Were you Assimilable?

'The Mortar of Assimilation--And the One Element that Just Won't Mix'

(standing is an Irishman)
Puck Magazine, June 1889

A great many people today can look at this map...

Image source

...and conclude, 'This can only spell good things for America.'

Why?

'Anglo-America absorbed millions of alien immigrants in the 19th century, then went on to become the biggest superpower in world history!'

As it happens, both these statements are true. It is also true that after metal helmets replaced leather ones, the number of soldiers' head injuries increased. So did America become a huge superpower because, or in spite of, these aliens? Or a little of both?

And if these waves of 19th c. foreigners did make her stronger, can the same be said of the millions streaming in yearly now?

The question is by no means flip.  Many of the arguments used by immigration restrictionists in 2012 are identical to those used a hundred years ago.  It's a case of Chicken Little, says our open-border contingent--'Your predecessors said the sky would fall; it didn't, and this time it won't either.'

Who's right?

Why, just look at this mosaic:

Image source

A propositional nation, n'est-ce pas?

Sweet Little Lies

'Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.'

--Honore de Balzac  
(Image source) 

Two hundred thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson opined:  

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Today, Euro America (like Euro South Africa) has pushed aside such ideas.  We are sure that God the Universe has created us all equal, as we go out of our way to tell each other at every opportunity.

But do we believe it?  Talk is cheap. When a man's actions don't back up his words, we call him mistaken--or a hypocrite.

'Black and White are equal in every important way,' proclaim a great number of Euro-Americans today. We here at Those Who Can See are not so sure that they really believe it.  We argue, on the contrary, that progressive white Americans are in the habit of treating Afros as if they were slightly mentally retarded.  And that Blacks themselves often seem to agree. 


What is our evidence?

Diversity and the North, Yesterday and Today

 Luncheonette in Lancaster, Ohio, 1938

Paul Kersey at SBPDL has been informing us better than anyone about the housing merry-go-round on which Afros and Euros have been riding for forty years.

Humans have a way of sniffing out their own interests, platitudes be damned. If you want to know what a man believes, don't watch his lips; watch his feet.  The young urban White may boast of his 'edgy' neighborhood (enduring daily street crime makes him more authentic), but come baby-making time, he finds his way to paler pastures with startling speed. The only 'diversity' which interests him past this point is of the Chinese, Indian, or talented-tenth Mulatto variety.

Given that this gentleman cheers the loudest about the joys of racial mixing, and weeps the most bitterly before maps like these,

Image source

...whence this paradox?  While his mouth is singing 'Fair Housing Act' hosannas, his feet are doing the 'Restrictive Covenant' two-step.

We know why: Afros bring down property values. And for good reason. From a Euro perspective, they don't make good neighbors.  Their children tend to commit more crime, as do their adults, they make transport unpleasant, degrade swimming pools, chase out merchants, shut down nightclubs, disrupt cinemas, mistreat animals, volunteer less, litter more, weaken schools, cripple school boards, waste police resources, and generally make life less pleasant for their white neighbors than it was before their arrival.

Since the Brits' ill-fated decision to import Africans to this land, the 98% of Euro-Americans who haven't own slaves have been forced to live with its consequences.  Broadly speaking, three approaches have been tried: (1) segregation de jure (the old South), (2) segregation de facto (the old North), and (3) attrition (today). 

We are all familiar with the South's de jure approach, their state lawmakers seeing to it that schools, housing, transport, and public accomodations existed in 'white' and 'colored' versions.  This apartheid system and its architects have been throughly villainized in all modern textbooks.

We may be less familiar with the old North.  Those of us born there have been told all our lives how warmly we opened our arms to these suffering Afros, saving them from the noose or at least the colored water fountain. 

Or did we.

Portland, OR, 1943

Checking our Ashkenazi Privilege

Image source

We recently explored the Blank-slatist's charge that U.S. minorities are currently under-achieving due to 'white privilege.'  What we found was that America's Asian minority is not only immune to this woe, but that they out-perform Euro-Americans on a number of measures. As we said then,

How to explain this paradox?  Are Asians creeping in at night and siphoning off the privilege from Whites' privilege-tanks?  Are they endowed with a force-field that resists the Euros' privilege-rays, ricocheting them back in a blinding flash that then cripples white performance relative to their own?

