
That 7.4 ratio I gave above was for the nation as a whole. In Washington,
D.C., the ratio is 29.3.
- John Derbyshire, "National Review"
White liberals who
would rather pluck out their eyeballs than let their kids attend a majority-black
public school nevertheless protest indignantly about the supposed racism
of a Don Imus... White Americans, a scattering of bohemians aside, beggar
themselves to buy homes as far as possible from big concentrations of their
black fellow-citizens. Inside those concentrations, black Americans stew
in dependency and hopelessness. When, as happened with Hurricane Katrina,
the dependency and the hopelessness decorate our TV screens for days on
end, we turn away in embarrassment, having no real clue what to do about
any of it.
- John Derbyshire, "National Review"
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Don't be fooled by affirmative action. It's just another trick the Democratic party uses to keep you poor even after you get a law and a medical degree. Affirmative action makes employers think, 'Black woman nuclear physicist? Hah! Probably let her into Harvard because they were looking for a twofer. Bet she got C's in high school practical math. Give her a job in personnel.' Meanwhile the same guy is thinking, 'Whoa, male, Japanese and Jewish - he must have been really good to get into chiropractor school.'
- President Richard Nixon, 1972.
Many Americans who
supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown
v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later
felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved
toward the concept of equal group results.
It is now estimated
that 70% of the American population is entitled to preferential treatment
under 'affirmative action.'
There are many reasons,
besides genes and discrimination, why groups differ in their economic performances
and rewards. Groups differ by large amounts demographically, culturally,
and geographically - and all these differences have profound effects on
incomes and occupations.
- Thomas Sowell, "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?"
The claim is often
made that the SAT is "culturally biased." But life itself is culturally
biased. If you can't handle math and the English language, you are in big
trouble. If the "culturally biased" argument is meant to insinuate that
these tests falsely predict a lower academic achievement level for minority
students than they later achieve, then that is a purely factual question.
And the facts have devastated that theory time and again, for years on
end. The tests are not unfair. Life is unfair. If you are serious about
wanting minority students to have a better chance in life, then you need
to start years before they take the SAT.
- Thomas Sowell, "Back Door Quotas"
The issue before the
High Court is whether local authorities have the legal right to make students'
race a factor in deciding which school to assign them to attend. The parent
of a white student is complaining because he is not allowed to go to the
school near where he lives but is instead being assigned to a different
school far away, in order to create the kind of racial mix of students
the local authorities are seeking, in the name of "diversity." Those of
us old enough to remember the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown
v. Board of Education will see a painful irony now, since that case began
because a black girl was not allowed to go to a school near where she lived
but was instead assigned to a different school far away, because of the
prevailing racial dogmas of that day. The racial dogmas have changed since
1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still
being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas.
- Thomas Sowell
Until recently, "African American" was just another way of defining native-born blacks. But what happens when others also make a case for being part of the group — in this case, black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean? Those who supported racially based remediation policies are now faced with the fact that black immigrants appear to be surpassing and even displacing native-born black Americans... According to Harvard University officials, up to two-thirds of black students attending the school are actually black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. Thus, for native-born blacks, affirmative action may now be producing the wrong outcome. If the definition of African American is not limited to native-born blacks that claim slave ancestry, these blacks may find themselves displaced by immigrant blacks... Moreover, the success of black immigrants points out the fundamental flaws of race-based policies and makes it more difficult to justify them. If race is the real issue, then why are black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean gaining an advantage over native-born blacks in employment and in access to prestigious educational institutions?
- J. A. Foster-Bey, "Not Black and White", "National Review"
There are problems
with this politically correct approach, this denial of race as a biological
fact. First, there is increasing evidence that there are small but significant
biological differences between the races - scientists are now patenting
heart medicines aimed at black people, for instance. Second, if you deny
race as a biological fact, but you still want to use the concept of "race",
then you have to claim that race is a "social construct", a figment, a
sad but persistent illusion. By this measurement, race is just what we
feel ourselves to be, what we put on our census forms. And this in turn
leads to the paradoxical situation where we can all say we feel Eskimo,
or black, and we could all qualify for special schooling, or positive discrimination.
Is there a solution? Yes. Instead of obsessing about race, we could try
to build a race-blind society. Instead of feeding the fires of neuroticism,
we could start teaching people to forget about race, to move on.
- Sean Thomas, writing in Britain's "Sunday Telegraph"
I have taken a genetic
test to assess my racial heritage, which shows that nine percent of my
ancestry is African. By custom, Americans with any minority ancestry have
counted as members of the minority race.
