Pondering Patterson [VI]: Responding To The Reality Of Race

Pondering Patterson Series [ I ], [ II ], [ III ], [ IV ], [ V ]

What can we do about the government's racial and ethnic classification system, which is key to making quotas feasible?

As we've seen, a racial group is an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some degree. This means there is a certain amount of flexibility in the scale of how racial groups are defined. For example, it would be nonsensical to group Koreans and Nigerians together in any race smaller than the human race. But Koreans could reasonably be grouped racially with all other Northeast Asians or, for that matter, with all East Asians, depending upon your purpose. So, there is nothing written in stone that says the current "Asian" and "Hispanic" categories are inevitable.

A general rule of thumb is that narrowly-defined groups, such as the Cubans, are more likely to get what they want from American foreign policy than broadly-defined groups, such as "Hispanics." That's because the constituent nationalities in the super-groups dreamed up by the Nixon Administration - "Hispanics" and "Asians" - are generally ancient or current enemies. El Salvador, for instance, invaded Honduras in 1967 to avenge a soccer defeat (a brutal little war that featured the last cavalry charge in history).  

The exceptions to this rule are the not-yet-official super-groups of the Arabs and the Muslims, who hate Israel even more than they hate each other, which is saying a lot.  

In contrast to foreign policy, you can't get in on the domestic racial spoils system if you aren't part of a big group. Consider Armenian-Americans, who number only one million or so. They have induced a remarkable 96 U.S. Congressmen to join the Armenian Caucus, which dedicates itself to sticking it to the Republic of Armenia's Muslim neighbors, Turkey and Azerbaijan. But Armenian-Americans are too isolated and thin on the ground to win affirmative action designation for themselves, outside of Pasadena, California, where they have a critical mass.

If you are Asian or, especially, Hispanic, though, you can have your cake and eat it too. Thus, a wealthy white Cuban-American is "Cuban" when he's demanding that his Congressmen vote for keeping the embargo on Castro going for a fifth decade, but he's "Hispanic" when his kid is trying to get into Princeton on a quota.

As countless examples from around the world show, in the long run government discrimination tends to lead to civil war. The current American system is based on the assumption that the legally disfavored non-Hispanic white majority is so large and so wealthy that it can afford to put up with these programs forever. And, indeed, white America could probably afford to subsidize indefinitely America's two historical minorities: African Americans and Native Americans. Because whites dramatically outnumber those two groups, and the ratios will never change too much, the burden on individual whites would always be tolerably small.

Unfortunately, extending legal privileges to one group automatically increases demands from other groups for the same privileges. Political opportunists quickly realize the short-term advantages of pandering to those desires.

The Nixon Administration invented racial quotas in 1969 for the not unreasonable purpose of punishing Philadelphia's all-white, all-Democrat crafts unions for blatantly discriminating against blacks. But the Nixonites soon established two far-reaching precedents. They allowed affirmative action to be extended to immigrants and in 1973 created the non-racial category of "Hispanics." These seemingly minor bureaucratic maneuvers transformed affirmative action from a system limited to a few tens of millions of American beneficiaries to one with billions of potential beneficiaries worldwide. Combined with the 1965 Immigration Act that opened the doors to mass legal immigration (along with the mass illegal immigration that typically follows legal immigrants, because most illegals won't make the attempt without legal relatives to help them out when they arrive in America), this started us down a dangerous path.

When the Census Bureau discovered recently that there were at least six million more people in America than it had previously believed (presumably, most of them illegal immigrants), this showed that the legally disfavored non-Hispanic white majority will probably cease to be a majority significantly sooner than the Census Bureau's earlier mid-century forecast. As the ratio of legally privileged to legally disprivileged individuals rises steadily, the second-class citizens will tend to become ever more discontented with their lot. To keep them intimidated, the government and cultural institutions will mount ever greater propaganda campaigns to badger non-Hispanic whites into agreeing that their race's historic guilt justifies penalizing them. The side effect of this official hate-mongering against whites, however, will be to inspire more and more anti-white pogroms of the kind we've already seen this year in both Seattle and Cincinnati, even before the Long Hot Summer of 2001 has arrived.

How do we get America off this treadmill toward ever worsening communal violence?

Dismantling the government's "Asian" and "Hispanic" demographic classifications would be a good start. Prudent dominant powers normally wield a "divide and conquer" strategy toward potential rivals. But the Nixon Administration's 1973 demographic labeling guidelines instituted what's turned out to be a "unite and surrender" policy. The sheer massiveness of these synthetic pressure groups is one of the prime culprits in the Balkanization of America.

Here's a seemingly symbolic first step:  

·         Change the imperialistic name "Asians" to the more accurate "East Asians." Asia is an enormous place, and it makes no sense for the people who used to be called "Orientals" to monopolize the name of an entire continent that they share with over one billion Caucasians.

Once that eminently reasonable step is taken, it would become obvious that the South Asian Indians don't belong with the East Asians, with whom they share practically nothing other than a tendency to eat a lot of rice. For the sake of American unity, Indian immigrants are too fast-growing, too smart, too hard-working, and too articulate in English to be allowed in on the racial spoils system. We need them on the Caucasian side, officially legally unprivileged along with the rest of the non-Hispanic Caucasians.

While it may seem ridiculous for higher-IQ Asian groups to support quotas that benefit lower IQ groups, it makes perfect sense to self-interested "Asian activists" who see the racial racket as the royal road to cushy jobs for themselves. Check out this amazing article from AsianWeek.com for vivid examples of "leaders" selling out their peoples for their own benefit. Imagine how utterly entrenched quotas would be without the long Jewish neoconservative assault on them. Well, the Indians are going to be the Jews of the 21st Century, and we'll all be better off if, like Jewish-Americans, Indian-Americans are classified as unprivileged Caucasians.

If Indians, however, remain officially favored, then all sorts of other bad things will also eventually happen. Their racial cousins, the Pakistanis, will have a perfectly reasonable claim to be legally protected. Privileging the Pakistanis would then lead to demands for a non-racial pan-Muslim classification, similar to the non-racial Hispanic category. By sponsoring pan-Muslim consciousness in the U.S., the government would be undermining Jewish interests, such as support for Israel.

Next:  

·         the "East Asian" category should be deconstructed into its constituent nationalities, such as the Japanese, Koreans (ruled by Japan until 1945), Chinese (invaded by Japan 1931-1945), Vietnam (invaded by China in 1979), and Cambodia (invaded by Vietnam in 1979).

Most importantly, though,

* the Hispanic category has got to go. There are plenty of ways to justify this. There's no single coherent rationale behind this category other than to lump together the largest hodgepodge of people for the purpose of raising the loudest clamor for special privileges from the government.

The definition of Hispanicness is often thought to have something to do with the lands where the Conquistadors raped and pillaged (although why America would want to commemorate those events, or offer privileges to descendents of the conquistadors and conquistadees alike, is baffling).

But nobody knows how far "Hispanic" extends. Are Portuguese-speaking Brazilians "Hispanic?" Nobody seems to know. How about Spaniards? Well, Antonio Banderas is always being celebrated as a "Hispanic" actor. What about the "Spanish-surnamed" but All-American blonde actress Cameron Diaz? What about my friend Steve Valles, who is sometimes offered advantages in bidding for contracts because of his Spanish surname, which he inherited from an admiral in the Spanish Armada who was shipwrecked on the coast of Ireland, where he found a wife among his fellow Catholics? (Steve turns down such offers on ethical principles.) How about non-Hispanic women who take their husband's Spanish surnames? In fact, you don't even have to have a Spanish surname, as shown by a Polish-born man named Liberman, who won a substantial tax-break when buying a radio station because some of Senor Liberman's ancestors were Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492.

"Hispanic" is not a racial category. It allows the occasional immigrant from the ruling white castes of Latin America to become an affirmative action hire at an American university, where he can pretend to be an intellectual spokesman for the darker masses that his family back home would only employ to sweep up after their polo ponies.

Nor is "Hispanic" a language category. It lassoes in millions of American-born citizens who speak no Spanish. It also seems to include millions of New World Indians who speak only indigenous languages.

Hispanics should be divided up by both nationality and race. If Nicaraguans want their own quota, well there should be separate ones for white Nicaraguans, Indian Nicaraguans, black Nicaraguans, and all the various combinations. Obviously, this would render many discrimination lawsuits laughable. No employer smaller than Wal-Mart would have to worry much about being sued for not filling its quota of Nicaraguan zambos (black-Indian mixes).

Well, this has been a fun fantasy. Is any political will out there to carry out any of these reforms? The first step is to think clearly about them – something that Orlando Patterson, and The New York Times, have not yet begun.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]

June 28, 2001