As it turns out, Asians are not the only group strangely inoculated against this danger.

One of the most persecuted, oppressed, and vilified groups in human history has settled in significant numbers in the U.S. and, despite years of mistreatment, has managed to resist the damaging effects of WASPs' privilege rays: Ashkenazi Jews.

How do we know?



1) Wealth

Forty-six percent (55% of Reform Jews) report family incomes of over $100,000 compared to 19% of all Americans, with the next highest group being Hindus at 43%.

Data source

Overcoming our Asian Privilege

 

"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign  organizers, said. 
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. 

So the first step is getting white people to see it."

Headlines you may have seen recently:

• 'Duluth's "unfair" campaign tackles white privilege'  

• 'No Longer Colorblind:  Portland teachers must rank themselves by their self-assessed "White Privilege" score'

• 'What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege'

Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.

In his universe,  all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep.  If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc.  Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?

'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :

But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.

So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'

'What is it?,' we ask him.

     'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.

'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.

     'We swim in a sea of whiteness.  White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'

'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'

     'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'


Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.

If Allah Wills It

Muslim philosopher Averroes

    In the Middle East, planning discussions are regularly punctuated by Inshallah—

“if Allah wills it.”  The status of a person’s health, wealth, and safety are believed to be inevitable.  Interviewees reported, “We don’t plan ahead,”  “We only act when a catastrophe happens,” and “If it’s going to come, 

then it will come.”

Psychologists Helen A. Klein and Gilber Kuperman

The question of HBD and the Arab might interest Western policy-makers for two reasons: Nation-building and Immigration. Whether we're imposing our political systems on them ('neo-colonialism') or inviting them en masse into our countries ('reverse colonialism?'), the deciders behind these things would do well to have a notion who they're dealing with.

The immigration question is especially salient. Western Europe has invited millions of Muslims (Arabs and others) into her bosom, with a variety of results...

'French Suburbs Becoming 'Separate Islamic Societies''

  

'Australia: Muslim's defense of relationship with eight-year-old girl as culturally acceptable rejected'

'All Rapes in Oslo Committed by Immigrants'

...And so forth.

Portuguese and Italians and Swiss and French have been wandering into each others' lands for centuries. Flying in millions of folks from a foreign civilization (cf. Huntington), however, is something new.  Who are these people, and what are their chances of assimilating? ['Arab' = 'Muslim Arab' for purposes of this post only.]


Observers may wonder at the apparent gulf between today's Greeks and the titans of two thousand years ago, but it seems to pale in comparison with that of the Arabs.  Lauded for embracing science while Europe slept, their present-day allergy to it has become a planetary curiosity:

 Members of the OIC, in green

OIC [Organisation of the Islamic Conference] countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with 139.3 for OECD countries.

Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world's science literature [in 1997], whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain alone. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The US NSF records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.

Boats Against the Current

For some who think about HBD and public policy, it's become an idée fixe that the 1950s is a line in the sand before which things went well, and after which things went to hell.

For others, our slow slide towards atomized, post-religious hedonism was inevitable: It had to follow the Industrial Revolution, like night follows day.

So who's right?  One way to know is to go back and see what folks were saying and doing as the second Industrial Revolution reached its end.  Was this the beginning of what we've become?  Did it have to be this way?  Hop in the touring car and take a brief spin with us through post-WWI America:


Women

The notion that before the 1960s all or even most women were full-time homemakers is of course ahistorical; most women in history have been farmers' or artisans' wives, with all the labor that entails.  Only women of the leisure class have ever been spared hard work. And after WWI, industry blew up that leisure class to proportions never before seen.  Just how old is 'the new woman'?

O tempora! O mores!

One last vacation post. Between holiday-making, we at Those Who Can See have stumbled upon a few news stories that so vividly called to mind Juvenal's satires that we couldn't help but take a peek side-by-side.

The empire was still centuries from falling when the Roman satirist so scathingly critiqued her vices.  Today many of us find ourselves tempted to proclaim 'the end is near!'  But decadence can have a long shelf life. Inertia, some claim, is itself one of the mightiest forces in human history. Who knows what lessons then (if any) can be drawn from comparisons such as these.  Perhaps wiser minds than us can say.



'How can a woman who wears a helmet be chaste?'