The One-Drop Rule: Mulatto History Month

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time. We plan to be back posting new material very soon--stay tuned!)

There's been a hubbub across the pond recently, as the British Royal Family's favored son and his Yankee wife have given up their titles and fled to Canada. Some are placing the blame squarely on the Brits's supposed 'racism.' But in the picture above just who, you may ask, is not white?

Not so black and white

Inviting a Han Chinese to gaze upon the above image and to tell us which two are the same 'color,' and which one is a different 'color,' would be an amusing exercise.

The one-drop rule, once used as a caste marker to place people of color at a lower rank, has today taken on the opposite role: It has now become a badge to allow membership in a privileged victimzation class.

The one-drop rule and its long, intriguing past come to the fore every February, when Americans celebrate 'Black History Month.' We here revisit our piece examining its complex role in the pantheon of Afro-American notables and heroes. We hope you will find it of interest.

[Re-post, original post here.]

The Slow Pravdaization of Our Press

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

'We will get from the virgin soil a rich harvest!

From the O.C. Register:

In legal news, CNN recently settled what is being described as a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High school student Nick Sandmann over its false and misleading coverage of a viral confrontation with a Native American elder that left viewers with the impression that the teenager and his pals were being racist provocateurs.

Turns out that Sandmann’s group had been taunted with racially charged, profane rants by the Black Hebrew Israelites. 

...Thanks to Google and shoddy memories, Sandmann will forever be known as the racist kid who harassed a Native American elder, even though there’s absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.

What could push 'the most trusted name in news' to commit such eye-wateringly expensive folly, all in the name of a narrative?

It's a question worth asking. We invite you to have a look at this piece from a few years back, in the hope that you will find it enlightening.

[Re-post, original post here.]

The Slow Sovietization of the West

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

 'Comrade, come to our kolkhoz!'

The circular firing squad has finally come for leftist cultural icon J.K. Rowling. Her tweet heard round the world:

Sex is not real, it would appear, to a large number of the twitterati, who promptly dogpiled Ms. Rowling whilst lamenting their now-ruined childhoods:

To understand how such a surreal sequence of events can in fact be unfolding, we offer this piece of research from a few years back. We hope you find it illuminating.

[Re-post, original post here.]

Islam: Why We Culturally Profile It

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Paris, Nov. 13, 2015: The Indian summer meant many were enjoying a meal out on the patio

Four years ago this week, France experienced its "9-11": The Bataclan terror attacks. Shortly after, we published this body of data on why, exactly, Europeans are becoming so wary of the mass of Muslim immigrants streaming into their countries.

We publish it again on this terrible anniversary, with the footnote that all of the tendencies described therein have only intensified in the intervening four years.

We hope you appreciate this food for thought.

The Europe to come?

[Re-post, original post here.]

At the height of the Trayvon Martin affair, we met a young Afro-Canadian who strongly objected to being racially profiled. Drawing on the pool of data at our disposal, we presented, to the best of our ability, the reasons such profiling exists.

Today, as hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants pour into Europe to claim asylum, profiling again rears its ugly head. Not racial/ethnic this time, but religious:

At least five European countries have signaled that they prefer to grant asylum only to Christian refugees flooding the continent from the Middle East, not to Muslims.

“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” Hungarian Prime Minister Orban said.  ... “Refugees from a completely different cultural background would not be in a good position in the Czech Republic,” said Czech President Milos Zeman.

 Lodz, Poland, September 2015

On what are these fears based? Ignorance, prejudice? We have been told for years that immigration is a gift, an economic boost, an injection of fresh blood, and that our new guests will culturally enrich our lives with their differentness (all while assimilating seamlessly thanks to their sameness). We at TWCS have thus decided to take a deeper look at the data.

But is Islam a religion, a culture, or a civilization? Has it genetically changed its adherents over time like Christianity has (cousin marriage enforced vs. forbidden)? In the absence of any genetic connection, does it culturally push its believers to certain behaviors? Could these beliefs and behaviors really, as the critics charge, prevent their assimilation into the West?

In a word--is this cultural profiling of Muslims based on fact or fantasy?

Being A Progressive, Yesterday: Embracing Eugenics

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

[Re-post, original post here.]

It is one of our vanities to imagine that if we'd been born in centuries past, we alone would have stood up against the rampant injustices of the age (slavery, colonialism, religious persecution, etc.) instead of going with the flow like most people did.  Unlike others, we're in no way molded by our era--our righteousness is ageless. (The host's tut-tutting in this otherwise fascinating podcast on slavery is but one example.)

Another point of view is that those of a progressive bent in 2012, had they magically existed in 1912, would have likely followed the leftist causes du jour.  Ditto conservatives.  So what was the progressive doctrine in 1912 that today's liberal can be fairly sure he'd have fervently believed and agitated for?

Eugenics.

Darwin's 1859 work landed in the Western conscience like a rock heaved into a pond.  Nothing would ever be the same.  The idea that such social ills as insanity, mental retardation, and psychopathy were heritable began to seep into the popular mind.  One reason was Francis Galton (cousin of Darwin), who coined the term 'eugenics' and wrote tirelessly about it for decades.

Many in the late 19th century had an almost childlike faith that science could solve humanity's woes.  And it was thought then that some of humanity's woes were:

• The retarded and insane, a burden on the private and public purse, were having retarded and insane children.
• The stupid and dysfunctional poor were having many more children than the intelligent and functional rich.
• (In the U.S:) South and East European immigrants, less intelligent and functional, were hurting the racial stock of the country.

The word 'dysgenics' was coined in 1915 by British physician Caleb Saleeby.  Biologist Julian Huxley, founding member of World Wildlife Fund and first director of UNESCO, described the threat thusly:

In the first of these [addresses to the British Eugenics Society] he reaffirmed that natural selection had become greatly relaxed in contemporary civilizations, noting that “the elimination of natural selection is largely, though of course by no means wholly, rendered inoperative by medicine, charity, and the social services” and that dysgenic fertility was leading to “the tendency to degradation of the germ plasm, ” the result of which will be that “humanity will gradually destroy itself from within, will decay in its very core and essence, if this slow but insidious relentless process is not checked.  (1)

Being a Progressive, Yesterday: Race

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Votes for women-- white women only, please

'The Conservative is afraid of the future,' goes the old trope, 'and the Progressive is afraid of the past.'

What the Progressive especially fears is his own past—that is, his fellow travelers of yesteryear. As Joe Biden is learning, what passed for 'leftist thought' 30 or 40 or 100 years ago can turn a modern-day liberal's ears scarlet. We hope you find this stroll down memory lane as fascinating as we did.

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[Re-post, original post here.]

Slate ran a series a few years back, 'Liberal Creationism,' after the brouhaha over James Watson's remark that Afros were less intelligent than other groups.  In this prescient piece, the author warns that many of the old 'racialist' tropes are likely to soon be proved true, and that the average progressive should mentally steel himself for it:

If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that way. Many Christians are going through a similar struggle over evolution. Their faith in human dignity rests on a literal belief in Genesis. To them, evolution isn't just another fact; it's a threat to their whole value system. 

The same values—equality, hope, and brotherhood—are under scientific threat today. But this time, the threat is racial genetics, and the people struggling with it are liberals. ... You can try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity. Or you can fight the evidence and hope it doesn't break your faith.

The proof is at this point hard to ignore, even if thought leaders are doing their level best to conceal it. As blogger JayMan asks from atop his mountain of scientific data, How much hard evidence do you need?  It is likely that in the next several years some lab finding will 'clinch' the question once and for all, pushing HBD into the mainstream as it has germ theory or heliocentrism.

Microbes and Planets: The skeptics had to be convinced

At that point, what is a sincere progressive to do?  The notion of cognitive or behavioral differences between ethnic groups is, for him, deeply repugnant.

One is tempted to hand him the same 'deal with it' doled out by his ilk to those who found the monkey-to-man mythos unpalatable:

But it may be more kind to invite such folks to spend some time with their own forebears--the Progressives of the late 19th / early 20th centuries.  People who like themselves were born with a desire to make the world a better place, but who unlike themselves did not shy away from the realities of human biodiversity.

So who is this creature, the Progressive?  What did he once believe and may believe again?

Reparations for Slavery: Fair or Folly?

We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter/spring, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces that you might have missed the first time.

With 'reparations for slavery' back in the news thanks to presidential hopefuls such as Kamala Harris, Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke, and Liz Warren, here is some data we were able to find on the subject back when Ta-Nehisi Coates last floated it. We hope you find it as interesting as we did.  

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[Re-post, original post here.]

'The Hayward family's nurse Louisa and her legal owner,' 1858

Having addressed Atlantic editor Ta-Nehisi Coates' wish for reparations for red-lining, we now turn to another of his claims: That descendents of U.S. slaves deserve cash payouts for their forebears' suffering.

There is the question of both a) the legitimacy and b) the practicality of such a scheme. We shall only discuss the former, because if it is truly worthwhile, the latter can always be worked out.

Poring through Coates' 17-page article, we have guessed that he objects to U.S. chattel slavery on the following grounds:  1) Its very existence was unconscionable, 2) It was unusually inhumane, 3) It destroyed the Afro family, and 4) It helped create the large black-white wealth gap we see today.

We shall address his points one by one.

Reparations for Redlining?

We are offline due to a much-needed research period this winter, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces that you might have missed the first time.

With 'reparations for red-lining' back in the news thanks to the plucky Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, here is the data we were able to find on this thorny question back when Ta-Nehisi Coates last tossed it in the punch bowl. We hope you find it as interesting as we did.  

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FHA map of Los Angeles, 1939 

[Re-post, original post here.]

'Ingenious and powerful,' 'important and compelling', 'stunningly ambitious;' it has 'broken traffic records and vanished from newsstands,' 'setting ablaze' social media.  What is it?

It is 'The Case for Reparations,' Atlantic's June 2014 cover story by editor Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The idea has been tossed around since Emancipation, falling out of fashion as of late. Coates brings it roaring back in this long-form piece, calling on Euro-Americans to 1) publicly express their guilt about past oppression, and 2) pay reparation money to their Afro countrymen.  Does his argument hold water?

The 17-page article covers much ground, but it seems Coates seeks redress for three major wrongs:

• Slavery
• Land theft
• Red-lining

They are three quite different topics, and should be treated as such.  We shall begin by addressing the most recent: so-called 'redlining.'

Coates tells the story of Clyde Ross, son of Mississipi sharecroppers who came to Chicago in the Great Migration:

'Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. 

Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime.'

Why was Ross obliged to buy a house 'on contract'? Because he could secure no regular mortgage financing. Chances are, in large part because he was Afro-American.

Governments Are Us

Harper's Weekly, 1869

David Brooks has a history lesson for Donald Trump (via Steve Sailer):

The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens.  …  This is a tribal story.  

Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity.

Naturalization ceremony, 2010

This lovely fiction from Mr. Brooks is as quaint as it is ahistorical. But it does go back a fair way. Not as far as our founders, bequeathing a nation 'to ourselves and our posterity.' Not as far as our first naturalization act, in 1790, extended to 'free white persons of good character.' 

Not as far as Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Alexander Hamilton:

Not multiculturalists

'The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. 

'They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? 

'There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule.'

The idea that the U.S. was meant to become a League of Nations avant l'heure dates back to the mid 19^th century, when America's first nativist party, the 'Know-Nothings,' agitated against Catholic immigrants (both Irish and German). They were  lambasted by people like George Julian, VP candidate:

'Know Nothingism . . . tramples down the doctrine of human brotherhood. It judges men by the accidents of their condition, instead of striving to find a common lot for all, with a common access to the blessings of life.' (1)

By the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson was currying favor with his new electorate by trumpeting:

'America has, so to say, opened its doors and extended its welcome to men who were Americans everywhere in the world. She has invited all the free forces of the modern civilized peoples to come to America where men can be free, and where all free forces can unite and forget all their differences of origins.' 

Wilson-style multiculturalism: No Asians or Blacks, thanks

But even a 'proposition nation' man like Wilson wasn't a true multiculturalist—he did not extend this welcome to Blacks or Asians:

'The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.'

These days, things have gone so far that we're being told that not letting masses of Mexicans or Africans into our countries is the equivalent of turning away the Jews in 1940, or runaway slaves in 1840.

Forcing Africans to be governed by their own: Worse than slavery

This is an astounding statement. Forcing a Mexican to be governed by other Mexicans, or a Senegalese to be governed by other Senegalese, is akin to committing genocide upon them. What a statement on the governing abilities of Mexicans or Senegalese! Perhaps Jefferson was onto something after all…

The 'magic dirt' theory, of course, says that once these foreigners set foot on our soil, they are suddenly blessed with the qualities that have allowed us to govern ourselves so successfully all these years.

Coming to take part in the Great Democratic Experiment

But we at TWCS suspect that, on the contrary, Jefferson was right—Governments Are Us. 'That temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism' has not been equally distributed on Planet Earth. 

We mostly rule ourselves now--the age of empire is over.  If we rule ourselves badly, that's because we are somehow ill-equipped to handle the running of a large, modern representative state.

(Formerly 'Failed States Index')

So if we few in well-run countries usher in the many fleeing ill-run countries,  what will be the result? Is it possible such people will recreate the conditions they've created in their own countries, right here on our soil? If so, we should be very, very careful which groups we let in the door.

What is the evidence?

Segregation: Our Most Cherished Myths

Tennessee, 1955

Newsweek recently sounded the alarm in a long-form piece on what they view as a troubling new trend:

Sixty years after Brown vs. Board, forty years after the end of busing, it appears that all the social engineering in the world can't make our multicultural dreams come true:

Economist Tyler Cowen, who is a conservative, calls white parents’ visceral fear of a mostly black school “discouraging.” ... [Journalist] Hannah-Jones agrees. “You’re gonna have to force and cajole people” into integration, she says, which is why the court orders of the 1960s and ’70s proved effective. “We’re not going to do this voluntarily.”

 Boston busing protest, 1970s

By 1988, the high point of school integration in the U.S., nearly half of all black children attended a majority-white school. … Since then, however, the gains of Brown v. Board have been almost entirely reversed. 

Water will find its level. Yet the narrative remains that somehow, after enough 'forcing and cajoling,' a diverse and happy future awaits us all--even ethnic groups as radically different as Northwest Euros and Sub-Saharan Africans.  

Train station, Pretoria, South Africa

We at TWCS, on the contrary, posit that: 

• Any time a large flux of Afros has arrived among ethnic NW Euros (up to and including the present), the latter have reacted sharply by separating themselves, and 

• Their reasons have been not senseless but on the whole fairly defensible.

The two biggest laboratories for this social experiment, of course, have been South Africa and the United States. We have chosen to examine the latter.

Johannesburg 1990, Detroit 1973

Is Hannah-Jones right? Will enough 'forcing and cajoling' bring about the multicultural blessings we've long been waiting for?  Or, on the contrary, have we believed so many myths about segregation that we've painted ourselves into a policy corner? 

I Lift My Lamp Beside the Cold Hard Facts

Have we arrived?

Why, one may ask, have so many leftists gone ballistic over a short stoppage on immigration from 7 terror-prone states?  

Via Steve Sailer

Crowds are mobbing airports. Pundits, movie stars, sports players, foreign heads of state, all lifting their voices in horror….

As though such a banal, oft-practiced, and sensible measure were some kind of crime against humanity.

Headlines courtesy of Breitbart News

It is a question worth asking. An alien arriving from another planet might think Trump had just announced he was planning to rain down bombs on these countries for years. (Thus confusing Trump with his predecessor.) Such country-specific migration blocks are nothing new, and have been a favorite of Democrat presidents from Obama to Carter to old FDR himself. Yet our current hysteria continues unabated.

Agitated Hollywoodians won't take this lying down

One can't be blamed for feeling as though one has arrived at Saint Anthony's 1700-year-old prophecy. Truly, has the whole world gone mad?

Though we're hard at work on our next piece, we're taking a quick break to provide a few links to those seeking some facts and data in the midst of this planetary pants-soiling. 

Some may wonder:

The Past is a Real-Talking Country

California recently scrapped plans for a 'John Wayne Day' when his 1971 race-realist comments on Afro-Americans came to light:

High plains realtalker

'We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.'

At the same time, Princeton students are demanding the Woodrow Wilson School be re-named, U. of Missouri is petitioning to remove Thomas Jefferson's statue, and San Fran's School Board president has even said he'll re-name every school bearing the title of a slave owner.

It is surely any people's right to wipe out the names of past heroes who ruffle current mores. We've seen Stalin and Lenin statues come crashing down in Eastern Bloc countries since the wall fell.

But Stalin and Lenin were proper génocidaires who oversaw the repression, imprisonment, torture, and death of tens of millions. Washington and Jefferson were founders of their nation who, uncontroversially in their time and place, owned slaves.

Good-bye, Enver Hoxha; Albania, 1991

But even if one were to convince them that slaveholding was not controversial in those days, this John Wayne dust-up opens a whole new can of worms. Are California's civic leaders even dimly aware of the kind of realtalk in which nearly all our prominent men of yesteryear engaged?  We fear they are not. 

May we gently remind them that When an out-group seemed to under-perform, or over-perform, or just act differently, people noticed.  

And commented.

Such was the way of the world--and still is, in most of the world. Only ethnic NW Euros seem to have caught the disease that pushes them to sing the praises of 'diversity' while at the same time loudly claiming we're all exactly the same.

The multiculturalist's conundrum: 

Why can't we be different yet exactly the same? 

As more and more decisions must be made about naming holidays, schools, bridges, airports, highways, erecting and demolishing statues... How shall our civic leaders be expected to cope? If they start subjecting each historical figure to the 'didn't say anything that offends me today' test, they are in for some sore and cruel disappointment.

We at TWCS would very much like to help them. First, by acquainting them with the fact that the past was, indeed, a real-talking country, as the quotations we are about to share will show. 

Another Californian realtalker 

Second, by helping them step into their ancestors' shoes, in order to pick out what is simple observation of difference (as painful as that may be for us to hear today), and what is real bigotry.  

We propose five categories of historical realtalk (some of which overlap in our quotes):

• Banal my-group preference
• The More Able remarking upon the Less Able
• The Less Able remarking upon the More Able
• Us remarking upon the otherness of Them
• True bigotry

We focus on two out-groups with whom ethnic Europeans have long been in contact: Sub-Saharan Africans and Jews.


So which kinds of old-style realtalk can our city fathers forgive, and which should have them tearing down statues?