Mohammad Is On Facebook

Too funny.

Serial Killer on the Loose in Gaffney, SC

Update November 16: Tyler Home Center is now closed due to the death of its owner, Steven Tyler.

There is no connection between any of three sets of victims other than evidence. Victims did not know each other, or at least did not know each other well. There is no known motive or connection for the killings.

A ballcap was worn at all three murders. This implies that he was seen at the Linder killings. The killer was wearing a checkered shirt and blue jeans.

Police are confident it is the same man who did all three sets of killings. There is a lot of evidence linking the three crime scenes.

Two people spoke to the killer shortly before the killings at two of the crime scenes. They said he was “polite” and “seemed like an average person.” In addition, several more people saw the killer at the crime scenes but did not speak to him. He waited until the victims left the area before he killed.

The man found dead in an alley near the Little Theatre on the corner of North Petty Street and East Robinson Street in Gaffney was determined to have died of natural causes. Reports indicating that he had been shot in the chest and had been beaten up were false. The dead man is 53 year old James Thomas McGaha of North Limestone Street, Gaffney.

All of the victims are said to have been from upper middle class families.

Gena Parker attended the funeral of Cline Parker shortly before she was murdered.

All victims were members of older, generationally established Gaffney families that have lived in Gaffney for a long time.

Steven Tyler and Gena Parker were from the same graduating class. They did not graduate together as Steve went to the old Gaffney Day School and graduated in 11th Grade. However, they were from the same class era.

The killer of Kline Cash had a 4-5 day growth of beard.

Many are saying that the killer is either unemployed or works nights or staggered shifts. A day shift worker could not have committed the Linder killings and a swing shift worker could not have committed the Tyler killings. A weekend day shift worker could not have committed Cash killing.

We have discovered the reason why there are two different artist renderings of the suspect. See the photos of the renderings below for more.

There is an unconfirmed rumor that two guns were taken from Kline Cash before he was killed. One of those guns was a rifle. This may be the robbery that the police refer to. The rumor states that one of the stolen guns was left behind at the Linder crime scene.

Stephen Tyler may have been called back to his business just before it closed. When he arrived, he was shot dead along with his daughter.

The Tyler killings occurred at the precise time when the funeral for Kline Cash was going on.

You can listen to the Spartanburg County police scanner here.

A serial killer is on the loose in South Carolina.

This is the first photo released by the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office of the South Carolina serial killer. This first sketch is based on Mrs. Cash's recollection of the man who came asking about buying hay at the Cash home shortly before Mr. Cash was killed.

Residents of Gaffney, South Carolina are staying indoors instead of partying on the Fourth of July. There have been five homicides in the past six days, all shootings. Police say they are all connected. Police have released a sketch of the suspect, a White male with salt and pepper hair. He may be driving a light-gray or champagne tan 1991-1994 two-door Ford Explorer. The Whites of the area are  locking doors in the daytime, hoping to save their lives.

The spree began on Saturday, June 27. The suspect came to the home of Kline Cash and asked about buying hay. His wife said when she left at 3 PM the man was talking to her husband about buying hay. A few hours later, at 6:45 PM, she came back and found peach farmer Kline Cash, 63, shot dead in the living room of the home. The motive may have been robbery.

Kline Cash, a local peach farmer, bound and shot in his living room. He was also robbed. Cash was the first victim of the Gaffney Serial Killer.

Four days later, at 3 PM on Wednesday, July 1, family members found the bodies of Hazel Linder, 83 and her daughter Gina Linder Parker, 50, bound and shot to death in their home. A sign, “Hay For Sale” was visible outside the residence. In the Kline Cash case, the Gaffney Serial Killer had stopped by asking to buy hay.

Photo of Gena Parker Linder, bound and murdered in her mother's home by the Gaffney Serial Killer. She was a beloved 3rd grade teacher at a local elementary school.

Photo of Hazel Linder, bound and shot to death in her home by the Gaffney Serial Killer. She looked in great shape for 83.

Yesterday, Thursday, June 2, Steven Tyler, 48, was shot to death and his 15 year old daughter, Abby Tyler, was shot in the head and seriously wounded around closing time, 7:30 PM, in Tyler Home Center, the furniture and appliance store that the family ran. They were found by Tyler’s wife, an older daughter and an employee. It is not known if the Tylers were bound. Abby Tyler died in the hospital at noon on the Fourth of July.

Photo of Abby Tyler, age 15, who was shot in the head by the Gaffney Serial Killer. She died 1 1/2 days later on the Fourth of July. She was a very pretty girl.

Photo of Stephen Tyler, owner of Tyler Center, shot and killed by the Gaffney Serial Killer.

Incredibly, the Tyler shootings occurred only 1/2 mile away from the sheriff’s office, where 30 officers are working full-time on the case. The Tylers may have been shot to taunt investigators by pulling off a crime so close to the cops’ headquarters. It was a pretty ballsy thing to do.

Although authorities are describing this as a serial killer, a better description might be spree killer. Spree killers are really easy to catch, but the problem is that since there is little to no downtime between killings, they can kill quite a few before they get caught.

Even though he has killed two men, authorities say he is targeting females. Authorities have now retracted that statement.

Right now, 100 officers from North and South Carolina are working on the case.

It’s not known if anything was taken in the Tyler and Linder killings.

The suspect is a White man. He is said to be 6’2-6’3, heavyset at 230-250 pounds, with intense blue eyes and salt and pepper hair. He is in his late 40′s. He had a 4-5 day growth of beard at the time of the Kline killing. He was wearing a checkered shirt and blue jeans. He had a ballcap on during all three killings.

This is the second photo released of the Gaffney, SC serial killer. The second sketch is based on a woman who saw the killer enter Tyler Home Center shortly before the two Tyler victims were killed. The woman got a good look at him.

Awesome Paper on Intelligibility Testing

It’s dated, from 1974, but not a whole lot has changed ever since.

There is a lot of interesting information in this book.

For instance, when you get widely divergent results, it’s probably a result of bilingual learning. Say you speakers of Lect A on nearby Lect B. Suppose the males score 90% and the females score 50%. This is almost always due to bilingual learning. The males have been dealing with Lect B speakers because they leave the village to work and whatnot, whereas the women just stay home and have no exposure to Lect B. So the score is that Lect A has 70% intelligibility of Lect B.

It’s important to test speakers individually. Testing in groups results in cases where a strong personality, often male, may lie and say that he can understand all of the text. Everyone else just agrees with him. The strong personality says this because he thinks it’s insulting to admit that he can’t understand the lect. The others, especially women or weaker men, just go along because he’s a strong personality.

Ability to understand another lect is independent of age, sex, status, income and other variables. That right there is pretty interesting.

Anyway, here is the book for download on this site. It’s over 200 pages, so it’s a mouthful.

References

Casad, Eugene H. 1974. Dialect Intelligibility Testing.‭ Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields, 38. Norman: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. xiv, 201 p.

Do the Races Smell Different?

Repost from the old site.

From a very interesting discussion over at American Renaissance in an article about how the Pill disrupts women’s sense of smell. The article itself is interesting. Females have an evolutionarily developed sense of smell that makes them prefer males who differ in a set of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which governs the immune system.

When they choose men with a different set of MHC genes, the offspring gets a complementary set of MHC genes, or the best of both parties, and has an increased resistance to disease. However, women on the Pill lose this preference. Researchers worried that women on the Pill might lose interest in their boyfriends or husbands while on the Pill.

But the comments were even more interesting. I have been wanting to write for a long time about the notion that some Whites say that Black people stink, or smell bad. There did not seem to be a way of writing about this without sounding like a racist asshole, so I put it off.

A relative told me that many Whites say that Blacks smell bad. He even said that they are called “Stink Bugs” by some Hispanics here in California. I said that I had been around Blacks most of my life, including having Black girlfriends, Black best friends who I hung out with every day, and teaching whole classes full of Blacks every day for months on end, and I never noticed it.

It’s not really known what Blacks smell like to those who say they are stinkers. Some say they smell like sweat or onions, but a lot say that they just flat out stink, period.

There is also evidence that Northeast Asians find the odor of Blacks particularly offensive, perhaps more so than Whites do. Asians also say that we Whites stink too, but not as much as Blacks do. They often say that we smell like red meat. Some of this may have to do with diet. But one White Vietnam vet said that Vietnamese could hardly smell Blacks at all, but could smell a White a block away.

Even Hispanics are said to be stinky by some Whites.

So far, this post sounds pretty racist. Black folks are getting screwed like they always do. The other races think they’re stinky, and there’s no hope.

Ah.

But there is hope for Black folks. It seems that a lot of Blacks say that we Whites stink too. Equal time! In the comments to the article (which Amren will not keep and I could not get Google too cache), commenters noted that Blacks often refer to Whites as having a “wet dog smell”.

There is supposedly even a type of spray called “Wet Dog” that you can spray on yourself to give yourself a scent that Blacks hate, though this may be an urban myth. What a way to keep the darkies away!

Along the same lines, a female commenter said that a Black woman told her that Black females can’t stand to take showers with White women in gymnasiums or at school since they think White women smell terrible when they get wet.

Even other Whites say we Whites stink. A White woman said that White men often smell like corn on the cob. A White man said if you get a lot of White guys together in a locker room, they smell like rotten peppers.

I’m a little upset that in yet another lineup between the three great races, those darned cunning, inscrutable Oriental despots come out on top, smelling like a rose even. But alas, all is not lost. It seems that some Whites say that foreign-born Asians and FOB’s (recent immigrants) smell bad. It’s something like sesame oil plus old socks with a drop of rice wine. It’s subtle, but one woman described it as almost nauseating.

A White man who served in Vietnam said that he could smell differences between Vietnamese and Chinese (the Chinese stunk worse), so there may be national variations in stinkiness. I’m happy that some folks think Asians think too. All’s fair.

I supposedly have a great sense of smell, but I’ve been missing out on all these stinky races. I can’t detect any racial or ethnic differences in smell, though I used to work with this nice older White woman who smelled horrible for some reason.

But I find it amusing that in this area of dictatorially enforced anti-racism that so many Blacks, Whites and Asians all think the other races stink.

IQ Population Genetics – Not So Simple

Repost from the old site.

IQ Population Genetics: It’s Not as Simple as You Think. That’s the title of a very nice paper by Gerhard Gerhard Meisenberg, a professor at Ross University, in the Caribbean nation of Dominica. Meisenberg previously worked on a study in Dominica that found a massive 18-point IQ increase over 35 years on this small, almost all-Black island. It was published in the Winter 2003 issue of the Mankind Quarterly.

I believe that the Mankind Quarterly is run by the nefarious Richard Lynn, but in between the racist horrors, there is a lot of great academic work in there that you often can’t find in other places. Meisenberg in particular is an interesting scholar, fully open to genes for intelligence that vary by race but also a strong proponent of the Flynn Effect of strong environmental effects on IQ.

First of all, Meisenberg notes that IQ correlates fairly well with race, religion latitude and economic development. Other variables such as head size, type of economic system and history of colonialism do not seem to have much of an effect.

Most of the text is about IQ and genes, which I am not much interested in.

He does, however, uphold the supposed “Lewontin’s Fallacy”, which hereditarians love to thrash.

First of all, Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has proven that 85% of genetic differences between humans is within races, 10% between races and 5% between ethnic groups within races. What is interesting is that Arthur Jensen, uber-IQ hereditarian, agrees with this assessment. He found that 15% of IQ variation in humans in his studies was between races. But this added up to a significant figure.

Skull shape has similar figures: 79% between individuals, 13% between races and 6% between ethnic groups within races.

So for genes, skull shape and intelligence, Lewontin’s analogy makes sense, and there is no need to conjure up “fallacies” about it. In terms of intelligence, Lewontin’s analogy ends up showing a significant Black-White differential.

In contrast, skin color is almost totally racial: 88% is between races, 3% is among ethnic groups in races and 9% is between individuals. There was very strong selection pressure for skin color due to the needs for Vitamin D and protection from UV waves – skull shape underwent no such rigorous selection.

This paper shows a substantial increase in the size of cranial vaults in the US from 1850-1975. The probable cause is general nutrition. Although the Flynn Effect has been ridiculed on the basis that we could not possibly be smarter than our grandparents’ generation, if our brains are bigger than theirs were, it makes sense that we could actually be smarter than previous generations.

The head size increase was consistent in both Blacks and Whites and males and females. This gives the lie to the hereditarian notion that the Black IQ has been a flat “85″ for the last 100 years. Clearly, Blacks today have much larger heads and are much brighter than Blacks a century ago. Black skulls showed no change from 1850-1900, but after 1900, their size began expanding dramatically, an increase that is ongoing.

In particular and amazingly, Whites and Blacks in the late 1900′s had skulls that were closer to each other than either was to their ancestors! Especially, US Black skulls are now dramatically different from African skulls.

This study looked at Black and White skulls in the US through time. Colonial Black skulls looked very African. By 1900, they looked less African, though still retaining strong African characteristics. In both races, there has been a trend towards decreased prognathism and a receding lower half of the face.

Meisenberg also questions whether or not IQ actually drives economic development. If so, then why did the Industrial Revolution take place in Europe rather than in Northeast Asia? He questions the notion that genetic IQ differentials among races take thousands of years, shedding doubt on Lynn’s Ice Age Theory. Meisenberg suggests that the Asian advantage over Whites in IQ may have evolved in only the past 200 years or so.

There are problems with the latitude effect on IQ as a variable. For one, it has no effect among Africans. It seems to have had little effect in Amerindians either. Latitude also correlates with brain size and Meisenberg gives us the first data I have seen on head size in SE Asians. Malays have quite small heads and IQ’s of 92, whereas Koreans have much larger heads and IQ’s of 106.

Meisenberg also suggests that genetic intelligence and head size rises may work much faster than skin color changes due to complexity of the traits. Intelligence is probably acted on by many genes, whereas skin color is only controlled by a small set of genes. The greater the number of genes controlling an effect, the faster evolution can occur.

Meisenberg comes out strongly for a high standard of living as having a positive effect on IQ.

The massive rise of IQ that took place in many countries over the past century shows conclusively that environmental effects can have a powerful effect on the average intellectual level of large populations. Presumably one or another aspect of “standard of living” is responsible for this secular trend: education, nutrition, health care, mass media, or, most likely, a combination of all of these.Together with the Flynn effect, these results suggest that the causal arrow points both ways. High intelligence produces a high standard of living, which in turn raises intelligence even more. Thus intelligence and economic development are mutually reinforcing in a positive feedback loop.

This feedback loop explains two of the greatest mysteries of our time: the rapid progress of science, technology and economic development during the 20th century, which is indeed a major historical anomaly; and the rise in mental test performance that has become known as the Flynn effect.

This feedback loop between intelligence and standard of living can explain the great magnitude of the IQ differences between nations.

It predicts that even in cases where genetic differences affecting mental ability are small, the observed phenotypic differences become amplified because the slightly more gifted populations achieve a higher standard of living which raises their measured intelligence even more, which in turn raises their standard of living yet further.

Similar “amplifier effects” have previously been proposed as explanations for the Flynn effect.

Excellent stuff, huh?

First of all, let us elucidate who exactly those opposing the Flynn Effect so strenuously are. Other than hereditarians like Jensen with a deep career and theoretical investment in hereditarian views, the most vociferous opponents are almost all Whites, mostly Northern Europeans, creepily enough (Aryans anyone?). Almost all of them are racists.

Even Southern European White nationalist types tend to poo-poo IQ fetishism more than the de facto Nordicists.

Race realists seem more interested in the Flynn Effect. An environmental effect on IQ will mean that differences between races are not fixed by the genes, and these racists have a strong need to believe that Blacks, Hispanics, Amerindians, etc. are hereditarily inferior to European Whites in intelligence, and that no cultural variables can change this.

If environment effects IQ, then presumably Blacks or others could start to close the gap with Whites, and they want to maintain their superior position.

One of the principal arguments against the Flynn Effect is that we have not seen the expected Second Renaissance in the arts, sciences, etc. that we should have seen. Nor should we be seeing people railing about school failure and the ignorance of high school and college students. But these criticisms fail to understand the Flynn Effect.

The effect has been mostly on culture-free areas like abstract thinking, and much less to none on areas affected by schooling such as mathematics, vocabulary and general knowledge.

With school learning skills flat and many more poor students staying in high school and even trying to go college (students who would have dropped out of high school or never gone to college in my Mother’s generation), we should expect disconnects between expectations and scores.

On the other hand, Meisenberg suggests that the supposedly nonexistent Renaissance has in fact occurred. As he notes, the rapid progress of science, technology and economic development in the 20th century is historically anomalous. I would argue that it was a Renaissance, and would add that it took place in the arts also. Look at the explosion of creativity in literature, music, art and architecture in the 20th Century.

And he notes that this explosion in intellectual and societal development nicely mirrored a concomitant rise in both intelligence as measured by IQ and head size.

Further, the deniers of the Flynn Effect have a hard time explaining away the growth in head size in the last 150 years, which eerily parallels the Flynn Effect. If the Flynn Effect represents no real increase in intelligence, as the hereditarians insist, why did it parallel both a major technological and intellectual revolution and a striking increase in head size itself?

These scores are taken from this paper, and indicate varying scores for IQ tests and semi-IQ tests taken over about 30 years. As you move down in each individual row, you move into revised versions of the tests in more recent years.As you can see, White adult IQ (age 25+) in the US is now 102.9, or 103 rounded off. Black adult IQ (age 25+) has increased in recent years to 89.1 or 89 rounded off. There remains a 13.8 point gap between Blacks and Whites. It is no longer appropriate to say that Blacks have an IQ of 85.

A Flynn Effect and growth of US Black skull size explain nicely the relatively high IQ’s of US Blacks. By White percentages alone, US Blacks should have IQ’s of only 72 (native IQ of 67 plus 17.5% White IQ of 103 gives 67 + 5 = 72). With Black adult IQ (age 25+) in the US now at 89.1, that leaves 15.1 points of US Black IQ unexplained. Meisenberg’s theories laid out in this paper explain this well.

At the same time, there have been similar rises in IQ for immigrants from East India and the Caribbean to the UK and for North Africans to the Europe. Hereditarians such as Richard Lynn desperately try to explain these increases away as either selective immigration or increased miscegenation among UK Jamaicans, but given the parallel experiences of US Blacks, it seems we are dealing with a Flynn Effect in Europe also.

Meisenberg has an interesting take on contraception. In terms of selection for intelligence, widespread contraception use is dysgenic in advanced societies and eugenic in developing countries. Over time, population differences in IQ should narrow, something we socialists like.

References

Beals, K.L., Smith, C.L. & Dodd, S.M. 1984. Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, And Time Machines. Current Anthropology, 25:301-330.

 

Dickens, William T. & Flynn, James R. October 2006. Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap: Evidence from Standardization Samples. Psychological Science.

Jantz, RL. July 2001. Cranial change in Americans: 1850-1975 . J Forensic Sci. 46(4):784-7.

Meisenberg, Gerhard. Winter 2003. IQ Population Genetics: It’s Not as Simple as You Think. Washington, DC: Mankind Quarterly, Volume XLIV, Number 2, pp. 185-210.

Truesdell, Nicole D. May 2005. Secular Change In The Skull Between American Blacks And Whites. MA Thesis. Baton Rogue, LA: Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Department of Geography and Anthropology.

Blacks and Crime: An Examination

Repost from the old site.

Note: This post has been accused, as usual, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism.

Black crime rate in the US is approximately 8.1 times greater than the White crime rate. It is about 36.8 times higher than the US Asian rate, which itself is 4.6 times lower than the White rate. It is even 4 times higher than the US Amerindian and Polynesian (mostly Hawaiian) crime rates. It is also 2.4 times higher than the extremely high Hispanic crime rate.

These rates are particularly disparate when one looks at such things as rape. For instance, in 2005, Black criminals raped 37,460 White females, while between 0-10 (they don’t even keep records below 10 rapes) Black females were raped by a White man. There is also a suggestion that about 10,000 of those 37,000+ rapes were by groups of more than one Black male (gang rapes).

Figures like this just drive White nationalists up the wall. You know these White racists have always had a thing about “Black men raping our women”. Despite all the lynchings of often-innocent Black men, it appears that they were onto something.

However, these figures also leave out that Black women seem to be about five times more likely to be raped by Black male rapists than White women are. As usual with Black criminals (and this point is lost on White nationalists) the truly victimized are Blacks themselves.

Whites get off easy. Any given White woman is five times less likely to be raped by a Black man than a Black woman is. She should thank her lucky stars she is White! And if anything, those figures give the lie to the notion that Black criminals preferentially prey on Whites (a favorite, feverish and mad White nationalist obsession).

These frightening statistics scream out for an explanation. Where can we look? Society? Poverty? Discrimination? Racism? Racism and discrimination have declined tremendously since the 1960′s and the Black crime rate rocketed upwards. It’s hard to believe that anyone is poorer and more deprived than US Amerindians, so why is the Black crime rate four times higher?

The IQ’s of US Blacks (88.3) are about the same as those of US Amerindians (88.5) and US Polynesians (87.5), yet the Amerindian and Polynesian crime rates are 4 times lower than the Black rate. IQ’s of US Hmong (84 – probably artificially low due to poor English skills) are even lower than US Blacks, yet the Hmong crime rate is probably 18 times lower than the Black crime rate.

Blacks have become much wealthier in the US since liberation in the 1960′s. Rising income and declining poverty hardly offer poverty as an explanation for Black crime.

In short, all of the standard liberal explanations of Black crime (poverty, racism, discrimination) do not hold water. The White racist explanation (low IQ) does not appear to make sense either. Something is driving Black crime, and it’s not poverty, racism, or IQ.

So what is it?

Let’s look at the question in depth.

First of all, Blacks have a high crime rate all over the world. This implies that there is something in Blacks, genetically, as a group, that is causing a lot of crime in modern societies. African village societies often had developed strict cultural mores along with ferocious punishments that kept Black crime at a low level. With the movement to the cities, Black crime in Africa has generally gone through the roof.

Most Caribbean nations have very high crime rates.

Blacks in the UK have a very high crime rate. Only 2% of the population commits fully 20% of the homicides and the vast majority of all gun homicides.

Let’s take a look at the UK.

Jamaican immigrants came in the 1950′s – there were few before. They were relatively hard working and law abiding. Their kids are a disaster. Black gang and gun culture is new to Britain and has nothing to do with poverty at all. In the near past, Whites in Britain were much poorer, such that they were often malnourished, but they were not as depraved as this new Black Jamaican culture, the children of low-wage immigrants.

Now let’s take a look at Blacks in the US.

Fully 50% of black women are overweight – so clearly whether or not US Blacks live in poverty, surely they are not starving. This is a serious point, as capitalist countries all over the Third World cannot seem to figure out how to give folks enough food to eat, and rates of malnutrition are extremely high in the capitalist Third World.

Poverty? The average Black in the US has an income the same as the average Swede – so much for that. Black neighborhoods were safer 50 yrs ago, but in the meantime, blacks have become richer and better educated, yet the crime rate has gone through the roof. A suggestion that genes may contribute to crime comes from reports that criminal parents tend to have criminal kids, even when the kid is adopted away.

Steve Sailer suggests that Blacks, in particular Black males, are big, strong, aggressive and have higher numbers of of testosterone receptors in their bodies, so they have access to more testosterone or they react more to testosterone in their bodies.

I would like to point out that Black crime is often associated with young Black males, and that Black males around 30-45+ have often got it figured out, no matter what they were like as kids. If they settle down, have some kids and own or rent a home, they often relax and are fairly peaceful and easy to deal with.

I say this because my car has broken down a couple of times in the heart of the Los Angeles Black ghetto, and both times Black males around this age came out and worked on my engine to try to get it going again.

Studies of psychopathic personality (broken link) have found that in the US, Blacks and Amerindians have the highest rates, then Hispanics, then Whites, and last Asians. These approximately follow crime rates, except that Amerindian crime rates are far lower than would be predicted by their sociopathy rates.

However, other large-scale studies (broken link) find no difference in Antisocial Personality Disorder by race. They also found no consistent racial differences in traits closely associated with psychopathy, such as sensation seeking and psychoticism, and, contra Richard Lynn’s studies, the Psychopathic Deviate scale of the MMPI.

Neither are these negative results on sociopathy by race compatible with Rushton’s r/K theory of evolutionary selection, as claimed by Lynn, because Native Americans and Hispanic groups are of Siberian Mongoloid origin in the case of the former and mixed Central American Amerindian and Spanish Caucasian in the case of the latter.

Steve Sailer points out that whatever the sociopathy rates really are, Blacks are simply more aggressive than other races (I would say primarily younger Black males). Blacks have .3 standard deviation excess in aggressiveness across surveys (actually, that is not a tremendously elevated rate of aggression), including Interpol.

Sailer points out that there is no discrimination involved in higher black suspension rates in schools. I would agree with that, and add, as a former teacher who taught in Black inner city schools for years, that the only discrimination is probably that far fewer Black students are suspended than ought to be.

I would also add that Black 11th and 12th graders, even in the ghetto, are exceptionally well-behaved, all of the idiots being out of school, in jail, juvey or boot camp, or dead, by then.

In death row sentencing, Sailer notes that the only bias is towards White inmates and this applies even to the South. What Sailer means by that is that Whites are actually more likely than Blacks to get the death penalty for the same crime, even in the South. Obviously, the days of White racist hanging juries are pretty much through in this country, even in the South.

Gene Expression (not my favorite blog at all), quoting Le Griffe Du Lion (not my favorite White racist academic at all) on violent crime:

Le Griffe messes around with some figures and comes up with a .84 correlation of % of Blacks and Hispanics in a neighborhood and violent crime rates. That’s incredibly high in social science, and is almost a perfect fit. The more Blacks and Hispanics in a given neighborhood, the more violent crime, period.

I must point out that Le Griffe Du Lion is an academic lab coat racist, and a true White Supremacist, with a stated agenda of getting rid of all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws in the US.

Yet Black crime rates are not adequately explained on a global basis merely by presence of Blacks.

For instance, the Miami Herald (dead link) quotes the World Health Organization saying that Latin America, with a mixed Caucasian-Amerindian population, has a higher homicide rate (27.5 per 100,000) than even Black Africa (22 per 100,000), lily-White but organized crime-overrun Eastern Europe (15 per 100,000) and Industrialized nations – generally speaking, the West (1 per 100,000).

Furthermore, other studies show that the mixed Caucasian-Amerindians of Latin America, with only 8 percent of the global population, account for 75 percent of the world’s kidnappings.

Clearly, there is something other than pure genetics at work in high Latin American crime rates.

I know it’s heresy in these free market times to mention this, but perhaps, could an insane gap between rich and poor, among the worst on Earth, have a might bit to do with this?

Gini coefficient map for Latin America.

Oh no, of course not, capitalism doesn’t cause any problems, and all societal problems are caused by too much socialism. How do I know this? Wikipedia told me 10,000 times so far, and Wikipedia is God, you know.

Shall we end this on a upbeat tone? Please do.

Given the genetics that Blacks bring to the table, Black crime rates can either be relatively higher or relatively lower, depending on societal variables. A recognition that Blacks bring a different genetic set to the table, which may make them more susceptible to crime, is essential in devising societal actions to reduce Black crime.

What works for other races with different genetic sets may not work for Blacks with their own mental toolbox.

This is why race realism or racialism is so important.

One suggestion I would like to make as a socialist is that socialism seems to dramatically reduce Black crime.

Dominica, an island in the Caribbean, has a homicide rate 50% the US rate. Dominica is a country that is almost 100% Black, and the US is merely 13% Black. Dominica is a country characterized by a relatively equitable distribution of wealth. Most don’t have much, but they tend to all be poor together, and that may be easier for Blacks to take.

In Mozambique in the 1980′s there was a Communist regime under one of my heroes, Samora Machel. The crime rate was almost nonexistent. They were all poor together. According to a resident, anyone, male or female, native or foreigner, could walk across the all-Black capital city, Maputo, in the middle of the night, with scarcely a worry.

Abiola Lapite, one of my least favorite human beings on Earth, does note that there is a tribe called the Dioula in Burkina Faso who have a homicide rate of 1.3/100,000, nearly as low as Japan’s rate of 1.1/100,000.

Why don’t we get some Western criminologists over to Burkina Faso to study the very Black Dioula? Until there is a recognition of the existence of race as a salient variable in human diversity, and that races may differ genetically and biologically on behavioral outcomes, this will never occur.

Genetics provides the clay. Culture or society is the sculptor.

No Black population anywhere is doomed to an insane crime rate. If the Dioula can do it, so can any Blacks anywhere.

Immigration – A Question of Quality

Repost from the old site.

It is quite common in the US for the debate on immigration to be split into polar opposites. On the pro-immigrant side is an utterly insane Open Borders group that seems to more or less argue for unfettered immigration into the US. The overwhelming majority of the US business class supports this for the sole reason of cheap and easily intimidated labor.

On the liberal side of the spectrum, many liberals simply feel it is cruel to keep anyone out of the US who wants to come here. Many others have swallowed the pro-diversity propaganda whole. There is a whole industry out there that is promoting diversity and multiculturalism.

These things are human norms, and human societies have been diverse and multicultural since the beginning of time, so it is insane to argue that these things are unnatural, which is a typical White nationalist argument.

The problem is that diversity, while normal, is not necessarily such a great thing per se. For one thing, various immigrant groups can be poor quality and create many problems for a society. Hispanic immigrants and their offspring are vastly more criminal and problematic that other immigrant groups, or than, say, White Americans.

Long-term resident Hispanics often cause few problems, but the recent immigrants and their children have been a total nightmare. New evidence shows that diversity reduces trust at the neighborhood level. It is common sense that high-diversity societies are often more unstable that monocultural societies.

I am not saying any of this to be a xenophobe. I am just pointing out that it makes little sense to shill for diversity as if it were automatically a good thing in and of itself.

We also have minority groups, in particular Hispanics, who are now pro-immigrant simply out of ethnocentrism and for no other reason. On this, the Left is utterly bonkers. Black and Hispanic ethnocentrism is cheered on wildly, while Whites are forbidden to be ethnocentric themselves.

This Identity Politics has been the curse of the Left since the 1960′s. It is now backfiring as a new White nationalist movement comes into being. This movement is nothing but the logical result of Whites creating their own Identity Politics movement after the Left fertilized society with this nonsense cult.

Also, now that the Open Borders crowd has, in the past 15 years, cleverly conned society into thinking that anti-immigrant sentiment (even anti-illegal immigrant sentiment!) is de facto racist, you have many guilt-ridden folks, especially liberals and Centrists, who support even illegal immigration out of fear of being called a racist.

Nearly the entire US environmental movement has gone over to Open Borders, including Earth First and the Center for Biological Diversity. Sierra Club lost its anti-immigrant battle long ago. Since CBD is focused on endangered species, their position seems particularly insane.

Habitat loss by overpopulation is obviously one of the major causes of environmental damage and the extinction crisis. Anyone who cannot see this is blind. The environmental movement has come out for Open Borders simply out of terror of being labeled racist and for no other reason.

On the opposite side, we have a lot of sensible folks, especially those who want to limit illegal immigration. Even 14 years ago, the debate was much more sensible. In 1994, 40% of California Hispanics voted for Proposition 187 to limit social services to illegals. Now, things have gotten so polarized that I think many of those Hispanics are probably Open Borders folks.

We also have lots of nasty racists, especially White nationalists, on the anti-immigrant side. These people simply do not want any non-White immigration whatsoever, though they are not opposed to the immigration of European Whites (However arbitrarily they may define that group!).

Most of these folks actively dislike everyone who is not White; there are others who do not, but just want to “preserve the declining White race” as if it were an animal subspecies on the Endangered Species List.

There are also the xenophobes. Vdare is a good example of these folks. They just don’t like any furriners period. Most people here are not White nationalists at all – they just oppose non-Americans coming to our land.

In general, most of the hardcore anti-immigrant crowd is on the political Right. The Left has granted this entire field to the Right, even on illegal immigration, which, incredibly, almost the entire liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to support.

There may be less ulterior motives for this. Democrats need Hispanics votes to win, and the only way to get those these days is to support amnesty for 12 million illegals. More cynically, Democrats are supporting illegals as a way to get 12 million new Democratic voters into the US, since 80% of Mesoamerican immigrants are voting Democratic.

Hence it is nice to see someone step out of the box on immigration, like this progressive, Randall Burns, on Vdare actually coming out against illegal immigrants, but focusing his anger on the businesses who hire them. He also makes an argument similar to the one I have made – that mass illegal immigration has been a major factor in both the screwing of the US worker and in the wild inequality gap of the past 35 years .

We need some sense on the immigration debate. In particular, we on the Left and in the environmental movement need to open up some space for the progressives and environmentalists to take sane positions on immigration without fear of being called racists.

First of all, not all immigrants are bad news. It is hard to make a case that legal immigration has been a terrible problem for this country, though we need to drop the numbers way down. The “limit” is now something like 1.1 million legal immigrants.

There is not a lot of evidence that even this level of legal immigration has harmed wages, created crime waves, or done much of anything other than harmed the environment. It is dubious whether legal immigrants take jobs for less wages than US citizens. Most legal immigrants come here and want to work for US wages.

H-1B and the gamut of other “temporary worker” visas are often simply outrageous. Businesses do indeed bring in foreign workers for just about every position imaginable generally for the sole reason of cheap labor. These visas are “non-immigrant temporary worker” visas and last for up to six years!

The whole temporary worker visa BS game needs to be pretty much scrapped. There is little evidence of any labor shortage in any field anywhere in this nation. Most stories about such shortages are simply lies.

Illegal immigration is a catastrophe because the immigrants are unscreened.

With legal immigration, we have a very strict process that winnows out a large number of prospective candidates. The process is so long and drawn out that only those determined to assimilate make it through the program. Once in, they need to be on very good behavior and can be deported for the slightest thing. Legal immigrants in general are not a serious problem in our nation.

With illegal immigration, you are simply importing entire slices of foreign countries wholesale. It’s madness. We have no idea who these folks are, and many of them are criminals and bad folks indeed. Their whole time they are in the US they are breaking the law every day in myriad ways. Their employer is breaking the law. They are using fake ID.

When you import an illegal, you’ve just imported a criminal.

Refugees are another problematic group of immigrants, also because they are unscreened.

I do love SE Asians, but we have had quite a few problems here in California with Vietnamese, Lao, Khmu, Khmer and Hmong gangs. These groups also have huge rates of welfare use, even many years on. It’s clear that they are hardly paying for themselves. I think most of these folks will eventually work out.

Yet even where SE Asian gangs are a problem, SE Asians have a low crime rate. Fresno is near here, and the city’s crime statistics are interesting.

In Fresno, Blacks have a wildly elevated crime rate, the Hispanic rate is about 3 X the White rate, and the “Asian” rate is much lower than the White rate. But most Asians in Fresno are SE Asians. This implies that even with their gangs, SE Asians have a much lower crime rate than Whites.

Nevertheless, there are reports of Liberian and Somali refugees in the US committing a lot of crime and using a lot of welfare. In Australia, Sudanese refugees have been a nightmare.

In one town where many were settled, their crime rate is eight times the normal rate. At a meeting called by a bunch of liberal do-gooders to whitewash the problem of the Sudanese, a Sudanese refugee stole the briefcase of one of the top liberal presenters!

It seems to me that African refugees can be adequately resettled in other African lands. I do not think that many of these people are going to fit in well with our modern society.

It is interesting that other than some Caribbean and Mesoamerican immigrants, Hispanic immigrants have caused few problems.

We have sizable numbers of Brazilians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Chileans, Argentines, Uruguayans and Bolivians in the US. Other than some Colombian drug dealers, most of these groups are causing few to no problems.

The reason is that they are not flooding in here as refugees or illegals. They are coming in as legal immigrants, and we are probably doing a good job of screening them.

On the other hand, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been a nightmare. Vast numbers of all of these groups came here illegally, in the case of the Central Americans, as war refugees. So vast numbers of this group were simply unscreened immigrants. Unscreened means low quality, de facto.

Cubans are a problem in that this is an example of an ingrate immigrant. Since we outrageously automatically let them in as soon as they set foot on land since they are fleeing evil Communism, they have little motivation to assimilate.

Hence they have recreated 1958 Havana in Miami, complete with outrageous corruption, and insane gap between the rich and poor, a corrupt government serves only the rich and spits on everyone else, and a city where English is not necessary. One can go into nice stores and hotels in Miami and you will not find anyone who speaks English. The English language has for all intents and purposes disappeared from this vast city.

One gets the impression that almost no other country on Earth would put up with this sort of insane bullshit.

Unfortunately, Puerto Ricans and Samoans have been problem ethnic groups. This is because they are unscreened! Puerto Rico and American Samoa are colonies of the United States in a world that has decolonized. Because they are US colonies, just about any Puerto Rican and American Samoan gets to come to the US as easily as I can move to New York.

Both groups have a high crime rate and have fallen into Underclass gang culture. The solution is to completely decolonize the US. American Samoa and Puerto Rico need to be set free and cut off the welfare gravy train and Puerto Ricans and American Samoans need to get into the normal immigration line like everyone else.

After 1965, huge numbers of Dominicans from the Dominican Republic flooded into the US as legal immigrants. Now, I like Dominicans just fine and have known a couple of them, but the available information indicates that they have caused a lot of crime, ghettoization and an Underclass in Upper Manhattan – Washington Heights and Inwood – and in much of the Bronx, though legal immigrants.

This is a case where mass immigration of a national group, in this case Dominicans, has not worked out well. The only solution is to get a lot stricter about which Dominicans we allow to immigrate to the US.

It’s also true that mass legal immigration of Mexicans to the US has not worked out well. The available data show that even in the 4th and 5th generation, Chicanos have very high rates of high school dropout and gang involvement. They have very low rates of college graduation. We obviously are not doing a very good job of selecting legal Mexican immigrants to the US and we need to be a lot more selective.

For Mexicans and Dominicans, studies should be undertaken to determine which ones are likely to work out well and which are likely to join the Underclass. Perhaps even IQ tests could be used to screen. This is a difficult area and I do not have all the answers.

Immigrants to your country are like visitors to your house. If an immigrant group is causing problems, it’s time to evaluate our criteria for letting them in, the same way you deal with troublemakers in your home. By definition, legal immigrants should be a benefit to our nation. Groups are likely to create more problems than benefits are not good for America and need to be subject to a more selective immigration process.

There are some Jamaican gangs, but in general, we do not have a Jamaican Underclass seething in our cities. I do not know much about Haitian immigrants. I am not aware that a teeming Haitian Underclass is a threat to the republic.

White nationalist racists like to say that the problem with some immigrant groups is that they are a genetically low quality group. There is nothing to this. Perhaps if we let whole populations flood in unscreened, we could have this discussion.

East Indians, Filipinos and Black Africans are three groups that do not have extremely high IQ’s. All of these places are steaming Third World wrecks. Yet Filipino, Black African and East Indian immigrants have been some of the most wildly successful immigrants of them all. The reason is simple – screening.

No ethnic group is “low quality” per se. Certainly, properly screened, one can find immigrant gold in any race or ethnic group. This ought to be a principle of a sane immigration policy.

On the other hand, letting Black Africans and East Indians flood in here unscreened would probably be a nightmare. They would simply tend to recreate Calcutta or Lagos in the US.

R-K Scale or Introversion-Extroverion Scale?

Repost from the old site.

There are clearly some differences between the races, at least between Northeast Asians, European Caucasians and Blacks. Those differences are obvious to me and to many others, and show up in many statistics on a variety of societal variables.

Whether or not there are global personality differences between the races is very controversial, but it seems obvious to many folks just looking around at the world, and as a former US schoolteacher who taught classes full of Anglo-Americans, Japanese Americans and Afro-Americans for years all over Los Angeles, after a while you have to really lie to yourself to believe that such a thing does not exist.

At Gardena High School, there were many Blacks and many Japanese-Americans, and the contrast simply belts you in the face with a knockout punch. Even those experts who agree that there are differences go on and on about whether they are genetic or cultural, when it’s clear that they are both.

Some recent studies have come out (by Jewish psychologists, of course) claiming that there are no significant personality differences between Blacks and Whites. I don’t even care to read such a study, as it flies in the face of common sense observation.

Philippe Rushton is a racist who dislikes Blacks and his books are very controversial. He has suggested r-strategy versus k-strategy for the differences between Blacks, Whites and Asians. R-k selection theory is a theory in biology relating different modes of adaptation that animals use to survive in the environment.

I’m going to stay agnostic on the r/k thing and I don’t wish to align myself with the oily Mr. Rushton, who, by the way, wishes to do away with all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws, but one thing I think Rushton makes clear is that there is an extroversion-introversion scale that closely mirrors that r/k scale.

As introverts have a vastly lower crime rate and extroverts tend to make up the vast majority of criminals (even among Whites) that makes good sense to me.

Also, extroverts are much more likely to be bored with school, tend to use and manipulate others more, have a “strong prey on the weak and that’s ok” mindset, are vastly less moral and mannered, less inclined to repay debts, have much more regard for self than others, are more promiscuous, gamble, drink and take drugs more, take worse care of their health, are less cautious, have more accidents, take way more risks, are much more aggressive, impulsive prone to wild and excessive mood swings (wild emotionality) and are financially irresponsible and have a lowered life expectancy.

It’s clear to me that all of these are true even within a race, say, with Whites (that’s the race I’m most familiar with).

It’s obvious to me that Blacks are the most extroverted race, NE Asians the least, and Whites in between.

Honestly, I have no idea what to do with most of the other races. SE Asians psychologically resemble NE Asians, though I think they are somewhat more extroverted. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with Amerindians, Hispanics, Polynesians, Micronesians and Papuans. I suspect that Papuans and Aborigines may be more like Blacks in extroversion.

Polynesians are very odd. They’re obviously part-Asian and can be pretty quiet and introverted, yet at the same time, they are collectivist, love parties and are surrounded by people all the time. Filipinos are much the same. East Indians, Arabs, North Africans and South Asians are pretty much like Whites, cultural baggage aside.

Culture seems to intervene a lot here, as with everything else, and it gets real hard to disentangle everything. Sure, there are introverted Blacks (I’ve known a few of them!) and there are extroverted NE Asians, but we are looking at these groups globally here.

Francis Galton’s Insight

Repost from the old site.

Link.

From American Renaissance, a very problematic website due to its racism, but one that I nevertheless check out regularly. Why? It’s the only place anywhere you can see frank talk about race.

The Hispanics have learned to wield the race card like every other liar and huckster in our society. I’m almost sorry we campaigned against racism 40 years ago because we created this horrible Racism Club that every reactionary ethnic activist and nationalist on Earth is using to beat up anyone critical of their petty little group.

It’s almost an honor to be called a racist nowadays in PC America. All too often, it just means anyone speaking frankly about race in any way whatsoever. I assume that the insane PC hate speech laws come next, and I get threatened with jail.

The piece above, among other things, quotes Francis Galton as saying that after observing various races for a long time, he concluded that they had the following personality characteristics:

• Amerindians display taciturn reserve
• Blacks have a talkative impulsiveness
• E Asians are placid

That strikes me as just about right, and it’s interesting that those personality traits are observable in the youngest babies. I am not trying to draw any conclusions from that, but only to note that on average, Blacks are more extroverted and Asians are more introverted. American Indians are somewhat different, but seem to be more toward the Asians.

It’s also interesting to note that Asians are the latest to mature and Blacks are the earliest to mature. How maturation rate fits into introversion/extroversion, I am not sure.

I am convinced that some the pathologies attributed to Blacks are due to their simply being more extroverted. Even in Whites, the more extroverted folks are much more criminal, hate school because it’s no fun, are more sexually active and even promiscuous, are more emotionally volatile, have more problems with drugs and alcohol, and in my opinion, tend to be a lot less responsible and more manipulative.

They are less responsible and more manipulative because they just don’t care about others’ feelings the way that we introverts do, and they are self-centered and feel entitled to use others to get what they want.

Most introverts are horrified by the idea of openly using or manipulating a human being in a grotesque way to get something for yourself and leave the other person high and dry. Extroverts seem to regard this as a normal part of life like eating and sleeping.

That Indians display a taciturn reserve is well-known to those who spend a lot of time around them, and fits in with the old stereotypes about Amerindians. Indian babies are said to be like rocks. It’s not uncommon to wonder if they are alive or dead, and often they don’t even cry much.

However, they are said to be quite alert. Alert and silent – this is the stereotypical Indian baby. It’s interesting how this fits in well with the stereotype of the silent yet alert Indian hunter, waiting in the woods for hours with his bow and arrow for the game to come into view.

Fine, so races have different temperaments.

Now.

What about this?

I’m not sure I’m even going to there for now, but I will say that different ethnicities do seem to have different levels of morality. Comparing poor Hispanics, poor Blacks and poor Whites, the poor Blacks and Hispanics tend to behave vastly worse.

In the Hispanics’ case, it’s mostly the young males, who are an absolute disaster and a menace to our very nation such that we really need to consider importing fewer Hispanics until we can figure out which ones are going to do all right and which are going to degenerate into this Hispanic Underclass catastrophe.

In this neighborhood, it is the little things that you notice. Poor Blacks and Hispanics do seem much less cultivated and civilized, and you notice it with the little stuff. As soon as I step outside, they will badger me for “loans.” You’re insane if you ever loan most of them one dime for anything. They never pay back any loans, and then they have the nerve to still come around!

They come into your house and immediately start demanding things like wine, changing the radio station, this or that. They point at nice things in my house and ask me to give the thing to them! Many of them are will just try to openly use you and manipulate you in any way they can do get whatever they can out of you. That boils down to an all take and no give relationship.

They also engage in petty theft as soon as you turn your back on them if they get into your place. They also tend to be rather disrespectful of your property. They just more or less act like animals. Now, I can’t see myself as engaging in any behaviors like that. I would never go to someone’s place just to see what I can get out of them.

I would never demand anything on entry to someone’s house, much less suggest that they should give me some of their property for free. I don’t owe anyone outside my family one nickel, and I’m 51. If I never paid back a loan, I would be ashamed forever. I never ask anyone but my Mom for money, and I would be humiliated if I did.

Now, the worst actors for all of this are young Hispanics who are enamored of the gangsta thing. Most are not employed or in school, and I am starting to wonder if they will ever work one day again. Many spend every nickel they get on marijuana. Most live off their stupid girlfriends, who give these worthless idiots money every day.

Since most of the Hispanics grow out of this a ways into their 20′s, one wonders if it’s really genetic. We are creating vast armies of sociopaths in our cities, and I am convinced that much of it is due the males being raised by single females. The male children of single Moms all too often are just criminals.

With the Blacks, they don’t necessarily grow out of this ghetto mindset at all. I know Blacks in their 50′s who still act this way. I am convinced that it is so because many Blacks seem to have a lower level of morality, even on the “little stuff”, like throwing trash on the ground or strolling across a crosswalk after the light has already turned, that so many Whites have a problem with Blacks.

Most Whites have a revulsion to little stuff like that, whereas many Blacks may very well think it’s perfectly normal.

Now I know quite a few Blacks who are assimilated to mainstream society and don’t act “ghetto” at all.

Blacks are really split into two different groups:

• An Underclass of varying degrees that shows varying degrees of “ghetto” and more or less uncivilized behavior.
• An assimilated group that has left the ghetto behind or never joined it to start with, and whose behavior is in general more or less respectable or at least tolerable.

The second group is increasingly washing its hands of the problems of the first group, but the truth is that nowadays, there is substantial overlap between the two groups. There are Blacks who have crawled halfway out of the ghetto but are not quite assimilated yet. There are plenty of others floating around between the two groups, or moving in and out of either group. Nevertheless, the distinction should be made, and it’s one that almost all racists never make.

I see Hispanics as increasingly splitting into an Underclass and an assimilated group in the future also.

The Death of Detroit

Repost from the old site:

Racists and White nationalists (in practice, identical) like to blame Detroit’s problems on the fact that it is full of Black folks. This is what happens when you have a Black majority city, in the US, Hell, anywhere, they say. I was wondering about it myself for a long time.

How about another look at things? From a Detroit Free Press article, now a dead link, so I am going to violate copyright here, and the article is 10 years old anyway:

A Historian Dissects Detroit’s Trouble

Thomas Sugrue, native Detroiter, historian and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis , has spent 20 years in major cities in the United States and in London. He came to the Free Press in the summer of 1998 to talk about the conditions that created present-day Detroit, and the implications for journalists. These are excerpts from his talk.

Anyone who has spent time in cities like Detroit in America’s former industrial heartland can’t help but be struck by the eerily apocalyptic landscapes that are so common as one passes through these places.

I asked a simple, but very difficult question: “Why?”

After digging around in the papers of unions and business, civil rights organizations, census data, city records and countless newspaper articles, I arrived at the conclusion that follows: Detroit’s woes began, not in the 1960s with the riot, not with the election of Coleman Young as mayor, not with the rise of international competition and the auto industry’s globalization, they began amid the steaming prosperity and consensus of the 1950s, and in an era about which we have very little to go on apart from hoary shibboleths and cliches.

A THREE-PART STORY

Three sweeping changes transformed the city. These three things, occurring simultaneously and interacting, dramatically reshaped the metropolis of Detroit and other metropolises like it. First was deindustrialization, the flight of jobs away from the city, something that began unnoticed and unheralded in the 1950s.

Next was persistent racial discrimination in labor markets. Racial discrimination remained a very persistent problem despite decades of civil rights activism and some improvement in attitudes and beliefs.

Finally was intense residential segregation, a division of the metropolitan area into two metropolitan areas: one black and one white.

Any one of these forces would have been devastating, but the fact that all three of them occurred simultaneously and interacted with each other proved to have devastating consequences.

WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION

World War II was a great moment of opportunity for working-class Detroiters, black and white alike. The city was a magnet for workers coming from other parts of the country. African-Americans had been pretty much closed out of the industries that provided skilled jobs, but that pretty much ended during World War II.

Only 3 percent of auto workers in Detroit were black in 1940. By 1945, 15 percent of the city’s auto workers were African American. Detroit, then, became a magnet for black migrants who heard about these great opportunities. But the reality for black workers, even in this window of opportunities, was a great deal more complicated and harsher and more frustrating than those statistics would lead us to believe.

DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

One of the supreme ironies of post-war Detroit is that, just as discrimination was under siege, just as blacks found a small window of opportunity in the city’s labor market, that job base began to fall away.

First, beginning in the late ’40′s, and especially in the 1950s, began a process that has continued right up to the present. Jobs began to move out of places like Detroit to low-wage regions in other parts of the United States and the world.

Companies in Detroit began picking up and moving their production to rural Indiana and Ohio, increasingly to the South and, by the 1970s and beyond, increasingly to the Third World — places where wages and other standards were lower than they were in Detroit.

At the same time, industry in Detroit was changing from within. There was introduction of automation, of new, labor-saving technology within the factories. The consequence was a dramatic decline in the number of manufacturing jobs, solid, blue-collar jobs, the jobs that made Detroit the city that it was.

Between 1947 and 1963, a period of unprecedented national economic prosperity, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs. This is not the ’70s. This is not when there is any competition from Germany and Japan and Korea for automobiles. These are jobs that were picking up and moving to other parts of the country, or these were jobs that were being replaced by machines.

Workers who had come to Detroit during World War II, seeking opportunities, found their choices seriously constrained. The workers who suffered the worst were African Americans, and they suffered because of seniority.

African Americans, because they didn’t get their foot into the door until the 1940s, were the first to be fired. So, when companies began moving out of Detroit, the burden was borne disproportionately by black Detroiters.

So, in the midst of the 1950s, 15.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, but only 6 percent of whites were unemployed, so we’re talking about black unemployment two and a half times the rate of white unemployment.

RESIDENTIAL DISCRIMINATION

The third and, indeed, probably the most pernicious force was residential discrimination by race. The city was divided into districts by race, divided by invisible lines.

These invisible lines were drawn in a whole bunch of different ways by different groups. The federal government subsidized housing development for whites through the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation.

But federal policies prohibited making loans to risky properties, and risky properties, according to federal standards, meant homes in old or homes in racially or ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods. It meant that, if you were a black trying to build your own home or trying to get a loan to purchase a home, you had many obstacles to face, whereas if you were a white it was really quite easy.

Real estate investors reinforced these invisible racial lines by steering black home buyers to certain neighborhoods and white home buyers to certain other neighborhoods, and stirring up racial anxiety when neighborhoods were along that invisible boundary.

In one west-side neighborhood, in the late 1950s, there were more than 50 real estate agents working a several-block area trying to persuade panicked whites to sell now and sell fast because “they’re moving in.” Real estate agents even went so far as to pay African-American women to walk their children through all-white streets to encourage panic among white homeowners.

Also reinforcing these invisible boundaries were the actions of ordinary people. There were more than 200 violent racial incidents that accompanied the first blacks who moved into formerly white neighborhoods in Detroit.

If you were the first black to move into a formerly all-white block, you could expect, certainly, for your house to be pelted with rocks and stones. In one case, a tree stump went through a window.

Regularly, vandals would break 20, 30 — every window in a house. Arson was another popular tactic.

As newspaper reporters, if such an incident were happening today, you can be sure that you would be covering it, but until 1956, there was not a mention of any of these incidents in Detroit’s daily newspapers. They were off the radar of the major dailies.

This process of housing discrimination set into motion a chain reaction.

Blacks were poorer than whites and they had to pay more for housing. They had a harder time getting loans. Hence, they spent more of their income on the purchase of real estate. They were, by and large, confined to the oldest houses in the city, houses that needed lots of repair work.

Many of their houses deteriorated as a consequence of them being older, not being able to get loans and folks not having all that much money in their pockets. City officials looked out onto the poor housing stock in poor neighborhoods and said, “we should tear this down.”

Moreover, the fact that housing stock was old and in many cases deteriorating in black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable evidence to whites that blacks were irresponsible. “We kept up our property, why aren’t they keeping up their property?

Finally, this neighborhood deterioration seemed to lenders definitive proof that blacks were a poor credit risk and justified disinvestment.

CONCLUSION

To talk about Detroit’s problems beginning in 1967, or beginning with the election of Coleman Young, or beginning with the globalization of the 1970s is to miss the boat.

The pattern of workplace discrimination, of the massive loss of jobs, of the residential balkanization of the city into black and white — this was already well established by 1967. It wasn’t Coleman Young that led to the harsh racial divisions between blacks and whites in metropolitan Detroit. It was there, and had been festering for a long time.

It wasn’t the riot that led to disinvestment from the city of Detroit. Disinvestment had been going on very significantly for years.

And it wasn’t globalization that led to the loss of jobs. That loss of jobs was going on when the auto industry was at its very peak.

IMPLICATIONS

We focus on changing the attitudes and motivations of individual workers, rather than challenging larger discriminatory practices.

We have a policy mismatch, a gap between the reality that I have described and the policy recommendations to try to address those problems.

The premise of welfare reform is to put welfare recipients to work. The problem is that the areas with the greatest job growth in the metropolitan area tend to be the farthest away from where the poorest folk live, in the outer suburbs largely inaccessible by public transportation. So there’s a gap between the reality of jobs and job loss and a policy solution.

Another major one,is downtown revitalization and tourism: “Build casinos and they will come. You need to deal with the deeply rooted problems I’ve described: job flight, racial segregation, discrimination.

We need to think about providing poor people with access to secure, well-paying jobs, wherever those jobs might be.

We need to begin thinking more creatively than we have with the real problem of racial division in our city and in our nation. Conversations on race are not enough. We need to deal with the reality of economic and residential division.

From the Google link to Sugrue’s book, also apparently a dead link, but I copied the text anyway:

The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by Thomas J. Sugrue

Once America’s “arsenal of democracy,” Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.

He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.

In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries.

He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city.

Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today’s urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.

In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.

See also The Fire Last Time, from the Washington Post last year, for more along the same lines.