Therefore, I am black.
I do not know whether the nine percent reflects ancient heritage or a hidden
episode of 19th-century family history. It does not matter. According to
Jeffrey Rosen, trouble will come if lawmakers use genetic testing to settle
the issue of racial classification. If a state legislature "were to declare
that anyone with a drop of African-American blood is entitled to be considered
black, the policy might provoke a bitter Supreme Court challenge." What
could the justices do? If they rejected genetic testing, what rule would
they use? Other methods of racial classification dissolve into ambiguity
or absurdity. If they accepted genetic testing, what "blood quantum" would
they pick? What would become of people who consider themselves black but
test just a few drops short of the mark? There is no good answer. But there
is a way out. In his Plessy dissent, Justice Harlan suggested a principle
that would allow that Court to avoid the whole irrational mess of racial
classification: "There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind,
and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil
rights, all citizens are equal before the law."
- John J. Pitney Jr, "National Review"
If you examine the
statistics it is certainly difficult to conclude that our schools discriminate
against ethnic minorities, even unwittingly. Chinese and some other Asian
pupils excel, easily outperforming the whites. African-Caribbean girls
do better than white boys. The Static Irish perform very well, too. White
boys, black boys and Bangladeshis of both sexes underperform: the CRE thinks
Bangladeshi girls are held back in some way by their families, which, to
over-generalise, do not enormously favour the advanced education of women.
Impoverished white boys, meanwhile, perform less well than impoverished
black boys — but then black boys are much more likely to be impoverished
and come from dysfunctional homes.
- Rod Liddle, "It’s not race that keeps black boys back", in Britain's
"Sunday Times"
Less a rage against
the dying of the light, more a prolonged, high-pitched whine of complaint
and self-justification, the sound of a swarm of badly earthed strimmers,
heard from a distance on an early autumn morning. The Commission for Racial
Equality has issued its valedictory press release before its duties are
acquired by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights next month. The
new organisation, headed by Trevor Phillips, will co-ordinate all manner
of whining on behalf of absolutely anybody who considers him- or herself
to be oppressed and victimised and discriminated against by the vindictive
white male hegemony. Good luck to it.
- Rod Liddle, in the UK "Spectator"
A child born to any
one of the following ethnic minority groups is far more likely than a white
British child to get a job in the top managerial and professional class:
Indian, Chinese, East Asian, Irish. A boy born to a white British working-class
family will do worse at school than every ethnic minority other than those
from the Caribbean, Bangladeshi and travelling communities... The argument
that discrimination on the part of a predominantly white society is to
blame for the underachievement of one or another ethnic group no longer
has the remotest basis in fact. If there are disparities in achievement
between the various ethnic communities in this country it is solely down
to the cultural forces at work within those communities. Chinese kids do
well at school because the Chinese community places a very high value upon
education. Caribbean boys do very badly at school because of a corrosively
macho anti-educationalist ethos among Caribbean boys, which is gradually
transmitting itself to white boys. This is something Trevor Phillips —
and other black community leaders — have recognised in the past. The CRE’s
problem is that it was set up to counter white discrimination against ethnic
minorities and it cannot drag itself away from that now long redundant
and counterproductive state of mind. It persists in seeing our various
minority ethnic communities as a sort of weird, undifferentiated morass
of oppressed people — defined, politically, by their deeply regrettable
lack of whiteness. It is, to my mind, a racist assumption — but also patently
false.
- Rod Liddle, "The Spectator"
It’s time to admit
that 'diversity' is code for racism. If it makes you feel better, we can
call it 'nice' racism or 'well-intentioned' racism. "Theoretically, affirmative
action is supposed to take spots away from white applicants and redistribute
them to underrepresented minorities," Jian Li told the Daily Princetonian.
“What’s happening is one segment of the minority population is losing places
to another segment of minorities, namely Asians to underrepresented minorities.”
Li points to a study conducted by two Princeton academics last year which
concluded that if you got rid of racial preferences in higher education,
the number of whites admitted to schools would remain fairly constant.
However, without racial preferences, Asians would take roughly 80 percent
of the positions now allotted to Hispanic and black students. In other
words, there is a quota — though none dare call it that — keeping Asians
out of elite schools in numbers disproportionate to their merit. This is
the same sort of quota once used to keep Jews out of the Ivy League.
- Jonah Goldberg, commenting on the Jian Li case, "National Review"
It was a good start
to the year for Sgt. Leslie Turner, who was awarded 30,000 pounds in an
out-of-court settlement after suing Scotland Yard. Sergeant Turner was
the first black officer in London’s Metropolitan Police to be made a royal
bodyguard. Anyway, Sergeant Turner ceased being a royal bodyguard last
spring and subsequently brought his suit for “racial discrimination.” Here’s
the wrinkle: He claims he was over-promoted only because he was black.
If he’d been a white copper, he’d have been given a job commensurate with
his abilities and he’d have done it fine and been happy in his work. Instead,
because he had the misfortune to be a black copper, his politically correct
superiors singled him out for a job for which he was unqualified, thus
leading to misery and dissatisfaction. In discriminating in favor of him
because he was black, they in effect discriminated against him, also because
he was black. That, at any rate, is what his lawyer argued, and it worked.
With hindsight, it seems amazing that no such case has yet been brought
in this great Republic, where “affirmative action” is so much more advanced.
Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH could have a sister Rainbow-PULL organization:
twice the shakedowns! One week you’re jumpin’ up and down outside Texaco
or Wal-Mart shouting, “No Justice, No Peace,” because they’re not promoting
enough blacks. Then, a month later, you’re back demanding they cease over-promoting
blacks: “No Demotion, No Peace.” And the settlement wouldn’t be a footling
30,000 quid, either. If you’ve got too few blacks in senior management,
you’re a racist; if you’ve got too many blacks in senior management, you’re
also a racist...
- Mark Steyn, "National Review"
HATE CRIMES
People who glibly talk
about 'hate crimes' ignore both the past and the implications for the future
in what they are advocating. It took centuries of struggle and people putting
their lives on the line to get rid of the idea that a crime against 'A'
should be treated differently than the same crime committed against 'B.'
After much sacrifice and bloodshed, the principle finally prevailed that
killing a peasant deserved the same punishment as killing a baron. Now
the 'hate crime' advocates want to undo all that and take us back to the
days when punishment did not fit the crime, but varied with who the crime
was committed against.
- Thomas Sowell
"If somebody kills
somebody, it's a crime, but if somebody kills somebody of a different race,
it's a hate crime. And we think that that is a savage hypocrisy, because
all crimes are hate crimes. If a man beats another man because that man
was sleeping with his wife, is that not a hate crime? If a person vandalizes
a government building, is it not because of his hate for the government?
The motivation for a crime shouldn't affect the sentencing.
It is time to stop
splitting people into groups. All hate crime laws do is support the idea
that blacks are different from whites, that homosexuals are different,
that we aren't the same. But instead we should all be treated the same,
with the same laws and the same punishments for the same crimes."
- The South Park kids
Sacha Baron Cohen’s
success stems in part from the fact that he never lets on what his movie
is really “about.” Unlike Michael Moore — who, just for the record, isn’t
a fraction as talented as Cohen — Cohen never made himself available to
interviewers when promoting the movie. He always appeared as Borat, which
made it impossible to ask Cohen what he really thinks of America, what
the “message” of the film is or how realistic his “reality” film is. This
was a brilliant marketing ploy, and the TV press eagerly played themselves
for suckers. Imagine if, say, Cookie Monster started spewing racial epithets
on Sesame Street and, in response to the controversy, the producers allowed
Cookie Monster to do all the talking at the press conference. Borat’s more
conservative defenders hail the film’s allegedly implicit critique of political
correctness. But this is a hard case to make when Borat’s victims are almost
all demons in the politically correct pantheon (Christians, rednecks, et
al.). Borat never visits, say, Muslims who might sincerely return Borat’s
high-fives for Jew hatred. In short, Borat isn’t as revolutionary or “transgressive”
as its fans claim. It’s just a funny movie. And that should be enough.
- Jonah Goldberg, on "Borat", "National Review"
If ever an author needed
protection from his friends, it was WE Johns. One adventure, Biggles And
The Lost Sovereigns (1964), ended with Biggles about to run home Chintoo,
his Malay interpreter-become-friend with the comment: "When you find yourself
with a reliable chap like that it makes nonsense of the colour-bar argument".
But when Johns was dead, the book was reprinted, largely unchanged, in
1978, by Knight Books; that sentence was deleted. No doubt the officious
publishing hand thought it was being 'politically correct'. In so doing,
it revealed the degree of racial prejudice underlying political correctness,
much deeper and more pernicious than was ever intended by Johns, even in
his worst days. He regretted his bad actions; his advisors regretted his
good ones.
- Owen Dudley Edwards, "British Children's Fiction in the Second World
War"
Killing a gay man is
no worse than killing a disc jockey. They are all acts which are pretty
much equal in their quotient of evil.
- Rod Liddle, on the absurdity of hate crime laws
The New York Times
has taken up the cause of Arthur Warren, a gay black man savagely beaten
to death. Despite official denials, the Times implies that "racism" and
"homophobia" are to blame. Maybe so. But there is no "maybe" in the case
of the black man accused of slashing the throat of Kevin Shifflett, an
8-year-old white boy. The evidence points plainly to racial hatred as his
motivation. The Times' indifference to this little boy's murder reveals
the bone-chilling horror at the core of political correctness – a philosophy
which condones the killing of white males, even when they are children.
According to Department
of Justice figures, 85 percent of the crimes of interracial violence nationwide
are committed by blacks against whites. But these are not called hate crimes.
The leftist academy says that only whites can be racist, because only whites
have power. But a black outlaw with a gun — and there are many — has the
power of life and death over an unarmed law-abiding citizen of any race
or color.
- David Horowitz
With anti-gay crimes,
the left is willing to suspend the 14th Amendment's provision of equal
protection of the laws. Do advocates of this new law realize what they
are saying? They are saying that if Matt's sadistic murderers had been
gay, his killing would be of no special interest to them, and if Matt had
not himself been gay, this atrocity would not be a hate crime. They don't
care about Matthew Shepard. They care only that he was gay.
To show the fraud
of what is being done, ask yourself: Why has the left not demanded that
all interracial assaults and rapes be made hate crimes? Indeed, if violence
against women and racial violence are the real enemy, let's permit a federal
death penalty in every case of interracial murder. Yet the Justice Department
doesn't even publicize the statistics on the race of the victims of violence
or of the race of the perpetrators. Because the weight of those numbers
would crush the myth about America.
- Pat Buchanan
Last week in a Denver
suburb, someone lit a Book of Mormon on fire and dropped it on the doorstep
of a Mormon temple, presumably as a statement about the church’s support
of Proposition 8 in California, an initiative that amended the state constitution
to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. In a move that
may make gay-rights supporters’ heads spin, the incident is being investigated
as a hate crime. The outbreak of attacks on the Mormon church since the
passage of Proposition 8 has been chilling: envelopes full of suspicious
white powder were sent to church headquarters in Salt Lake City; protesters
showed up en masse to intimidate Mormon small-business owners who supported
the measure; a website was created to identify and shame members of the
church who backed it; activists are targeting the relatives of prominent
Mormons who gave money to pass it, as well as other Mormons who are only
tangentially associated with the cause; some have even called for a boycott
of the entire state of Utah... Freedom of conscience, or diversity of belief,
is the last thing the homosexual lobby will tolerate: In New Mexico, a
state civil-rights commission fined an evangelical wedding photographer
$6,637 for politely declining to photograph a gay commitment ceremony.
In California, the state Supreme Court ruled unanimously against two San
Diego fertility doctors who refused to give in-vitro fertilization to a
lesbian owing to their religious beliefs, even though they had referred
her to another doctor. And just this week, evangelical dating site eHarmony,
which hadn’t previously provided same-sex matchmaking services, announced
it had been browbeaten into doing so by New Jersey’s Division on Civil
Rights and the threat of litigation. The first 10,000 same-sex eHarmony
registrants will receive a free six-month subscription. “That’s one of
the things I asked for,” crowed Eric McKinley, who brought the charges
against eHarmony.
- National Review editorial (Nov'08)
Hate-crime laws would
create an additional penalty under the law for having a homophobic motive.
This means that some thug driven to beat up gay people by homophobia would
be given a harsher sentence than, say, a mugger driven by greed to beat
people up and steal their wallets... But it is already deeply illegal to
attack gay people, or threaten violence against us - because we are human
beings. If the police don't enforce the existing laws, there's no reason
to believe they will enforce new ones... Hate crimes laws undermine one
of the most persuasive arguments of the gay rights movement. At every step
of the way, all we have asked for is the same rights enjoyed by straight
people: to have sex, to get married, to adopt. The anti-gay lobby has always
claimed we are asking for "special rights", and it has always been a lie.
But hate crimes laws do, finally, turn us into a special category. It says
that stabbing me is worse than stabbing my heterosexual brother.
- Johann Hari
I'm a dead white male.
Suppose on Martin Luther King Day I went to the offices of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and shot the receptionists.
How many nano-seconds do you think it would take before the attack was
being characterized as racially motivated? Your top Olympic hotshot could
ingest every steroid on the planet and he couldn't beat that time.
- Mark Steyn, "The National Post"
We should acknowledge
that there are no arguments applicable to racism which cannot be extended
to other private beliefs which may affect public servants’ approach to
their customers. Should practising Muslims be allowed to be police officers,
for instance, given the attitude of Islam to homosexuality or women’s rights?
Should devout Roman Catholic doctors be allowed to advise women patients
on issues of family planning or abortion? What might be a Hindu policeman's
approach to an Untouchable suspect? Should atheists be allowed to teach
in faith schools? Should a reincarnationist work among the congenitally
disabled? Should a police officer who abhors hunting hold the ring between
the hunt and its saboteurs? Should a prominent supporter of the Labour
Party be Director-General of the BBC? Racism is distinguished from Catholicism,
Evangelicalism, Judaism or Islam by being unable to claim any respectable
followers, but in its potential to harden the hearts of its believers towards
other human groups it is not alone among belief systems.
- Matthew Parris, "Beware the Thought Police, Punishing Words not Deeds",
"The Times"
Hitler strongly disapproved
of Jewish jokes, he wrote in Mein Kampf, on the grounds that people find
it tough to hate that which makes them laugh.
- Matthew Norman, "The Irish Independent"
There is growing concern
that attacks by Asians and other ethnic minorities have been steadily increasing,
leaving some white people feeling too scared to enter city areas dominated
by Asians and other minority ethnic groups. Figures recently published
under the Freedom of Information Act seem to support such fears: of the
58 people killed because of the colour of their skin between 1995 and 2004,
almost half were described as white. The British Crime Survey reveals that
in 2004, 87,000 people who described themselves as black or minority ethnic
(BME) had been victims of what they believed was a racially motivated crime.
They had suffered 49,000 violent attacks, with 4,000 being wounded. At
the same time a staggering 92,000 white people also said that racism was
the cause of an attack or crime they had suffered. The number of violent
attacks against whites reached 77,000, while the number of white people
who reported being wounded was five times the number of black and minority
ethnic victims at 20,000.
- Brendan Montague, "The Times"
MULTICULTURALISM & IMMIGRATION
Having argued for decades
that immigrant communities be allowed to retain every aspect of their indigenous
culture, the Left now believes that this was a mistake and that there are
many aspects of those indigenous cultures which are simply not on. It is
not just the shadow of 9/11; the soft Left knows that Islam is a socially
conservative (if economically leftish) belief system opposed to almost
everything it stands for in terms of education, the family, sexual promiscuity
and so on. Islam, even ‘proper’ Islam, demands a distinctly illiberal social
regimen. But now the Left has recognised, belatedly, that race and culture
are two entirely separate entities.
- Rod Liddle , "How
Islam has Killed Multiculturalism" in "The Spectator"
Expect more new stories
like this: Two primary schools have withdrawn storybooks about same-sex
relationships after objections from Muslim parents. Up to 90 gathered at
the schools to complain about the books which are aimed at pupils as young
as five. One story, titled King & King, is a fairytale about a prince
who turns down three princesses before marrying one of their brothers.
Another named And Tango Makes Three features two male penguins who fall
in love at a New York zoo. Bristol City Council said the two schools had
been using the books to ensure they complied with gay rights laws which
came into force last April.
- Mark Steyn, on the internal contradictions of multi-culturalism, "National
Review"
Modern identity politics
springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy.
That hole is liberalism’s silence about the place and significance of groups.
The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues
through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands
the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals
rather than groups... Liberalism cannot be based on group rights because
not all groups uphold liberal values. The civilisation of the European
enlightenment, of which contemporary liberal democracy is the heir, cannot
be culturally neutral since liberal societies have their own values regarding
the equal worth and dignity of individuals. Cultures that do not accept
these premises do not deserve equal protection in a liberal democracy.
Members of immigrant communities and their offspring deserve to be treated
equally as individuals, not as members of cultural communities. There is
no reason for a Muslim girl to be treated differently under the law from
a Christian or Jewish one, whatever the feelings of her relatives.
- Franic Fukayama, "The Times"
It is perhaps pointless
to look back at the shamefully irresponsible immigration policies that
have brought so many European countries to this explosive point. It is
pointless to wonder how anyone in authority could have imagined that it
would be a good idea to dump enormous numbers of poorly educated Third
World immigrants from different societies into unprepared and unwilling,
sometimes racist, European host cultures, into hellish high-rise suburbs
from Seville to Rotterdam, in numbers so huge that integration became ever
more unlikely and ghettos more inevitable. It is done now. However, we
might at least recognise the problem. As usual a great many people are
deliberately avoiding it, in particular by editing the word Muslim out
of their debates, as if Islam had nothing to do with the dangerous mood
sweeping Europe. Poverty and rejection have played a significant part,
but there is an unmistakable sense in which the riots are Muslim, consciously
so.
- Minette Marrin, "The Times"
When advanced economies
admit ever larger numbers of unskilled workers (plus a chain of relatives
through "family reunification"), they are importing poverty. The President
says this is to do "the jobs Americans won't do". For the sake of argument,
take him at his word. So why won't Americans do them? Because they're a
great way to ensure you live in poverty. So we import foreigners to be
our poor people. Can we import just the right number to ensure that poverty
doesn't "grow"? Unlikely. There are arguments to be made both for and against
immigration, but you can't be in favor of mass unskilled immigration and
then pledge to fight the "war on poverty". It's like spooning out a bathtub
with a thimble while leaving the faucets running.
- Mark Steyn, "National Review"
Harvard political scientist
Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing
his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that
immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term
influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness
that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly
negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate,
even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities
and new ties... Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result.
"Americans raised in the 1970s," he writes,"seem fully as unnerved by diversity
as those raised in the 1920s"... Even when communities are equally poor
or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust
of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less
charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness.
- John Leo, in "City Journal"
Earlier and more clearly
than most of his contemporaries, Albert Shanker foresaw how "identity politics"
would eventually tear apart the Democratic Party. It would rob liberals
of the moral power of the argument for a colorblind society. It would fracture
liberalism along racial, ethnic, and gender lines, pitting blacks not only
against whites, Jews, and women, but also every other ethnic or minority
group, as each stepped forward with separate, and competing, grievances.
The special-interest sparring would prevent working-class Americans from
ever making common cause on an agenda of economic betterment, to the detriment
of all. Shanker all but begged liberals, through the 1970s and '80s, to
concentrate on more bread-and-butter issues, to little avail. When such
appeals failed, Shanker glumly predicted the rise of Reaganism, including
the defection of the so-called Reagan Democrats to the Republican Party.
As early as the mid-1970s, Shanker also recognized the importance of "values"
issues. He urged liberals to reach out to evangelicals and other working-class
whites on concerns such as school safety and discipline in schools. Shanker
argued, again correctly, that poorer families often cared more about such
issues than did more privileged Americans, because it was in poorer neighborhoods
that kids had the most to lose, educationally, in unruly classrooms.
At the core of Shanker's prescience was a single, revolutionary, but astoundingly
commonsensical, insight: Poverty causes bad schools rather than the other
way around.
- Sara Mosle, on the legacy of educator Albert Shankar, "Slate Magazine"
"In your recent book,
Mexifornia, you argue that our goal should not be a multicultural nation
but a multiracial nation with one culture. Could you elaborate?"
"I was getting frustrated
with this term everyone used: 'multicultural'. The very affluent, mostly
white, liberal people who use it don't actually want the police in their
neighborhood to have the culture of Mexican officers. They don't want to
be treated with the same medical protocols that prevail in China. They
don't want their daughters to have clitorectomies as in Sudan. So what
do they mean with this idea of a salad bowl of culture? What they really
mean is they want a core culture that is Western, enhanced by exotica on
the periphery, such as fashion, food, literature, and movies. That's a
very different concept from multiculturalism. What we have to agree on
is one culture, one language, one notion of what the law is, respect for
private property, faith in democracy, capitalism, a transparent society,
free speech. And those things are pretty much confined to those countries
that are Western or Western-inspired."
- Victor Davis Hanson, interviewed for TAE
You want to see multiculturalism
in action? Look at Yugoslavia, at Lebanon, at Sri Lanka, at Northern Ireland,
at Azerbaijan, or wherever else group 'identity' has been hyped.
- Thomas Sowell
Deep thinkers like
to talk about such things as the oppression of women in Western society
- when in fact women have had a much lower position in Islamic cultures,
for example, and girl babies were often routinely killed in parts of Asia.
It was a Western nation - Britain - which put an end to the burning of
widows alive on their husbands' funeral pyres in India. It was precisely
in the West that a moral revulsion against slavery and a movement to stamp
it out everywhere developed in the late eighteenth century.
- Thomas Sowell
The multicultural crisis
should teach us that only a West with a strong religious, cultural and
moral identity can challenge and open itself to the 'others' in a constructive
and peaceful way. And that the goal must be a system of shared values within
a common identity."
- Magdi Allam
The early Muslim geographer, Mas'udi, found the Franks and Slavs of Europe to be the ultimate barbarians, and they became paler, grosser and dumber the further north one went. He blames this on the absence of the sun's heat. Perhaps tiring of temperature as an explanation, another Muslim traveler of the period attributes the stupidity of the Sicilians and Italians to their gross habit of eating onions.
The basis on which
you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is
that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing
difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse,
if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult
to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People
ask: 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn't
do?' This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state
provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values.
In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where
people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity,
but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large
welfare state rests.
- David Willets, British Conservative MP
Much of the advancement of the human race has occurred because people made the judgment that some things were not simply different from others, but better.
- Mark Steyn
Multiculturalism means
that the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women
— combine with the worst attributes of Western culture — licence and self-gratification.
Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets
of northern England areas are as much a product of multiculturalism as
the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort.
- Mark Steyn
"Norwegian women must
take their share of responsibility for these rapes... Norwegian women must
realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to
it."
- Professor Unni Wikan, discussing increased sexual assaults in Norway
(2001)
Today, even the best
countries in the Islamic world, such as Saudi Arabia, are xenophobic.
The very soldiers
sent to save Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War were cautioned not to hang Christmas
decorations outside their tents or they would offend their hosts. This
illustrated both the sensitivity of the Westerners and the intolerance
of the people they were rescuing.
If the First World
hadn't discovered that xenophobia was bad, would the Third World know it?
- Barbara Amiel, "The Daily Telegraph"
It is considered the
height of sexist impropriety in the West to call a woman a girl, but more
or less OK for a cabal of regressive theocratic bigots to put out the eyes
of offenders on TV. Oppression is what they do in the West. What they do
in the Middle East is their culture.
- Robert Hughes, "The Culture of Complaint"
In places like Bradford, Oldham and Burnley, multiculturalism has helped segregate communities far more effectively than racism. The real failure of multiculturalism is its failure to understand what is valuable about cultural diversity. There is nothing good in itself about diversity. It is important because it allows us to compare and contrast different values, beliefs and lifestyles, make judgements upon them, and decide which are better and which worse.
- Kenan Malik, "Spiked Online"
Immigration in Europe is a perfect example of our poor government. It is not enough to allow millions of foreign people to come to Europe without adequate ability to assimilate them. Putting an African family in a degrading tower block and giving them Social Security is not compatible with human dignity. Many of the skilled immigrants that are now in Europe should in fact be the catalysts for change and improvement in the countries they left.
- Richard Neat, letter to "The Spectator"
The more Americans learn about the world of the madrassas; the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings; and the murderous gangs in Somalia, the Congo, and Rwanda - the more, not less, they are appalled by societies that are anti-Western. Indeed, we now know that advocacy for multiculturalism depends upon romance, ignorance, and isolation - studying about Islamic fundamentalism in tree-lined Marin County rather than in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia; role-playing in costumes at safe and upscale suburban schools rather than avoiding the lash under burqas in Kabul; or lecturing about religious diversity on ivied campuses rather than witnessing Buddhas blown up in Afghanistan.
– Victor Davis Hanson, "The National Review"
What is called Black
History Month might more accurately be called "the sins of white people"
month. The sins of any branch of the human race are virtually inexhaustible,
but the history of blacks in America includes a lot more than the sins
of white people, which are put front and center each Februry...
Black-white differences
in income, IQ, lifestyle or anything else you care to name are exceeded
by differences between innumerable other groups around the world today
and throughout history - even when none of the factors that we blame for
the differences in America was present.
For example, when
the Romans invaded Britain, they came from an empire with magnificent art,
architecture, literature, political organization and military might. But
the Britons were an illiterate tribal people. There was not a building
on the island, and no Briton's name had ever been recorded in the pages
of history.
The Britons didn't
build London. The Romans built London. And when the Romans left, four centuries
later, the country fragmented into tribal domains again, the economy collapsed,
and buildings and roads decayed. No one would have dreamed at that point
that someday there would be a British Empire to exceed anything the Romans
had ever achieved. Maybe we need a British History Month.
- Thomas Sowell
Immigrants are walking
refutations of cultural relativism, they are voting with their feet in
favor of the new culture represented by America and the West. There is
a one-way movement from tribal, agrarian cultures toward modern, industrialized,
American-style cultures. Why would immigrants voluntarily uproot themselves
and relocate to another society unless they were deeply convinced that,
on balance, the new culture was better than the old culture?
America is the greatest,
freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness
in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment
unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.
- Dinesh D'Souza, "What's So Great About America?"
"If you don’t want
to integrate, why come to Britain?"
- Trevor McDonald, 'unashamed integrationist', in an interview with "The
Times"
"Black history is American
history."
- Morgan Freeman, criticising 'Black History' month
"What do they call
it? 'Multi-culti'? It's all absurd, you know. I think if a man picks himself
up and comes to another country he must meet it halfway. He can’t say,
'I want the country, I want the laws and the protection, but I want to
live in my own way'. It's wrong. It's become a kind of racket, this multiculturalism,
jobs for the boys."
- Sir Vidia Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning author
The victorious French
team in the 1998 World Cup was presented as the very image of modern France,
with so many of its players being drawn from the old colonies, mainly in
Africa. It was new, multicultural France, proving to everyone, including
itself, that it had successfully integrated all these nationalities within
its borders and turned them all into Frenchmen. Zinedine Zidane was exhibit
number one, being of Algerian extraction. But then, barely three years
later, the wheels come off this particular self-image. At a match in Paris
between France and Algeria, French-Algerians in the crowd loudly booed
the French national anthem. What really shocked the French was that the
malcontents were second and third-generation Algerians. Thierry Henry's
parents are from the French Antilles but Henry is so French that if he
were any more French he'd be Charles De Gaulle. Thierry Henry is the face
of successful integration. He is the face of multi-ethnic France and multi-ethnic
Europe. The point about Thierry Henry isn't simply that he is of ultimately
African descent; it is that he is also so quintessentially French.
If the World Cup teaches us one thing above all, it is that a nation can
be indeed multi-ethnic, but not truly multicultural unless it wants trouble.
A nation, to be a nation, must have shared values.
- David Quinn, writing during 2006 World Cup, "The Irish Independent"
"Judging cultures is
not the same as judging races. One's race is unchosen; no-one can be condemned
for membership of a racial group. However, culture is chosen, so a person
can be condemned for their acceptance of an immoral culture. The equivocation
of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it
is based on the racist view that one's race determines one's ideas and
outlook."
- Andrew Medworth
They reject the multiculturalism
that the mandarins attempt to impose upon them. This is partly because,
as any sane person knows, it is an empty faith, but, more importantly,
it is because it celebrates every culture except that of the white working
class... if you are to accord identity to others, you must first have one
yourself.
- Bryan Appleyard reviews "The Likes of Us" by Michael Collins in "The
Times"
The same applies to
the underperformance of black boys in school — teaching them to see themselves
as victims of white racist teachers is not to help them, but to discourage
them and their families from looking at cultural attitudes to education
that may be the root cause of the problem. That is not to say there are
not racist white teachers; just that focusing only on that issue does not
help black boys but hinders them. Telling Africa and Africans that its
plight is the West’s fault because it won’t cough up enough aid discourages
them from tackling the root cause of their poverty, which is bad governance.
By condemning everyone
who disagrees with them in the most extreme terms — those isms — the PC
brigade have succeeded in making us a nervy nation, with most people anxious
about what they say or think. This has fuelled politics of denial, with
politicians preferring to stick their heads in the sand rather than tackle
sensitive issues. And again, it is the vulnerable who end up suffering.
The Government’s refusal
to face up to abuse in the asylum system until it was on the verge of collapse
was a gift to the people traffickers, fuelling the international smuggling
of humans: much misery would have been saved if it clamped down early on.
The reports into the Bradford riots made clear how local politicians didn’t
dare face up to obviously deteriorating community tensions, instead letting
them fester until they exploded.
- Anthony Browne, "The Times"
# FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES
Stan: Hello, Mister
Governor and thank you for taking the time to hear our presentation on
hate crime laws entitled "Hate Crime Laws. A Savage Hypocrisy." Yes, over
the past few years, our great country has been developing new hate crime
laws!
Token : If somebody
kills somebody, it's a crime! But if somebody kills somebody of a different
colour, it's a hate crime.
Kyle: And we think
that that is a savage hypocrisy, because all crimes are hate crimes! If
a man beats another man because that man was sleeping with his wife, is
that not a hate crime?
Stan: If a person
vandalizes a government building, is it not because of his hate for the
government?
Token: The motivation
for a crime shouldn't affect the sentencing.
Stan: It is time to
stop splitting people into groups. All hate crime laws do is support the
ideas that blacks are different from whites, that homosexuals need to be
treated differently from not-homos, that we aren't the same.
Kyle: But instead,
we should all be treated the same, with the same laws, and the same punishments
for the same crime.
Governor: That made
the most sence of any presentation I've heard in the last three years!
- The Boys from South Park, "Cartman's Silly Hate Crime 2000"
#