West African Officials Apologize For Role In U.S. Slave Trade

From the Chicago Tribune in 2000:

Benin Officials Apologize For Role In U.S. Slave Trade 

May 01, 2000|By From Tribune News Services. 

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA — Officials from the West African nation Benin apologized during a ceremony here for their country's role in once selling fellow Africans by the millions to white slave traders. 

The group is making several stops in Virginia and Washington, D.C., to publicize President Mathieu Kerekou's recent apologies for his country's participation in the slave trade.

"We cry for forgiveness and reconciliation," said Luc Gnacadja, minister of environment and housing for Benin. "The slave trade is a shame, and we do repent for it." 

Benin, a country of 4.7 million people, was called Dahomey in the 17th Century, when it was a major supplier of slaves for white exporters shipping from what was called the Slave Coast. Some accounts say Dahomey rounded up more than 3 million people for sale to slave traders. 

Gnacadja spoke Saturday at a James River dock where, before the Civil War, slaves were shipped into Richmond, unloaded and marched across a bridge to downtown holding pens to await auction.

    

An island where Africans act like Asians

Whenever you mention that African-Americans seem to have brought with them some sub-Saharan African behavioral patterns, it's now traditional for somebody to say: "Africans are the most genetically diverse people on earth" and/or references to the dazzling diversity of African cultures. In reality, with famous exceptions like the Bushmen and Pygmies, Africa is a fairly homogeneous place for its vast size. As genetic anthropologist L.L. Cavalli-Sforza summed up in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes, “… differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.” Similarly, sub-Saharan cultures tend to be variations on a rather limited number of themes.

There are some exceptions, however, John Reader's Africa: Biography of a Continent provides a fascinating example of a not very African place in the heart of Africa: the island of Ukara in Lake Victoria in northwest Tanzania, in which a favorable environment leads to a Malthusian trap, which seems to lead to more Eurasian-like behavior.

The population has been around 16,000 for a century, with about one percent of the population annually moving to the mainland, a rate of increase unusual in Africa until recently.

Ukara has a few major advantages over the surrounding mainland of Africa: no tsetse flies to spread sleeping sickness. No lions and no elephants, either, to compete with humans. Life (and death) is presumably less random than on the African mainland, so hard work and investment pay off more reliably.

Life on Ukara sounds rather like life in a poor Southeast Asian peasant society rather than in most of Africa. A 1968 aerial survey showed that 98.6 percent of the land on the island was in use. In contrast to the typical pattern of land use rights in Africa, almost every resource on the island, including each tree, is privately owned, which has prevented deforestation. (Here's a description of Ukara from a libertarian perspective.) People on Ukara practice much more intensive and sophisticated agriculture than elsewhere in Tanzania, supposedly working ten hours per day, every day.

I spent some time looking for accounts by recent tourists visiting Ukara Island, but it became apparent that very few people go there, which is not surprising since people on holiday generally visit big cities or go to less crowded places to relax. We tend to think of islands as being less crowded (and thus more relaxing) than mainlands because they are less convenient to get to, but in Africa, apparently, things work the opposite. Being inconveniently far out in Lake Victoria makes life healthier and less risky than being on the mainland.

Has the Ukaran culture spread with the steady flow of Ukarans to the mainland of Africa? Evidently, no. Phil Raikes wrote in 1986:

This provides a very clear example of Esther Boserup's contention that necessity in the form of population pressure is the mother of agricultural innovation. Further evidence for this comes from the fact that Ukara Islanders who migrate to the mainland, where population density is far lower, promptly drop their labour-intensive methods (over ten hours per day throughout the year) for the much easier methods practised on the mainland.

I'm not sure what the ultimate lessons are from Ukara Island, but the place is worth thinking about.

    

Africa and the Malthusian Wringer

Nicholas Wade is in trouble for trying to bring up the topic of the selection pressures felt by Africans in Africa. That's not a topic we are supposed to think about. Instead, we are supposed to nod along as T-N Coates informs us that the reason African-Americans have lower property values than white Americans is solely because of bad things done by white Americans since 1619 so white must pay reparations. No history from before 1619 is imaginable. 

But as Wade wrote in The Spectator:

More specific evidence that evolution has shaped human social behaviour in the recent past comes from a third major social transition, from agrarian to modern economies. 

This transition is usually known as the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everyone in agrarian economies but the rich lived near the edge of starvation. Whenever any improvement in farming technology raised productivity, more children were born, the extra mouths ate up the surplus and semi-starvation soon reigned again. This harsh regime is known as a Malthusian economy after the Revd Thomas Malthus, who described it in his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’. As it happened, the Malthusian regime was nearing an end at the very time Malthus was writing because of the vast increase in productivity that was the essence of the Industrial Revolution. 

The cause of the Industrial Revolution is the central issue of economic history, yet economic historians have arrived at no consensus as to what that cause or causes may have been. Their preferred candidates are institutions of various kinds, or access to resources. For a quite different explanation, step back to Malthus for a moment. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the idea of natural selection. 

Darwin perceived that if people were struggling on the edge of existence, as Malthus described, then a person with the slightest advantage would have more children and bequeath this advantage to them. ‘Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work,’ Darwin wrote in his autobiography. 

If the English population provided the example from which Darwin intuited the idea of natural selection, that population was surely being subjected to the same force. The question then is what traits were being selected for. The economic historian Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, has documented four behavioural changes in the English population between 1200 and 1800 AD. 

The level of violence declined, literacy increased, and so did work hours and the propensity to save. The effect of these changes, Clark notes in his 2009 book Farewell to Alms, was to transform the violent peasant population of 1200 into the disciplined workforce of 1800. Because the nature of the people had changed, productivity soared, and for the first time an increase in population failed to drag down the standard of living. 

Clark not only documents the behavioural change in English society but also provides a plausible mechanism of hereditary transmission. From the study of wills he finds that the well-off had more surviving children than the poor. Since the size of the English population remained fairly constant, many children of the rich must have dropped in social status, diffusing the genes and values that had made their parents wealthy into the wider-population. 

The same process presumably occurred in other agrarian populations, which is why the Industrial Revolution spread so easily to other European countries and later, after political obstacles had been removed, to the countries of East Asia. 

With all three transitions, an evolutionary change is plausible but remains a hypothesis nonetheless: proof awaits discovery of the relevant genes. ...

Persistently poor countries, particularly those that are still tribally organised, have not been through the Malthusian wringer experienced by agrarian populations and may therefore find the transition to a modern state that much harder. 

Jared Diamond made a lot of money off his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel documenting how different the environment was in Africa than in Eurasia. But when in 2002 during a previously congenial conversation I brought up the obvious implication of his book, as I put it in my 1997 review in National Review: "Diamond makes environmental differences seem so compelling that it's hard to believe that humans would not become somewhat adapted to their homelands through natural selection," his face fell, he gathered his things and hustled out of the auditorium. Diamond isn't dumb.

The lack of a Malthusian Trap in most of Africa during most of pre-history is a central theme in the best book I've read on Africa, John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent. The concept of a Malthusian Trap is hard enough to grasp, so it's particularly braintwisting to come to grips with the implications of the lack of a Malthusian Trap. So, please allow me to repeat what I blogged in 2010:

Reader writes on p. 249:

The human population of Africa has never approached the size that the continent seems capable of supporting. ... An FAO survey published in 1991 reported that only 22 percent of land in Africa suitable for agriculture was actually in production (the comparable figure for south-east Asia is 92 per cent).

Reader offers a long list of discouraging factors, such as disease burden, poor soil, and wild beasts, especially elephants. We think elephants are cute, but they're huge and thus quite capable of eating a farmer's crop. Africa tended to be populated in a patchwork fashion. In some regions, enough people could be concentrated to drive off elephants, while other areas were conceded to elephants until enough human numbers could be assembled. Somewhat similarly, stronger herding tribes would tend to drive farming tribes (who use less land per person) into refuges in the mountains or islands. 

So, intensive agricultural use of land was rare, which meant that men didn't have to work terribly hard at farm work as long as they had women hoeing weeds for them. 

Reader writes:

From the time that Europeans first set foot in Africa, travelers have commented upon what they saw as an excessive interest in sex among Africans.

Think of this from the perspective of the Malthusian Trap. Europeans already tended to voluntarily keep their populations below Malthusian limits by practicing the moral restraint that the Rev. Malthus famously advised in 1798. From 1200-1800, the average age of first marriage for an Englishwoman was 24-26. Rich women tended to marry at younger ages, poor women at older. Illegitimacy rates were in the lower single digits. 

Thus, due to this sexual restraint, Europeans tended to be in a less Malthusian situation than, say, the Chinese, who tended to marry younger. Consequently, Europeans tended to be richer while working less hard than the Chinese. If the European population didn't grow as fast during good times as the Chinese population did, they didn't experience quite as many vast die-offs from famine during times when good government broke down (e.g., as recently as the early 1960s during Mao's crazy Great Leap Forward). England, for example, hasn't had a major famine in over 600 years.

So, Europeans developed cultural forms that attempted to sublimate sexual urges in more restrained and refined directions. Traditional Europeans dances like the minuet didn't feature a lot of pelvic thrusting, for example.

In Africa, however, conditions of life were such that the Malthusian Trap was not an active worry. More people were needed, so African culture -- dance, song, and so forth -- tended to encourage mating now rather than to encourage delay. Listening to Top 40 radio today, this pattern seems to have carried over from Africa.

    

Larry David on Leon Black's worldview

Larry David (played by Larry David) and Leon Black (played by J.B. Smoove) discuss Michael J. Fox, Parkinson's disease, and Leon's predominant perspective on human existence.

35 seconds. Language NSFW. 

     

Coates: "The Case for Reparations"

Five and half years into the Obama Presidency, the problems plaguing black people (and their neighbors) haven't disappeared, and in fact appear to be about the same as they've been on average over the last 40 years or so. 

This has created an ever greater demand for ever more detailed explanations for why this is all White People's Fault. Thus, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become the go-to guy for Glenn Beck-like deep dives into old books to explain why History demonstrates that white people are at fault for black people being poor.

The Case for Reparations 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Please keep in mind, however, that acceptable History is extremely circumscribed. History began in 1619. Nothing about African people in Africa before the arrival of white people is admissible. A book like John Reader's illuminating Africa: A Biography of the Continent is simply not to be considered. Instead, Africans were a blank slate solely written upon by white people.

Also, you may have noticed that liberals, black and white, have dominated racial policy in the United States for the last half century or so. Well, that's not History, either. 

For example, much of Coates' article is devoted to Chicago real estate, a topic about which I know a little. But Coates' history mostly peters out about the time liberals took charge of housing policy.

