Archive index | Homepage


Vol 7, No. 3 March, 1996
  C O N T E N T S 

The Origin of Races (Part II)
What We Know, Don't Know, and
          Don't Want to Know About Crime (Book Review)

0 Tempora, 0 Mores!
Letters from Readers

  C O V E R   S T O R Y 

The Origin of Races
(Part II)

All world civilizations can probably be
traced back to Cro-Magnon man.

by Michael W. Masters

"Everywhere one looks the Upper Paleolithic
arrives in the form of an invasion . . . ."

– David de Laubenfels

hirty-five thousand years ago a new human race appeared somewhere in western Eurasia. Scientists do not know the precise point of origin or exactly how this new Homo sapiens sapiens became differentiated from his immediate predecessors, but differences there were, and in abundance. Though anatomically modern humans appeared more than 100,000 years ago, this new race possessed a remarkable constellation of new talents: creativity, ingenuity and a restless wanderlust that forever altered the course of life on earth.

Known as people of the Upper Paleolithic Period (the end of the Paleolithic – from approximately 60,000 to 10,000 B.C.), they were identified in 1868 by the discovery of fossils in a cave in southern France called Cro-Magnon. Soon exquisite cave paintings, clay figurines, ivory and calcite carvings, jewelry and musical instruments were found in other caves in France, Spain and Germany. Vivid images of mammoth, bison, horses and Cro-Magnon females indicated awareness not only of the physical world but also of sexual reproduction.



Formed in the crucible of a European ice age, Cro-Magnon had a cranial capacity of well over 1500 cubic centimeters. This is larger than modern Northern Europeans and East Asians, who have an average, including both males and females, of about 1350 cubic centimeters. Modern Africans have an average cranial capacity of about 1250 cubic centimeters. Since the correlation between brain size and intelligence is now well established, the intellectual capabilities of Cro-Magnon must have been impressive.

The original Upper Paleolithic people would,
if they appeared among us today, be called Caucasoid.
Cro-Magnon people looked very similar to modern Europeans. David de Laubenfels, a Syracuse University anthropologist, said of them: "All have certain physical characteristics in common; all have well formed chins, high straight foreheads, smaller modern teeth, and brains as big as Neanderthal but without the heavy brow ridges. . . . The original Upper Paleolithic people would, if they appeared among us today, be called Caucasoid . . . ."

Technologically advanced Cro-Magnon people expanded outward from Northwest Europe during the Mesolithic era, 20,000 years ago or more, moving into West Asia and North Africa, as well as into Northeast Asia, where mixing with indigenous proto-Mongoloids appears to have been substantial. The mountains of Central Asia formed a barrier to their penetration into Southeast Asia. As a result, Southeast Asia today is largely a mix of early Mongoloids, Australoids and Negritos (possibly descended from earlier migrations of Africans).

The impact of the dispersal of these early Caucasians on the creation of civilization is incalculable. As the map on this page shows, every place on earth where history records the rise of great civilizations lies on a Cro-Magnon migration path. Prof. De Laubenfels adds: "There is reason to believe that the significant changes associated with the cultural advance known as the Upper Paleolithic had fully as great an impact on the human condition as any one of the familiar more recent great economic 'revolutions' [agricultural, industrial, etc.] . . . . The Upper Paleolithic techniques . . . overwhelmed all regional bounds and spread inexorably in all directions ultimately to transform the economy in all parts of the inhabited world . . . . The resulting population realignment produced for the most part the familiar modern racial groups and for the first time placed humans in the dominant ecological role in the world."

What Prof. de Laubenfels attributes to "cultural advance" and "techniques" may be ascribed to intellect and temperament. Culture follows these traits and not the other way around. And, as numerous researchers have suggested – for example, Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario and Edward Miller of the University of New Orleans – these traits have genetic origins. Even so timid a source as The History and Geography of Human Genes, by Professors Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi and Piazza, affirms that "the prototype of modern humans comes from Cro-Magnon."

Civilization, throughout time and place, is therefore the virtually exclusive creation of the new race that was shaped in the forests and caves of Europe 35,000 years ago. This creation is not merely cultural. It is organic and genetic, and followed the restless migrations of Upper Paleolithic peoples into nearly every corner of the earth.

Ice People and Sun People


Upper Paleolithic Cave Art.
Prior to the arrival of Cro-Magnon, humans lived mainly in small, genetically homogeneous groups with restricted ranges. These isolated groups tended to diverge genetically. The result, according to de Laubenfels, was that "[b]y the end of the Middle Paleolithic period [250,000 to 60,000 B.C.] there had developed substantial divisions between peoples of different regions of the world and these resulting human types can be called early races." [emphasis in original]

Modern races – Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, Australoid, etc. – were formed by isolation and adaptation to local conditions, the most powerful of which is climate. Intellectual adaptations that allowed early humans to survive long, cold ice-age winters were vastly different from those sufficient to sustain existence in a tropical climate, rich with year-round nourishment. These adaptations appear not only in external physical differences but in dramatically different IQ profiles, and in traits such as foresight, altruism, mating fidelity, anxiety, diligence, thriftiness, etc.

Philippe Rushton has used life history theory to explain such adaptations (see full treatment of this theory in AR, Dec. 1994). Citing Edward O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, he explains:

"Evolutionary biologists assume that each species (or subspecies, such as a race) has evolved a characteristic life history adapted to the particular ecological problems encountered by its ancestors. A life history is a genetically organized suite of characteristics that evolved in a coordinated manner so as to allocate energy to survival, growth, and reproduction. These strategies may be organized on a scale.

"At one end are 'r-strategies' that emphasize gamete production, mating behavior, and high reproductive rates and, at the other, 'K-strategies' that emphasize high levels of parental care, resource acquisition, kin provisioning, and social complexity. The K-strategy requires more complex nervous systems and larger brains . . . . [A]rchaic versions of what were to become the modern Caucasoid and Mongoloid peoples dispersed out of Africa about 100,000 years ago and adapted to the problem of survival in predictably cold environments. This evolutionary process required a bioenergetic tradeoff that increased brain size and parenting behavior ('K') at the expense of egg production and sexual behavior ('r')."

Edward Miller has proposed a concept called paternal investment theory. He suggests that "in cold climates males were selected for provisioning, rather than for mating success. In warm climates, where female gathering made male provisioning unessential, selection was for mating success. Male-hunted meat was essential [in cold climates] for female winter survival. Genes that encouraged mating success were selected for in warm climates. Negroes (blacks) evolved in warm climates, while Caucasians (whites) and Mongoloids (Asians) evolved in colder climates. Mating is assisted by a strong sex drive, aggression, dominance, sociability, extroversion, impulsiveness, sensation seeking, and high testosterone. Provisioning is assisted by anxiety, altruism, empathy, behavioral restraint, gratification delay, and a long life span."


Upper Paleolithic Art.
The History and Geography of Human Genes devotes an early section, "Scientific Failure of the Concept of Human Races," to denying what the average man knows instinctively, i.e. that races exist. The authors then spend a thousand pages proving what they have just denied. As Edward Miller says in his review of the book, "there do appear to be three major groups that include very large numbers of people, and whose gene frequencies differ. These are the three traditional groups of Negroids, Caucasoids and Mongoloids. American Indians and Australians constitute other large groupings with distinctive gene frequencies."

The History and Geography of Human Genes presents a variety of techniques to illustrate genetic differences. They can be used to calculate a measure of "genetic distance," which shows how much any two ethnic groups differ. Since the authors analyze only a few of the 100,000 human genes – and since the easily-measured genes from blood samples are not those that affect obvious traits that vary by race such as skin and eye color, hair texture, temperament, etc. – their genetic distances must be viewed as relative and approximate.

Genetic Distance of Selected Ethnic Groups
  West
Africans
Koreans Central
Amerinds
New
Guineans
English
West Africans 0        
Koreans 1807 0      
Central
Amerinds
2293 790 0    
New Guineans 2752 1420 1924 0  
English 1487 982 1246 1816 0
           
Average IQ 70 100 90 65 100

The above table provides data for a few ethnic groups, selected from the book's analysis of 42 ethnic groups worldwide. On this scale, the English and the Danish differ by 21 points, the smallest difference among the 42 groups. The English differ from the Caucasoids of India by 280 points. The largest difference, 4573, occurs between Central African Mbuti Pygmies (not shown) and New Guinean aborigines. Approximate IQs have been added, based on work by Richard Lynn.

The Sorcerer's Seed

The table shows the enduring imprint of Upper Paleolithic people. Cro-Magnon and his progeny seeded northern Eurasia with his genes, giving rise to civilization. Europeans, exemplified by the English, are genetically and intellectually closer to East Asians (typified by Koreans) than they are to black Africans and New Guinean aborigines, who have the lowest IQs.

Northeast Asians received a substantial infusion of Caucasoid genes during and after the Mesolithic period. During his expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s, American scientist Roy Chapman Andrews found Cro-Magnon skeletons as far east as central Mongolia and dating from 20,000 years ago. More recently, four-thousand-year-old Caucasoid corpses have been found in the Tarim Basin area of Central China, confirming ancient Chinese legends about men having, in the words of researcher Victor H. Mair, "great height, deep set blue or green eyes, long noses, full beards, and red or blonde hair."

American Indians are descended from Northeast Asians who, about 30,000 years ago, crossed a land bridge that spanned what is now the Bering Strait. They are genetically closest to present-day Northeast Asians but more distant than Asians from Europeans.

Why are American Indians not as intelligent as Northeast Asians? Upper Paleolithic people spread outward 20,000 years ago but Asians may have come to America 10,000 years earlier. It may be that Asians crossed the Bering Strait land bridge before Cro-Magnon's descendants migrated into Northeast Asia – or before they arrived in large enough numbers to raise Asian intelligence. The Amerind IQ data suggest that climate-related evolution may have initially lifted Northeast Asian IQs moderately above those of Africans and Australoids but that it was the Cro-Magnon influx that lifted Asian IQ to the European level.

In an unpublished paper, Edward Miller writes: "When Australia and the Americas were settled the original populations lacked certain alleles because the relevant mutations had not yet occurred, or because these mutations had not reached the relevant parts of Eurasia. After Australia and the Americas came to be isolated from the larger Eurasian populations, they did not receive further immigrants . . . . Thus, the intelligence of the Australian and American aboriginal populations came to lag behind that of the rest of the world."

Evolution in Reverse

There is great intellectual resistance to the view that Cro-Magnon genes played a fundamental role in creating modern civilization, just as there is resistance to the view that human intellectual potential differs by race. Nevertheless, these concepts explain much of human life experience and we ignore them at our peril.

There is no guarantee that evolution will always move forward. In the white nations, low birthrates, non-white immigration, and miscegenation are weakening the gene pool. Current racial policies can lead only to genetic submersion.

Welfare has recreated an environment similar to that of Africa and has produced similar behavior. Recipients can subsist on government subsidies without having to plan for long, cold winters, much as early Africans could obtain food year-round in a tropical climate. Males can engage in promiscuous sexual activity and a substantial number of their offspring will reach maturity to repeat the cycle. Males are not needed for provisioning; females can rear children alone, sustained by government food and medicine. As a result, a violent new underclass has appeared, free from Nature's culling forces.

Just as welfare drives evolution backwards, immigration is bringing to the West millions of people who cannot build or sustain our civilization. What will be lost if we do not act now to reverse this trend?

In The Decline of Intelligence in America, Seymour Itzkoff writes: "These words may sound crass. They are. But the situation is crassly serious. The United States, along with other European cultures around the world, is at risk. An epochal change is in process. For the past 35,000 years, the genetics of European intelligence, passed around the world, have laid the groundwork for what we call and treasure as civilization. Civilization in the West is now in jeopardy."

Civilization is in jeopardy because our genetic heritage is in jeopardy. Humans with the endowments required to create civilization have arisen only once in the history of man. Cro-Magnon's progeny will always create civilization; it is his destiny to do so. But without the genes that make it possible, there will be no rebirth if the West should fall. Text end.

Michael W. Masters is the author of "The Morality of Survival," which appeared in the July and August 1995 issues of AR. His articles have appeared in The Social Contract, Southern Patriot and The Citizens Informer.

•   •   • BACK TO TOP   •   •   •

  B O O K    R E V I E W 

What We Know, Don't Know, and
Don't Want to Know About Crime

Criminologists have begun to
shed the illusions of the 1960s.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Crime

James Q. Wilson & Joan Petersilia (eds.)

ICS Press
1995, 650 pp.
$69.95 cloth-bound
$34.95 paper-bound.

ver since crime started rising sharply in the 1960s, it has been a subject of increasingly intensive study by criminologists. Crime, edited by two of the most highly-regarded authorities on the subject, James Q. Wilson of UCLA and Joan Petersilia of UC Irvine, is a collection of 20 scholarly essays by experts, summarizing the current academic understanding of street crime. Although the authors either ignore the implications of race or speak of it sotto voce, it is clear that criminologists are shedding some of the social science illusions from previous decades. Among their findings:

  • Criminals almost always share certain characteristics, both genetic and environmental.
  • Poverty and unemployment do not cause crime.
  • Rehabilitation does not work.
  • The only practical benefit of prison is that it keeps criminals from committing more crime.
  • Drug treatment, "crime prevention," and alternatives to imprisonment do not work.
  • Early "intervention" to reform juvenile delinquents does not work.


What this boils down to is that certain people are going to commit crimes no matter what society does. Only middle age – not punishment – cures them.

The Criminal Personality

Criminologists are virtually unanimous in agreeing that offenders cannot be rehabilitated.
The personality of the typical criminal is already established by age two or three. He is aggressive, refractory, impulsive, unaffectionate, and difficult to rear. By contrast, a child with a sunny, winning disposition is very unlikely to become a criminal. As one of the authors explains, "antisocial personality almost never shows up in adulthood (barring brain injury or disease) without having been foreshadowed by antisocial behavior in childhood."

Criminals tend to have sex and try drugs at an early age, and start offending when they are young, breaking windows and setting fires before they are teenagers. Nearly every career criminal had a long juvenile record, and nearly every juvenile with a long record becomes an adult criminal. These are the chronic offenders who terrorize society; about six percent of the male population accounts for 50 percent of all arrests. These same proportions have been found in other countries.

The association between low IQ and crime is now beyond doubt; the typical offender's score is 10 to 15 points below normal. Low IQ is not, however, decisive, but must usually be combined with the typical criminal personality. One telling indicator of future deviance is a school record that is even worse than a child's low IQ would predict. Disobedience and impulsiveness combine with dim-wittedness to make bad students, who often become offenders. Interestingly, the larger the family, the more likely that the children will be delinquent.

Consistent though these criminal characteristics are, they are not sure predictors. Many refractory, low-IQ children do not become predators. These traits indicate a strong propensity for crime but only a minority act on it. It is extremely likely that these characteristics are hereditary. Studies in Scandinavia have shown that children of criminals, when given up for adoption, are considerably more likely than other children to become criminals. Curiously, this link is stronger for property crime than for violent crime. If any given criminal has a twin, the twin is more likely than average also to be a criminal. If he has an identical twin, the chances are even greater.


Future offender.
There is one genetic condition that essentially proves that crime can have genetic causes. As Richard Herrnstein points out in this collection, men who are born with an extra male chromosome are about ten times more likely to be arrested than men born with just one Y chromosome. This condition does not run in families and can turn up as an abnormality in families with no criminal history.

Recent studies reported in this volume have found basic physiological correlates to crime. "Mesomorphs," or well-muscled people, are more likely to have typically criminal personalities and to be offenders. Criminals also tend to have low resting pulse rates and to be unresponsive to sudden stimuli. Electro-encephalogram (EEG) readings of the brain show unusual rates of theta or slow alpha waves in the brain, which indicate low levels of arousal. EEG abnormalities of this kind, which appear to be congenital, are found in 25 to 50 percent of violent criminals but in only five to 20 percent of non-offenders. As one of the authors explains:

"Criminals are hypothesized to be biologically underaroused. One consequence of this underarousal is a lack of fear, which allows them to more easily initiate risky or dangerous behaviors . . . . Biological underarousal may also lead to stimulation-seeking behaviors such as gang involvement and criminal activity that, in turn, raise their arousal to more optimal, 'normal' levels."

Abnormalities in the frontal cortex of the brain are also associated with crime and the aggressive personality. Cortical dysfunction can be identified through computerized tomography, positron emission tomography, and cerebral regional blood flow analysis, and is particularly likely to be found in violent offenders, including rapists. Low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin are also predictors of impulsiveness and violence.

Complications in pregnancy can disrupt neural development in the fetus in ways that predispose a child towards crime. Some of these complications can cause visible abnormalities, such as ears that are located low on the head.

The 19th century Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, taught that criminals show distinct mental and physical stigmata. He is now generally thought to be discredited, but new discoveries may yet prove him right.

We already know that blacks have lower IQs than whites and are more likely to be mesomorphs. An obvious area of fruitful study would be to determine whether the other biological indicators of crime are unevenly distributed among races. The research is yet to be done, probably for fear of what it might reveal.

Progress in the Field

Of course, even without data on racial differences, these findings have tremendous value in steering society away from liberal uplift policies that have failed. For decades, sociologists have pointed out that criminals grow up in poor, chaotic, drug-sodden communities, have bad role models, often lack fathers, are likely to be abused, and go to bad schools. All this is true, and the conventional view was that these circumstances made little boys into criminals regardless of genotype.

As this collection shows, criminologists are slowly beginning to note the possibility that criminals may well be produced in exactly the same way as the miserable neighborhoods in which they flourish: by incompetent, irresponsible people who both degrade their surroundings and pass destructive traits on genetically to their children. Although some of the writers in Crime use euphemisms like "personal characteristics" to describe what causes both bad neighborhoods and bad people, there is at least a hint of hereditarianism in this book.

On the other hand, environment cannot be discounted. Some people are strongly drawn to crime, and degenerate ghetto neighborhoods cannot but influence their choices. Many blacks and Hispanics and even some whites are now born with the gruesome double disadvantage of an unfavorable genotype and an environment fashioned by people just like themselves.

The Failure of "Intervention"

What can be done about any of this? The authors in this collection are virtually unanimous in concluding that rehabilitation and crime prevention have not worked and probably never will. In the concluding essay of the book, co-editor James Q. Wilson writes:

Biological research on race is yet to be done, probably for fear of what it would reveal.
"Prevention, if it can be made to work at all, must start very early in life, perhaps as early as the first two or three years, and given the odds it faces . . . be massive in scope." He writes that current fads like midnight basketball and summer jobs for young thugs will have no effect on crime. The idea that lack of jobs causes crime is increasingly untenable, since criminal proclivities are well established long before anyone needs a job.

Another author writes that "for all the lip service paid to prevention, there is still very little hard evidence regarding techniques that work, or their expected payoff." In fact, some efforts to identify potential juvenile delinquents and steer them away from crime have back-fired; cajolings from do-gooders can make rebellious children even worse.

Once people start committing crimes, there seems to be no way to persuade them to stop. "In the 1970s," writes one author, "a series of reviews concluded that the available evidence was insufficient to support the claim that any one particular form of treatment was more effective than any other, including no treatment at all." Criminologists have quietly set aside the idea that offenders can be rehabilitated. Some approaches may reduce recidivism to a small degree but a technique that was reported to have worked once may never work again. Drug treatment programs appear to be equally futile; even when they are run in prisons on captive audiences, they reform virtually no one. Other approaches introduced with much fanfare, have turned out to be duds. For example, it was long believed that probation failed to promote good behavior only because probation officers had too many cases. It is now known that intensive probation with lots of contact and counselling has practically no effect. Lots of street lighting and public places designed as "defensible space" have not worked as promised. Boot camps, community service, and house arrest with monitoring devices have all been tried as measures short of prison that might keep young offenders on the straight and narrow; they do not. Some people, especially in the uplift trade, still manage to work up futile enthusiasms for such exotica as "parent management training programs" that are supposed to teach unregenerate parents how to rear sterling children. Among criminologists, faith in "social engineering" is rapidly dying.

The Last Twenty Years

Every passing year helps snuff it out. During the 1960s, when crime first began to skyrocket, silly social theories contributed to an actual decrease in incarceration rates. There was more crime but it was not punished but "treated." This mistake was corrected in the next decade, and the incarceration rate has risen 350 percent since 1970. There are now over one million people in American jails – four times as many as in 1970 – and the average prison time served per violent crime tripled from 1975 to 1989. [N]

According to Crime, the equivalent of about two percent of the male workforce are now behind bars, and close to five percent are on probation or parole. This means that for about every twelve men with jobs there is one man under supervision by the courts. The figures are worse for blacks. There are only two working black men for every one in jail or under court supervision, and for blacks aged 18 to 34, the ratio is an astonishing one to one.

The last ten years should have been a period of sharply declining crime rates, and for two reasons. "Get-tough" sentencing keeps criminals out of mischief for a long time. Also, there was a drop in the number of men aged 16 to 22 – the peak crime years – which should have reduced crime. As several of the authors point out, the fact that overall crime rates declined only marginally indicates that there was a hugely increased propensity to commit crime. Crack cocaine, which first became widely available in 1985, seems to have accounted for much of this increase.

The same year also marked a spectacular rise in rates of juvenile violence, especially homicide, though the increase was largely among blacks (see top chart). For blacks aged 14 to 17, the homicide rate climbed from about 32 per 100,000 in 1984 to over 110 per 100,000 in 1991 – more than tripling in just seven years. This, too, appears to be closely associated with drug violence, and young killers are particularly volatile. Adults kill strangers about 20 percent of the time, but juveniles do so 34 percent of the time.

At first blush, since nothing prevents crime and nothing rehabilitates criminals, the current practice of locking people up for a long time seems sensible. "Three strikes and you're out" (mandatory life imprisonment for the third violent felony conviction) also seems sensible. But, as the authors point out, it may not be. Whether they are jailed, put on probation, "treated," or just ignored, almost all criminals voluntarily stop offending after a certain age. For every ten active burglars at age 17, nine have retired – at least from burglary – by age 40 (see bottom chart).

A life sentence means supporting, at a current cost of $25,000 a year, a dodderer who is no longer dangerous. Given the assumption that rehabilitation does not work (and the related assumption that jail time does not "harden" young offenders who would otherwise go straight) the best use for jail would be as a ten-year holding pen for the 16-year-olds who have shown every sign that they are among the incorrigible six percent who account for half the mayhem. As currently practiced, "three strikes and you're out" is likely to apply to repeat offenders in their mid-20s, who may already be approaching retirement.

What should the police be doing about crime? Here, too, this book makes a strong case for positions that run counter to fashion. For example, many city police departments have made a fetish of cutting response time to emergency calls. It takes an enormous amount of money and effort to reduce it from, say, seven minutes to four, but the number of additional arrests is likely to be small. Robbery and assault may be over in a few seconds, and even in the case of burglary, a startled homeowner is not likely to call the police until he has secured his property and the malefactor is blocks away.

Another misguided view is that all parts of a city deserve the same amount of police protection. In fact, there are plenty of places the police need never go. Although not all crimes are as concentrated as this, during one year in Minneapolis, 100 percent of the robberies happened at just two percent of the city's addresses. The best thing to do with uniformed police is to have them patrol a city's "hot spots," where crime is most frequent. Studies show that the most efficient way to discourage street crime is to have officers show up at frequent but erratic intervals.

Crack Cocaine

Crime contains a fascinating chapter on illegal drugs, which leaves no doubt that they are associated with crime. A majority of offenses are committed under the influence, often of alcohol or a combination of alcohol and something else. In Manhattan, urine tests show that three fourths of all criminals were using illegal drugs when they committed their crimes. Crack users tend to be far more violent than heroin or marijuana users, and the profits in the trade are so high that some dealers are willing to kill competitors.

Ever since the appearance of crack, the nation has put a huge effort into controlling drugs. There are now one million drug arrests per year. More than half of all federal prisoners and about 30 percent of state prisoners are drug offenders. The enforcement effort swallows up $13 billion in federal money alone and untold billions from the states.


Legal but still dangerous.
It has been impossible to wipe out either supply or demand, so we still have a thriving drug underworld. Moreover, locking up dealers does little good, since dealing is different from other crimes. If police jail a robber this does not open up a profitable market niche that was previously closed, but this is exactly what happens with dealers. If a dozen are swept off the streets a dozen more spring up to take their places.

Should we give up on enforcement, and legalize cocaine? The two authors of the chapter on drugs are militantly agnostic: "The effects of cocaine legalization would be so numerous, so profound, and so unpredictable that any strongly expressed opinion on the subject must reflect some mix of insufficient intellectual humility and simple bluff."

Legalization would surely increase consumption, but by how much? Should cocaine be controlled, like prescription medicine, or should it be sold in grocery stores? Should the legal price be high, as it is now, or low? Even if the legal price were low and this reduced property crime committed by addicts who needed money, mere consumption seems to stimulate crime. With more people smoking it, would there be more crime or less? As the authors point out, crack addiction is horrible – the plight of crack babies is even more horrible – so the unknown benefits of legalization would have to be substantial to justify an increase in addiction.

No one even knows the best way to enforce prohibition. Going after drug "king-pins" raises the street price, but that may only make addicts more violently desperate for money. It may be best to leave "king-pins" alone so that the supply is high and the price low, but chase dealers off the streets so that crack is hard to find and difficult to get. This might discourage new users but keep addicts supplied at a reasonable price. On the other hand, marijuana and heroin can be substitutes for crack and seem to provoke less violence. Perhaps it would be best to keep them cheap and crack expensive so that users will switch. Then again, short-term effects of price changes may be different from long-term effects. No one knows; the police stumble along in the dark.

Schools, Gangs, Race

Some of the chapters on other subjects are equally interesting. A specialist on crime in schools proposes that high school be voluntary rather than compulsory. It is impossible to teach anything to dim, crime-prone boys who are in school against their wills. In fact, they often cause so much trouble it is impossible to teach anything to anyone. The author guesses that some tens of thousands of the worst cases would leave school if they could, which would be an unqualified blessing. He does not think they would then go on a crime binge. They are already committing crimes, and juvenile offending is not much higher when school is out than when it is in session.

When the killing gets out of hand even the psycho- paths get scared and declare cease-fires.
Like the others, the chapter on gang crime concludes that "intervention" has no effect. Gangs have their own cycles of violence that have nothing to do with enforcement efforts. When the killing gets out of hand, even psychopaths get scared and declare cease-fires. If the cease-fire happens to coincide with a much-touted anti-gang campaign, the same technique will be tried in some other city but to no effect. The author argues that since gangs thrive on enemies, any specifically anti-gang effort or police unit will strengthen gang solidarity and increase crime.

Street gangs are on the rise. By 1992 there were approximately 9,000 gangs with 400,000 members operating in 769 cities. In 1970 a far smaller number was operating in only 101 cities. The author notes that gang members are "principally but not exclusively minority," and even writes about the distinctive organization of Asian gangs, but seems to see no connection between this new plague and lax immigration policies.

This is typical of the book's blind spots. There is an occasional mention of high black crime rates, but Hispanic criminals are lumped in with whites. There is no attempt to explain why crime rates differ by race, and not one word about interracial crime. For all the reader might know, blacks never rape or mug whites.

Willful ignorance limits thought. The increasingly wide-spread conclusion that prevention and rehabilitation do not work may be correct, but has anyone tested the effects by race? That whites commit violent crime at only one tenth the black rate says something about racial characteristics. It may be that treatments that fail with blacks would succeed with whites (or Asians). Fear of imprisonment may be greater for whites than for blacks, since jails are full of underclass blacks. Probation may therefore be more effective punishment for whites than for blacks.

The rise in crime rates, especially among adolescents, seems to baffle the experts. One simple explanation is the rising percentage of non-whites. At the same time, the ruthlessly dysgenic effect of large-scale welfare cannot help but increase crime. The army of enemies reared by "the great society" and its successors is on the march. The only effective prevention is probably selective birth control, but Crime has never heard of eugenics.

It takes no special insight to note these things, but even the most obvious ideas are beyond the reach of closed minds. In the meantime, the number of young men is increasing again. Things will get worse. Text end.

•   •   •  BACK TO TOP   •   •   •

  I N    T H E    N E W S 

O Tempora, O Mores!

Contemptible Canadian Customs

Prof. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, is the author of the remarkable book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (reviewed in AR, Dec. 1994). Prof. Rushton's publisher is the American company, Praeger, so books by the Canadian author are in fact imported into Canada. Early in January, Canadian customs were found to have held copies of the book for nine months while they determined whether or not it might be "hate" literature and therefore illegal to import.

An Ontario group called Canadians for Foreign Aid Reform (C-FAR) had ordered five copies of the book directly from Praeger. A spokesman for the group, Paul Fromm, reports that neither he nor Praeger was informed that the books had been confiscated for study; they simply showed up nine months later with a notice they had been reviewed for possible violation of customs laws. A spokesman for Praeger says that the last time the company had trouble shipping scholarly books was in the mid-1980s, when it was unable to get books into the Soviet Union.

Michael Cléroux, spokesman for Canadian customs, says that the government was only enforcing the import laws, which forbid "goods alleging that an identifiable group is racially inferior and/or weakens other segments of society to the detriment of society as a whole." He explained that a complex book would require study by a group of experts and consultation with lawyers. He conceded that the book was already widely available in academic bookstores in Canada but insisted that his department was required to make its own decision about material crossing the border.

Fortunately, this episode has been widely reported – and ridiculed – in the Canadian press. (Rudy Platiel, Customs Official Delayed Rushton Book for 9 Months, Globe and Mail (Toronto), Jan. 3, 1996. Pat Dare, Customs Halted Race-evolution book in Hate Investigation, Ottowa Citizen, Jan. 3, 1996, p. 1. John Herbert, Rushton Books Finally Arrive, London Free Press, Jan. 3, 1996, p. B3.)

Unreported, so far as we know, is the fact that two books published by Scott-Townsend, the American publisher, have been banned from Canada as "hate literature." They are Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson and Shockley on Race and Eugenics (reviewed in AR, Jan. 1993). Both are excellent, scholarly works. Just as inexcusably, the May, 1994 issue of the American immigration control newsletter, Border Watch, was also forbidden entry. Paul Fromm of C-FAR notes that among the videos that were examined this winter for salacious content but permitted entry to Canada were "Anal With an Oriental Slant," "No Holes Barred," and "Anal Sluts and Sweethearts."

Erasing the White Past

In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has decided to remove every painting, statue, picture, and decoration from the 110-year-old parliament building. These apartheid-era works were invariably of and by whites, and celebrated white leaders and the climactic moments of white rule. The National Assembly Speaker, an ANC activist named Frene Ginwala explained, "We will take everything down . . . to avoid the problem of what do we take down and what do we leave."

Upwards of 7,000 items will be removed, including a giant portrait of then-Prime Minister H.F. Verwoerd outlining his plans for apartheid, and a portrait of Paul Kruger, founder of the first Afrikaner republic. For six months at least, they will be replaced by a United Nations exhibition of anti-apartheid art. No decision has yet been made on their final disposition. (Brendan Boyle, Reuters, Apartheid Pictures Come Down In S. African Parliament, Jan. 25, 1996.)

A Homeland of their Own

Many of South Africa's 3.5 million mixed-race "coloreds" are increasingly opposed to the current black-dominated government. For one thing, they do not qualify for the majority of new affirmative action programs because they are not considered black. Even if they could qualify as black, 75% of all South African coloreds vehemently reject any claims of racial kinship to the majority population.

Under apartheid, coloreds had separate schools and were denied the right to vote. Nevertheless, during the 1993 elections the overwhelming majority in the Western Cape Province, where coloreds are concentrated, voted for the white-controlled National Party. Many feared black domination as much as whites did.

Coloreds are increasingly conscious of their distinct cultural identity. Recently, a group of protesters marched on the South African Broadcasting Corporation, demanding a "coloreds only" television channel.

Since the end of apartheid, droves of blacks have been moving into what were once colored-controlled areas. Many coloreds find this migration intolerable and are demanding a colored homeland. To accomplish this, some activists in the 40,000-member Colored Resistance Movement have allied themselves with the National Party. They realize that if they help the Nats return to power, the new alliance would be far more likely than the current government to grant them a homeland.

Although many coloreds were anti-apartheid activists, they do not see this new spirit of cooperation with whites as a compromise. Malcolm Lupton, head of another "brown power" group called the National Liberation Front puts it this way: "For us, whites are not a big problem. They will never return to power anywhere on the African continent. . . . We see them as an asset." (Ken Wells, 'Coloreds' Struggle To Find Their Place In a Free South Africa, Wall St. Journal, Dec. 6, 1995.)

Dark Continent

Though no one quite knows why, the end of white rule in South Africa has been followed by a sharp increase in "witch" killing. Belief in witches is widespread among blacks; four fifths are estimated regularly to consult sangomas, who, though not technically witches, deal in mysterious folk medicines.

In some tribes, there is simply no such thing as an accident. Any unfortunate occurrence must have been the result of witchery. Venda tribesmen also believe in zwivhuya according to which there is only a limited amount of wealth and happiness to go around; any extra can have been accumulated only through witchcraft.

According to traditional tribal practice, when someone is suspected of witchcraft a sangoma is called in to sniff out the culprit and then the chief determines punishment – usually banishment from the village. Lately, gangs of youngsters have stopped waiting for the chief's sentence and summarily kill the witch. They often sing ANC "liberation" songs while they burn, beat or stone the wretch to death. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, are killed this way every year.

In the far north of the country there is a town called Motonawabaloi, which means "place of the witches" in the Sotho language. One hundred twenty-two people live there, all of them accused witches who managed to escape mob execution but dare not return to their homes. Witch-killing is not easy to stop because so many blacks sympathize with it. "Homeland" judges often let killers off lightly. Some sangoma remedies are indistinguishable from witchcraft. According to a traditional practice called muti, strength can be gained by drinking a stew made of human body parts. To be effective the parts must have been removed while the original owner was still alive. The penis is considered particularly potent. (Witchcraft in South Africa, Economist, Dec. 9, 1995, p. 85.)

African Americans

What may be the best-preserved West African tribal community has been found in the jungles of – South America. In the 17th century, African slaves were brought to work the plantations of Surinam. Many escaped and fled into the wild interior to establish villages. Today, there are six tribes of Maroons, so called from the Spanish word cimarron, which means a runaway horse that has gone wild. Maroon villages are still unlinked by roads and can be reached only by canoe.

Maroon society is matrilineal, as it is in Africa, and in the evening parents tell their children spider fables from Ghana. The Maroons worship snakes, and build thatched spirit houses for them along the forest paths. Recently, the Maroons have decided to promote tourism. "We want to show white people we are clever and smart, that we have a culture equal to theirs," explains a tribal leader. (Laurie Goering, 'Pure' African culture thrives in S. America, Chicago Tribune, Sept. 11, 1995, p. 11.)

Separate in Death

The funeral parlor business is one of the most segregated in the country. In most areas, undertakers handle clienteles that are either exclusively white or exclusively black. Until 1985, funeral homes were labeled "white" or "black" in state directories, and there are still separate, black and white national undertakers' organizations. The business is actually getting more segregated. Until recently, small towns could support only one funeral director, who buried everyone. Now, families are more likely to drive to a nearby town to get service from someone of the same race.

Undertakers who still do handle both races say that traditions differ. Whites like to put the body in the ground in two to four days, while blacks often wait eight to ten days for family members to gather. White services are reserved, while black funerals are boisterous and full of song. Whites tend to show their sympathy for the bereaved during a visitation period, while blacks like to attend the funeral itself. Nationally, in 1993, 21 percent of American corpses were cremated, but fewer than one percent of black corpses were cremated. "Why burn twice?" is a common objection. (Suzi Parker, Equal but Separate, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Sept. 6, 1995, p. F1.)

Ethnic groups also differ in whether they want to be told they have fatal diseases. Only 35 percent of Korean-Americans think patients should know the truth. The figure for Mexican-Americans is 48 percent; blacks, 63 percent; whites, 69 percent. (Lindsey Tanner, Truth not Always Best, Doctors Told, Houston Chronicle, Sept. 13, 1995, p. 11A.)

Your Tax Dollars At Work

New York State has discovered that at least 700 prisoners collected welfare during 1994-95 while they were in jail. It is illegal to do so, but people simply sell or give away their welfare benefits and social services cards. The state estimates that at least $200,000 was spent in the name of people who were actually behind bars; many got kickbacks from the new beneficiaries. The state makes no attempt to recover the money or to prosecute cheaters, so this is a no-risk crime. (Beating the System, Reader's Digest, Nov. 1995.)

Fearful Truths

A Florida Department of Education study called "Successful Schools" has reported that one of the common characteristics of good schools is that they have few non-white students or teachers – the fewer the better. The report has prompted the usual uproar, which only confirms Mark Twain's observation that nothing astonishes people more than to tell them the truth. Gerald Richardson, the department employee who directed the study denies that he was suggesting that removing non-whites would improve schools. "It was just information," he says about the report, "information that we could share." (AP, Racial Information in Report Riles Educators, Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 1, 1996, p. 8B.)

Even More Fearful Truths

In its January 13/14 weekend issue, the Financial Times of London published an article by Joe Rogaly called "The White Tribe's Sunset." It reported that birth rates among Europeans are below replacement level (2.1 per woman) everywhere in Europe. Italy (1.3), Spain (1.2), Germany (1.3), Russia (1.5), France (1.7), the UK (1.8), and Hungary (1.7) are all failing behind. Only Ireland at 2.1 is barely keeping even. The author, himself white, seems to think this is nothing to worry about: "The pale sub-species that has been predominant, and behaved so abominably, during the 19th and 20th centuries may be on its way out."

Unfit for Habitation

We reproduce this article, verbatim and in toto, from the San Francisco Chronicle of Jan. 19, 1996. It was headlined, "L.A. Study on Race Relations."

"We can all get along, we just need more programs to improve race relations, an organization of community groups says in a new report.

"City officials must make human relations a top priority or Los Angeles could become 'unfit for habitation,' said the 100 page report by a coalition of 11 groups formed after the city's 1992 riots."


Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

The University of Nebraska football team, considered the best in the nation, can boast another distinctive achievement: a record number of players charged with crimes. In 1995, four of its varsity players were benched on a variety of charges: assault, sexual assault, weapons violations, and possession of stolen property. By January of this year, a basketball player had already been charged with beating his girl friend.

Athletes at Florida State University commit so many crimes – three were arrested for sexual assault in one nine-day period in 1994 – that students now refer to the Seminoles as the Criminoles. In one two-year period 28 University of Colorado football players had brushes with the police.

The sporting view was recently expressed by Bennie Blades, formerly of the University of Miami and now with the Detroit Lions. Musing on the publicity over O.J. Simpson's assaults on his wife, Nicole Brown, he said:

"It's gonna be a lot harder for us to get out of trouble. Three years ago, you smacked a girl around, people say maybe she asked for it. But nowadays, whether she asked for it or not, they're gonna haul you off." (First Down and 10 (years?), New York Post, Jan. 4, 1996.)


So far, the press has carefully refrained from pointing out that athlete criminals are overwhelmingly black.

Truth or Consequences

John Pike is senior vice president at CBS for late-night and non-network programming. In a discussion about programming he is reported to have said that blacks are an important, specialized audience for the following reasons: They do not have jobs and can therefore stay up to watch late-night TV. They enjoy comedy because they cannot follow an hour-long drama. They are a big network audience because, unlike cable, the networks are free. CBS is in the usual tizzy about "racism" and has promised a prompt investigation. (Lawrei Mifflin, CBS Studies Racism Charge, New York Times, Jan. 17, 1995)

Not to be Remembered

In the November, 1995 issue we reported that although Yale and Princeton have memorialized all their war dead, including men who fought for the Confederacy, Harvard has scrupulously kept Confederates off its honor roll. Recently the Harvard Alumni Association strongly proposed that this omission be corrected. The Harvard Board of Overseers was considering the proposal favorably, but decided to send it back to the alumni association for review after the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) protested any change in the status quo. "Our goal is to get the University to abandon this issue all together, and we're going to win," says a BLSA spokesman. (Tara Dawood, BLSA Successfully Protests Harvard Civil War Memorial, Harvard Law Record, Dec. 8, 1995, p. 1.)

"Diversity" Spreads

"Home invasions" are a common crime committed by Vietnamese in the United States against other Vietnamese. Robbers burst into a house and torture the occupants until they reveal where valuables are hidden. Frequently they kill the victims so there will be no witnesses. This crime has been common in southern California but has now appeared in Spokane, Washington, in the rural eastern part of the state.

A young Vietnamese couple was shot to death after the man was beaten beyond recognition and his wife slashed with a knife. Their five-year-old son watched it all, while his two-year-old sister slept. The victims were perfect targets. They were on welfare but ran several illegal, cash-based businesses from their home. Friends suspect that they probably had about $40,000 stashed in various places around the apartment. They were frequent patrons at the local casino and have taken several expensive trips to Vietnam. The wife had recently been flaunting a diamond ring that she claimed had cost $7,000.

  S I D E B A R 

AR Conference

Date: May 25-27, 1996
Place: Louisville, Ky.
Speakers: America's leading thinkers on race relations and the future of our civilization.

Places are beginning to fill up. For information or registration forms, please call:

(502) 637-3242
They were perfect targets for another reason. Vietnamese do not trust the police and usually refuse to cooperate with investigators. If neighbors, including three other Vietnamese families, heard any gunfire they are refusing to talk about it. (Putsata Reang, Asian Gang Linked to Killings, The Spokesman Review (Spokane), Jan. 14, 1996, p. A1.)

Placating the Losers

Every year there is a fundraising party for the National Symphony in Washington, DC, which is held in the National Building Museum. A Second World War P-39 fighter plane hangs from the ceiling of the museum's Great Hall, where the banquet for the National Symphony Ball is given. Each year a foreign embassy or country acts as official sponsor of the ball, and this year it was the Japanese embassy. The organizers of the ball, fearful of offending the losers in the Pacific War, covered up the large white stars on the wings and fuselage of the plane that identified it as a military aircraft.

This toadying has infuriated veterans groups. The American Legion points out that no matter what the reasons, it is highly irregular for an agency of the American government to conceal official insignia. (Joyce Price, Museums Hide Stars on Plane, Anger Vets, Wash. Times, Dec. 29, 1995.)

Another Multicultural Paradise

The population of Trinidad is 40 percent black and 40 percent subcontinental Indian, with a mix of whites, Chinese, and Latin Americans accounting for the rest. Blacks, who have dominated the government ever since independence from Britain in 1965, are in for a change. This year, the first Indian Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday takes office after a razor-thin victory in parliamentary elections.

Not surprisingly, voting is almost exclusively along racial lines, with 90 percent of all blacks and Indians voting for the parties of their races. This year, Indians won because 80 percent of them voted whereas less than 60 percent of the blacks bothered to.

The new prime minister has promised to introduce a Race Relations Act prohibiting racial discrimination. Some blacks, who are alarmed to see Indians outstripping them in business, education, and now government, fear that, in practice, "equal opportunity" will mean racial preferences for Indians.

Trinidad has a history of racial friction. Twice during the 1970s, black-power demonstrations got so far out of hand that the government declared a state of emergency. In July 1990, a black Muslim group tried to overthrow the (black) government in a rebellion that resulted in 23 deaths, 250 injuries, and a week-long siege of Parliament. (Larry Rohter, For New Trinidad Chief, Race Question Looms Big, New York Times, Jan. 1, 1996.)

Odd Coincidences

President Bill Clinton appointed a record number of non-whites – six – to fill his 14-man cabinet. Three years later, four of his appointees have been investigated by the Justice Department on ethics charges. All four are black or Hispanic.

In the last 25 years, 70 congressmen have faced criminal charges. Fifteen percent of them have been minorities, four times their proportion in Congress. (Helene Cooper, Capital Offense, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 12, 1996, p. 1.)

WHO has AIDS

The latest data from the World Health Organization indicate that some six million adults and children have contracted AIDS since the disease was first identified. Seventy-five percent of infections occurred in Africa, with nine percent in the Americas, seven percent in the United States and five percent in Asia.

The number of adults currently infected with HIV (but not necessarily suffering from AIDS) is estimated to be 17 million. These cases are not evenly distributed either; 66 percent are thought to be in sub-Saharan Africa. For the first time, the World Health Organization has estimated the percentage of sexually active adults in each country who carry the virus. In fifteen countries – all in black Africa – more than five percent sexually active adults carry HIV. The highest percentages in the world are Botswana (18 percent – nearly one in five), Zimbabwe (17 percent), Zambia (17 percent), and Malawi (14 percent). (Global Program on AIDS, WHO press release, Dec. 15, 1995)

In the United States, one half of one percent of adults have HIV, with black men, at three percent, six times more likely than average. One percent of adult black women have HIV. (J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Aids, and Sexual Behavior, Chronicles, Jan. 1996, p. 39.)

Ripe for Harvesting

Koreans are colonizing Argentina just as they are portions of the United States. They first began to come in 1965 and now the close-knit communitynumbers about 35,000. During the late 1980s there were as many as 50,000 butmany left for the United States during a difficult period of high inflation. Koreans now own more than 1,000 businesses in Argentina, including severalnewspapers and a cable television channel. There are 300 Korean cultural,athletic and business associations, as well as 30 Korean Protestant churches.

Koreans have been particularly successful in textiles and now dominate garmentdistricts in larger cities. They have the reputation of working 12-hour daysand hiring illegal immigrants from Bolivia at slave-labor wages. When they are assured of anonymity, Argentines grumble that Koreans are taking over the trade.

Sang Hyun Kim, a poor farm boy from South Korea, is typical of the first wave of immigrants. He arrived in 1965 and now has a successful insurance business. He has also brought nine of his brothers and sisters to Argentina and all own businesses. "In Korea, there were too many people and too few economic opportunities," explains Mr. Kim. "When I arrived in Argentina, I thought it was a paradise, like virgin territory ripe for the harvesting . . . ." Now that they have established themselves as an economic force, Korean leader say their next goal is more political power. (Calvin Sims, Don't Cry, This Land is Rich in Kims and Lees, New York Times, Nov. 15, 1995, p. 1.) Text end.

•   •   •  BACK TO TOP   •   •   • 


  L E T T E R S    F R O M     R E A D E R S 

Sir – The articles in the December issue about the Kansas City, Missouri school integration case were quite good. However, I would like to point out that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June that may stop the integration program did not occur in a vacuum. The efforts of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), particularly the Metro-South chapter in St. Louis, were instrumental in moving the suit forward.

In addition to Kansas City, St. Louis is under an older and equally elaborate court-ordered desegregation program. The two programs together have already cost the state $2.7 billion. Missouri has spent more on deseg programs than all other states combined, excluding California.

The liberal news media and power structure have tried to ignore opposition to the court orders, but the CofCC has kept the issue before the public. Especially successful was the Metro-South chapter's campaign to elect members to the St. Louis School Board. Despite unprecedented attacks by the leftist St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others in the media – whose gentlest term for the candidates was "racist" – and an influx of hundreds of thousands of dollars in liberal money, five strong "anti-busing" candidates were elected to the board. In three successive elections they consistently garnered over 80 percent of the white vote. The campaigns generated national news coverage.

Ambitious politicians saw that being "anti-busing" was an effective way to get votes, not only in St. Louis and Kansas City, but with voters throughout the state who also have to pay for deseg programs – often to the deprivation of their own school districts. So, despite opposition by the liberal media, state political figures, including state Attorney General Jay Nixon, continued to attack the deseg programs in federal court. It is doubtful they would have done this if the CofCC had not led the way in showing how popular the "end forced busing" issue continues to be.

The moral of the story is that we cannot just sit back and hope. We have to organize and work!
Gordon Lee Baum
Council of Conservative Citizens
Box 9683
St. Louis, MO 63122

Sir – The article by Michael W. Masters entitled "The Origin of Races" is pure speculation and does not belong in your magazine.

If I am from an ape, there is no God. If there is no God, I am lost. The problem is, I am not lost and there is a God. Darwin, Leaky and Mr. Masters are playing at being god. God does not play.

American Renaissance has been so correct. Have I been silly to be paying attention? Evolution is not science. It is a speculative religion.

Please, no more.
Richard C. Anderson, Sr., Chantilly, Va.

Sir – In connection with Michael Masters' "The Origin of Races" I would point out that supporters of evolution have to start off with a belief in spontaneous generation. They must then also attribute the existence of all organisms – which have clear designs – not to a designer but to a random process of mutations they call "evolution." They must then account for every organ (eyes, lungs, bones, pancreas – everything) in the same way. I find the evolutionary argument extremely improbable, just as I find the argument for absolute racial equality improbable. I don't know if every word or story in the Bible is the absolute truth, but I am not convinced by the atheistic "universe-and-life-from-nothing" argument.
Andrew Roesell, University, Miss.

Sir – Your review of Seymour Itzkoff's book, The Decline of Intelligence in America, contains some of the most worrying facts I have ever read in AR (and there have been plenty). Prof. Itzkoff claims that between 1962 and 1982, the number of students who scored over 700 on the verbal SAT dropped by more than half.

A drop of this kind can, in part, be attributed to such things as bad teaching, and long hours in front of the television. However, verbal scores are a truer indication of actual intelligence than math scores. Students are not (and cannot be) trained to understand language or think logically. Their verbal performance is a fair reflection of native ability. For this reason, I fear that Prof. Itzkoff is correct to suspect that the drop in scores is caused by a real decline in the number of Americans – in this case whites – who have top verbal abilities.

AR readers, who are likely to be well above average in intelligence, must have more children!
Thomas Shorter, Denver, Colo.

Sir – The latest issue (Feb.-March) of American Heritage has an interview with Dinesh D'Souza, in which he cites David Duke, Mark Fuhrman, and Jared Taylor as dangerous racists. He says nothing more about them, assuming that readers will be familiar with these three wicked people. Are you more famous than I thought?
Henry Arpen, Lexington, Ky.

No, I am not. Mr. D'Souza is more deluded than you thought.
– Editor


•   •   •  BACK TO TOP   •   •   •