With Black Alternate History Month barely behind us, the Carlyle Club is relieved to bring a close to our forthright conversations about the most uncomfortable aspects of race we could think of.
Table of Contents
- Once upon a Time
- Black Education, plus:
- Black Justice, plus:
- Black Preachers
- Racial Preferences
- The Free Republic of Liberia
- Recommended Reading
- The Future’s Bright at Radish
- Letters to the Editor
Once upon a Time
Above: White flight from St. Louis, 1960–1970; Matt Quain, victim of the “knockout game” in St. Louis; a “flash mob” in Philadelphia, March 20, 2010.
Given a choice between agreeable fantasy and disagreeable fact, Americans will go for the agreeable fantasy every time.
Adlai Stevenson
Once upon a time, in a far-away land called Missouri, there lived a simple peasant by the name of James Trible, with his simple peasant wife Jeanne Brauhar-Trible. For thousands of years, James and Jeanne’s ancestors, the good people of the Brauhar-Trible tribe, lived in Europe, where they evolved a particular suite of physical and behavioral traits, which were passed down through the generations to this simple, light-skinned peasant couple.
James and Jeanne owned a lovely little cottage in the woods of an enchanted suburb of Kansas City called Blue Springs, one of the best enchanted woodland areas in all the kingdom. Coincidentally, no doubt, almost everyone else in Blue Springs was a member of the Brauhar-Trible tribe, too. There were hardly any orcs (Orcish-Americans?) whose ancestors lived in Africa, which is a rather different sort of place, full of ferocious beasts, powerful wizards, ancient magics, and deadly curses. Not that there’s anything wrong with orcs. Only a very nasty, stupid sort of person would say that out loud.
Kansas City, a once-mighty fortress lately fallen into disrepair, was not quite as enchanted as Blue Springs. Only half of its men hailed from the Brauhar-Trible tribe, and most of the rest were orcs and half-orcs, which of course is just fine.
One day, James and Jeanne were angered and dismayed to learn that some members of their tribe prefer the company of others like themselves, which is just an awful, inexcusable thing to feel (KCTV-5):
A small paper wrapped in plastic and left in driveways in Blue Springs has angered one couple who received it. A flyer wrapped around the paper titled “Immigration or Invasion?” states, “[orcs and goblins] are turning America into a third-world slum… Let’s send them home now.”
“This is not how I feel about things,” said Jeanne Brauhar-Trible. Brauhar-Trible said she lives in a racially diverse neighborhood and felt both offended and embarrassed about the tone of the publication.
A grumpy old troll who lived under a nearby bridge was heard to say that Jeanne was so very “offended and embarrassed” because she knew, deep down, that she had some of the same ideas about “racial diversity” as the bad men who left the flyer, whose Statement of Principles reads: “We believe… that the American people and government should remain European in their composition and their character.” In fact, until quite recently, this idea was almost universal throughout the kingdom (White Identity):
… [Thomas] Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning [orcs] to Africa.
He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all of America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself… over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” …
Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty: “the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” he observed. “… I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. …
Abraham Lincoln considered [orcs] to be — in his words — “a troublesome presence”…
Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, shared these anti-[orc] sentiments: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men…” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear destiny: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race — the governing and self-governing race.”
Similarly Andrew Jackson, Stephen Douglas, Francis Scott Key, James Garfield, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Henry Cabot Lodge, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman… But no one listened, because after all, he was only a stupid troll, and what would a stupid troll know about American history?
“Look at Rwanda and look at Switzerland,” mumbled the moldy old troll to no one in particular (KCTV-5). “Duh. It’s pretty obvious who’s thriving. Do you want to go to Canada or go to Mexico? One doesn’t have to be an Einstein to figure this out.” But why inflict these terrible, hateful flyers on the innocent driveways of Blue Springs, Missouri, fiendish troll? “It’s one of the ways we reach new people,” the troublesome troll declared. “If they don’t like it, they can throw it in the recycling bin. We have a right to freedom of speech.”
Brauhar-Trible agrees. Free speech is part of a free society. Her husband, on the other hand, thinks the content just barely avoiding the tipping point between free speech and hate speech.
The warty old troll probably had one or two things to add about the compatibility of free speech and hate speech, noting that speech no one considers offensive rarely needs legal protection, but again, no one listens to stupid trolls.
The moral of the story is: trolls ruin the neighborhood. No, wait, that’s not right. The moral of the story is that most members of the Brauhar-Trible tribe, through a combination of wishful thinking, willful ignorance, and official disinformation, know less about the rainbow vibrancy of racial diversity with each passing year. After decades of white flight, desolating much of Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, and other once-mighty American fortresses, James and Jeanne appear to have no idea why those cities began to collapse the moment people like themselves, fearing for their lives, began to flee from the rising tide of orcs.
In this issue of Radish, the Carlyle Club will be dredging up a handful of long-forgotten fables from the long, sad history of American race relations. Consider it own, small contribution to reversing a regrettable loss of information.
Black Education
Men and Manners in America (1833) is Scottish philosopher Thomas Hamilton’s thorough account of his travels in the United States, and an early study of American society (predating Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America). In Chapter 4, Hamilton describes the education system in New York, including a “school for children of color” (pp. 90–93):
Having resolved to devote the day to the inspection of schools, I went from that under the superintendence of Professor Griscomb, to another for the education of children of colour. I here found about a hundred boys, in whose countenances might be traced every possible gradation of complexion between those of the swarthy Ethiop and florid European. Indeed several of the children were so fair [Radish 1.6], that I certainly never should have discovered the lurking taint of African descent. …
It has often happened to me, since my arrival in this country, to hear it gravely maintained by men of education and intelligence, that the Negroes were an inferior race, a link as it were between man and the brutes. Having enjoyed few opportunities of observation on people of colour in my own country, I was now glad to be enabled to enlarge my knowledge on a subject so interesting. I therefore requested the master to inform me whether the results of his experience had led to the inference, that the aptitude of the Negro children for acquiring knowledge was inferior to that of the whites. In reply, he assured me they had not done so; and, on the contrary, declared, that in sagacity, perseverance, and capacity for the acquisition and retention of knowledge, his poor despised scholars were equal to any boys he had ever known. “But, alas, sir!” said he, “to what end are these poor creatures taught acquirement, from the exercise of which they are destined to be debarred, by the prejudices of society? It is, surely, but a cruel mockery to cultivate talents, when, in the present state of public feeling, there is no field open for their useful employment. Be his acquirements what they may, a Negro is still a Negro, or, in other words, a creature marked out for degradation, and exclusion from those objects which stimulate the hopes and powers of other men.”
I observed, in reply, that I was not aware that, in those States in which slavery had been abolished, any such barrier existed as that to which he alluded. “In the State of New York, for instance,” I asked, “are not all offices and professions open to the man of colour as well as to the white?”
“I see, sir,” replied he, “that you are not a native of this country, or you would not have asked such a question.” He then went on to inform me, that the exclusion in question did not arise from any legislative enactment, but from the tyranny of that prejudice, which, regarding the poor black as a being of inferior order, works its own fulfilment in making him so. There was no answering this, for it accorded too well with my own observations in society, not to carry my implicit belief.
We’ll talk about “the tyranny of that prejudice” later.
If the balance of evidence favored the schoolmaster’s theory of racial equality in 1833, that balance had surely shifted by the early twentieth century. In The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (1904), American lawyer Thomas Nelson Page reports (pp. 303–304):
It is, undoubtedly, true that the apparent result of the effort to educate the Negro has been disappointing. There are a few thousand professional men, a considerable number of college or high school graduates, but, for the greater part, there is discernible little apparent breadth of view, no growth in ability, or tendency to consider great questions reasonably. There is, indeed, rather a tendency to racial solidarity in opposition to the whites on all questions whatsoever; continued failure to distinguish soundly between outward gifts and character; a general inclination to deny crime and side with criminals against the whites, no matter how flagrant the crime may be.
We’ll return to this interesting point about crime later. From the same text (p. 80):
They [Southern whites] unite… in the opinion that education such as they [Negroes] receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.
American historian Winfield H. Collins agrees substantially with this assessment in The Truth About Lynching and the Negro in the South (1918, pp. 150–152):
… many optimistic white men have thought that the Negro could be raised to the white man’s level by means of the training and culture that comes through the study of books. To these education for the Negro has been a watchword. To a large extent Southern whites have been in sympathy with the education of the Negro. Indeed, many years ago, contrary to what one not familiar with the South might suppose, a prominent man in North Carolina in seeking a congressional nomination on a platform hostile to Negro education failed even to carry his home county. …
But notwithstanding the fact that the illiteracy of the Negro race had been reduced by 1910 to about thirty-three per cent, there is a widespread feeling of disappointment in Negro education. Not that it has made the Negro more criminal as has sometimes been said, however, this is not yet well determined, but rather that it has failed to make him a greater producer, or to aid him to adjust himself to economic conditions. Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.
A century later, the disappointments continue (National Center for Youth Law, 2009):
Recently released results from the 2008 administration of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) suggest that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is failing to close the achievement gap between minority and non-minority students. The results call into question whether NCLB, officially described as “An Act to Close the Achievement Gap,” is having its intended effect.
According to the Washington Post, — well, the title tells the story: ‘A Decade of No Child Left Behind: Lessons from a Policy Failure’ (2012).
Ten years have passed since then president George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB), making it the educational law of the land. A review of a decade of evidence demonstrates that NCLB has failed badly both in terms of its own goals and more broadly. It has neither significantly increased academic performance nor significantly reduced achievement gaps, even as measured by standardized exams.
Only a decade? Public education has been failing at the task for at least 180 years.
Attempts to deal with NCLB’s severe shortcomings, such as the Obama administration’s waivers and the Senate Education Committee’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization bill, fail to address many of NCLB’s fundamental flaws and in some cases will intensify them. These proposals will extend a “lost decade for U.S. schools.”
Could yet another federal program be the answer? Howard University law professor Harold A. McDougall thinks so (Huffington Post, 2012):
… President Obama needs to create a sense of agency and engagement among the American people as we face depressing economic and social times. A signature program to close our achievement gaps would be a good way to do that. … The achievement gap is in many ways the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement. …
It is ironic that the achievement gap still exists, and has indeed worsened, since Brown v. Board of Education was decided.
“Ironic” is one way to put it… Not to worry, the president is on the case (Talking Points Memo, 2013):
President Obama on Thursday cited studies that the achievement gap begins at a very early age as the reason for his proposal for universal access to pre-school.
Perhaps universal access to pre-school will finally do the trick. One commenter has his doubts:
The black/white IQ gap is present at two years of age. It is present from as soon as individual intelligence can be measured in toddlers. There are two possible explanations for the gap and its early appearance. One hypothesis, the one most favorably to Obama’s point of view, is that the uniformly bad home environments of black children (even of upper middle-class black children compared with poor whites) explains the gap. The other hypothesis, the one less sanguine about the remedial possibilities of early childhood education, is that these poor home environments are themselves mainly a reflection of the largest underlying cause of the IQ gap: average genetic differences between the races. Less intelligent parents provide less cognitively stimulating home environments.
The jury is still out. No one has found an intervention that permanently raises black children’s IQ to the white average. On the other hand, our understanding of human genetics is still in its infancy, and very few genes have been identified that contribute to individual differences in intelligence, much less to average racial difference in intelligence — this in spite of the fact that we know through twin studies that intelligence is highly heritable genetically. We do know that socio-economic status is not a proxy for race and does not explain the majority of the black/white gap. For example, black high school students from households in the wealthiest decile score lower on the SAT than white students from households in the poorest decile. Likewise, the white children of high school drop-outs score higher on the SAT than the black children of college graduates.
One thing seems certain: no matter how many government programs fail to close the gap, no matter how many decades and trillions of dollars are lost to American schools, no education “expert” will ever bring up race differences in intelligence as an explanation — not when they can get away with centuries-old excuses.
Claude M. Steele and an artist’s impression of “stereotype threat”
Excuses, Excuses
Remember how the schoolmaster in Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America was inclined to judge the “sagacity, perseverance, and capacity for the acquisition and retention of knowledge” of all black students by the performance of a handful of mulatto children, some of them “so fair, that I certainly never should have discovered the lurking taint of African descent.” Now consider the history of African-American innovation presented in David A. Love’s ‘Debunking the 10 Biggest Myths about Black History’ (The Grio, 2012). Pretty standard fare for Black Alternate History Month:
Despite Pat Buchanan’s belief that “this has been a country built, basically, by white folks,” African-Americans have made invaluable contributions to this country through inventions, exploration, and all fields of endeavor.
… Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful open heart surgery operation [myth], while Dr. Charles Drew was a pioneer in blood banks [not really] and the storage and processing of blood plasma [not that either]. … Lewis Latimer worked with Thomas Edison [he actually just worked for the Edison Electric Light Company], and invented carbon filaments for incandescent lamps [no, he didn’t]. Garrett Morgan invented the traffic light and sold it to General Electric, with his design becoming the basis for modern traffic lights [none of which is true]. He also invented the gas mask [no, he didn’t]. Marie Van Brittan Brown invented the home security system [not really].
Setting aside the utter lack of factual merit to these claims of black innovation, here is what Daniel Hale Williams, Charles Drew, Lewis Latimer, Garrett Morgan, and Marie Van Brittan Brown actually looked like (recall Radish 1.6):
Here, for comparison, is a woman of purely African descent holding a purely European child in a black-and-white photograph:
The schoolmaster in Men and Manners in America also offered an explanation, which might have been plausible in 1833, for what we now call the “achievement gap” (Radish 1.7). He blamed it on “the tyranny of that prejudice, which, regarding the poor black as a being of inferior order, works its own fulfilment in making him so.” In 1995, Claude M. Steele (another suspiciously light-skinned “black” man) made a career for himself repackaging that same idea for the social “science” crowd, branding it stereotype threat (The Atlantic, 1999):
When capable black college students fail to perform as well as their white counterparts, the explanation often has less to do with preparation or ability than with the threat of stereotypes about their capacity to succeed.
For obvious reasons, — political, not scientific, — the “stereotype threat” hypothesis caught on, even though the “threat” doesn’t appear to exist, and couldn’t close the gap even if it did.
Mexican alternate history on display at Roosevelt High School in East Los Angeles
White Teachers, Black Students
Mary Morrison’s essay ‘White Teacher in an LA School’ (American Renaissance, 2012) brings to mind what Winfield H. Collins wrote about black education in 1918: “Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.”
… according to local talk-radio jocks and know-it-all opinion writers in the papers, we teachers are paid far too much for what we produce: a drop-out rate of approximately 60 percent, and unemployable graduates who cannot read, write or compute. Oh, what they don’t know! I’d like to tell them about lazy, low-IQ students who enter high school reading at a 2nd or 3rd grade level, who speak little or fractured English, are disrespectful to adults, and are hostile to the very idea of education. I’d like to tell the public about the students who arrive late every day unprepared, surly, and without textbooks, pens, pencils or paper, let alone homework. Yet these same students always have bags of fast food, and never seem to be without the latest 4G cell phone, iPad, iPod or any other i gadget, all of which are strictly forbidden. This is more because they could be stolen than because they distract from learning.
I’m told repeatedly at compulsory, professional development sessions held every other week, that it is my fault that Hispanic and black students score at the bottom on NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests. I’m told that I am the reason students who barely speak English and cannot multiply or divide can’t pass the required 4th-grade-level exit exam they need to finish high school. It is because of me that English learners aren’t getting past a rudimentary level even after years of intensive English-language instruction.
And what is needed? More teacher oversight, more professional development, better, newer methods of teaching, and textbooks loaded with photos that reflect “changing demographics” so “students of color” can see “others who look like them.” These changes will surely raise state test scores and staunch high drop-out rates. Rarely is there enough money to cover teachers’ salaries yet there always seem to be funds to pay for one lavish, hundred-million-dollar theoretical program after another that, we are told, will finally close the achievement gap.
In all my years of being talked down to and patronized by know-nothing, professional educational theorists who have never set foot in a classroom, I have never seen a single one of these expensive mandates succeed: not plush new buildings, nor brand new textbooks filled with “people of color,” nor the latest fad teaching hypothesis, nor all-day teacher professional development sessions. Not one has raised student scores or stopped students from dropping out. All have failed spectacularly.
Do you think the educational system will ever admit that maybe, just maybe, the problem could be the students? That perhaps the reasons for black and brown failure and high dropout rates are low IQ and lack of interest — and not institutional racism, bad teachers or run-down buildings? Of course, to suggest this would cost me my job, my pension, and my reputation.
Role models?
On the other hand, Christopher Jackson’s infamous essay ‘A White Teacher Speaks Out’ (American Renaissance, 2009) reminds us of nothing so much as Thomas Nelson Page’s words from 1904: “But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.”
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in America. …
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary white decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other. …
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!” …
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments. …
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work. …
One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth-century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!” …
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good. Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy — in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers — and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass. …
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level.
The solution is more diversity — or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work. Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
A flood in Senegambia, from Reade’s Savage Africa
Black Justice
Remember what Thomas Nelson Page wrote in The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (1904):
It is, undoubtedly, true that the apparent result of the effort to educate the Negro has been disappointing. There are a few thousand professional men, a considerable number of college or high school graduates, but, for the greater part, there is discernible little apparent breadth of view, no growth in ability, or tendency to consider great questions reasonably. There is, indeed, rather a tendency to racial solidarity in opposition to the whites on all questions whatsoever; continued failure to distinguish soundly between outward gifts and character; a general inclination to deny crime and side with criminals against the whites, no matter how flagrant the crime may be.
One of the most enjoyable traveller’s accounts of Africa is British historian and explorer William Winwood Reade’s Savage Africa: Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern, and Northwestern Africa; with Notes on the Habits of the Gorilla; on the Existence of Unicorns and Tailed Men; on the Slave Trade; on the Origin, Character, and Capabilities of the Negro, and on the Future Civilization of Western Africa (1864; Radish 1.7). The subject of Chapter 4, ‘The Paradise of the Blacks’ (pp. 25–33), is Sierra Leone:
Sierra Leone was colonized in 1787 by emigrants from England, consisting of four hundred negroes and sixty women of the town. The original stock was dying out, when the slave-trade was abolished, and the colony was fed with liberated slaves — a practice which is continued to this day. …
By this means a very mongrel population is introduced, and not a very virtuous one; for a large population of all slaves are sold out of their own country for their crimes. But then the first inhabitants of Rome were a mob of thieves, fugitive slaves, and miserable exiles, all of different countries and of different tongues. It is encouraging to find in Sierra Leone the same elements of future glory.
(Reade is not being entirely serious.)
I soon discovered that Sierra Leone is a true paradise of the blacks. Here the negro is triumphant…
It is one of the chief peculiarities of the Sierra Leone negro that he hates, with an intense and bitter hatred, this white man to whom he owes every thing. …
This hatred of the white man becomes really dangerous in a court of justice, when cases of black v. white come before black juries. These men do not want for intelligence; but they form no idea of the sacredness of their calling, and give verdicts at will where their private feelings are concerned. This explains how it is that trial by jury has only been adopted by refined nations. In a savage or semi-civilized state, the heads of the people alone are qualified to judge.
It is a common story here that if you call a black man a nigger you are liable to a fine of five pounds for defamation of character. I do not know if this is really the case, but any thing broader than mere insult is perilous in the extreme. A gentleman who had discharged his servant was annoyed by the man entering his private yard. He ordered him out; the negro was insolent, and refused to go. The white man then did what most Englishmen would have done: he took him by the scruff of the neck and kicked him out. The case was brought before a black jury, who fined him £50.
I had anecdotes of negro jury injustice from so many respectable informants that I could do no less than believe it to be common. I was a little staggered, certainly, when I read in the Rev. J. Leighton Wilson’s work on West Africa [Radish 1.3] the following paragraph:
“But perhaps the most interesting point of view in which the liberated Africans are to be seen, and which will render their moral condition most intelligible to those at a distance, is when they sit at the Quarter Sessions as petty, grand, and special jurors.”
(This remark was actually written by a “Dr. Ferguson, who was once governor of the Sierra Leone colony, and himself a colored man” (History of the Negro Race in America, p. 90; A Brief History of the Wesleyan Missions on the West Coast of Africa, p. 196).)
But the following evidence from Sierra Leone, a work written by Mr. Shreeve, who had resided many years in that colony, will prove, I think, that Mr. Wilson’s remark must be intended for irony. Nothing can render their “moral condition more intelligible” than these extracts; though whether it is an “interesting point of view” to those white men whose liberties or fortunes may be at stake, I will leave the reader to judge.
An African tornado, from Savage Africa
After observing that the negro’s system of physiognomy tends to represent all men bad who happen to be white, and that the white man can not obtain justice in Sierra Leone; after quoting an instance in which a man who had killed another (probably a white victim) was found Not Guilty in spite of all evidence, “a decision at which even the culprit himself appeared astonished, and a virtuous indignation from many ran through the hall,” Mr. Shreeve observes:
“Another reprehensible practice, or rather vice, in which many jurors indulge, is ardent spirits, from which may be traced their frequent, hasty, vociferous, and unjust decisions: this baneful indulgence is evident to all in court; and upon a late trial, at which I was present, a juror was so disorderly that the judge was obliged to impose a fine of £5, and lock the Bacchanalian up till it was paid. Another matter of serious importance, and often fatal to the course of justice, is the common practice of private communication of interested parties with jurors upon their retiring to find a verdict; and again, that of parties being permitted, through the absence or favoritism of the bailiffs, to eavesdrop at the door of the jury-room, and not only to overhear their deliberations, but actually communicate in the native language with those upon whose impartiality at the moment perhaps a life depends.”
Finally he adds, “Here Justice should be painted like Le Brun’s Revenge, with a bowl and dagger, not with the balance and the sword.”
You will perhaps suppose that this dislike for us has proceeded from acts of cruelty and oppression. But no, they have less to complain of in that way than our laboring classes at home. We are their liberators, their shelterers, their protectors — but we are really their masters. They acknowledge our supremacy, but they detest us for it; they do not love the hand which showers gold upon them from above: they prefer the baser metals, which they can grub up from beneath their feet. Paramount in their own paradise, they find themselves pigmies when they stir abroad; the politest words which they receive are tinged with a condescension which goes through them like a sword. Sensitive and vain, they hanker for dominion; possessed of neither patience nor persistence, they can never obtain it save in their own small spheres.
Theodore Roosevelt may have had this sort of jury malfeasance in mind when he spoke at the Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of New York in 1905:
Laziness and shiftlessness, these, and above all, vice and criminality of every kind, are evils more potent for harm to the black race than all acts of oppression of white men put together. The colored man who fails to condemn crime in another colored man, who fails to co-operate in all lawful ways in bringing colored criminals to justice, is the worst enemy of his own people, as well as an enemy to all the people. Law-abiding black men should, for the sake of their race, be foremost in relentless and unceasing warfare against law-breaking black men. If the standards of private morality and industrial efficiency can be raised high enough among the black race, then its future on this continent is secure. The stability and purity of the home is vital to the welfare of the black race, as it is to the welfare of every race.
Anne Pressly and her murderer, Curtis Vance
The Mistrial of Curtis Vance
While reading the following excerpt from David Koon’s ‘Lee County justice: the mistrial of Curtis Vance’ (Arkansas Times, 2011), we should bear in mind Reade’s tales of Savage Africa, particularly the case “in which a man who had killed another (probably a white victim) was found Not Guilty in spite of all evidence, ‘a decision at which even the culprit himself appeared astonished, and a virtuous indignation from many ran through the hall.'”
On the morning of April 21, 2008, Kristen Edwards got up and started getting ready for school. A native of Maine, she’d been a science teacher at Lee High School in Marianna for seven years, assigned there by the Teach for America program, which places eager young educators in under-performing schools. After getting out of the shower and putting on her bathrobe, Edwards was walking through the yellow house where she lived alone at 87 E. Mississippi St. in Marianna when a stranger grabbed her from behind.
The attacker told her he had a gun; that he “knew her house,” and would kill her if she looked at him. Pushed face down on a nearby couch, she was raped in her own living room. After locking Edwards onto an enclosed back porch, the man fled with her cell phone and charger, a video and $3 — the only cash she had. Edwards never saw his face.
Seven months later, the DNA taken from Edwards’ robe and body during a rape examination at a local hospital was processed at the Arkansas State Crime Lab. It turned out to be the break a lot of people a hundred miles away from Marianna had been looking for: a clear match for DNA evidence found in the home of KATV television anchor Anne Pressly, who had been raped and brutally beaten in her Little Rock home on Oct. 20, 2008, dying from her injuries five days later.
… Marianna police detectives focused on a small-time burglar from town named Curtis Lavelle Vance. His cheeks were swabbed by investigators, and within days the news came back: Vance’s DNA matched the genetic evidence collected in both the Marianna case and at the Pressly crime scene. Vance was arrested in Little Rock on Nov. 26, 2008.
Given how good the DNA evidence is in the Marianna rape, how much of a slam dunk it seems — 16 out of 16 genetic markers, evidence that would be the high-five moment on any “CSI”-style police procedural show worth its salt — not to mention the fact that Vance took the stand in the rape trial and testified that he had, in fact, told Little Rock detectives in a taped confession that he was in Edwards’ house on the morning of the rape, it was confusing for a lot of people when on Feb. 3, a jury in Marianna decided they couldn’t reach a verdict. The case was declared a mistrial.
The jury split seven to five along strictly racial lines — seven blacks and five whites. Even though it would be hard to find a genetics expert in the world who would tell you there was more than an unfathomably remote chance that the semen found inside the victim belonged to anyone other than Curtis Vance, the fact of the matter is this: All the white members of the jury were apparently swayed by that evidence, while all the black jurors were not.
While some we talked to say that the reason for that could be everything from a community-wide distrust of police to a simple lack of understanding among the potential jury pool when it comes to DNA, others — including the victim — contend that the case was decided on a factor that has nothing to do with evidence: the race of Curtis Vance. …
Even with what seemed to be overwhelming DNA evidence and with Vance’s taped statement admitting he’d been in Kristen Edwards’ house on the morning of the rape, [prosecutor] Fletcher Long said that he told Edwards before the trial even started that the best he could probably do for her was a mistrial.
When we asked why, Long told the story of another Marianna rape trial he was involved in a few years back, a case in which the crime lab found that the chance that the semen collected during the investigation belonged to anyone other than the defendant stood at around 2 trillion to one. That case, Long said, twice ended in a mistrial, the jury split strictly on racial lines, with the blacks for acquittal and the whites for conviction. After the second mistrial in that case with the jury again split strictly on racial lines, the victim decided not to press it any further. Unlike Curtis Vance, that defendant — innocent until proven guilty in a court of law — is walking the streets of Marianna today.
It’s only one of the cases in the area, Long said, where a trial involving DNA wound up with “equally bizarre results” broken down on racial lines. “I’ve seen it in other types of cases,” Long said. “Although it gets particularly difficult to deal with in black/white crime, you can have it where it rears its ugly head in black-on-black crime. I don’t know of another way to put it other than a distrust of ‘The Man’ leads the jurors to impose on the prosecution unbearable burdens.” …
The recipient of the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship from NASA, Edwards currently works at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., about as far east from Marianna, Ark., as you can get without falling in the Atlantic Ocean. Edwards said she “absolutely” believes the mistrial in her case was about color. “The jury was presented with incontrovertible DNA evidence — which was collected, transported, processed and verified flawlessly — that proved beyond all scientific certainty that Curtis Lavelle Vance is the man who attacked me,” she wrote. “Seven of those jurors either did not understand the evidence that was presented to them, or chose to ignore it and violate the oath they took to uphold justice.” … “It frightens me to know that juries can completely disregard everything they have heard in the courtroom and hand down verdicts based on their personal beliefs and biases, and that victims can be denied justice simply because they have the misfortune of being attacked in a part of the county where people will consider the color of a victim’s (or perpetrator’s) skin rather than seeing one human being committing a heinous act of violence against another human being.”
A classic example
Jury Nullification
For a broader look at black jury nullification, I recommend Nicholas Stix’s essay ‘Diversity Is Strength! It’s also… Minority Jury Nullification’ (VDARE, 2009; links in original).
“What do you have to do today to get the death penalty?” asked Channon Christian’s father incredulously.
Letalvis Cobbins, a black man, was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and murdering the 21-year-old white girl in the January 2007 Knoxville Horror. And yet the jurors sentenced him to “life without parole.” [Letalvis Cobbins found guilty in Christian-Newsom murders, WATE, August 25, 2009.]
Since murderers have been known to be released from prison sentences of “life without parole,” and prison is for the most violent black and Hispanic offenders a felon’s paradise, replete with cable TV, weight lifting, and ample opportunities to deal and buy drugs and gang-rape white men, Cobbins’ sentence is both misleading and of dubious punitive value.
The jury’s pretext for not sentencing Cobbins to death for the most heinous crimes ever committed in Knox County: laughable “mitigating” factors, which it asserted outweighed any aggravating factors: “a horrific childhood, the pleas of his relatives and his alleged role as subordinate to an evil mastermind”.
One or more of the potential jurors obviously perjured himself during voir dire. Because District Attorney General Randy Nichols had announced that he would seek the death penalty for Cobbins, each Cobbins juror had to be “death penalty-qualified” i.e., had to testify during jury selection that he was willing to consider the ultimate sanction or be automatically disqualified.
(In an instance of criminal justice affirmative action, in Tennessee a prospective juror in a capital case must also say that he will consider a convict’s “background” — wink, wink — rather than simply his crimes, in deciding whether to sentence him to death.)
Presiding Judge Richard Baumgartner had sabotaged the possibility of a death sentence before the trial even began. Arguing that pre-trial publicity made it impossible for the defendant Cobbins to get a fair trial with a Knox County jury, Baumgartner went to Davidson County to fetch a jury to bus in to Knoxville, the Knox County seat, and sequester for the trial.
Baumgartner then permitted “Cobbins’ defenders [to use] the jury challenge process to fashion a predominantly black panel from Davidson County.”
The jury originally contained only three white jurors, for crimes whose victims were both white, and which were carried out in a jurisdiction that was 87.3 white, and only 8.8 percent black. By contrast, Davidson County is 27.5 percent black. …
By all accounts lead prosecutor, ADA Takisha Fitzgerald (who is black), acquitted herself honorably. But she and her (white) co-prosecutor, ADA Leland Price, never had a chance with that jury.
This sort of behavior has become pervasive among black and other minority jurors. Their refusal to punish, or in some cases even to convict, heinous minority criminals amounts to a form of “jury nullification” that threatens the entire justice system.
Another recent example: Last December, Brian Nichols’ confessedly racially motivated, 2005 Atlanta mass murder spree resulted in only a life sentence, “without parole.”
The last case I know of… in which black jurors sentenced a black defendant to die for his crimes, was the 1992 trial in Los Angeles’ Mount Olive Church of God and Christ double-murder, in which both victims were black.
However, even that case required that prosecutors excuse numerous black potential jurors via peremptory challenges, after the latter expressed attitudes that were “anti-police, anti-prosecution, or anti-death penalty.”
Black potential jurors have since gotten smarter, and now publicly conceal their true views. …
Today, black civilians, lawyers, and felons alike routinely invent non-existent legal requirements as a pretext for acquitting black criminals, or diminishing their punishment, e.g., variously denying, expanding, or twisting legal principles such as criminal culpability and “acting in concert”…, “burden of proof,” and even the presumption of innocence, in order to rationalize acquitting guilty blacks, railroading innocent whites, and generally turning the law on its head. …
Black jurors have condemned police for engaging in perfectly legal practices, and used these non-violations as pretexts for acquitting black murderers, such as:
- Not telling a non-juvenile suspect that his mother had secured him counsel;
- Chasing a suspect whom they had just witnessed attempting to murder two people with a firearm; and
- Using deception in interrogations.
There is also mainstream black opposition to:
- Accepting any confession from a black suspect; and
- Incarcerating convicted black felons (also here).
The foregoing dodges can be summed up in one phrase: “It ain’t over ’til the black felon wins.”
It’s bad enough that most blacks embrace such insanity. But for over 40 years, they have increasingly succeeded at imposing it on America’s criminal justice system. …
The Knoxville Horror could never have been committed had the alleged “ringleader” not been given a token sentence for previous violent felonies. In 2001, Lemaricus Davidson was convicted in Tennessee of carjacking and aggravated robbery, for which he could have been sentenced to life in prison. Instead, he served a mere five years.
While exuberantly supporting the most bloodthirsty black felons, blacks also often demand the incarceration of innocent whites.
In 1992, four LAPD officers were acquitted in a state trial of using excessive force under color of authority. Their alleged “crime” was the brutal but perfectly lawful beating of parole-violating felon Rodney King who, while in a state of extreme intoxication, had led police on a chase at speeds of up to 115 miles per hour, violently resisted arrest, and assaulted four officers.
Their acquittal was greeted by the worst race riot in American history.
The feds responded by retrying the officers in an unconstitutional, double-jeopardy, civil rights trial. Jurors convicted two of them. Koon and Powell’s federal convictions were the result, variously, of racist black jurors, leftist whites, and whites who either appeased the racist black jurors, or as Lou Cannon suggested in his monumental work, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, sacrificed the two officers to “the 13th juror” — the “street,” i.e., the fear of additional black race riots.
Racist blacks also demand that whites be imprisoned for acts “violating” non-existent laws, as in the Jena Hoax, or for acts that never occurred, as in the Duke Rape Hoax. …
I have touched here only on the jury problem — leaving aside the issues of diversity-oriented local and federal prosecutors, sentencing (and reversals) by judges, “de-policing,” politicians who aid and abet criminals (here and here), and diversity-based, systemic overload.
America can have “diversity” — or it can have justice.
But, as is becoming increasingly clear, not both.
Jury in the Vicky Pryce trial
A “Fundamental Deficit in Understanding”
Melanie Phillips raises an interesting question: ‘Do We Need IQ Tests for Juries?’ (Daily Mail, 2013).
By discharging the jury which had failed to reach even a majority verdict, the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney, did not hide his astonishment and dismay at the way it had behaved. On Tuesday, the jurors had presented him with a list of ten questions which revealed that they simply did not have a clue about what they had heard as evidence, what they had been told by himself or indeed what they were supposed to be doing there at all. … Most extraordinary of all, they asked whether they could reach a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and had no facts or evidence to support it.
Since a criminal trial is no more or less than a trial of the evidence, such a question revealed a fundamental lack of understanding of what a criminal trial actually is. No wonder the judge said that some of these questions had shown a ‘fundamental deficit in understanding’ of the jury’s role, and that in 30 years of criminal trials he had not come across anything similar.
Inevitably, the question will be asked whether the jury system is breaking down because some of the public are no longer adequate to the challenge of understanding even basic English, let alone the fundamental rudiments of a trial. … Of course, one jury that just didn’t have a clue does not spell the end of a trial system that has helped define English justice and society for hundreds of years. But it’s a pretty stark hint that something is going terribly awry, not merely with the justice system but with the society that it serves.
Only at the end of the article do we learn that of the twelve members of the jury, “only two were white — the rest appeared to be of Afro-Caribbean or Asian origin.”
On a lighter note, we are relieved to learn that Kinshasa has finally released a herd of innocent goats, languishing in Congolese prison on trumped-up charges (BBC, 2008):
A minister in the Democratic Republic of Congo has ordered a Kinshasa jail to release a dozen goats, which he said were being held there illegally. Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo said he found the goats just in time during a routine jail visit. The beasts were due to appear in court, charged with being sold illegally by the roadside. The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining.
Mr Nyamugabo was conducting a routine visit to the prison when, he said, he was astonished to discover not only humans, but a herd of goats crammed into a prison cell in the capital.
Black Preachers
I must return to Reade’s Savage Africa for this irresistible anecdote (p. 31):
It is one of the chief peculiarities of the Sierra Leone negro that he hates, with an intense and bitter hatred, this white man to whom he owes every thing. This Christian feeling is propagated even by the native preachers, for one is said to have explained our origin from the pulpit in the following manner:
“My breddren, you see white man bad too much, ugly too much, no good. You want sabby how man like dat come to lib in the world? Well, I tell you. Adam and Eve dey colored people, very hansum; lib in one beautiful garden. Dere dey hab all things dat be good. Plantains, yams, sweet potatoes, foo-foo palm wine — he-igh, too much! Den dey hab two childrum, Cain and Abel. Cain no like Abel’s palaver; one day he kill’m. Den God angry, and he say Cain! Cain go hide himself; he tink him verry claber. Heigh-heigh! God say again, Cain, you tink I no see you, you bush-nigger — eh? Den Cain come out, and he say, ‘Yes, massa, I lib here — what de matter, massa?’ Den God say in one big voice like de tunder in de sky, ‘Where’m broder Abel?’ Den Cain turn white all ober with fear — dat de first white man, breddren.”
This is very profane; but profanity is only dangerous in the pulpit, and when it is spoken in earnest. This absurd anecdote will make you laugh, and that is all; but you must remember that the effect upon that man’s congregation would be very different, and would certainly not tend to promote an amiable feeling toward the white population.
Compare, if you please (Daily Caller, 2012):
Speaking at the 100th anniversary of a Washington, D.C. church, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright knocked President Barack Obama and accused America’s elite academic institutions of instilling racism. …
Wright later went on to suggest that America’s elite universities infect African Americans with “white racist DNA.”
“Take a baby born an African, as an African in the oven,” he said… “Take that baby him or her away from the African mother, away from the African community, away from the African experience… and put them Africans at the breasts of Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago, those trinity schools, UCLA or U.C. Berkley. Turn them into biscuits then they’ll get that alien DNA all up inside their brain and they will turn on their own people in defense of the ones who are keeping their own people under oppression.”
“There is white racist DNA running through the synapses of their under-brain tissue,” he continued. “They will kill their own kind, defend the enemies of their kind or anyone who is perceived to be the enemy of the milky white way of life.”
“This absurd anecdote will make you laugh,” Reade said, “and that is all; but you must remember that the effect upon that man’s congregation would be very different, and would certainly not tend to promote an amiable feeling toward the white population.” We should have learned that lesson a long time ago (JTA, 2011):
Rev. Al Sharpton says he made “mistakes” during the Crown Heights riots 20 years ago. Sharpton has been faulted for playing the role of agitator during three days of riots in which African-Americans rampaged through a Brooklyn neighborhood, killing a Jewish student, after a black boy had been struck and killed by a vehicle driven by a Chasidic Jew. During the unrest, Sharpton led a march of hundreds shouting “No justice, no peace” through the streets of Crown Heights to the Lubavitcher movement’s world headquarters.
The riots started after Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old African-American child, was struck and killed by a car in the motorcade of the Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Scheerson, in August 1991. Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish scholar visiting from Australia, was fatally stabbed later that night by a mob. After the riots had subsided, at Cato’s funeral Sharpton referred to the neighborhood’s Chasidic Jews as “diamond merchants.”
Racial Preferences
In The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (1997), Richard Kahlenberg explains Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court’s 1978 ruling in favor of “racial preferences and quotas”:
The Court’s liberals clung to the notion of eventual color blindness, saying racial preferences were only a temporary means by which our society would advance to its ultimate colorblind stage. In Justice Blackmun’s familiar words, “In order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race.” Short-term race consciousness, he said, was necessary before the country could “achieve its professed goal of a society that is not race conscious.” He added: “I yield to no one in my earnest hope that the time will come when an ‘affirmative action’ program is unnecessary and is, in truth, only a relic of the past.” …
While some opponents of preferences were always skeptical of their temporary nature, the public record is replete with examples of proponents of affirmative action pledging their impermanence. Congressman Robert Drinan (D-Mass.) called race and gender preferences “an interim strategy,” and Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Carter, acknowledged that “there is a general consensus in our society” that affirmative action “ought to be temporary.” Most proponents did not specify a time limit, though a few did. Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League called for “a decade of discrimination in favor of Negro youth,” and Justice Blackmun said he hoped that affirmative action programs would be unnecessary “within a decade at most.”
Those predictions turned out to be quite optimistic. 25 years later (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010), the Supreme Court ruled (in Grutter v. Bollinger) that racial discrimination by universities is constitutional as long as the beneficiaries aren’t white, because acts of anti-white discrimination “serve the compelling state interest of promoting diversity and its associated educational benefits” — benefits, by the way, whose existence no one has yet been able to establish (Rothman, Lipset, and Nevitte). Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her majority opinion:
We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
However, she seems to have changed her mind, arguing in 2010 “that the majority opinion she wrote in the 2003 affirmative-action case should not be seen as imposing a deadline on the use of race-conscious policies or as relieving the need for more research showing such policies have educational benefits.” I wonder if there’s any need for research showing such policies don’t have educational benefits.
In 2012, more than 30 years after the “short-term race consciousness” of Regents v. Bakke, with a mulatto supporter and beneficiary of anti-white discrimination in the White House, Attorney General Eric “Nation of Cowards” Holder, also of African descent, “expressed support for affirmative action” (Columbia Spectator),
saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.”
“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin… When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”
When, indeed, does the anti-white discrimination truly begin? When will black people have stolen enough from white people? For some, the answer will always be: not yet, not enough. And as Christopher Caldwell wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009):
One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.
Child soldiers back the Liberian government against rebels in 2003.
The Free Republic of Liberia
In 1848, Wilson Armistead, author of a 550-page Tribute for the Negro, presented the Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar with a pamphlet bearing the catchy title Calumny Refuted, by Facts from Liberia:
The Reader will please to observe, that the following pages are printed solely with a view of refuting the calumnious charge of incapability and inferiority made against the Negro race.
[…]
Amidst the numerous attempts to depreciate the character of the Negro, by exhibiting it as inferior and incapable of improvement, it is desirable to adduce evidence of an opposite nature, and to show that circumstances operate no less powerfully on the Sable inhabitants of a tropical climate than on the natives of more northern latitudes, in which opportunities have been employed to remove the ignorance of uncivilised man, and to invest him with the glorious light of religion and science.
[…]
The false philosophy which has imputed to the Negro a constitutional inferiority, is amply refuted by facts.
[…]
The capabilities of this calumniated race have been remarkably exhibited within a few years, on a portion of the Western coast of Africa colonised by Free Blacks from the United States, most of them formerly Slaves, including aborigines recaptured from slave-vessels as well as Negroes from the adjoining districts. From this interesting locality, recently constituted into the Free Republic of Liberia, overwhelming evidence might be adduced of the ability, sound judgment, and Christian character of its Sable inhabitants and legislators.
Challenge accepted, Mr. Armistead! I present to you Vice magazine’s The Cannibal Warlords of Liberia (2009). (Quick correction: Samuel K. Doe was not “elected.” He disemboweled the President and overthrew the government, then stole the election. See below.)
Alternatively, from Chapter 1 of Bill Berkeley’s 2002 book The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa (“First-rate reporting informed by good social science,” according to Foreign Affairs):
On a Saturday morning in June 1992, the Liberian port of Buchanan sweltered in the dense tropical humidity of West Africa’s rainy season. Four small boys ambled up a muddy and pothole-ridden sidewalk and entered a tea stall on the city’s main street. They looked to be scarcely older than ten. Dressed in baggy jeans and grimy T-shirts, not much taller than the loaded Soviet-era Kalashnikov assault rifles they cradled in their arms, the boys shuffled heavily in big brown military boots that on them resembled the outsized paws on a puppy.
“How the day?” one of them muttered.
A shudder ran down my spine. The bullets were bigger than his fingers. The boy brushed by the stool where I was sitting and approached the woman who owned the stall. He lifted his fingers to his mouth. The owner dutifully fetched some bananas and buttered some rolls. The boys shuffled out into the street — no word of thanks, no suggestion of payment—savoring their breakfast as they walked.
It was six years since I had last visited Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves and for a century and a half America’s closest ally in Africa. In 1986 I had written some unkind words about the country’s mercurial tyrant, Samuel K. Doe, and his confederates, and Doe had flattered me with a personal rebuke. “Lies, lies, lies, bias and misinformation,” the president said of my work, and he banned its distribution in Liberia. The chief of Doe’s personal militia, a notorious butcher named Charles Julu, whom I had singled out for his particularly egregious conduct, had let it be known that he could not guarantee my safety if I chose to return. A friend of mine, Gabriel Williams, one of Liberia’s many fearless journalists, had apprised me of these developments in a letter from Monrovia, signing off, “Keep fit and keep well, don’t come to Liberia now.”
So I had watched from afar as the country descended from repression into slaughter — from tyranny into lethal anarchy. On Christmas Eve, 1989, a band of insurgents invaded Liberia from neighboring Ivory Coast. Within months, in a spiraling conflagration that had long been feared, tens of thousands of Liberians were murdered, half the population was scattered into exile, and much of the country was bombed and looted into ruins. The much-loathed Doe was captured by a rebel gang and tortured to death. Charles Julu fled into exile.
You can watch Doe’s torture on YouTube. (Note that by 14:26, his ears are missing.)
Now, two years later, Liberia was in thrall to armed children and teenagers, to a mind-numbing array of con artists, embezzlers, and murderers, and to ghosts from its peculiar past.
The boys in Buchanan were soldiers in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), the rebel force that had launched the war against Doe, and that at this moment of attenuated stalemate controlled 95 percent of the country outside Monrovia, the capital. They were among several hundred scruffy, edgy, blank-expressioned members of the “Small Boys Unit” attached to the personal security force of Charles Taylor, the rebel leader. They were not paid, but neither were they hungry. They got what they wanted with their guns. …
Before Taylor’s war few Americans could locate Liberia on a map of the seven continents. Once the fighting started, Liberia briefly captured our imagination as Hell on Earth, an especially lurid example of apparently senseless slaughter. Taylor against Doe, Gio against Krahn — the images that flickered across our TV screens were as inscrutable as they were chilling and bizarre. Sadistic teenage killers with names like “General Fuck Me Quick” and “Babykiller” [not to mention “General Butt Naked”] raped, shot and beheaded at roadside checkpoints decorated with human heads and entrails. Fighters fortified by amphetamines, marijuana and palm wine sashayed irresistibly for photographers, decked out in looted wedding gowns and women’s wigs and shower caps, or in novelty-store fright masks. Some sported fetishes they believed made them impervious to bullets. Accounts of cannibalism were commonplace, and apparently credible. Taylor’s fighters, among others, were said to eat the hearts and genitals of their slain enemies to enhance their “power.”
[…]
Charles Taylor comes as close as anyone in this volume to being outright evil — or “wicked,” as Liberians say. Race war was his method. By “race war” I mean not a war between whites and blacks but rather between groups distinguished by ethnicity, in which their ethnicity is a calculated instrument of mobilization. In this case it was a war between groups distinct not just from each other but from the man who set them against each other. It was Taylor’s signature insight that someone else’s will to mass slaughter, that of the aggrieved Gio people toward Samuel Doe’s tiny minority Krahn, could be harnessed to his own will to power. “Kill the Krahn!” became his battle cry.
As many as 150,000 Liberians were murdered in the seven years between 1989 and 1997 out of Liberia’s prewar population of 2.5 million [six percent of the population], and 25,000 women and girls were raped, as Taylor made one disastrous miscalculation after another, survived to fight another day, and finally prevailed.
[…]
At the time of my visit with Taylor, Liberia’s war was in a lull. The country was split in two, with two governments, two economies, three currencies, at least four armed factions, and some twenty thousand armed “fighters” hustling for survival without pay — and with much blood on their hands for which they would rather not be held accountable. Rival militias were proliferating. Profiteers were milking the stalemate and stripping mines and forests. More than 700,000 refugees languished in limbo in neighboring countries. There were forces at play and interests at stake that suggested to many Liberians that renewed military conflict was likely. And they were right.
Three months after my visit, Taylor launched an assault on Monrovia code-named “Operation Octopus.” Attacking the capital from three sides, his drug-addled fighters bombarded residential neighborhoods, looted, raped and pillaged on an awesome scale, and murdered several thousand civilians. Taylor failed to take the city, however, and he was finally driven out by West African peacekeepers. He licked his wounds and bided his time.
Charles Taylor’s war was not a purely “tribal” affair. Taylor’s rebels sought to eliminate not just Doe’s ethnic Krahn but also people of means, people who wore fine clothes or lived in decent houses. The fighters assumed that people of means had collaborated with Doe. The Krahn suffered disproportionately not just because they were Krahn but because their leaders had appropriated an inequitable and oppressive system and exaggerated its worst features.
It was the Americo-Liberians who built that system. Ultimately the Krahn, traditionally one of Liberia’s poorest ethnic groups, took the fall for 133 years of simmering hatred born of envy. It is a sinister irony that Charles Taylor and many who bankrolled his war against that system are themselves Americo-Liberians.
[…]
The first freed American slaves arrived in 1822, but white governors ruled the settlement on behalf of the Colonization Society until 1847, when Liberia was handed over to the settlers — the Americo-Liberians — and proclaimed Africa’s first independent republic. The new country’s motto, “The love of liberty brought us here,” survives to this day. But the years of settler rule were characterized by severe exploitation of the indigenous inhabitants, who still constitute more than 97 percent of Liberia’s 2.5 million population. Half the country’s national income was enjoyed by less than five percent of the population. The ruling True Whig party, composed entirely of Americo-Liberians, maintained a kind of feudal oligarchy, monopolizing political power. While the settlers along the coast developed an elaborate lifestyle reminiscent of the antebellum South, complete with top hats and morning coats and a Society of Masons, the indigenous peasants eked out a meager, brutish existence on the thin edge of survival. Exploitation reached a nadir in the 1920s, when high government officials were implicated in a flourishing international slave trade and domestic forced labor.
On April 12, 1980, Samuel Doe, then an unknown semiliterate master sergeant, and a band of sixteen collaborators — the youngest was sixteen years old — stormed the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, captured President Tolbert in his pajamas and disemboweled him. Two weeks later, in an unforgettable public spectacle that haunts Liberia to this day, thirteen members of Tolbert’s cabinet were tied to telephone poles on the beach and mowed down by a drunken firing squad.
You can watch that on YouTube as well.
There followed weeks of bloodletting in which hundreds were killed.
Nevertheless, Doe’s coup was widely applauded at first. There was dancing in the streets of Monrovia. Casting himself as the liberator of the indigenous masses, Doe promised an end to the corrupt and oppressive domination of the Americo-Liberian elite and a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth. He also pledged to return the country to civilian rule in five years. But he soon proved to be a lawless and brutal tyrant.
[…]
On August 22, 1984, in an event that left an indelible impression on a generation of Liberians, uniformed troops of Doe’s personal militia, the Executive Mansion Guard, opened fire on unarmed student demonstrators. They killed a still-unknown number of students. Doe’s justice minister at the time, Jenkins Scott, acknowledged there had also been “some rapes” on the campus of both students and staff, but the episode was never investigated, and no one was ever prosecuted.
In October 1985 Doe brazenly stole an election that was to have ushered in civilian rule. There were piles of burning ballots.
[…]
Doe by then was well on his way toward bankrupting the country. In a decade in power Doe and his cronies are estimated to have stolen about $300 million — equal to half of the anemic gross domestic product for their final year at the till.
I had been sent to Monrovia to investigate an event that would prove to be the catalyst for Charles Taylor’s war five years later. On November 12, 1985, barely a month after the stolen election, Taylor’s mentor, the erstwhile fellow putschist of Doe’s named Thomas Quiwonkpa, attempted a coup. The coup nearly succeeded, and Doe finally put it down with horrific violence, killing hundreds of presumed supporters of Quiwonkpa — mostly members of the Gio and Mano ethnic groups from the remote border region of Nimba County.
The “November 12 business,” as it came to be called, established an unprecedented new level of brutality and yielded a critical mass of enduring hatred for Doe — particularly among the Gio and Mano. This was the ethnic division that Charles Taylor would exploit for his own ends five years later. It was from Nimba County that Taylor launched his rebellion in 1990; he would call it “a continuation of November 12.”
Wilson Armistead, who believed that only “circumstances” and a lack of “opportunities” were holding back Africans, had his own vision for the future of the Free Republic of Liberia. It did not include the National Patriotic Front’s teenage junkie transvestite soldiers (Calumny Refuted):
Here we behold a community of Blacks, in almost a defenceless state, located on the border of a vast country, the swarming inhabitants of which are enshrouded in ignorance; — a regularly organised government, which, though still in comparative embryo, is the germ of what may become a great and powerful nation, the nucleus of a vast political and religious empire, from which may radiate, far into the interior of this land of moral and intellectual degradation, the elevating and ennobling principles of civilization, and the benign and heavenly influences of Christianity. — Liberia, amidst the gloom of midnight darkness which envelopes the minds of the millions of Africa’s benighted children, stands as a beacon-light to direct them to the port of freedom and the haven of everlasting rest.
Armistead quotes extensively from the inaugural address of Liberian President J.J. Roberts, which he says provides “striking evidence of the capacity and attainments of Negroes, whose education and life from early boyhood are thoroughly African.” Below, on the left, is the curiously pale, “thoroughly African” Roberts:
On the right is US Secretary of State Robert Lansing who, in 1918, and in spite of all this “striking evidence of the capacity and attainments of Negroes,” had occasion to write Rear Admiral J.H. Oliver, governor of the Virgin Islands (The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1995):
The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course there are many exceptions to this racial weakness but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically unsolvable.
We can only imagine what Lansing would deduce from General Butt Naked, and what he would make of Armistead’s predictions for the future of race relations in America (Calumny Refuted):
If “the aristocracy of the skin” were laid aside, and the Coloured population of America were invested with the full rights of citizenship, and every civil prize, every useful employment, and every honourable station were thrown open to their exertions, there can be little doubt, as J.J. Gurney observes, in his Remarks on a Speech of Henry Clay’s, “that the mixture of colours, in the same population, would soon be found perfectly harmless. Every man, white or black, would rest on his own responsibility; character, like other things, would find its natural level; light and truth would spread without obstruction; and the North American Union would afford, to an admiring world, a splendid and unsullied evidence of the truth of that mighty principle on which her constitution is founded; viz., that ‘All men are created equal, and are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, — Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’”
River Navigation in Equatorial Africa and Killing a Gorilla, from Reade’s Savage Africa (above)
The Future’s Bright at Radish
Thanks for reading. We hope you enjoyed exploring the history of race relations with us in this, the final installment of our three-part celebration of Black Alternate History Month.
I leave you with the discouraging predictions and scurrilous commentary of one Fred Reed:
I read, with the joy that I usually reserve for recurrent migraines, that Precedent Obama will establish an Office of African-American Education, thus furthering the racial Balkanization of the country, providing makework jobs for useless bureaucrats and, predictably, accomplishing nothing. I read also that the NAACP has filed complaint with the Department of Education against Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside of Washington, because its high school for the very bright, Thomas Jefferson High, doesn’t have enough blacks.
Probably I should give up reading.
It never ends. Charges of discrimination, demands for special privilege, endless laws, wringing of teeth and gnashing of hands, lowered standards, no positive results, and start over again.
Readers may not know this, but I suffer from a rare mental condition called “predictive clairvoyance,” that lets me read newspaper headlines from far in the future. Really. I’m serious. Psychologists know about it. This morning I channeled a story from the Beijing Times from the year 5012 (Beijing being the world capital):
“NAACP files suit against school board over test scores, citing discrimination and lingering effects of slavery.”
One Charisse Espy Glassman of the NAACP says (of the Fairfax complaint, not the Beijing, though the two are barely distinguishable) that the county needs to pour resources into the early grades, find gifted blacks and Hispanics, and funnel them into Thomas Jefferson High. It’s because, see, discrimination starts in kindergarten, blah, blah, blah.
What is the woman smoking? Somebody must have put something in her drugs. Her delusion is beyond Paraquat. Yes, racial discrimination exists. This I concede. Racial discrimination pervades American society, apparently ineradicably, rising over window sills, clogging storm drains — and all of it in favor of blacks. Try:
Head Start, the federal Department of Education, NCLB, forced integration, forced busing, free after-school programs, Youth Scholars, welfare, grants given to universities,medical schools, and law schools for developing minority outreach programs, affirmative action in school admissions, government contracts, government and private-sector jobs, unidirectional hate-crime laws, and so on. And on. And on.
Everything in America aims at somehow keeping blacks happy. […] The United States has tied itself into knots that would baffle a wind-era sailor to keep thirteen percent of the population placated. And done it unsuccessfully. All we hear is slavery, send money. We be discriminate, send money. Give us a job we can’t do very well, or perhaps at all. That is what affirmative action is.
No nation has ever made such desperate, soul-wrenching efforts to convince a large minority to for God’s sake do your homework. And this is what it comes to. I say to black parents: Your kids do not do poorly in school because of discrimination, but because they don’t know the answers. We evil whites can give you schools and books. We can’t read them for you. …
Implicit in all the solemn trumpery about race is that vile and malevolent whites want to exploit blacks, or see advantage in holding them down. Oh? I suspect that if rationality were oil, race hustlers would be about a quart low, so let me explain some facts. Most whites do not want to hold blacks down. On purely selfish grounds, it is very much in the interest of whites for blacks to prosper. If all blacks shot into the middle class tomorrow, we could tax them instead of paying for welfare. We could fire three-quarters of most urban police departments. We could live in the cities. We could take the wrong exit into Newark and expect to come out alive.
Maybe next year, my hopeful friends. Maybe next year.
Recommended Reading
Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We recommend the following resources. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)
White Flight
- ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’ and ‘The Blind Leading the Blind, Part II’
- ‘Diversity and the North, Yesterday and Today’
Black Education
- ‘The Mis-education of Afro-Americans, Yesterday’ (essential)
- ‘Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment’
Black Justice
- ‘Curtis Lavelle Vance on Trial for Beating Anchorwoman Anne Pressly to Death’
- ‘The Central Park Gang Rape’
- ‘The O. J. Simpson Trial: The Jury’
- ‘Self-policing and the Afro-American’
- ‘Dirty Little Secrets’
Black Preachers
- ‘Examining the United Church of Christ’
- ‘The Peculiar Theology of Black Liberation’
- ‘Obama’s Radical Background: More Questions Only VDARE.COM Will Ask’
- ‘“Yes, This Is War.” When Blacks Say It, Maybe Whites Should Take Them Seriously?’
- ‘Newsweek Whitewashes Al Sharpton’
- ‘Expressions of Ethnic Animosity’
Racial Preferences
The Free Republic of Liberia
- The VICE Guide to Liberia
- ‘Black History Month 2012: The (Black) “Land of the Free”’
- ‘Black History Month 2012: “Greater Liberia” Goes Full Gangsta’
- ‘Entire country of Liberia to relocate to Washington State’
- ‘Scare Tactics’
- ‘Ex-President of Liberia Aided War Crimes, Court Rules’
- ‘Ex-Liberian Leader Gets 50 Years for War Crimes’
- ‘Struggling but Grateful, Liberia Welcomes Bush’
- ‘How American aid is lifting Liberia’
- The Redemption of General Butt Naked
- Q. Sakamaki’s Liberia gallery
Black Civilization
- ‘Why Africa Has Gone To Hell’
- ‘Black History Month 2012: Review: Cry Freetown’ (on Sierra Leone)
- Lothrop Stoddard’s The French Revolution in San Domingo (Foseti’s review here)
- ‘Conversation With The Haitian Driver’
- ‘Haiti, Again: Like A Confused Kitten Contemplating A Porcupine, The Verminous Reality Contortionists Of Forty Second Street Reveal Their Tragic Cluelessness’
- ‘Japan and Chile make unbelievable recovery while Haiti still a sea of rubble’
- ‘Haitian invasion welcomed in rural America’
Assorted, Tangential & Miscellaneous
- ‘Black History Month Resources’
- ‘Black Alternate History Month: The Extended Remix’
- ‘Brawl Erupts at East St. Louis Food Stamp Office’
- ‘New 911 police tapes from Wisconsin State Fair released’
- ‘“This Is How We Lost to the White Man”’
- ‘Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History’ (excerpt)
- ‘Lynching: History and Analysis: A Legal Studies Monograph’
- “Corner Stone” Speech (Alexander Stephens)
- ’Tis Sixty Years Since and Shall Cromwell Have a Statue? (C.F. Adams II)
- The Noble Savage (Charles Dickens)
- Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (Thomas Carlyle)
Lovely people. For the life of me I can’t understand why anyone ever compared them to gorillas or baboons and worried about letting them vote. They must have just been plain ignorant. Oh well, haters gonna hate, as they say.