Alyssa Katz, an NYU journalism professor and contributor to Mother Jones, published a fascinating history, Our Lot, a half decade ago that explained, among much else, what liberalism did to Chicago's housing. From my 2009 review in VDARE: 

Alyssa Katz` Our Lot: A Liberal Perspective On How Political Pressure To Boost Minority Homeownership Helped Blow Up The Economy 

By Steve Sailer on August 30, 2009 

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us by Alyssa Katz, a liberal journalist and NYU journalism professor who writes for Mother Jones, is the best book yet on how the sacred cause of “diversity” merged with pedal-to-the-metal capitalism to bring us the Great Mortgage Meltdown. 

The book hasn't garnered the attention it deserves—probably because it makes clear the bipartisan responsibility of both her opponents on the Right and her friends on the Left. 

Our Lot focuses equally on the misdeeds of both capitalists and leftists. But I won't give the boiler room boys as much attention in this review because they're a more familiar tale, while Katz`s reporting on the role of her side is compelling “testimony against interest.“ 

Katz is remarkably frank about how government programs and political pressure to boost minority homeownership helped blow up the economy. She`s particularly good at explicating how leftist housing activists, such as ACORN and Gale Cincotta, the godmother of the Community Reinvestment Act, worked with Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Jim Johnson, CEO of Fannie Mae, to lay the groundwork for the Bubble and Bust. 

Katz doesn`t devote quite as much depth to the Bush Administration`s culpability (which, to my mind, is even greater). Perhaps she lacked Republican contacts to give her the kind of inside story she got on her own party`s mistakes. 

Still, Our Lot makes clear that on housing policy, the Clinton-Bush years form a single continuum with one overarching plan: boost the minority homeownership rate by lowering credit standards. I call it the Era of Multi-Culti Capitalism. 

And there's little reason to think that its lessons have been learned yet. 

Katz begins her book in 1972, in the collapsing Austin neighborhood on Chicago`s Far West side, where Gale Cincotta was a Greek-American housewife. 

Fortuitously for me, Our Lot fills in the political backstory of my own in-laws` lives. My wife grew up in Austin, which had been a peaceful, densely populated working class where small children could play safely on the crowded sidewalks. 

Suddenly, in the late 1960s, middle class blacks began buying into the neighborhood. 

Friends warned my late father-in-law, a classical musician and union leader, to flee, that underclass blacks would follow. But he and my late mother-in-law, a schoolteacher, resolved to show that integration could work. 

After my future wife was mugged twice and her younger brother once, however, my in-laws finally sold in 1970—losing half their life savings. They moved 63 miles out of Chicago, to a dilapidated farm where they lacked running water for their first two years. (And my father-in-law started voting Republican.) 

How did this disaster hit Austin? Katz demonstrates that it was the direct result of a 1968 change in the Federal Housing Administration, which set off a bubble and bust in America's inner cities, like a smaller precursor of this decade. As in 2005, 

“In 1972, in Chicago and in every other city in the nation, almost anyone could get a home mortgage, including borrowers who didn't earn enough to pay them off, on just about any house, for any reason. … And just like the recent adventure in lending beyond any rational limits, the mortgage disaster of the early 1970s was born from a lofty ideological conviction that enabled the basest of crimes and most foolish of gambles under its cover, insulated from almost any scrutiny until the damage was already done.” 

Franklin D. Roosevelt had started the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans, and Fannie Mae to buy loans from lenders. Together, these agencies created the familiar template of 30-year-year fixed rate mortgages with a moderate down payment that underpinned the growth of home-owning suburbanites after WWII. 

FDR's FHA, however, was reluctant to back loans in black neighborhoods—a practice that Cincotta later dubbed “redlining.” Eventually, in 1968, liberal Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy and the Johnson Administration revamped the FHA in a more politically correct direction. Katz explains: 

“The FHA was now, in effect, a front in the War on Poverty. … Under the new regime, homebuyers living in Chicago and other inner cities weren`' just eligible for loans. Lenders who signed up to sell FHA-insured mortgages were asked to do everything they could to make sure the buyers got them.” 

Of course, the results of the Federal government encouraging mortgages with down payments of never more than $500 were absolutely predictable: 

“Across the country, neighborhood destruction became a booming business, financed by the federal government. In Chicago they called it `panic peddling.` In New York, it was `blockbusting.` … The FHA-insured loans threw gasoline on that smoldering fire. … Indeed, the insurance made it profitable to seek out the most impoverished and unreliable borrowers, since the sooner a borrower defaulted on a loan, the more quickly the lender would get paid back in full by FHA.” 

In Chicago, Gale Cincotta started a national coalition of “community activists,” who helped pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Cincotta remains a heroine to the author, although she can't quite make clear Cincotta's logic. If the feds encouraging lending to minorities had destroyed Austin, how was more hair of the dog that bit you supposed to fix Austin? 

Sadly, Austin remains unfixed. On a visit to Chicago earlier this month, my wife drove by her old house. Her former home had no doorknob, just an empty hole in the front door. But at least it was still standing, unlike two large apartment buildings on her old block, which are now just crabgrass-covered vacant lots. 

Cincotta died in 2001—across the municipal border from Austin in Oak Park. In telling contrast to Austin, that prosperous suburb that had succeeded in saving its famous district of Frank Lloyd Wright homes (where my father was born in 1917) by limiting the number of blacks allowed to move in through its notoriously illegal but effective “black-a-block“ quota. 

Katz notes that Cincotta`s organization of the left, combined with the invention of mortgage securitizing by investment banker Lewis Ranieri in 1983, made possible the disasters of this decade.

Cincotta began siccing her “pushy capitalist radicals” on Fannie Mae, which remained reluctant to buy the dubious mortgages of likely deadbeats. Still, Katz writes, “The reality was that to meet its growth objectives, Fannie Mae needed these poor people as much as the poor people needed them.” 

Looking back from 2009, Katz asks: 

“How did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac … turn into the world`s biggest funders of Wall Street-backed subprime mortgages? … It all started with the best of intentions, with … the activists who demanded bank loans for the poor and urban.”
  

Nerd Lib and the popularity of Race-Does-Not-Exist

Perhaps the biggest social change after the famous ones of the 1960s and early 1970s has been what I call Nerd Lib. Our culture has become much more congenial toward and perhaps conducive to the Aspergerish style of mind than when I was young. 

This has happened with little in the way of political attention or leadership. Like lefthandedness, it's not the kind of identity that current identity politics work well with. On the other hand, it's cultural influence is unmistakable.

It finally dawned on me while reading hundreds of extremely confident Internet commenters explain that Nicholas Wade can't possibly know anything about science because science proves that race-does-not-exist, that this dogma of recent decades is tied into the rise of the nerds who deal well with rigid categories but don't deal well with human complexity. 

   

Annual drowning PSA

I've known a couple of young men who have drowned, so this time of year I like to cite a good article in Slate on how often people drown in plain sight of potential rescuers who don't realize what is happening: 

The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs. ... Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

From a new report mentioned in the NYT:

... blacks ages 5 to 19 were 5.5 times more likely to drown in pools than whites the same age. The study is limited by a lack of data on who swims where — for example, if blacks have less access to swimming pools or choose not to use them, their rates of drowning may be even higher than the report indicates. 

Motel swimming pools are extremely dangerous for blacks. Black males tend to have lower percentage body fat and denser bones and thus tend to float poorly or not at all. You can definitely learn to swim if you don't float but it's less fun than if you do float. Black girls often have have complicated hair treatments that make them averse to taking swimming lessons. But black parents need to overcome all their children's reasons not to learn to swim and make sure their kids learn.

    

Being Julian Castro pays okay, not great

Byron York in the Washington Examiner goes deeper into Julian Castro story.

The problem with Castro as a subject to write about is that he's kind of a dull Obama-like figure who has been polished to be a figurehead. In the hands of a master of malice like Zev Chafets, Castro is a pretty funny story, but you pretty much have to be an iSteve reader to get the joke.

If chosen for HUD, Julian Castro's work, big payday could face scrutiny 

BY BYRON YORK | MAY 18, 2014 | 12:00 AM  

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro is widely referred to as a "rising star" in Democratic politics. There's even talk the Mexican-American Castro could earn the vice-presidential spot on the 2016 Democratic ticket in an effort to further strengthen the party's bonds with Hispanic voters. And now, it appears Castro's national profile is about to rise with word that President Obama plans to nominate him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. 

If Castro is tapped for the job, his Senate confirmation hearings will likely shine a spotlight both on his role in San Antonio's government and his way of making a living. 

San Antonio, the second-largest city in Texas and seventh-largest in the nation, has a council-manager-weak mayor form of government. The manager runs the city.  

The office of mayor carries with it no executive authority. ... "The mayor's job pays $20 a meeting plus a one-time $2,000 fee, so I basically make $4,000 a year," Castro told San Antonio television station KENS last year. 

So how does Castro, 39 years old, with a wife and a child, make a living? First, his wife, Erica, an elementary school teacher, makes about $55,000 a year. But lately, it appears Castro's real livelihood comes from being Julian Castro -- making speeches, surfing on his fame after a well-received keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and writing a book about himself. 

San Antonio Express-News columnist Brian Chasnoff recently reported that Castro made more than $200,000 in 2013. The bulk of that, Chasnoff noted, was a $127,500 advance for the memoir that Castro is writing.

In contrast, after Obama gave the same speech at the Democratic convention eight years before, he received a $1.9 million advance for what became The Audacity of Hope. In general, blacks are just a lot more interesting to the white reading public than Mexicans are.

More came from the speaking fees that were a product of Castro's post-convention visibility: $12,750 for one speech, $16,250 for another, $8,500 for another, and so on.

These are not particularly large amounts of money -- Castromania appears to be a long ways from liftoff. (It also doesn't help that Castro doesn't speak much Spanish, so that market is out.)

That's how Castro supports himself and his family now. But the seed money for Castro's time in the mayor's office -- he was first elected in 2009 -- was a controversial seven-figure "referral fee" that Castro, a Harvard-educated lawyer, received from a well-connected trial lawyer and Democratic donor in a personal injury lawsuit in which Castro may or may not have played a major role. 

The case stemmed from a 2006 drunk driving accident in which three people were killed. ... One of the victims, a man who lost his mother, wife, and son in the crash, knew Castro and chose Castro's small firm to represent him in a suit against the oilfield services company. Castro then referred the case to a much larger firm, headed by Mikal Watts, a prominent personal injury lawyer and Democratic contributor. Watts won the case, and a big award, and Castro was paid a seven-figure "referral fee" for bringing the suit to Watts' firm. ... 

Julian's identical twin Joaquin shared in the tip.

Watts is a Texas-sized contingency fee lawyer. A cornerback named Mikal Watts would be black, but a major Democratic donor named Mikal Watts is white.

So, basically, the Castro Twins are the creation of the Bob Odenkirk-like Mikal Watts.

Castro's lawsuit payday has attracted some scrutiny. In 2009, the Express-News ran a piece (not available on the Web) headlined, "Whispers about Castro's referral of case grow louder." But Castro has remained mostly silent about the financial details of the matter. Still, the bottom line is that it appears the referral fee and Castro's connection to Watts are major parts of the foundation of Castro's political career so far. If Castro is nominated to be HUD secretary, the senators charged with his confirmation will undoubtedly want to know more about them.

I'm sure York is better plugged in to what Republican Senators are planning than I am. Generally speaking, though, whatever questions I think would be interesting to ask never get asked. 

For example, I thought it was fascinating that Obama nominated Israeli government official Stanley Fischer to be the deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Fischer had been seen as loyal enough to Israel to run Israel's monetary policy in 2005 by prime minister Ariel Sharon and finance minister Bibi Netanyahu (Fischer became a citizen of Israel in 2005), so I thought maybe Fischer's switching teams would be of some interest to United States senators, but I can't find any online reference to whether that subject ever came up during Fischer's March 13 hearing in front of the Senate Banking Committee. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Harrah's Cherokee Casino) voted to confirm him, but did make a good point in Politico:

The Citigroup Clique 

Why is Obama appointing so many former employees of one Wall St. bank? 

By SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN April 29, 2014 

Today, I cast my vote on the Senate Banking Committee for Stanley Fischer to serve in the No. 2 position at the U.S. Federal Reserve. I asked Fischer tough questions – in person, at his nomination hearing, and in writing – and I have been impressed with the depth of his knowledge and experience. 

But I cast my vote reluctantly because of my growing frustration over the concentration of people with ties to the megabank Citigroup in senior government positions. 

In recent years, Wall Street institutions have exerted extraordinary influence in Washington’s corridors of power, but Citi has risen above the others in exercising a tight grip over the Democratic Party’s economic policymaking apparatus. Fischer, after all, is just the latest Citi alumnus to be tapped for a high-level government position. Starting with Robert Rubin – a former Citi CEO – three of the last four Treasury secretaries under Democratic presidents have had Citigroup affiliations before or after their Treasury service. (The fourth [Timothy Geithner] was offered, but declined, Citigroup’s CEO position.) Directors of the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget, as well as our current U.S. trade representative, also have had strong ties to Citigroup.

So, while I would like to ask Castro some embarrassing questions, my guess is that he will sail through untouched because he's exactly the type of smooth nonentity whom the Important People are looking for to surf the Hispanic Tidal Wave for them.

    

The benefits of reciprocity

From Ira Glass's This American Life on NPR, an African-American expatriate living in Paris recalls an early lesson learned in France:

Janet Mcdonald says:

I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let's jump the line. These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I'm black. That usually works in New York. 

These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn't believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there. You can't just walk to the front of the line. They were, like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people, and they're not scared of us? 

That's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating, because you know, we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these French bitches in high heels were threatening us. And they were in our faces. And it made me realize that the whole black-white game just doesn't work outside of the United States. 

Because white people aren't afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don't hate you, because that sort of goes together. So I'll take it. I'll wait on line. Now I don't dare jump lines. So that opened my eyes.

     

Newark passes stronger rent control law

Novelist Philip Roth grew up in Newark and has set what seems like a few dozen of his novels there. Since it's only 11 miles from Manhattan, I'd hardly be surprised if it gentrifies and some of his great-grandchildren (assuming he has any) wind up in Newark. 

Of course, Newark's African-American majority aren't in much hurry for that to happen. From NJ.com:

Newark city council passes new rent control ordinance
by Naomi Nix /The Star-Ledger  

NEWARK — The Newark city council passed tonight a new ordinance that will make it harder for landlords to raise the rents of tenants in rent-controlled properties. 

Under the old rules, landlords of rent-controlled buildings could raise rents annually by 5 percent if the building had 49 units or less and by 4 percent if the building had more than 49 units. 

The new ordinance caps the annual rent increases to the the Consumer Price Index in New Jersey.

I.e., not much.

I had a rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica in 1981-82 while I was getting my MBA at UCLA. The landlady invested not one thin dime in maintenance during my 20 months there.

Rent control did not prove as disastrous to Santa Monica, however, as my libertarian econ professor predicted. (I offered some theories why here.) But the demographics of Santa Monica in 1981 were maybe 80% white and 10% Asian, where as Newark in 2010 was 26.3% white and 1.6% Asian.

    

Indian election: Nationalist tide is global

The victory in the Indian elections of Modi's Hindu nationalist right wing party is another reminder that, strange as it may seem to consumers of the American press, conservative nationalism is the leading political trend of the 2010s. The DC/NYC globalist view, which has been become even more dominant now that the Commander-in-Chief is Barack Obama, is that there aren't really any independent countries out there, just rebellious provinces. *

The important thing is for nationalists to not squabble with each other across borders, like the unfortunate events of 100 years ago.

----------------
* Lifted from the comments of a couple of months ago.

     

New Statesman: Thinking Jews good at capitalism is racism, thinking Finns violent when drunk is science

From the New Statesman:

“Jews are adapted to capitalism”, and other nonsenses of the new scientific racism 

Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance argues that the genetic differences between racial groups explain why the West is rich and Africa is poor - but beneath the new science lies an old, dangerous lie.

BY IAN STEADMAN PUBLISHED 20 MAY, 2014 - 11:34

Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance - a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic “adaptation to capitalism” - is racist,  it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. 

Viewers of the BBC’s coverage of the Olympics on 10 August would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes ...

Spot the problem? Congratulations - you’re better at this than Nicholas Wade, former deputy editor of Nature, writer for the New York Times and Washington Post, pop-sci author and pusher of the hypothesis that: a) there is a biological basis for race, and b) racial differences explain cultural and societal differences. 

In this, he is partly correct - at least, in the way he defines “race” - but in oh-so-very-many other ways he is not. Frankly, it may well be that A Troublesome Inheritance is most useful as an illustration of the gap between the popular understanding of racism and the reality of how it operates. Wade very clearly does not consider himself, or his conclusions, to be racist, writing that "no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race". Yet this book is ultimately racist, because it does exactly that. 

Of course, at the 2012 Olympics, black men achieved all 8 spots in the 100m final for the 8th straight Olympics, but who is counting?

This is most obvious during the (numerous) sections of the book where Wade uses language that can best be described as “unfortunate”. We are told that, as a consequence of genetic analysis, “an individual can be assigned with high confidence to the appropriate continent of origin”. Furthermore, it is “perfectly reasonable” to classify all humans into one of five “continental based races”, while “classification into the three main races of African, East Asian and European is supported by the physical anthropology of human skull types and dentition”. ...

Then there’s the money shot: 

"Populations that live at high altitudes, like Tibetans, represent another adaptation to extreme environments. The adaptation of Jews to capitalism is another such evolutionary process.” 

And lest you be in any doubt that this isn’t a political tract disguised as science writing, Wade believes that the current scientific consensus is “shaped by leftist and Marxist political dogma”. (Plus, he’s been given the cover feature in this week’s Spectator to argue his position, which is always a science writing red flag.) 

A Troublesome Inheritance begins with a history of Darwin and the theory of evolution, an overview of how natural selection works, and an explanation of how eugenics was the “perversion” of  Darwinism (including a shout out for New Statesman founders and eugenics fans Sidney and Beatrice Webb - always appreciated). As an opening, it comes across as an attempt to make clear that this new, scientific conception of race isn’t the same, but it’s a bit like saying Father Christmas and your dad aren’t the same person. They both get to screw your mother. 

Wade is keen to argue that humans, like all animals, are subject to evolutionary pressures, and that this evolution continues to happen. There are discussions of studies showing how different human populations carry certain genes more than others (for example, Finns disproportionately carry the HTR2B gene, linked with a tendency towards violent behaviour when drunk), but between the science there are bizarre asides where he attacks those he perceives as suppressing these findings - like Marxists, “who wish government to mold socialist man in its desired image and [who] see genetics as an impediment to the power of the state”. (These statements are not given citations.)

     

Race v. ethnicity among Hispanics

I've long argued that if you want to make coherent logical sense of the U.S. government's distinction between race and ethnicity, then: 

- A racial group is a partly inbred biological extended family

- While an ethnic group is united by some or all of the nonbiological traits usually found among extended families but that aren't necessarily biological, such as shared language, religion, cuisine, heroes, customs, and so forth.

The most obvious example for thinking about this involves adoption: An adoptee might be racially Korean but also be ethnically white Minnesotan Lutheran or whatever. 

From the NYT's Upshot:

More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White
Nate Cohn

Hispanics are often described as driving up the nonwhite share of the population. But a new study of census forms finds that more Hispanics are identifying as white. 

An estimated net 1.2 million Americans of the 35 million Americans identified in 2000 as of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,” as the census form puts it, changed their race from “some other race” to “white” between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, according to research presented at an annual meeting of the Population Association of America and reported by Pew Research. 

All over the world, in both Latin America and India, people want to be seen as fairer, going so far as to painfully bleach their skin (e.g., Sammy Sosa). In America, however, the government, academia, and media offer incentives for these folks to identify strongly as nonwhite. However, that bangs up against their distaste for African-Americans.

The researchers, who have not yet published their findings, compared individual census forms from the 2000 and 2010 censuses. They found that millions of Americans answered the census questions about race and ethnicity differently in 2000 and 2010. The largest shifts were among Americans of Hispanic origin, who are the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group by total numbers. 

Race is an immutable characteristic for many white, black and Asian-Americans. 

It is less clear for Americans of Hispanic origin. The census form asks two questions about race and ethnicity: one about whether individuals are of Hispanic or Latino origin, and another about race. “Hispanics” do not constitute a race, according to the census, and so 37 percent of Hispanics, presumably dissatisfied with options like “white” or “black,” selected “some other race.” 

The researchers found that 2.5 million Americans of Hispanic origin, or approximately 7 percent of the 35 million Americans of Hispanic origin in 2000, changed their race from “some other race” in 2000 to “white” in 2010. An additional 1.3 million people switched in the other direction. A noteworthy but unspecified share of the change came from children who weren’t old enough to fill out a form in 2000, but chose for themselves in 2010. 

The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white.

Which is why Italians and Irish we're constantly being sold into slavery.

But, like I've said, while the media denounce the GOP for being the White Party and thus a party that Hispanics and Asians would naturally be allergic to, the Democrats ought to fear being identified in the minds of Hispanics and Asians as the Black Party. Where the rubber hits the road, most Hispanics and Asians would rather ally with self-confident whites than with blacks, which is why the confidence of whites is under constant assault for all manner of racial high crimes and misdemeanors.

(The Republicans can help along the process of the Dems being considered the Black Party. The Dems win with Hispanics and Asians when the election is framed as the Evil White Party v. the Cool Multi-Party. The Repubs win with Hispanics and Asians when the election is framed as the Responsible Adult Party v. the Dysfunctional Corrupt Black Party.)

It is particularly significant that the shift toward white identification withstood a decade of debate over immigration and the country’s exploding Hispanic population, which might have been expected to inculcate or reinforce a sense of Hispanic identity, or draw attention to divisions that remain between Hispanics and non-Hispanic white Americans. Research suggests that Hispanics who have experienced discrimination are less likely to identify as white. 

The data also call into question whether America is destined to become a so-called minority-majority nation, where whites represent a minority of the nation’s population. Those projections assume that Hispanics aren’t white, but if Hispanics ultimately identify as white Americans, then whites will remain the majority for the foreseeable future.

Of course, as the government offers money and prizes to Hispanics and Asians for identifying as non-white, it's hard to bet against their leaders insisting on being victims of the Evil White Man.

White identification is not necessarily a sign that Hispanics consider themselves white. Many or even most might identify their race as “Hispanic” if it were an explicit option.

The American government doesn't offer useful Latin American racial categories such as mestizo, mulatto, and pardo, so they tend to fill out the race and ethnicity forms in a hit or miss fashion.

... There is mounting evidence that Hispanics are succeeding in American society at a pace similar to that of prior waves of European immigrants.

As long as we ignore the economic collapse of the popping of the Mortgage Bubble.
   

NYT: "The Great White Hope"

Tom Edsall writes in the NYT:

The Great White Hope 

MAY 20, 2014 

Three unlikely sources are providing qualified encouragement to Republicans who are either openly or covertly committed to a campaign strategy that focuses on white turnout, as opposed to seeking votes from Hispanics and African Americans. 

The first source of this qualified encouragement is an academic study — “More Diverse Yet Less Tolerant?” — that explores what happens to racial and ethnic attitudes when you present white voters with census findings that show that whites will be in the minority in the United States by 2042.

The second source is a related study by the same authors — “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America” — that explores how the “salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans’ political-party leanings and expressed political ideology.” 

The third source is a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit think tank. The survey measured the percentage of whites who are “bothered” by the “idea of” an “America where most of the people are not white.” 

These studies present a challenge to those who have declared that the Republican Party must move away from the “white strategy” – formerly known as the “Southern Strategy.” That strategy has been the de facto Republican approach to elections since the mid-1960s. It was initially very successful, but over the past decade it has only been effective in low-turnout, midterm elections. 

Now, partly in response to the Obama victories of 2008 and 2012, Resurgent Republic, a Republican organization that includes a segment of the party establishment and some of the party’s Bush-era elder statesmen, denounced the “white strategy” as “the route to political irrelevance in national elections. Mitt Romney won a landslide among white voters, defeating Barack Obama by 59 to 39 percent. In the process he won every large segment of white voters, often by double-digit margins: white men, white women, white Catholics, white Protestants, white old people, white young people. Yet that was not enough to craft a national majority. Republicans have run out of persuadable white voters. For the fifth time in the past six presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. Trying to win a national election by gaining a larger and larger share of a smaller and smaller portion of the electorate is a losing political proposition.” 

Maureen A. Craig, a doctoral candidate, and Jennifer A. Richeson, a professor of psychology, both at Northwestern, have written two papers that ask questions that are relevant to this internal party debate. The authors do not endorse such tactics but their work suggests that there are in fact ways to intensify white suspicion of and hostility toward minorities and immigrants. These tactics offer the potential to shift voters to the right, into the Republican column. 

For their first paper, Craig and Richeson conducted a series of experiments that tested how whites respond to census data projecting that minorities will become the majority in the United States by 2042. 

What did they uncover? That “exposure to the changing demographics evokes the expression of greater explicit and implicit racial bias.” One group of respondents was shown evidence of the demographic trends and another was not. Those who saw the evidence “expressed more negative attitudes toward Latinos, Blacks, and Asian-Americans” than participants who were not shown the evidence. The authors concluded that “rather than ushering in a more tolerant future, the increasing diversity of the nation may instead yield intergroup hostility.”

Really? It's almost as if the problem is diversity in general, not the unique evilosity of straight white men.

Craig and Richeson’s second study, “On the Precipice of a ‘Majority-Minority’ America,” published last month, is even more directly relevant to the strategic choices facing Republicans. The authors found that whites – whether they called themselves liberals, centrists or conservatives — all moved to the right when exposed to the information about the approaching minority status of whites. This “suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide,” Craig and Richeson write. 

These findings led the two authors to observe that the future of the contemporary Republican Party may not be as bleak as some say. “Whites may be increasingly likely and motivated to support conservative candidates and policies in response to the changing racial demographics,” they write. “These results suggest that presumptions of the decline of the Republican Party due to the very same changing racial demographics may be premature.” 

Responding to my emailed questions, Craig wrote, “Overall, making this racial shift salient could bring more moderate White Americans into the Republican Party, as well as increase turnout among White Americans who already consider themselves Republicans. “

Like I've been saying for going on a decade and a half, if you prefer the politics of New Hampshire to the politics of Mississippi or Chicago or Bell, CA, then you should prefer the demographics of New Hampshire.

They are a package deal.
 

Rihanna: "“I Was Bullied At School For Being White”

Speaking of the Barbadian-American attorney general Eric Holder ... from the Barbados Free Press, 12/19/07:

The Ugly Secret Of Barbados Revealed Worldwide: Rihanna “I Was Bullied At School For Being White” 

The hidden secret of Barbados has just been splashed all over the world as the most popular music star on the planet says in a new media interview that she was bullied in school for being “white”. (ShowBiz Spy: Rihanna says she was bullied at school – for being ‘white’)

This might be the best thing that ever happened to those of us on this island who have shades of skin that are “not dark enough” – because it will focus world attention on that dirty little Bajan secret that we all live with: a virulent new strain of racism is alive and well in Barbados and it is being nurtured by our own government to serve a partisan agenda. 

Racism raises its head in schools, when applying for a government job, when shopping for groceries. And especially in politics. 

Racial division is encouraged by a Barbados political elite that regularly dismisses valid criticism on the basis that the opponent’s skin is not dark enough. Bajans with lighter skin colours are often given as a reason for failure – be it personal failure or failure of government projects – much like the Russian Communists would attribute production shortfalls to “wreckers”. 

Oh yes, the “whites” and “asians” are the cause of all trouble on this island of mongrels. 

Bajans who have never traveled abroad are almost always surprised that persons considered “white” on Barbados are considered “black” in North America or Europe! 

Who among us is of “pure” racial stock? We are truly an island of mongrels.

A college roommate of one of my sons said, "Here in America, everybody calls me black, while back home in Jamaica, everybody calls me white."

I discussed the West Indian middle class marriage system that produced Rihanna and Holder in my review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

      

Reparations, amnesty, Brendan Eich

From The New Republic:

The Atlantic's Case for Slavery Reparations
By Isaac Chotiner

Ta-Nehisi Coates's long cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic is about reparations for slavery. Indeed, the piece is titled 'The Case For Reparations.' (It isn't online yet.) The story has been buzzed about for a while now, and while I recommend that everyone get their hands on the essay and read it at once, Coates's argument shouldn't be too controversial. But it will be—which is another sign of the sorry state of racial discourse in America.  

Coates was wise to focus the essay less on the evils of slavery and more on the systemic and institutional ways in which African-Americans have been beaten down, discriminated against, and terrorized over the past 150 years. Rather than being left to their own devices—something America prides itself on doing for its citizens—blacks were forcefully kept down by government and private institutions, federal laws and private banks. (The piece closes with Bank of America's recent behavior.) It is a powerful argument with some superb storytelling. 

But prescriptively? Here is Coates, with some big ideas that really shouldn't sound all that earth-shattering: 

What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payout, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. 

Coates adds that he believes "wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced," and says he supports a John Conyers bill that would merely call for a "Congressional study of slavery" and make recommendations for "appropriate remedies."
The fact that such measures will no doubt prove to be controversial is what makes this subject so depressing.

Obviously, paying out big cash reparations would, as Dave Chappelle observed, drive up in the short run the price of Cadillacs and cocaine with few long term benefits, which is why so many black intellectuals over the years who have argued for reparations eventually get around to saying that, well, of course reparations shouldn't be mailed out in checks to black individuals, they should instead be given to black foundations run by black intellectuals like me.

If we spent $4 trillion giving $100,000 to every black person in America, blacks would still do badly a generation later on fire department hiring exams and all the rest. So, nothing would change about the status of blacks, nor about their complaints about invisible racism.

But Coates' argument is an important one: the point of reparations is not just the money, but also "a revolution of American consciousness," i.e., a permanent delegitimization of dissent, present and past, from the racial ideological conventional wisdom as embodied by T-N Coates. Let the Brendan Eich-style firings begin!

As we saw, as long as gay marriage was losing over and over in referendums, some degree of ideological pluralism had to be pro forma allowed. But once the Supreme Court ruled, persecution of past pluralists seemed natural.

We need to understand that an amnesty for illegal immigrants would be used in exactly the same way: as signifying the end of any need for even the most pro forma tolerance of dissent on immigration policy. Let the firings begin!

There were a lot of things Orwell didn't understand, but he did grasp the essential appeal of being an ideologue on the winning side:

But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

            

Eric Holder isn't black: just ask his mom

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to talk about race some more.

It's quite interesting how Americans find Eric Holder's ancestry invisible to them. Most of Eric Holder ancestors weren't black. His recent ancestors were middle class mulattos in Barbados who carefully avoided marriage to blacks. (See the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" for a description of how people who look like Gladwell and Holder were bred.) Holder grew up in a middle class West Indian enclave in NYC that tried (and in Holder's case succeeded) keeping out black American influence.

   

Newark's new mayor

A key number for understanding the election as mayor of Newark of black nationalist Ras Baraka (son of Sixties poet Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka) over Cory Booker's well-funded designated successor is 10.9. That's the number of miles from downtown Newark to Wall Street. Another number is 18: that's the number of minutes from Newark's Penn Station to New York's Penn Station.

In an age of gentrification, electing a hostile mayor like Baraka is intended to scare off potential gentrifiers.