Mulatto History Month

Mulatto historian Carter G. Woodson, an attendee at Chicago's 1915 Exposition of Negro Progress (celebrating 50 years of Emancipation), was so inspired by the crowds' enthusiasm that he went on to promote the very first 'Negro History Week' in February 1926.  A roaring success, this yearly event was expanded to an entire month in 1976, when President Gerald Ford urged all Americans to 'seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.'

But what is a Black American?

Let us take a moment to gaze upon the visages of those individuals held up as most honorable and praiseworthy during this month.  First, 'Negro History Week's' creator, Mr. Carter G. Woodson himself:

POLITICS

Our first 'black' president needs little introduction, but what of our first 'black' Secretary of State?:

Who's Fleeing Whom?

Michigan's largest city, Detroit, has been in the news of late due to its imminent bankruptcy and takeover  by the state.  We have considered its demise (as have others) in light of dysfunctional Afro governance and a misbehaving Afro populace (83% of the citizenry).

Though Afro criminality in North America has always surpassed that of Euros, and the latter have known it, separating oneself from Black neighbors was not difficult for the first 350 years of British North America / the United States.  Even in the North, segregation in housing was permitted de facto where it was not de jure.

The 'Great Migration,' waves of Afros moving from the South to the North, began in earnest in 1910, with its second wave after WWII (1945).

However, the flight of Euro-Americans out of the cities did not truly begin until Blacks were free to live where they pleased-- the 1960s.  Since then, a sort of merry-go-round has ensued:  Whites, suffering under Afro dysfunction, flee to suburbs, only to be pursued by the Talented Tenth fleeing same.  The latter are followed, as night follows day,  by the Untalented Nine-Tenths, who promptly re-create the urban hellscapes they left behind. Euro-Americans are forced to pack up, and the musical chairs begin again.  Section 8 vouchers have revved this carousel up to warp speed.

Instructive, perhaps, to watch the flight unfold before our eyes via U.S. Census numbers.

We give the figures from 1960, just before Segregation ended. We then fast-forward twenty years to 1980 to see what the first wave of 'White Flight' has wrought.  Finally, we give the most recent figures (2010), which contain some surprises, especially re: Hispanics, who did not even exist as a census category two generations ago.  For selected cities, we have also given the figures from 1910, before the Great Migration got underway.  Asians have been included where their historic presence has been strongest.

So: Who's fleeing whom?



We start with the Midwest, industrial center and destination of choice for the Great Migrators:

Déménagement

 

It's moving time in this neck of the woods, so we will be sans internet for a bit.

Catch up on some old-school HBD-reading with...


* Races and Immigrants in America, by John R. Commons (1907). (We have looked before at this fine, clear-eyed analysis of the immigrant waves from southern and eastern Europe flooding into the U.S. in the 19th century.  Was turning off the tap in 1924 the wise choice?)


Why not peruse some of the original race scientists?  You've been told they're bogeymen, imbeciles, génocidaires.  Nonsense.  Have a look.

* The Races of Europe, A Sociological Study, by W.Z. Ripley (1900)

* The Racial Basis of European History, by Madison Grant (1921)

* The Races of Europe, by Carleton Coon (1939)


Some old-school thoughts on Ancient Rome:

* The Grandeur That Was Rome, by J.C. Stobart (1912)

* Race Mixture in the Roman Empire, by Tenney Frank (1916)


Thoughts on the Afro question:

* The Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois's exhaustively-researched contribution to the 19th century corpus on 'the Negro question.' (1899)

* Lynching: History and Analysis, Dwight Murphey's thought-provoking monograph on the controversial practice.  Recommended reading for Black History Month. (1995)


The female question:

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* Sexual Utopia in Power.  F. Roger Devlin in simple, colorful terms explains the Sexual Revolution as to a visitor from another realm. Very highly recommended. (2006)



* If you haven't yet perused the HBD Reading List website, don't hesitate.  A one-of-a-kind online resource with links to works on every HBD-related topic under the sun, from Aristotle to Arthur Jensen.



* An entire website with hundreds of old-time travelogues.  (17th-20th centuries)  A treasure trove of observations on the world's peoples, from the time when people could speak plainly.  We especially recommend Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, by Rudyard Kipling. From Seattle to Yokohama to the Nile, reading as pure pleasure.

Finally, for a smile, why not see Charles Dickens' rather curmudgeonly 1853 take on the vaunted Noble Savage so à la mode in his day?

TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. [...] I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives.

Hope to be back online shortly.  Thank you for stopping by and good luck on your journey.

The Voice of the People II: Arab Democracy

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We have wondered, will any democracy taken up by Arab Muslims inevitably become authoritarian?


One might well ask it of Russians. Twenty years after the wall crumbled with a whimper and the West's Democracy 101 knights rode in, where are they?

[International observers of the 2008] elections concluded that they were "not fair and failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections." [...] Frequent abuses of administrative resources, media coverage strongly in favor of United Russia, and the revised election code combined to hinder political pluralism.

[...] A law enacted in December 2004 eliminated the direct election of the country's regional leaders. Governors are now nominated by the president [...] The judiciary is not independent, is often subject to manipulation by political authorities,...

... The government uses direct ownership or ownership by large private companies with links to the government to control or influence the major media outlets, especially television, [...]  Unsolved murders of journalists have increased the reluctance of journalists to cover controversial subjects...

The Economist Intelligence Unit's World Democracy Index (1 - 10, 10 being 'most democratic') lists four categories--'Full democracy,' 'Flawed democracy,' 'Hybrid regime,' and 'Authoritarian regime.'  Cut-off for this fourth category is a score of 4.00 or lower; Russia misses it by a hair at 4.26.

Perhaps not exactly what Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

But little matter.

Moscow street protests seen round the world (thank you Facebook) have roused the true believers from their slumber.  English Liberal Democracy is coming to Russia, for real this time, after twenty years of Some Other Kind of Democracy.  Just as it has come to the Middle East in 2011, after sixty years of Some Other Kind of Democracy.


Or is it.


In 1915 Nikolai Berdyaev wrote,

The Russian people does not want to be a masculine builder, its nature defines itself as feminine, passive and submissive in matters of state, it always awaits a bridegroom, a man, a ruler.  ...  The state ruling authority always was an external, and not an inward principle for the non-statist Russian people; it was not created by her, but the rather came as it were from the outside, like a bridegroom to the bride.

And so often therefore the ruling power has provided the impression of  being foreign, ... the state -- is "they" and not "we".

'They' and not 'we.'

Whither the demos?

The Voice of the People

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The Arab Spring one year on: Switzerland on the Sahara and Norway on the Nile have yet to materialize.

“I remind all media that they have to be accurate; we are not celebrating the first anniversary of the revolution; we are reviving the revolution in its first anniversary,” tweeted well-known writer Ayman El-Sayyad.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians thronged Cairo's Tahrir Square Wednesday morning, renewing the atmosphere of mass protests witnessed in the country a year ago, Ahram online reported.

“Down, down with military rule,” they chanted.

Though the house of Mubarak was no more, the shadow of his legacy still lives on in the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took power after Mubarak’s resignation, pro-democracy protesters say.

But materialize they shall.  Thomas Friedman says so.  So does The Council on Foreign Relations. So does Hillary Clinton--and she's ready to put your money where her mouth is:

Three weeks ago, the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative sent Congress what's known as a "congressional notification," requesting permission to shift $29 million in funds from other programs in the region. State wants to shift $20 million to democracy promotion efforts in Tunisia and around the region. Another $7 million would go supporting rule of law and political development programs in the Middle East. $1 million would go to youth councils in Yemen.

Spending our hard-earned dollars on 'democracy promotion' has always had its fans.  Traditionally, U.S. policy has been to push democracy where it serves her strategic interests, and to crush it where it does not.  The Middle East, your blinking gas gauge reminds you, falls under door #2. But throngs pouring into the streets over a young Arab who had immolated himself in despair could not be ignored, and the about-face was total: Out with dear friends Mubarak, Gaddafi, and Ben Ali; in with...

...democracy?

The Blind Leading the Blind, Part II

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We have considered Detroit's demise in light of Afros' seeming inability to capably take over the reins of Euro-created government, be it in Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, or Birmingham.

But it takes two to tango.  Inept city leaders can do harm, but an inept population can double the damage.  Consider Orange County's surprise bankruptcy in 1994. Referendum-loving Californians having made it nearly impossible for local government to raise taxes, county treasurer Bob Citron began to invest what little they could raise into ever-riskier securities.  November 1994: The bomb dropped, with $1.7 billion up in smoke, also known as Citron's Barings Bank moment.

Or see New York City's famous near-bankruptcy in 1975 ('Ford to City: Drop Dead'), when the Big Apple was humiliatingly taken over by New York State.  In addition to the oil shock, stubborn unions, and shoddy bookkeeping, the city had recently seen a sudden flight of net taxpayers and an inflow of the government-dependent:

The 1970s saw New York lose more than 800,000 residents, almost all of them non-Hispanic whites.  This was the first significant population decrease in more than 150 years.
      

Residents with household incomes below federal poverty standards increased by 25 percent from 1970 to 1980, while all other income groups diminished in number.  Whereas the number of impoverished white residents decreased by 12 percent, the number of poor blacks increased by 40 percent, and poor Hispanics by 52 percent.

Rona Stein opines that

There is some evidence that New York City and other industrial regions may have unintentionally encouraged the poor to move in by offering relatively generous levels of welfare benefits. 

Perhaps, but the post-war boom that had made sure everyone who wanted a job had one was already waning in the 1960s.  Afro-Americans were now, as they had been after the Civil War, thrown into sudden competition with other ethnies.  W.H. Collins in 1918 had bemoaned the newly freed blacks' reticence to work, predicting:

The Blind Leading the Blind

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Detroit, the largest city in Michigan, is about to join its sisters Flint, Pontiac, Benton Harbor, and Ecorse in being stripped of its municipal authority and ceded to an 'emergency manager.' Well-covered by commentators who can see, the story has also attracted observations such as:

“How come all of the jurisdictions put under emergency management are majority African American? Has anybody noticed that?” asked Rep. John Conyers (D), who has represented Detroit for 47 years.

How come indeed.

As Congressman Conyers implies, majority-Afro cities tend to elect majority-Afro city governments.  As the average Afro is less well-endowed than other ethnies in future-time orientation, commonweal-orientation, industriousness, and logical aptitude, majority-Afro governments tend to govern poorly.

.             .            .

Haiti, the world's first Black Republic, stunned the planet in 1804 by driving out her European masters and embarking upon true self-government.  A century later, adventurer and journalist Hesketh Prichard ambled from one end of the island to the other, to report on what one hundred years of freedom had wrought.

On the capital city:

A German by Any Other Name...

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The Maastricht treaty, indeed the whole idea of the E.U., is based on the principle that 'People are people.' Also known as the Late Twentieth Century Delusion.  As we have seen, the Think-Tankers who cook up international policy are in utter thrall to it.  No reason, say they, why a semiconductor industry such as flourishes in Japan couldn't do the same in Angola.  No reason at all.  All that's missing are the right incentives, the right institutions, the right...

...Shhh. Don't say 'people.' Crimethink.

It has become obvious that the Eurozone will survive in present form only if the Germans keep paying the debts of the Greeks.  Talk of new 'institutions' and 'treaties and 'incentives' is silly.  The incentives and treaties and institutions have been in place for ten years; they have not yet been able to turn Greeks into Germans.  Nor will they.

Why not?  What makes a German a German, and a Greek a Greek?  Couldn't we switch out the populations of these two countries and just assume that Greek-Germany and German-Greece would continue to function as they always have?

*               *               *

Though it has become terribly unfashionable, there is little as satisfying as reading old-time authors' stout observations of other peoples, untouched by today's feminized hive-mind and its cries to not hurt anyone's feelings.  It was once taken for granted that a German was not a Greek.  Would today's Eurozone decision-makers come back to this distant wisdom, they might yet come up with some policy worth the name.

So-- a 2012 currency zone containing both a Germany and a Greece will not function, and we need writers from before the Wars to give us a hint as to why: