Affordable family formation for the few

With the decline in crime, Manhattan is turning back into paradise for families -- for the tiny handful who can afford it. Via Half Sigma, from the NYT:

Since 2000, according to census figures released last year, the number of children under age 5 living in Manhattan mushroomed by more than 32 percent. And though their ranks have been growing for several years, a new analysis for The New York Times makes clear for the first time who has been driving that growth: wealthy white families.

At least half of the growth was generated by children who are white and non-Hispanic. Their ranks expanded by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2005. For the first time since at least the 1960s, white children now outnumber either black or Hispanic youngsters in that age group in Manhattan.

The analysis shows that Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005, which means they are growing up in wealthier households than similar youngsters in any other large county in the country.

Among white families with toddlers, San Francisco ranked second, with a median income of $150,763, followed by Somerset, N.J. ($136,807); San Jose, Calif. ($134,668); Fairfield, Conn. ($132,427); and Westchester ($122,240). In comparison, the median income of other Manhattan households with toddlers was $66,213 for Asians, $31,171 for blacks and $25,467 for Hispanic families.

Keep in mind that $284k is the median income of white parents of toddlers, not of teens. I would extrapolate that Manhattan parents of teens going off to college have a median income of somewhere around a half million per year.

You can see how the 1990s fall in crime, which was much sharper in Manhattan that just about anywhere else in America, set off a virtuous cycle (virtuous from the perspective of the extremely wealth), making Manhattan ever more desirable and thus ever more expensive, which in turns drives out more and more of the nonwealthy from south of Harlem, leaving inside traders as the only criminals who can afford to live in most of Manhattan.

By the way, this reminds me that the media routinely gives an unrealistically lowball sense of just how much money it costs to live in the more fashionable parts of the country. It's common for personal business and advice articles in the press to give the impression that making $100,000 per year would be the solution to all your financial problems, when it's just enough to introduce you to a whole new world of problems.

Is the cost-of-living variance among places within this country greater than in the past? It sure seems that way, but I've never seen a study of it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

In defense of Jonah Goldberg

The NRO columnist is getting a lot of razzing over the title of his often-delayed book (now, not due until after Christmas): Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton

Obviously, Jonah wants his book to sell more than one with an academic title would, so he's giving it an attention-getting title and cover. I'm not Jonah's biggest fan, but I expect his book has a chance to be better than most of his daily journalism: it could be polemical but eye opening. Jonah has a lot of valid historical material to work with.

There is widespread severe ignorance about 20th Century history that Jonah's book could help rectify.

The truth is that human beings love a winner, and from 1922 through 1942, Fascism was highly influential because, along with Communism, it looked like a winner.

After Stalingrad, however, it looked like a loser, so a lot of people in the West started rewriting history to cover up the influence Fascism had had on them. Just to take one example, the Swedish movie director legend Ingmar Bergman finally admitted in 1999 that he had been a Nazi-supporter all through WWII, when he was in his 20s, because he found Nazism to be "fun and youthful." This was not an idiosyncratic opinion at the time.

It's easy to come up with a list of linkages between Fascism and the left, both of ancestry and descent. For instance:

- Mussolini was a Marxist heretic -- he converted from international socialism to national socialism because he found the solidarity across class lines in the trenches of WWI such fun. (Neither he nor Hitler were ever pro-capitalist -- they just realized the economic idiocy of Marxism, and thus didn't shoot businessmen as long the Party held the ultimate power.)

- In contrast to the myth that Fascism was always culturally traditionalist, Mussolini was the most aggressively anti-traditionalist, pro-modern art leader of the 20th Century, being closely associated with the Futurist poets and painters like Marinetti, whose Futurist Political Party Mussolini absorbed in 1919.

- The first two years of FDR's New Deal, up through the Supreme Court throwing out the Fascist-inspired National Recovery Administration in 1935, were closely modeled on Mussolini's corporativist economic policy that discouraged market competition.

- Much of the highbrow French intellectualizing that has dominated the American academy in recent decades has its roots in the Occupied France and Belgium of the early 1940s. The French world was so stunned by its defeat by Germany that it opened itself up to German ideas during the years of Nazi rule. For example, the German philosopher Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi Party, became the single most dominant influence on post-war French philosophizing.

- Animal rights and environmentalism were favorites causes of Hitler, and remain favorite causes of leftists in Germanic Europe today.

- The invention of the favorite car of Sixties hippies, the Volkswagen Beetle, was sponsored by Hitler.

- Attacks on cigarette smoking as causing cancer were initiated by the Nazis.

These are easy links to pull off the top of my head. If Jonah wants to put in the work -- and considering how long his book has been delayed, he may be doing just that -- he could uncover far more.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rabbit vs. Raptor Update

As you may recall, last year some kind of giant vicious bird came within inches of catching our white rabbit Fred, who lives in the backyard. To my surprise, the most intelligent course of action in response to the death-from-above threat came from Fred, who set about industriously digging himself escape tunnels. According to Watership Down, the source of all my scientific knowledge about rabbits, bucks don't dig burrows, they just wait around for pregnant does to do it for them. So, we were surprised to find two-foot high piles of dirt appearing in the backyard. It looked like the prisoner of war camp in The Great Escape, except Fred didn't bother with surreptitiously dribbling the dirt extracted from the tunnels out through the cuffs of his trousers, which he doesn't wear anyway.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's Doppelganger

Perhaps the most interesting character in Sen. Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is his half-brother "Mark," even though he appears only briefly. Another half-white son of Barack Obama Sr., Mark, a physics student at Stanford, disturbs Obama with his individualism, well-adjusted personality, and lack of black racialism. He looks so much like Obama, but his values are so different.

While many whites fantasize that Obama "transcends race," the Presidential candidate's autobiography is actually obsessed with race. It's his estranged half-brother Mark who is the true post-racial man.

Mark is the son of Obama's father and his third wife (and second white American wife) Ruth. She divorced Obama's drunken dad after seven years of marriage (during which he beat her badly), then married a prosperous Tanzanian. Today, according to the Daily Mail, she works in a Kenyan school.

Unlike Obama, who long dreamed of Kenya but knew little about it, Mark spent his summers off from his American studies in Kenya at his mother and step-father's upscale Nairobi home, where Obama met him in the late 1980s.

"'So, Mark,' I said, turning to my brother, 'I hear you're at Berkeley.'

"'Stanford,' he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. 'I'm in my last year of the physics program there.'"

They meet once more, for lunch:

"I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

"'Fine,' he said. 'It's nice to see my mom and dad, of course. … As for the rest of Kenya, I don't feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.'

"'You don't ever think about settling here?'

"Mark took a sip from his Coke. 'No,' he said. 'I mean, there's not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn't have a telephone.'

"I should have stopped then, but something -- the certainty in this brother's voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror -- made me want to push harder. I asked, "Don't you ever feel like you might be losing something?'

"Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

"'I understand what you're getting at,' he said flatly. 'You think that somehow I'm cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.' He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. 'Well, you're right. At a certain point, I made a decision not think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.'

"'It made you mad.'

"'Not mad. Just numb.'

"'And that doesn't bother you? Being numb, I mean?'

"'Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven's symphonies. Shakespeare's sonnets. I know -- it's not what an African is supposed to care about. But who's to tell me what I should and shouldn't care about? Understand, I'm not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don't ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.' He shrugged. 'I don't know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if looked more carefully at myself, I would …'

"For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

"'Who knows?' he said. 'What's certain is that I don't need the stress. Life's hard enough without all that excess baggage.'

"… Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache."

Notice that it's Obama's own dishonesty that is (supposedly) making his heart ache -- he can't know what's in Mark's heart as they exchange addresses, but Obama knows that he never wants to hear from his own half-brother Mark again. The physicist is (at least) Obama's intellectual equal, but his realism about Kenya, his lack of an identity crisis, lack of black ethnocentrism, and lack of illusions about their mutual father leave Obama so uncomfortable that he doesn't want to see Mark anymore.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's Self Pity

It has seldom been remarked how large a role self-pity plays in the wildly popular 45-year-old Presidential candidate's personality. Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance concludes with a relatively brief description of his wedding, as performed by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Here's the happy ending to the book (which, according to Google, has never before been quoted online, fueling my suspicion that almost nobody has finished his bestseller because it's such a downer):

"The person who made me proudest of all, though, was [half-brother] Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol. He still works at his accounting firm [in America], but talks about moving back to Kenya once he has enough money. …

Abongo lifted up his glass of fruit punch for a toast.

"'To those who are not here,'" he said.

"'And to a happy ending," I said.

"We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered-tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive."

I love that last sentence in the autobiography that Random House paid Obama to write at age 33. That not only "for that moment," but that day in and day out he just might be one of the luckier men alive never occurs to him.

Obama's concluding phrase "luckiest man alive" is a common misrendering of slugger Lou Gehrig's famous July 4, 1939 farewell speech at Yankee Stadium as he was dying at age 36 of Lou Gehrig's Disease [insert "shoulda seen it coming" joke here]:

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."

Here is the president of the Harvard Law Review getting married to a lovely woman (who is, he neglects to mention, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate and fellow Ivy League bachelor's degree holder) and, yet, he wants us to know that he feels as lucky as Lou Gehrig did while dying … "for that moment, at least."

In other words, in almost all other moments (as detailed at vast length in his book), Obama feels like fate has done him a dirty deal.

We should all be so unlucky.

Now, here's what's really funny. I bet that when a lot of people realize just how profound is Obama's sense of self-pity, they will feel, deep down inside in all sincerity, that we should get together and elect him President … just to cheer him up.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tagging:

Rob Long writes in the LA Times:

I LEARNED THREE things after reading the account of the 15-year-old boy who tagged a bus while Los Angeles' mayor was on board.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, along with a busload of other officials, were at the Santee Education Complex in South L.A. to celebrate the successful relocation of a bus stop from two blocks away from the school to directly behind of the school complex.

So the first thing I learned was this: Moving a bus stop two blocks is so complicated a process, so thorny a political problem, that when it actually happens — when the steel pole with the Metro sign is dug up from one spot and planted a few hundred yards away in another spot — it's time for everyone involved to celebrate the moment, get in a bus, drive down to the spot and congratulate themselves.

While doing so, the mayor and his party were surprised to notice that a sophomore at the school was celebrating in his own way, by tagging the bus, which, translated for our Brentwood and Pacific Palisades readers, means scrawling his nickname — "Zoner" — on the window.

The snag: The mayor and his guests were inside the bus at the time. Zoner, I guess, didn't look before he tagged. One thing they don't seem to offer at the Santee Learning Complex, apparently, is a class called Awareness of the World Around You. ...

On the other hand, in the aftermath of the event, Zoner's act doesn't look like such a boneheaded move. The bad news is, the kid will probably have to do some kind of community service. The good news, though, is that Villaraigosa quickly realized that while Zoner is obviously a young man in trouble, he's also got a certain reckless charm. So the mayor graciously offered to mentor him, help him make better choices, guide him to more productive activities. So Zoner goes from tagger to mayor's new best friend. Not bad, mobility-wise. ...

The third thing I learned, then, is this: If you want to move up in the world, or get somebody's attention, vandalism is probably the answer. If, say, you're an aspiring writer with a couple of solid action-picture pitches, my advice would be to find out where producer Jerry Bruckheimer parks his car, and then deface it.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A general rule: The whiter a black is culturally, the more ethnocentric he will be politically

A reader points out:

"I have always been amused that Kanye West, the benign rapper with the art school background and the English professor mother, is the one into trendy political grandstanding and accusing Bush of not caring about black people, whereas 50 Cent, the gangsta rapper with the South Jamaica, Queens background and the cocaine-dealer mother, is the one who makes occasionally favorable references to Bush and doesn't think Katrina should be blamed on any people in particular."

He also points out that in 1972, another black celebrity endorsed Richard Nixon besides Sammy Davis Jr. (who agonized for rest of his life over whether he had betrayed his people) and Wilt Chamberlain (who did not): James Brown. You can't get any blacker culturally than Soul Brother Number One, so that gave Brown more freedom politically to be nonstereotypical.

I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions to this tendency, but it appears relevant to Barack's Obama's life story.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Caitlin Flanagan's father

The witty prose stylist who writes about housewifery for The Atlantic and The New Yorker often mentions her mother, but gives few details about her father, other than that he was a writer. Some poking around on Google reveals that he was the late Thomas Flanagan, author of the grand 1979 bestseller The Year of the French, the famous historical novel about the doomed 1798 Irish rebellion that was assisted by a French army dispatched by Revolutionary Paris.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Wind that Shakes the Barley"

From my upcoming American Conservative review:

Neoconservatives who extol Winston Churchill's adamancy never mention that in 1921, after Britain suffered no more than 700 army and police deaths in Ireland, he played a key role in negotiations with insurgents that resulted in Britain suddenly cutting and running from southern Ireland after 700 years of occupation.

Why did the UK, which sent 20,000 Tommies to their deaths on the first day of the Battle of the Somme a half decade earlier, not stay the course in Ireland? Ken Loach's film about Irish Republican Army gunmen in 1920-22, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," which won the top prize at the 2006 Cannes festival, graphically conveys why the English, a civilized people, went home. Defeating a guerilla uprising broadly supported by the local populace requires a level of frightfulness that does not bear close inspection.

Loach, the 70-year-old English movie director, is an old-fashioned lefty of the didactic Marxist sort. His films include "A Contemporary Case for Common Ownership" and "Which Side Are You On?" Not surprisingly, these haven't made him a big name in America, but "Barley" is worth a watch. Loach is neither the most fluid of filmmakers nor the most historically trustworthy, but "Barley" is consistently informative about the Anglo-Irish War, if spectacularly wrong-headed about the subsequent Irish Civil War among the victors...

Compared to Britain, the Emerald Isle was smaller and rockier, so less populated. It was also more chaotic (no national king ever emerged), leaving it at its neighbor's highly limited mercy until its sons could win her freedom.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Finland is full of Finns

My newest VDARE.com column:

Diversity Is Strength! But…What About Finland?
By Steve Sailer

We are constantly told that the long border and large disparity in income between the U.S. and Mexico makes it absolutely impossible for America to enforce its immigration laws.

And yet it is almost never mentioned that a not terribly dissimilar frontier exists within Europe: the 833 mile border between Finland (which has a higher per capita income than Germany, France, or Britain) and corrupt and dysfunctional Russia—the Mexico of Europe. While America's per capita GDP is 4.1 times Mexico's, Finland's is 2.7 times Russia's.

Even though Finland has the kind of Nordic welfare state that attracts immigrants (for example, 12 percent of neighboring Sweden's population is foreign-born), it still has one of the lowest percentages of immigrants of any Western European country: only two percent of its 5.2 million residents.

And a substantial fraction of Finland's immigrants consist of spouses of Finns, Finnish-speaking citizens of Russia (there are pockets of Finnish-speakers throughout the forests of northern Russia), Estonians, whose Uralic language is closest to Finnish, and Swedes (Swedish is the second official language). Third World immigrants make up less than one percent of the population.

This hasn't exactly hurt Finland. The World Economic Forum's poll of 11,000 global business leaders ranks Finland as possessing the second-most competitive economy in the world. (The U.S. is sixth.) Transparency International finds Finland tied with Iceland and New Zealand for the honor of being the least corrupt country on Earth. (The U.S. is merely tied for 20th.)

In 2005, the Washington Post sent two reporters to Finland for several weeks to find out why Finland has "the world's best educational system, produces such talented musicians and architects, and has more cell phones per capita than Japan and America." Sitting here in my pajamas in California, I could have saved the Washington Post all the expense. The most important reason why Finland is so Finlandy is because it is full of Finns. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Marie Antoinette"

This has to be the girliest movie ever. The French didn't think it was an accurate biopic of the young wife of the King Louis XVI, but that's missing the point. The film is more about what it was like to be Sofia Coppola growing up in a Hollywood royal family. surrounded by luxury and such regal characters as her father Francis Ford Coppola and her cousin Nicholas Cage, in the 1980s, complete with KROQ classics like "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow and "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

My sons each watched thirty seconds of it independently, then both announced Marie Antoinette deserved to have her head chopped off. Personally I liked it exactly because you don't get to see such a purely feminine film often: "Clueless" at Versailles.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Diversity Is Unity! It’s Also…Gang Warfare

My New VDARE.com column:

Diversity Is Unity! It’s Also…Gang Warfare
By Steve Sailer

Santa Barbara, California is famously close to paradise. The cool Pacific waters and sun-warmed south-facing beaches endow the small city with the quintessence of the Mediterranean climate. Rich Americans began flocking to Santa Barbara in the late 19th Century, and, in contrast to today's plutocrats, they had excellent taste in architecture. The rebuilding of Santa Barbara's State Street in the Spanish Mission style after the 1925 earthquake was the aesthetic peak of white Californians' long Hispanophilic phase. Today, State Street is arguably the most pleasant downtown avenue to stroll in the country.

Or it was, until last Thursday afternoon, when California's growing Latino gang wars boiled over onto State Street, with a 14-year-old junior high school student stabbing a 15-year-old to death outside of Saks Fifth Avenue. ...

So why is gang war breaking out in Southern California now? [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama's "lack of experience"

The other side of the coin is that our emphasis on name brand politicians means that they are often too old when they finally get their shot, like 72-year-old Bob Dole in 1996, or even 67 year-old George Bush in 1992, who appeared to have largely retired after the successful conclusion of Desert Storm. Reagan was too old after he got shot, but the country was lucky that his principles were the right ones for the time. Even Clinton at age 54 spent most of his last year in office trying to break Ike's Presidential record for most rounds of golf in a year (103).

Being President is hard, and Obama's youth could come in handy.

There are other reasons to question Obama (e.g., his passionate ethnocentrism, as documented at vast length in his autobiography), but we aren't supposed to mention those, so many are turning to "experience" as a politically correct way to express perfectly appropriate concerns about Obama.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

David Ehrenstein on Obama

In the LA Times, a pundit expands on a point I made in "Obama's Identity Crisis" about the Presidential candidate as the new Sidney Poitier.

Obama the 'Magic Negro'
By David Ehrenstein

But it's clear that Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination — the "Magic Negro."

The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. "He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist," reads the description on Wikipedia http://en.-wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_Negro .

He's there to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. …

[Sidney] Poitier really poured on the "magic" in "Lilies of the Field" (for which he won a best actor Oscar) and "To Sir, With Love" (which, along with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," made him a No. 1 box-office attraction). In these films, Poitier triumphs through yeoman service to his white benefactors. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is particularly striking in this regard, as it posits miscegenation without evoking sex. (Talk about magic!)

And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That's a question asked by John Guare in "Six Degrees of Separation," his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. …

That's where Obama comes in: as Poitier's "real" fake son. …

Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books [that's for sure!], or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

Ehrenstein, who says he's black, obviously hasn't read Obama's 1995 autobiography, which depicts his passionate ethnocentrism at vast length. But, Ehrenstein's point about how whites think about Obama is valid. It explains a lot of the mindless rage directed at me for pointing out that Obama's autobiography doesn't say what they hope it says.

Ehrenstein is just not cynical enough about white motivations. First, I don't know any whites under 55 who personally feel guilty for the status of blacks. Instead of white guilt, there is white vs. white status competition, in which publicly-expressed attitudes toward blacks can function as a trump card.

Second, as I wrote:

My late mom was also a big fan of Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier back in the 1960s. To her, they embodied an admirable combination of black masculine charm and white gentlemanliness. (In contrast, she thought Muhammad Ali, who is now the more popular representative of 1960s black manhood, an uncultured blowhard.)

It sorely disappointed her when blacks burned down Watts in 1965. They were not following the fine example for their race set by Harry and Sidney. She would have liked Barack Obama, too, and for the same reasons.

Nobody uses the term “example for his race” anymore. Today, we say “role model.” Even so, what many whites hope, deep down, to accomplish by electing the well-mannered Obama as president is to make him the supreme role model for all African Americans, eclipsing such deplorable bad examples as Al Sharpton, Snoop Dogg, and 50 Cent. Stuart Taylor Jr., a white critic of affirmative action, exulted in The Atlantic: “The ascent of Obama is the best hope for focusing the attention of black Americans on the opportunities that await them instead of on the oppression of their ancestors.”

The message much of white America hopes to send to black America by electing Obama is: Don’t Be So Black. Act More Barack.

Perhaps this explains why blacks haven’t been all that enthusiastic.

In assessing what an Obama Administration might be like, it's important to note that, not surprisingly, blacks who become beloved by whites tend to espouse more politically radical, ethnocentric views in order to compensate, to prove to other blacks that they are keepin' it real. (Harry Belafonte in a classic case.)

For example, at the 1972 Republican convention, two black celebrities appeared on stage with Richard Nixon: Sammy Davis Jr. and Wilt Chamberlain. Poor little Sammy, a favorite of whites since the 1940s, was psychologically tortured by all the hate mail and death threats he received from blacks in response, and for the rest of his life regretted endorsing Nixon. In contrast, Wilt, the epitome of the big scary black man, never seemed to give a damn. He went on being politically independent from the black mainstream.

Which one is more like Obama?

This tendency of blacks popular with whites to try to act super-black in private was parodied in Dave Chappelle's famous Wayne Brady skit. (Here's the video. NSFW.) First, Chappelle made fun of the brilliant nice guy mimic who may be more popular with whites than blacks, having a character say, "White people love Wayne Brady, because he makes Bryant Gumbel look like Malcolm X." (Bryant Gumbel, of course, is another example of this psychological dynamic: he's notoriously anti-white man, although he didn't have a problem trading in his black first wife of 26 years for a blonde trophy wife.)

In a later episode, Brady shows up and Chappelle apologizes, so they go out for a drive, in which Brady turns out to be a psychopathic pimp, killing a cop, shooting rival drug dealers, and roughing up his streetwalkers, declaring "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?"

So, whites who think that Obama, the preppie from Honolulu who always strove with all his might to be accepted as black by other blacks, will upbraid African-Americans and persuade them to act more like him just might turn out disappointed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer