According to new conventional wisdom … [a] mismatch in race between doctor and patient - especially when the doctor is white and the patient is not - may be enough to trigger subtle, or not so subtle, biases that result in second-rate medical treatment and poorer health. “It is increasingly evident that African-Americans and other minority patients have strong grounds for doubting both the goodwill and the color-blindness of White medical practitioners,”
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writes Kenneth DeVille of the Department of Medical Humanities at the East Carolina University School of Medicine. No less authoritative a voice than the American Medical Association’s official newspaper has claimed that “growing body of research reports that racial disparities in health status can be explained, at least in part, by racism and discrimination within the health care system itself.” This is why, according to the Reverend Al Sharpton, health will be the “new civil rights battlefront,” a prediction echoed by other black leaders, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, NAACP chairman Julian Bond and the Congressional Black Caucus.
In a 1998 radio address delivered during Black History Month, President Clinton spoke of race and health, “Nowhere are the divisions of race and ethnicity more sharply drawn than in the health of our people.” It is indeed true that black Americans are less healthy than whites and Asians on a number of measures, such as life expectancy, infant mortality and death from cancer. This often remains true even when insurance coverage is taken into account. Beyond these facts, the president could only speculate when he said that perhaps one of the reasons for racial disparities is “discrimination in the delivery of health services.”
Given the history of systematic racial discrimination and segregation in the health care system, lingering bias seems, at first, plausible. Black patients were treated in separate and inferior hospital wards - a policy that persisted at many hospitals in the Deep South until the late 1960s. Once routinely barred from joining hospital staffs and medical societies, black physicians started their own institutions to treat other blacks who were denied adequate care by the white-controlled medical facilities. As late as the mid-1960s several medical schools had restrictions against admitting black students.
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[…] Decades later however, accusations of medical bias still linger… In the fall of 1999 the US. Commission on Civil Rights informed Congress and the White House that “racism continues to infect the health care system.” Earlier that year an official of the Association of American Medical Colleges commented on physicians’ unwitting biases. “Most doctors think they are fair,” he told the Boston Globe. “That they carry bias is very hard for them to think about.”
For her part, Leslie Pickering Francis, a medical ethicist at the University of Utah, prefers to believe that “racism [is] the presumptive cause of health care problems minorities face” until there is evidence to the contrary. This view is increasingly common - not too surprising considering the habit nowadays of presuming that discrimination inevitably lies beneath the surface of any race-related difference in social outcome. But evidence suggests that many race-related differences in health are not what they seem to observers like Professor Francis, Reverend Sharpton and the Commission on Civil Rights.
The charge of physician bias against minority patients is often made reflexively, overlooking the myriad complicated reasons for differences in care. In this chapter I present evidence that supports other interpretations of “health disparities” as they are often called. As we will see, the race-related differences that do exist in both access to health care and in health status are better understood - and remedied - from the vantage points of clinical need and health care financing - not race politics.
Do Physicians Treat Minority Patients Differently?
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999 described differences in the treatment of lung cancer between black and white patients who were beneficiaries of Medicare insurance. In a careful analysis, Peter B. Bach and his colleagues cat Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City looked at the records of more than ten thousand patients who received diagnoses of operable lung cancer. Seventy-seven percent of the white patients underwent surgery compared with 64 percent of the black patients. Five years after diagnosis, only one-quarter of black patients were still alive compared to one-third of whites.
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What accounts for the different rates of surgery? Did doctors not suggest the treatment as often to their black patients, or did these patients more often refuse the recommendation for surgery? Were the black patients more likely to have poor lung function, such as more carbon dioxide build-up, or other problems that would have prohibited surgery or contributed to earlier demise? Details like these are crucial in explaining why surgery was used less for black patients and why death rates differed, but those were not the questions that Bach and his colleagues set out to answer. Indeed, the authors themselves said they could not offer an explanation for different rates of surgery based on the kinds of data they collected.
Other physicians, however, were ready with hypotheses. “Possibly, physicians are treating cancer patients not just based upon their illness and recommended treatment, but on the basis of their race,” suggested Dr. Hugh Stallworth of the American Cancer Society. A more emphatic reaction greeted a report in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that 74 percent of white patients with fractures of the extremities received pain medication in the emergency room compared with 57 percent of black patients. “I think it’s racism, flat out,” said Dr, Lewis Goldfrank, director of emergency services at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.
Responses like these would probably not surprise John Landsverk of Children’s Hospital in San Diego. As he observes: “The usual implication of such disparities (in treatment rates) is that the health care system is biased against persons of the ethnic minority group and that the bias is likely to be found even in professional clinicians’ perceptions of clinical problems and (referrals for) clinical procedures.”
In light of this, Landsverk is especially enthusiastic about one study led by a group of doctors from the University of Pittsburgh that found no race-related differences in the treatment of children with behavioral problems. Their report appeared in the journal Medical Care one month after
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Bach’s study that attracted little public attention. It should have: it was “an important nonfinding,” as Landsverk notes in an accompanying editorial in the same journal. Not only did the Pittsburgh study include a very large sample - almost fifteen thousand children treated in clinics across the country and Canada - but most important, the researchers interviewed the parent and doctor of every patient. The results: the race and ethnicity of the child had no relationship to clinician patterns of drug prescribing, referral or diagnosis of behavioral problems. The clinicians also reported spending slightly more time with minority children than with their white counterparts.
The handful of studies just discussed gives a taste of the challenges inherent in interpreting health disparities data. First, the vast majority of treatment disparity studies are what scientists call “retrospective.” That is, the raw data already exist in hospital records, and researchers use them (in retrospect) to explore a specific question. (For example, are there more visits to emergency rooms on nights with a full moon?) The disadvantage of this approach is that key questions cannot be asked directly of the very people being studied: for example, in the case of the lung cancer study, did subjects want or refuse a specific treatment? Did their physicians offer it, and if not, why? Second, as Landsverk’s reaction to the University of Pittsburgh study suggests, the absence of alleged racial bias does not make news. Consider the following example of a study that made a media splash the first time around.
A Misdiagnosed Case of Physician Bias
Cardiac catheterization is a procedure used to discern whether there is blockage in the coronary arteries - the vessels that feed blood to the heart itself - and thus whether the patient is at risk for a heart attack. The delicate process involves introducing a catheter into an artery in the leg and threading it upward toward the heart. When it reaches the point near the apex of the heart where the coronary arteries branch off, dye is squirted in, and the arterial patterns show up on a real-time X-ray. This is generally the first step in determining whether the vessels can be opened wider
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using a tiny balloon (balloon angioplasty) or whether some or all of the vessels must be replaced in a bypass operation.
Struck by the observation that black patients undergo catheterization less often than whites, Dr, Kevin A. Schulman and others at Georgetown University Medical Center wanted to examine how doctors make their decisions to refer patients for the procedure. The researchers recruited 720 general internists at medical conventions and asked them to participate in a study of clinical decision-making. The internists were not told that a primary purpose of the study was to explore how the race and sex of the patient might affect those decision, or that the researchers expected to find that African Americans (and women) would be referred for cardiac catheterization less frequently than white men.
The doctors watched a video of actors wearing hospital gowns and answering questions posed to them by an interviewer who elicited their complaints about chest pain and other relevant medical and personal history. The viewing doctors were informed of the actor-patients’ insurance types and their occupations. All the questions asked of the actors and their responses, down to the gestures they used in describing their symptoms, were scripted to minimize inconsistencies. As a group, the doctors, most of whom were white, viewed 144 different videotapes, one for every possible combination of race (black or white), sex (male or female), and age (fifty-five and seventy years old), and including different clinical variables, like the nature of the chest pain and EKG and stress test results. Individual doctors were shown one randomly selected video.
Next, the physicians were asked whether the patients’ complaints appeared to reflect heart disease or another kind of distress, such as indigestion, and to rate the likelihood that the pain was indeed heart-related. As it turned out, all eight actor-patients received similar ratings from the doctors, leading the authors to assume the doctors would refer the catheterization at similar rates as well. Yet this did not happen; according to Schulman, “women and blacks [in the study] were less likely to be referred for cardiac catheterization than men and whites.” Doctors did not refer white men about 9 percent of the time, while the black actor-patients
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and women of both races did not get referred 15 percent of the time. If representative of actual clinical outcomes, Schulman told the media, this would mean that blacks are “40 percent less likely to be referred for cardiac catheterization compared to whites.” He misspoke, however; what it really would mean is that white patients have a forty percent lower chance of not being referred. Quite a difference, as we will see.
These findings were presented in an article titled “The Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 1999. Schulman and his associates speculate:Our findings that the race and sex of the patient influence the recommendations of physicians independently of other factors may suggest bias on the part of the physicians. However, our study could not assess the form of bias. Bias may represent overt prejudice on the part of the physicians, or, more likely, could be the result of subconscious perceptions rather than deliberate actions or thoughts. Subconscious bias occurs when a patient’s membership in a target group automatically activates a cultural stereotype in the physician’s memory regardless of the level of prejudice the physician has.
The study was a media sensation. On ABC’s World News This Morning, Juju Chang told viewers, “How your doctor treats your heart may depend on the color of your skin … The bias shows up in the diagnosis and the doctors don’t even realize it.” Peter Jennings predicted that the study would make “political waves” because it showed that “prejudice among doctors causes a gap in the quality of health care between blacks and whites.”
On Nightline, Ted Koppel set up the story like this: “Last night we told you how the town of Jasper, Texas, is coming to terms with being the place where a black man was dragged to his death behind a truck by an avowed racist. Tonight we’re going to focus on [doctors] … who would be shocked to learn that what they do routinely fits quite easily into the category of racist behavior.” Newspaper headlines echoed the theme:
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“Cardiac Testing: Study Finds Women, Blacks are Being Shortchanged,” the Chicago Tribune said. “Health Care: It’s Better if You’re White,” announced The Economist. And all the articles repreated Schulman’s claim that blacks were forty percent less likely to be referred.
Some of the most intense - indeed, self-flagellating - reactions came from the medical profession itself. An editorial in the Lancet, Britain’s foremost medical journal saw the findings as being “as close to a definition of institutional racism as doctors and health-care providers may dare to get.” Aubrey Lewis, a Long Island cardiologist warned on Nightline that “if this [physician bias] continues on, you’re looking at literally a decimation of the African American population.”
No-one seemed to notice another article, published earlier that same February, in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the Harvard researcher Lucian L. Leape and his colleagues. In their evaluation of thirteen New York city hospitals. Leape’s group found that African American patients are as likely to undergo cardiac bypass or balloon angioplasty as whites and Hispanics, and in some hospitals more likely to receive a recommendation for these procedures.
A Second, Sober Look at Schulman’s Study
A careful look at the work of Schulman and his colleagues reveals a number of intriguing things. One is the doctors’ impressions of the subjects: one might be surprised to find that they found the white actor-patients to be the least agreeable. When asked, for example, to rate their impressions of the subjects’ personal characteristics, the doctors rated the white men as more “hostile” and gave them the lowest ratings on scales that ranged from “ignorant” (lowest score) to “knowledgeable” highest score” and from “poor communicator” to “good communicator.” Similarly, doctors judged white men to be more “dependent” than their black counterparts, more “sad,” more “negative” in disposition, more “worried” and more “likely to over-report symptoms.”
Finally, the white males were judged “most likely to sue.” With such a litigious profile, one might have expected white men to be over-referred by physicians in order to avoid malpractice lawsuits.
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The second revelation came six months after the Schulman study appeared, when the New England Journal of Medicine itself published a powerful rebuttal. Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin and H. Gilbert Welch, all physicians at the White River Junction Veterans Administration Hospital in Vermont, reanalyzed Schulman’s data and showed that the actual referral rates for three of the four groups were in fact the same. White men, white women and black men were all referred by nine in ten doctors. Only black women, for reasons that remain unclear, had a lower referral rate: about eight in ten. Put another way, the black women were eighty-eight percent as likely as white women and men of both races to be referred for catheterization in the actor-patient study.
The doctors from White River Junction also expressed dismay at what might be called the statistical sleight-of-hand that Schulman and his colleagues used to support their hypothesis of physician referral bias in favour of white men. It was only because Schulman and colleagues combined the referral rates for black men (91 percent) and black women (79 percent) to yield an 85 percent black referral rate that they could conclude that the racial differences were so marked. This maneuver led to the “mistaken impression that blacks had a forty percent lower probability of referral than whites, whereas, in fact, the probability of referral for blacks was 7 percent lower,” wrote the White River Junction doctors. “These exaggerations serve only to fuel anger and undermine the trust between physicians and their patients.” Schwartz and her colleagues were not alone in expressing concern; the NEJM editors published a note in the same issue regretting that they had not required the authors to use more straightforward statistical measures. “We take responsibility for the media’s overinterpretation of [this] article … The evidence of racism and sexism in [the Schulman] study was overstated,” the editors wrote.
Nevertheless, even after seeing how his findings had been interpreted by the press and used to goad racial resentments, Schulman wouldn’t budge. “Our study … will encourage the medical profession to seek ways to eliminate unconscious bias that may influence physicians’ clinical decision,” he maintained. Schulman also met with the Congressional Black Caucus at its invitation and briefed the members on bias in the health care
[p.163]
system. Also sticking with Schulman’s interpretation was Paul Douglass, a cardiologist at Morehouse school of medicine. “You can argue with statistics all day,” he told USA Today. “We have to face the reality of our situation: there is a gender and racial bias.” Compared with the tidal wave of coverage triggered by the Schulman study, the article by Schwartz and her colleagues generated a mere trickle of media interest, as noted by the columnist John Leo and the media magazine Brill’s Content.
Alternative Explanations for Differences in Treatment
Less eye-catching than accusations of bias are the everyday aspects of clinical care that account for many of the recorded disparities. For example, one reason procedure rates differ is that medical problems do not necessarily occur with the same frequency across races. [..] Consider these facts: uterine fibroid tumors, and thus hysterectomies, are more common in black women than in whites, while osteoporosis-related fractures, and thus hip-replacement are rarer. Limb amputation is more common among black patients, typically because thicker atherosclerosis of the blood vessels in the leg makes it harder to perform limb-saving surgery.
African Americans suffer stroke at many times the rate of whites yet undergo a procedure to unclog arteries in the neck (endarterectomy) only one-fourth as often. Racism? Unlikely. Some studies have documented a greater aversion to surgery and other invasive procedures among African American patients, but the more substantial reason, in the case of endarterectomy, is clinical. It turns out that whites tend to have their obstructions in the large, superficial carotid arteries of the neck region, which are readily accessible to surgery. Blacks, by comparison, tend to have their blockages in the branches of the carotids. These smaller vessels run deeper and further up into the head where the surgeon cannot reach them.
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Thus, even without financial obstacles, an African American patient at high risk for stroke is far less likely than a white counterpart to undergo endarterectomy. Yet indoctrinologists like David R. Williams, a sociologist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, are quick to turn this disparity into evidence of bias. After all, they argue, if money is not an issue, then the difference in treatment must represent bias on the part of the doctors. American Medical News, the newspaper of the American Medical Association, gives voice to this view: “National studies, such as the one that examined care at Dept. of Veterans Affairs medical facilities - where all of the patients have comparable insurance coverage - suggest ‘racial disparities in the quality of medical care do not merely reflect the behavior of a few bad apples,’ Dr. Williams said. ‘The evidence is too overwhelming and the pattern is too pervasive.’ ”
Williams seems not to consider a different interpretation: the patients’ clinical needs rather than the doctors’ personal biases are dictating the care. Think about it. If not for concern about the patient (many of whom are treated in private hospitals and have medical insurance), why wouldn’t physicians perform a reimbursable procedure?
Another consideration in performing procedures is the clinical condition of the patient. Does he have other medical problems that alter the risk-to-benefit ratio of a procedure and make the outcome less favorable? The treatment of heart disease, for example, often needs to be modified in the presence of uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes - conditions more typical of black patients with heart disease than of their white counterparts.
Then there is the site of care itself. Some hospitals simply do not offer certain cardiac procedures, such as bypass grafts or balloon angioplasty. Examining a sample taken from New York City hospitals, Dr. Lucian L. Leape of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues found that about one-fifth of all patients needing these procedures do not get them, largely because those hospitals do not offer them. Leape found that failure to recommend these procedures - and hence to transfer a patient to a hospital where it could be performed - is equal across all groups of black, white and Hispanic patients. Conversely, when medical care is readily available for special patient populations (for example the veterans’
[p.165]
affairs medical centers or the military service), racial differences in treatment and outcome can melt away. For example, veterans with colorectal and prostate cancer show no race-related differences in treatment availability, treatment methods or survival rates.
Fairness and Kidney Transplantation
Patients’ attititudes toward illness and care also play a role in determining the treatment they receive. The nature of their belief in their personal susceptibility to disease, the seriousness with which they perceive disease, their confidence that the treatment will work - and even that the medical system is benign - are all relevant. Differences in health benefits account for some of the reluctance in the African American community to donate (and sometimes receive) kidneys, according to Dr. Clive O. Callender, head of transplant surgery at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, DC.
Callender tells me that, compared to whites, African American patients are less trustful that they will be well cared for, whether as a living relative undergoing surgery to donate a kidney or as a patient undergoing transplant surgery to receive one. Some fear that signing a donor card will lead to premature declaration of death. Others express concern that a deceased donor will either be disfigured or unable to get into heaven without all his body parts. A potential recipient ay also object on religious grounds to having the tissue of a dead person in his body. Moreover, blacks are not as likely as whites to believe that people who get transplants gain additional healthy years of life.
To enhance recruitment of African American donors and dispel the myths surrounding donation, Clive Callender directs the national Minority Organ Tissue Transplantation and Education Program (MOTTEP), which operates in over a dozen cities. Understanding patients’ objections to donation and demystifying the process is critical because severe (or “end-stage”) renal disease is about four times as common in blacks than in whites and , as we will see, there are considerable benefits to receiving a kidney from a living donor of the same race.
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To create incentives for organ donation and expand the black organ donor pool, Wayne B. Arnason, a minister writing in the Hastings Center Report, has proposed an experimental protocol that would try to pair a black donor kidney with a black recipient, some African Americans have expressed a desire that their organs be earmarked for black recipients. Arnason’s proposal addresses the fears of some black patients that they are being discriminated against in the kidney transplantation process, fears stoked by observers like David Barton Smith, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, who asserts in his 1999 book Health Care Divided: Race and Healing a Nation: “The assumptions that served as justification for the Tuskegee Study remain in evidence among those providing health services to [the black] population . . . Blacks have lower rates of kidney transplants . . . even where no differences in insurance or ability to pay exist.”
This matter has attracted the attention of a wide spectrum of advocates, from the Reverend Louis Farrakhan (who has said that whites condone black-on-black killing as a source of transplantable organs) to law professors who propose suing the federal government for violating civil rights laws in the allocation of organs. The US Commission on Civil Rights has also weighed in: “Black patients remain less likely than other minorities and whites to receive a kidney transplant,” it reported in 1999, calling this “an aspect of health care inequality that thus far seems to have eluded the [HHS’s] Office of Civil Rights.”
To assess the fairness of the charges levied by the Commission on Civil Rights and others we must first walk through the steps involved in donating and receiving a kidney. The road starts at renal dialysis. Every two or three days patients with end-stage kidney disease undergo a process called renal dialysis while they wait far a kidney to become available. During the three-to-four-hour dialysis process, patients are hooked up to a machine that acts as an external kidney, removing the fluid and metabolic by-products that are normally cleared by the kidney and excreted as urine. For unclear reasons, black patients, on average, tolerate dialysis better than white patients - who are more likely than black patients to die while on the waiting list - and blacks can be
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maintained longer in a healthy state before transplantation. Just the opposite is true, however, once the operation has taken place: black patients, on average, do not tolerate the transplant organ as well as whites, and they must return to dialysis support sooner and more frequently.
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[…] Another key aspect of the transplantation process is the patient’s interest in receiving a kidney. United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) data suggest that African American patients decline the procedure more often than do whites. Reports have documented that black transplant candidates were more often undecided, more apt to decline the transplant operation at the last minute, more often unavailable owing to illness and more likely to be unlocatable when a kidney became available.
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[…] [T]he remedy for recruiting more organ donors is better education of both medical personnel and the public.
[…] Combining these principles - with better education for the public through a program like Clive Callender’s MOTTEP seems most promising. Simply getting more people to have a family discussion about donation is important because families are more likely to agree to the donation process if they know the deceased had previously expressed a desire to give his organs. The MOTTEP program also involves explaining the biology of matching and the nature of the surgical procedure, and working with churches to dispel religion-based myths. Callender’s results are encouraging: by the late 1990s 45 percent of kidneys transplanted at Howard University (a predominantly African American institution) were from black donors; a decade earlier the figure had been under 20 percent.
Fairness Continued
Now let us turn to the clinical aspects of transplantation. A crucial dimension is tissue compatibility. Without a good “match” the donor kidney will provoke the recipient’s immune system to attack or “reject” it. The better the match on biological variables, the better the outcome, Accord-
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-ing to a report issued by the UNOS Histocompatibility Committee, black patients in need of a transplant wait longer owing to factors such as blood type, sensitization and some antigens. Similarly, Rand researchers found that “once a patient is on the waiting list, biological factors may predominate” in explaining his lower chances of receiving a kidney.
A technique called antigen matching is used to test for different combinations of six major antigens, or proteins, found on the surface of tissues. A perfect six-out-of-six match is the ideal condition for compatibility between donor and recipient. A complete match is far less common in African American transplant candidates than in whites because they have more possible antigen combinations than whites do, and some of those antigens are very rare in the general population. Scientists are still debating the precise physiology of organ rejection, and particularly the extent to which the organ is jeopardized by less-than-perfect antigen matching. What they do know is that black transplant recipients are more likely to reject their new kidneys. Possible reasons include poor control of hypertension or a more vigorous immune response. Even well-matched transplants can be lost to rejection, suggesting that the standard antigen-matching system may be too simplistic.
[…] To circumvent some of the biological constraints, physicians encourage donation of a kidney from a living relative so that the chance of a match will be enhanced. Living donation is also promoted even if the donor is not related and not of the same race because there is so much
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added benefit from getting a fresh kidney - one that goes straight from the operating room of a healthy donor to the operating room of the recipient without spending too much time on ice. In fact, along with tissue compatibility and the clinical condition of the recipient, the amount of time spent in “cold storage” is one of the most important factors in the successful functioning of a transplanted organ.
Getting a live kidney has little to do with the medical establishment and a great deal to do with the health and attitude of one’s family and others of one’s own race. Unfortunately, the black donation rate from living individuals is very low relative to need. In 1998, for example, 438 living kidneys were donated by African Americans, but 14,923 African Americans needed a kidney (a ratio of 3 donated per 100 needed), while 2,559 whites gave live kidneys and 20,616 were in need (a ratio of 12 per 100). In addition to personal reluctance and wariness of the system, the low rate of black live donations relative to need is due in part to the fact that so many potential donors are not eligible to give a kidney because they suffer from hypertension or diabetes, conditions that diminish the health of their kidneys. UNOS data show that in 1998 almost one-third of all transplant candidates received a living kidney: 73 percent of those kidneys were given by white individuals to their relatives or friends, and 13 percent by African Americans to theirs.
Most patients on dialysis, especially black individuals, receive an organ from a deceased donor; a so-called cadaveric donor. Once on the waiting list, how do black patients fare in the allocation of kidneys from cadavers? In 1998 African Americans represented 36 percent of the waiting list for kidneys; as a group, they donated 11 percent of all cadaveric kidneys (proportionate to their representation in the general population) and received 27 percent of all donated kidneys.
Thus, more than half of all cadaver kidneys received by black transplant recipients came from donors of other races (predominantly white). As Maritza Rozon-Solomon and Dr. Lewis Burrows of the Department of Surgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine observe: “African-Americans have historically donated significantly fewer cadaver kidneys than they have received. They have benefitted from Caucasian organ donation.”
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Donation is a gift of life that transcends racial score-keeping, but it is still important to look closely at the numbers when bias in the allocation of kidneys is alleged.
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Showing posts with label Multicult. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Multicult. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine
Brit nationalist blogger John of Gwent has written about the situation in Britain of ethnic minorities needing more organs for transplant than they provide to the organ bank, yet another subsidy we provide for the parasite groups. Unsurprisingly, the situation in America is the same, and yet still there is the complaint that Blacks suffer discrimination in the organ donor process, an issue reported on in Sally Satel, P.C. M.D. : How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine (New York, Basic Books, 2000), chapter 6, ‘Race and Medicine’:
Monday, 9 November 2009
Media rejoice as pro-war beauty becomes Miss England
___________________________Christie and Hodge______________________
When Rachel Christie somewhat bizarrely won the Miss England beauty contest earlier this year our ‘anti-racist’ mainstream media were cockahoop - because she wasn’t White. The ITN News reporter said that Christie’s non-Whiteness made her ‘a thoroughly modern beauty queen’; Christie herself said that she hoped to be a role-model to Black youngsters:
‘I want to show them you can do anything you want, whatever your colour. I don't like hearing: "I can't do this or that because I'm black." They should stop behaving in a way that stereotypes them. If you come across as smart, if you dress nicely and speak well, it shouldn't make a difference if you're black or white.’
It made a difference to the media, every piece of news coverage mentioned her race as a positive factor. I quoted some headlines at the time:
I won Miss England to prove being black is NEVER an excuse for failure
First Black Miss England crowned
Victory for Linford Christie’s niece as she becomes first black Miss England
100m star Christie’s niece crowned first black Miss England
Linford Christie's niece is first black Miss England
But now that Christie has conformed to stereotype and been forced to hand back her crown after punching another girl repeatedly in the face in a nightclub brawl, the media are strangely silent about race. Maybe her uncle Linford Christie, the drug cheat sprinter, is right about the media’s racism but wrong about which groups it privileges?
Fortunately for the media, though, every cloud has a silver lining, and while Christie’s resignation means no more anti-White propaganda can be squeezed from this story, her replacement offers propaganda scope for one of their other wars:
Miss England: 'I Want To Serve In Afghanistan'
The soldier recently crowned Miss England has expressed her wish to one day serve on the frontline alongside comrades in Afghanistan.
Lance Corporal Katrina Hodge, dubbed "Combat Barbie" by Army colleagues, had been due to join the British effort before she was drafted in to compete for the Miss World crown.
The 22-year-old soldier, who has already served in Iraq, said she hopes to be deployed when her reign as Miss England ends in July next year.
The 2009 runner up was fast-tracked in as a replacement for the year's original winner Rachel Christie.
The 21-year-old relinquished the beauty title following her arrest over an alleged brawl in a Manchester nightclub.
How convenient. I wonder if the second runner-up was a professional global warming activist?
Monday, 26 October 2009
Morale and Morale-busting
I suppose we’d always find something topical in these extracts from Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1979). But the recently published claim that that the current government had a policy of promoting immigration expressly as a means of transforming the ethnic and cultural make-up of the country gives this post added interest.
Looking back we find that many of the persuasion strategies used in the era of mass immigration were given their first run out during the Second World War to manage the reaction to US soldiers’ presence in WWII. As part of this ‘gigantic social experiment’ we see many of the practices that are now familiar being used for perhaps the first time, at least on so large a scale: such practices as historically constructed apologias for Black behaviour; intervention in schools to control politically sensitive language; the police being instructed to discourage ‘discrimination’; the large scale funding and social deployment as government proxies of voluntary organisations known to be committed to race-liberalism; acculturation to social problems imposed by government diktat leading to a growing acceptance that the artificial situation is ‘normal’; propaganda publications specially designed for both host and incomer to smooth both groups' rough edges and facilitate mixing; the government sponsoring of ‘spontaneous’ goodwill and hospitality as model for private emulation; these and more are here.
We can also imagine that this social experiment had interest for integrationists in America. Eisenhower’s agreement not to segregate White and Black troops stationed in Britain, and the Americans’ exposure to British puzzlement and anger at negative attitudes to Blacks born of long experience can only have aided the integrationist cause.
These extracts are also interesting for the light they throw on the growth of government involvement in the minutiae of everyday life and the inexorable growth of rules and regulations; WWII ushered in the nanny state, then as now war was used as pretext for social control.
***
One of the primary tasks of the Ministry of Information was to compile a weekly report for government on the state of public opinion and on the results of various surveys into lifestyle and consumption habits, the Wartime Social Surveys:
[all emphases in bold are mine]
Looking back we find that many of the persuasion strategies used in the era of mass immigration were given their first run out during the Second World War to manage the reaction to US soldiers’ presence in WWII. As part of this ‘gigantic social experiment’ we see many of the practices that are now familiar being used for perhaps the first time, at least on so large a scale: such practices as historically constructed apologias for Black behaviour; intervention in schools to control politically sensitive language; the police being instructed to discourage ‘discrimination’; the large scale funding and social deployment as government proxies of voluntary organisations known to be committed to race-liberalism; acculturation to social problems imposed by government diktat leading to a growing acceptance that the artificial situation is ‘normal’; propaganda publications specially designed for both host and incomer to smooth both groups' rough edges and facilitate mixing; the government sponsoring of ‘spontaneous’ goodwill and hospitality as model for private emulation; these and more are here.
We can also imagine that this social experiment had interest for integrationists in America. Eisenhower’s agreement not to segregate White and Black troops stationed in Britain, and the Americans’ exposure to British puzzlement and anger at negative attitudes to Blacks born of long experience can only have aided the integrationist cause.
These extracts are also interesting for the light they throw on the growth of government involvement in the minutiae of everyday life and the inexorable growth of rules and regulations; WWII ushered in the nanny state, then as now war was used as pretext for social control.
***
One of the primary tasks of the Ministry of Information was to compile a weekly report for government on the state of public opinion and on the results of various surveys into lifestyle and consumption habits, the Wartime Social Surveys:
[all emphases in bold are mine]
Not only were the reports comprehensive and detailed, delving into many apparently trivial aspects of wartime life, they were - which was more important - unbiased and accurate when tested against the quantitative findings of the British Institute of Public Opinion and the Wartime Social Survey. Their uniqueness lay in the fact that for the first time a government had at its disposal a reliable machine for testing public responses to administrative and policy decisions
[p.259]
… and for gauging the needs of the people. […]
The cynically-minded observer might be disposed to comment that it took a total war for the British governing classes to show real and practical concern for the condition of the people. But while it may be true to say that the main thrust of Home Intelligence’s work was directed towards ameliorating wartime discomforts and grievances in order to buttress support for the government, it is also true that the staff of the Ministry came to regard their labours as socially useful, war or no war. […]
Once it had settled down, the Wartime Social Survey became an extremely useful adjunct to government. In June 1941 Louis Moss, late of the BBC Listener Research unit and the British Institute of Public Opinion, was appointed as Superintendent and together with Stephen Taylor he readied the Survey for the great demands that were to be made upon it by governments. At the end of the following month all but two of the existing staff resigned when the Ministry refused to approach the National Institute of Economic and Social Research again, the Institute having earlier withdrawn its support because it objected to the Survey’s study of morale as well as of public opinion. However, new staff were immediately engaged and put to work.
[p.260]
Although the major concern was with the immediate physical and psychological well-being of the populace in time of war, the nature and breadth of the Survey’s work had obvious implications for peacetime. Never before had government involved itself so intimately with the minutiae of British, largely working-class, life. Appalled at the prospect of the loss of such a unique organisation, Taylor from as early as September 1942 urged the retention of the Survey after victory in the form of a National Institute of Opinion Studies. He correctly anticipated that after the war economic and social restrictions would continue in being for some time, necessitating appropriate social research so that the government of the day might reach sound and just decisions. […] Taylor was supported by the Ministry. The unit survived and is today a valuable part of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.
[p.262]
For our purposes it is important to note that, as with the reports of Home Intelligence, the Wartime Social Survey was more than an expedient tool for the maintenance of morale. It represented a considerable widening of the ambit of government concern for the condition of the people and may be considered part of the wartime acceleration towards social reform.
The presence in Britain after January 1942 of American troops, several million of whom had passed through the country by D-Day, threw on the Ministry of Information yet another responsibility that of smoothing and enhancing relations between this most numerous body of foreign soldiers and their civilian hosts.
Certain worrying questions presented themselves. How would the populace respond to the presence of soldiers whose country of origin was by no means popular in Britain? A country, moreover, which was inevitably to become the senior partner in the alliance. If resentment arose, would it affect the nature and quality of the British war effort? What of the large numbers - amounting to tens of thousands - of black American troops? The potential for friction between a strained, tired population and the well-paid, ebullient young Americans, freed of the many restraints governing their behaviour at home, was considerable.
[p.263]
Upon the arrival of US servicemen, the Ministry of Information set up an American Forces Liaison Division which was made responsible for co-ordinating what was essentially a locally based programme of smoothing relations between the public and the American forces. Only at the level of town and village could the Ministry, through the agency of RIOs, (Regional Information Officers) recruit the co-operation of numerous bodies and authorities. Local improvisation rather than central direction was necessary if success was to be achieved. Employing much the same tactics as were applied to stealing the thunder from the left, the Ministry remained in the background, ‘fomenting spontaneous hospitality’* and encouraging manifestations of good will. […]
* Southern Region Report, INF 1/327B
There were two initial difficulties. The Americans came ‘self-sufficing, fully equipped, and prepared to regard Britain in much the same light as they regarded North Africa, namely, as the base from which they happened to be fighting at the moment’; and it was only through the efforts of General Eisenhower and the creation of a top-level British-American Liaison Board, on which the Ministry was represented, that this variant of isolationism was broken down. A number of publications prepared for distribution to American troops undoubtedly helped. […]
[p.265]
The second difficulty had to do with money. The Ministry’s programme languished for want of it. When the government was persuaded to allocate finance for disbursement by the department, the hospitable impulses of the areas in which US soldiers were stationed or spent their leave were given tangible form.
What was done once money became available? The Local Information Committees, which had been a cause of distress to the Ministry in the past now came into their own, for on them were represented the many interests whose co-operation was required. Hospitality Committees were set up. These comprised local authorities, the Regional Commissioner, voluntary societies and the churches, their ‘ideal being to allow no American to go home again without having at least been under one British roof and made one British friend’. The American Red Cross, which lodged and fed troops on leave in facilities provided by the British, was assisted by a total of 40,000 women volunteers who helped organise Red Cross Clubs. Two hundred and fifty social clubs were established by voluntary agencies such as the YMCA, Rotary, the Salvation Army and the Jewish Hospitality Committee, while the WVS ran some 200 Welcome Clubs where British civilians were able to meet American servicemen ‘away from the atmosphere of the street or the pub’. The Ministry encouraged and supported the British Council and the English Speaking Union in sending speakers to American establishments and aided the American Red Cross in forming clubs for the purpose of instructing some of the 60,000 ‘G.I. brides’ about American life and customs.
[p.266]
Care must he exercised lest the impression is given that most Americans took their ease in church halls and Rotary clubs: it is more likely that the majority preferred the atmosphere of the pub and the company of ‘loose women’ to the amenities so earnestly and anonymously fostered by the Ministry of Information. But insofar as the Ministry facilitated it, the contact of hundreds of thousands of young Americans with the kindness and warmth of ordinary Britons undoubtedly helped to ease much confusion and loneliness. We are, however, principally concerned with the impact of the U.S. troops on their hosts. It did not have the consequences which might have been anticipated from a reading of the intelligence reports prior to Pearl Harbour or from the fears which motivated the Ministry’s campaign to popularise the United States.
The complaints and accusations levelled at the American troops were many. They were said to drink too heavily, to be boastful and contemptuous of the British armed forces (‘the Dunkirk Harriers’), to be too highly paid, to corrupt young women, and to practise discrimination against their black comrades.
[p.267]
By December 1942 such reports had considerably declined in number and in 1943 they had all but disappeared. This, together with the constant remark that the Americans were ‘settling down well’, may be taken as an indication of the way in which they came to be regarded as part of wartime life, albeit an exotic part. The RIO for the Southern Region described the American ‘occupation’ as a gigantic social experiment and asked whether it had succeeded:... in spite of fairly frequent incidents ... annoyance and criticism lost significance as time went on. It was smothered by a growing appreciation of the Americans as a whole. Irritating and disquieting incidents continued, but there Was less and less inclination to draw general and damning deductions from them. People began to realise ... that the Americans really belong to a different nation, with different standards, customs, manners of approach’.
If after actual contact the British revised their earlier notion of the Americans as close relations, how did they respond to the black American troops in their midst? Great concern was expressed in the War Cabinet. It was feared in a generally undefined way that the presence of black US soldiers would have untoward consequences for the morale of both civilians and servicemen and for Anglo-American relations. The Ministry of Information did not entertain such fears and adopted a cautious and sensible approach to this contentious matter.
In August 1942 Anthony Eden referred the War Cabinet to ‘the various difficulties’ likely to be encountered, including the health of coloured troops during the English winter, should the United
[p.268]
States continue to send the existing proportion of black troops to Britain. Cabinet agreed with the Foreign Secretary’s proposal to press the Americans for a reduction in the number being sent over. A month later Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, submitted a memorandum in which he argued that the failure of British civilians to sympathise with the distinction drawn by white against black troops would lead to friction between white Americans and the host populace. The morale of British troops overseas would also be adversely affected should there ‘be any unnecessary association between American coloured troops and British women’. He therefore recommended that the lead of the US authorities should be followed and, as an example of the policy he had in mind, he appended to the memorandum a note written by the Major-General in charge of Administration, Southern Command, for the guidance of British servicemen.
Following a potted history of slavery and of the reasons for the segregation practised in the southern American states, the note spoke of the ‘bond of mutual esteem’ between the races and the white Southerner’s sense of moral duty to the negro ‘as it were to a child’. Of ‘a simple mental outlook’ and lacking ‘the white man’s ability to think and act to a plan’, the negro is nevertheless capable of engaging in civil strife if allowed too much freedom and too close an association with white people. With these facts in mind, British serving men and women were advised to be sympathetic to coloured men but to avoid making intimate friends with them, women being adjured never to ‘walk out, dance or drink’ with coloured soldiers. As a general rule, it was thought best in such matters to emulate the behaviour of white American troops.
Grigg’s recommendations were too much for Lord Cranborne who, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, was aware of the effect the adoption of such a policy might have on black colonials serving with the British forces. He protested that ‘it is going too far to attempt to ask the British Army or the ATS to adopt the attitude of the American Army towards American coloured people’. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, warmly supported Cranborne. Although he stated that the coloured man was entitled to equal treatment only ‘if he behaves himself’, Simon insisted upon the maintenance of equality in service and in civilian life. Herbert Morrison, despite concern for the consequences of the fascination of coloured men for some British women, also came down against Grigg’s proposals: the police had already been instructed not to practise discrimination and to discourage it among others; advice to soldiers on the lines suggested
[p.269]
would certainly become known to the general public; and in any case assurances had been received from General Eisenhower that the US Army would not segregate coloured from white troops in the United Kingdom.
Bracken’s contribution to the debate was confined to the circulation of a letter he had written to Grigg on 16 September. Though it was desirable, the Minister of Information maintained, to avoid offending white American soldiers, it would be unwise to try to lead the British people to adopt the American social attitude to the negro:I do not think that the mass of the civilian population ought to be approached with any propaganda on the subject. A wrong step would be disastrous, and there is not sufficient prospect of any real success, however wise one’s attitude. Incidentally, the essential agents of national hospitality are the Voluntary Societies, with whom we are working very closely. Their fundamental principles are involved in the doctrine of no racial discrimination.
The Ministry’s general philosophy on propaganda apart, Bracken could hardly have advised otherwise since on 20 September 1942 the Sunday Express had carried an article under his name, ‘The Colour Bar Must Go’, which, while referring to coloured British subjects, was unlikely to be divorced from the American issue in the minds of most readers.
In the light of reports reaching the Ministry of Information, Bracken’s caution was well advised. The probability of antagonising the public by ‘education’ along the lines suggested by Sir James Grigg was high. Of all factors contributing to tension between the civil population and the Americans by far the most important was the discrimination publicly exercised by white against black, the initial puzzlement leading eventually to ‘strong feeling’ and ‘considerable indignation’. British soldiers shared the civilians’ feelings: one incident said to be typical was that in which a number of soldiers, upbraided by Americans for ‘fraternising with negroes’, commented that as both black and white troops had come 3,000 miles to help win the war they saw no reason to distinguish between one American and another. Civilians took increasingly to interfering verbally and physically in disputes between black troops and white officers and military police, the GOC Southern Command reporting a number of such incidents to Sir James Grigg who in turn anxiously informed the Prime Minister.
Faced with a cascade of memoranda on the subject, the War
[p.270]
Cabinet was thrown into a lengthy discussion on 13 October 1942. While it was thought that the British people ‘should avoid becoming too friendly with coloured American troops’, it was also agreed that Grigg’s suggestions ‘went too far’ and that no modification be made in respect of free access by coloured persons to canteens, pubs, cinemas and the like. The Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, was asked to consult with the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for War and to produce a revised set of instructions for the Army and an article for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.
For the man who had been chosen earlier in the year to go to India in order to conduct extremely delicate negotiations with Congress and who might therefore have been expected to possess an understanding of racial problems and communal sensitivities, Cripps made surprisingly few alterations to the instructions appended to Grigg’s paper of 3 October. The offensive analysis of the negro character and the recommendation that the British should emulate the white American attitude were omitted, but there remained references to black slaves as having taken ‘root and multiplied’, to the capacity of their descendants for inspiring ‘affection and admiration’ like children, and to semi-tropical labour being more fitted to the coloured man. British servicemen and women were to be told to adopt an objective attitude in any discussions they might have with white Americans on the colour question, but the advice remained much the same as before. Just what effect the issuing of these instructions had on ‘other ranks’ it is difficult to say, but it is doubtful whether on a matter so closely involving deeply personal beliefs and attitudes much influence was exerted. Bracken successfully vetoed the distribution of similar advice to the general public. He also expressed opposition to ‘written documents’ and ‘the didactic approach’ being inflicted on the Army, but could not prevent the scheme going ahead.
Some publicity did, in fact, escape from the Ministry of Information. But it was on a small scale, aimed at specific groups in the community and exhibited rather more discretion than was shown in the final product of the War Cabinet’s deliberations. Louis MacNeice, the poet, was commissioned by the Ministry on behalf of the Board of Education to write a booklet, Meet the U.S. Army, for the guidance of school teachers. In it he touched on the colour problem:The American Negroes require a special comment. There are many Negro soldiers in this country, and those Britons who have met them have been very favourably impressed by their pleasant manners and their readiness to please. These Negro troops are not,
[p.271]
on principle, separately brigaded, the U.S, War Department having rightly declined to differentiate them from other American citizens. It must be remembered, however, that ... they are in the unique position of being descended from slaves; this memory of slavery, being still fresh, retains a psychological hold both on the Negroes themselves and on many of the white fellow-citizens ... from this they will only gradually break free. Any American Negro who comes to Britain must be treated by us on a basis of absolute equality. And remember never to call a Negro a ‘nigger’.
The Ministry steered very cautiously between the shoals of indignant British opinion and the ingrained attitudes of many white American soldiers. The Regions were advised to seek the guidance of the commanding officer of the local American unit before encouraging hospitality for black troops and to obviate ‘embarrassment’ by never inviting ‘negro troops to a dance at which white American troops and English girls’ were present. RIOs were also asked to point out to Americans that the British people, having no colour problem of their own, could afford to take ‘a more detached and seemingly more humanitarian attitude to negroes’: hence their impatience at evidence of discrimination. One Regional officer found this policy irksome. When asked by the American Southern Base Commander whether anything could be done to moderate the public’s ‘effusiveness’ towards black soldiers, he replied unofficially that departmental instructions prevented him from taking such action in much the same way as US Army policy prevented ‘what most American Officers would have liked to do, namely, to exclude Negro troops from this country’.
A year after the thorough Cabinet discussion Sir James Grigg was still pressing for a change of ‘attitude on the colour question’. Failing to analyse the circumstances and the possibility of discriminatory behaviour on the part of the US military police, he cited the crime statistics relating to black troops. These showed that the incidence of sex offences was twice as heavy and of violent crimes five times as heavy as among white American soldiers; and as black troops were less inclined towards drunkenness, Grigg concluded that ‘in both these classes of crime the trouble is due to the natural propensities of the coloured man’. The Duke of Marlborough, who as a lieutenant-colonel was liaising between the American and British forces, also felt constrained to warn Churchill:There is, I know, a feeling throughout parts of the country in which these negro troops are quartered that it is unwise and
[p.272]
dangerous to go out into the roads and country lanes after dark and ‘there is growing resentment that these conditions should be allowed to exist. I know the difficulties of the situation as they confront you and the American authorities, I do not wish to make a mountain out of a molehill but I do visualize that during the coming winter when the hours of darkness grow longer that the number of these crimes will become greater and also the possibility of their being undetected will also be facilitated.
The Prime Minister considered the situation ‘serious’. But the Ministry of Information, in possession of no evidence to substantiate the Duke’s forebodings, continued to counsel prudence, Both in the policy towards black troops and in the tactic of quietly encouraging the basically friendly and hospitable promptings of the public towards the American visitors, the department acted in accordance with the stance evolved in 1941. In these, as in other matters of morale and public opinion, the British people were trusted to behave sensibly and in a manner consistent with the nation’s best interests.
[p.273]
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Myths of Oppression
Quote:
John La Rose, ‘We Did Not Come Alive in Britain,’ Race Today (8:3, March 1976)
So they fight a heroic battle for independence from ‘white racist’ Britain and its supposedly capitalist system, yet the minute they win independence vast hordes of the perverted masochists turn up here to suffer more exploitation and abuse. It’s difficult to say of any individual responsible for this kind of stuff whether or not he believes the crap he writes, but it’s safe to say that some of them must know it’s purest nonsense. And just as assuredly it only gets promoted to orthodoxy because it serves the interests of the powerful.
From one of Yggdrasil’s classic lessons:
Some of the worker emigrants to Britain were active participants in the People’s Progressive Party and the People’s National Congress in Guyana, the Gairy Party, the Grenada Manual and Metal Workers Union, the Butler Party, the People’s National Movement, the People’s National Party, the Jamaican Labour Party, the St Kitts Labour Party, the Antigua Labour Party, the Barbados Labour Party, the West Indian Independence Party and in trade unions and other more radical sections of the nationalist movement which were Marxist and stood for revolutionary social change . They were also active in trade unions and peasant organisations.
All these groupings have also been the leavening here for the early cultural, social and political activity of blacks in Britain. The encounter with white racism and the manoeuvres of the British capitalist power did not begin in England but in the Caribbean.
John La Rose, ‘We Did Not Come Alive in Britain,’ Race Today (8:3, March 1976)
So they fight a heroic battle for independence from ‘white racist’ Britain and its supposedly capitalist system, yet the minute they win independence vast hordes of the perverted masochists turn up here to suffer more exploitation and abuse. It’s difficult to say of any individual responsible for this kind of stuff whether or not he believes the crap he writes, but it’s safe to say that some of them must know it’s purest nonsense. And just as assuredly it only gets promoted to orthodoxy because it serves the interests of the powerful.
From one of Yggdrasil’s classic lessons:
Imagine yourself an impartial visitor from an isolated civilization studying the United States.
The popular press and politicians recite that majority European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet people of color, by the boatloads and by the hundreds of thousands, are clamoring to get into the U.S. If the word ‘oppression’ has any meaning, you would expect that people of color would be moving in the opposite direction.
The popular press claims that European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet tax dollars, on balance, flow disproportionately in the other direction - from European-Americans to people of color.
U.S. history texts and Supreme Court opinions state that majorities always oppress and exploit minorities. And yet, if the proverbial visitor from an isolated civilization were to pick a group to exploit based on economic motives, the visitor would choose the group that is the most productive and the most numerous. After all, that is where the money is.
The popular press constantly excoriates rich ‘WASPs’ (or European-American Protestants) as the prime movers in this exploitation of people of color. Yet when you measure actual income and education levels, you find out that Jews are the most prosperous ethnic group, followed by Japanese and Chinese Americans. European-American Protestants rank below European-Americans of Italian, Polish and Irish descent, and are only marginally above African-Americans.
Many civilizations have their myths. Ancient Greeks and Romans were taught, and perhaps believed, that their secular rulers were descended from gods.
But the myths which America recites every day are contrary to easily observable fact. Any myth that is contrary to clearly observable fact must be very important to the elites it serves. For such a myth takes a great deal of energy to sustain, and can serve as grounds for dangerous rebellion when overthrown.
The ‘One Show’ and ‘The Jungle’
I saw the portion of last night’s One Show covering the closure of ‘the jungle.’ Even for the BBC its naked advocacy for the would-be illegal immigrants was shockingly biased, perhaps unwisely so.
The (Asian) reporter that had visited the camp talked up its residents’ youth as though it implied vulnerability. The men she interviewed looked to me to have about the same average age as the English Defence League, I don’t recall anyone at the Beeb making sympathetic gurgles over them because of their youth. Next, and implying that this was an unfortunate loophole, she stated that asylum regulations would permit the British government to deny the campers asylum since they had not claimed refugee status in the first EU country they passed through. In fact they should have claimed asylum in the very first country which they entered, EU or no, on leaving their own. Guest Matt Lucas gave the standard Jewish line: ancestors who had fled the Nazis and other recent immigrant ancestors … enrichment … melting-pot, all that vomit. Even Adrian Chiles, nominally the average bloke (but happening to be half-Jewish/half-Croatian -- do any Englishmen still work at the BBC?) expressed only sympathy for the economic migrants’ ‘plight’ (they became ‘economic migrants’ when they entered the second country after ‘fleeing’ their own).
All-in-all it was a text book example of one-sided, emotional-plea propaganda. No questions asked of whether these people were truly fleeing some unusually criminal regime; no criticism of them for not seeking asylum in any of the numerous countries they had passed through; no-one - to provide that mythical BBC balance - from Migration Watch or the BNP to offer an alternative to the limitless tolerance of the media dandies (limitless until tolerance of Migration Watch, BNP and the like is required, anyway).
In openly seeking to illegally enter another people’s country knowing their entry is opposed by most of that country’s owner-citizens these migrants show themselves to be hostile to basic civilisational norms. That the beeb’s reporters do not seem concerned by this is not surprising - the BBC itself has long been hostile to basic civilisational norms. But ordinarily the beeb’s culture war is far more subtle than last night’s love-fest with criminals who openly conspire to aggress against us as a nation. In brazenly endorsing the law of ‘the jungle,’ the beeb - I hope - will have shocked some of its tame teatime viewers.
The (Asian) reporter that had visited the camp talked up its residents’ youth as though it implied vulnerability. The men she interviewed looked to me to have about the same average age as the English Defence League, I don’t recall anyone at the Beeb making sympathetic gurgles over them because of their youth. Next, and implying that this was an unfortunate loophole, she stated that asylum regulations would permit the British government to deny the campers asylum since they had not claimed refugee status in the first EU country they passed through. In fact they should have claimed asylum in the very first country which they entered, EU or no, on leaving their own. Guest Matt Lucas gave the standard Jewish line: ancestors who had fled the Nazis and other recent immigrant ancestors … enrichment … melting-pot, all that vomit. Even Adrian Chiles, nominally the average bloke (but happening to be half-Jewish/half-Croatian -- do any Englishmen still work at the BBC?) expressed only sympathy for the economic migrants’ ‘plight’ (they became ‘economic migrants’ when they entered the second country after ‘fleeing’ their own).
All-in-all it was a text book example of one-sided, emotional-plea propaganda. No questions asked of whether these people were truly fleeing some unusually criminal regime; no criticism of them for not seeking asylum in any of the numerous countries they had passed through; no-one - to provide that mythical BBC balance - from Migration Watch or the BNP to offer an alternative to the limitless tolerance of the media dandies (limitless until tolerance of Migration Watch, BNP and the like is required, anyway).
In openly seeking to illegally enter another people’s country knowing their entry is opposed by most of that country’s owner-citizens these migrants show themselves to be hostile to basic civilisational norms. That the beeb’s reporters do not seem concerned by this is not surprising - the BBC itself has long been hostile to basic civilisational norms. But ordinarily the beeb’s culture war is far more subtle than last night’s love-fest with criminals who openly conspire to aggress against us as a nation. In brazenly endorsing the law of ‘the jungle,’ the beeb - I hope - will have shocked some of its tame teatime viewers.
Monday, 21 September 2009
Leo Kuper: Genocide and the Plural State
… focusing on the fallout from the partition of India.
It’s impossible not to question either the sanity or the good intentions of the state that could not keep these groups from each other’s throats yet insisted on their mass import into Britain contrary to the expressed wish of its natives. Kuper should have included that group, us, the Britons - distinct in race and religion from the groups focused on here - in his history of India’s partition. Partition followed violent uprisings against us, we were driven out of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh just as the peoples of those states drove each other out of their new homelands. We are unique only in that we were compelled to suffer the mass immigration of peoples unlike ourselves into our homeland. This double standard, genocidal in itself if taken to extreme, was merely the first ‘superimposition of inequality’ post-independence and partition. In modern Britain we are subordinated, discriminated against in the political structure, the economy, education, human rights, and access to amenity: structural conditions Kuper identifies as conducive to large scale violent conflict and, potentially, genocide.
From Leo Kuper, Genocide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 57-56.
It’s impossible not to question either the sanity or the good intentions of the state that could not keep these groups from each other’s throats yet insisted on their mass import into Britain contrary to the expressed wish of its natives. Kuper should have included that group, us, the Britons - distinct in race and religion from the groups focused on here - in his history of India’s partition. Partition followed violent uprisings against us, we were driven out of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh just as the peoples of those states drove each other out of their new homelands. We are unique only in that we were compelled to suffer the mass immigration of peoples unlike ourselves into our homeland. This double standard, genocidal in itself if taken to extreme, was merely the first ‘superimposition of inequality’ post-independence and partition. In modern Britain we are subordinated, discriminated against in the political structure, the economy, education, human rights, and access to amenity: structural conditions Kuper identifies as conducive to large scale violent conflict and, potentially, genocide.
From Leo Kuper, Genocide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 57-56.
The plural society provides the structural base for genocide, the presence of a diversity of racial, ethnic and/or religious groups being the structural characteristic of the plural society, and genocide a crime committed against these groups. This is not to say that genocide is inevitable in the history of plural societies, but only that plural societies offer the necessary conditions for domestic genocide. The many genocidal conflicts in plural societies (as for example in India on partition, or in Bangladesh, or in Rwanda and Burundi) suggest an intimate relationship between the plural society and genocide.
I do not use the term plural society to mean simply the presence of a diversity of racial, ethnic and/ or religious groups. The effect of this would be to classify the overwhelming majority of societies as plural societies. I use the term rather, in a tradition deriving from J. S. Furnivall, to describe societies with persistent and pervasive cleavages between these sections. It is a distinctive type of society, recognized as such in the literature under a variety of names-divided societies, communally fragmented societies, multi-ethnic or multiple societies, composite societies, segmented societies and internally colonized societies.
In the plural society, racial or ethnic or religious differentiation is elaborated in many different spheres. There is generally inequality in the mode of political incorporation, as in the constitutional provisions which exclude Africans from the vote for members of the South African parliament. Even where there is formal recognition of political equality, there may be practical inequality, as in Northern Ireland, where Protestants succeeded in maintaining an entrenched political domination over Catholics, notwithstanding a democratic constitution. The political inequality is usually associated with economic discrimination-in opportunities for employment, in wages, in access to the means of production. There is almost certain to be discrimination also in provision for education, sometimes with quite startling differences in expenditure for dominant groups as compared with subordinate. Segregation may be imposed in many spheres, including prohibition against intermarriage, or an increasing segregation may develop in the course of conflicts protracted over many years. Differences in culture and social organization may add further to division between the different sections.
The plural society, in its extreme form, is characterized by a superimposition of inequalities. The same sections are dominant or subordinate, favoured or discriminated against, in the political structure, in the economy, in opportunities for education, in human rights, in access to amenity. And issues of conflict tend also to be superimposed along the same lines of cleavage and inequality. These structural conditions are likely to be conducive to genocidal conflict. They aggregate the population into distinctive sections, thereby facilitating crimes against collectivities. The divisions being so pervasive, and relatively consistent in so many spheres, issues of conflict may move rapidly from one sector to another, until almost the entire society is polarized. A quite local racial disturbance, for example, of seemingly minor significance, may set off a chain of reactions - rioting at distant geographical points, demonstrations, strike action, police reprisals, reciprocal terrorism and violent political confrontation at a national level. So too, by reason of the superimposition of issues of conflict, particular issues, however specific in their origin, become generalized to a wide range of grievance. And if there is a long history of struggle, with its models, for the dominant group, of effective violent repression, and its memories, for the subordinate group, of past injustice and atrocity, it will give an emotional charge to the conflict, which may escalate to high levels of destructive violence. But this is by no means an inevitable development. A society which one might characterize as an extreme plural society on the basis of objective measures may remain quiescent for long periods, perhaps indefinitely, lacking the subjective reactions and opportunity to sustain a destructive conflict.
In the examples which follow [fellist: Arabs and the French during the process of decolonisation, Tutsis and Hutus post-colonially, and the example I quote from, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims at Partition] I have drawn on case studies of highly destructive violence to establish the argument of a genocidal potential in the conflicts between racial, ethnic or religious sections of a plural society. I would not personally describe each of the case studies as genocide. But they are all conflicts in which the charge of genocide has been made - though this charge is often made in a loose and exaggerated way. And they are all conflicts in which there has been massive slaughter, with episodes of genocidal massacre, whole communities of the target group being annihilated.
[...]
In India, the conflicts in the process of decolonization were aggravated by the religious cleavages. At the time of partition, the relationship between the British, Hindus and Muslims was hardly comparable to the two-tier structure of Rwanda under Belgian mandate. Hindus were in a great majority, some 300 million Hindus as against 100 million Muslims. They were separated from Muslims not only by their religion, but also by caste prohibitions on intermingling. They had been more ready than Muslims to seize the opportunities for British education, and they were largely the administrators of India for the British. It was mainly from their ranks too that India's businessmen, financiers and professionals were recruited. To be sure, the great majority of Hindus and Muslims must have been living in equal poverty. Still, in an independent India, politically unified but communally divided, Hindus would have dominated the society.
Partition transformed this situation, giving dominance to the majority, Muslim or non-Muslim, in the partitioned sections. But the distribution of populations, with substantial religious minorities in areas dominated numerically by members of other religions, or with much intermingling of people of different religion, or with segregated enclaves, did not permit of an easy severance into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. The structure thus gave opportunity for the persecution of minorities, and for retaliation in massacre, as reprisal provoked counter-reprisal in areas of mixed living, and as atrocity against Hindus or Sikhs in Muslim areas, or against Muslims in areas of Hindu or Sikh dominance, set off counter-massacres in a continuous spiral of escalating violence.
Already massacres had started in some areas prior to partition, when communal sentiment became inflamed in the troubled course of constitutional negotiation. In Calcutta, following the proclamation by the Muslim League of 16 August 1946 as Direct Action Day, Muslim
mobs howling in a quasi-religious fervor came bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull ... They savagely beat to a pulp any Hindu in their path and left the bodies in the city's open gutters ... Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighbourhoods, looking for defenseless Muslims to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known twenty-four hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated cadavers bobbed down the Hooghly river toward the sea. Other corpses, savagely mutilated, littered the city's streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most ... By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy grey packs they scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city's six thousand dead.And the Calcutta massacres triggered off other massacres not only in neighbouring areas, but across the continent in Bombay.
Relationships were particularly explosive in the Punjab. This was a Muslim majority province, but Muslims constituted only about 57 per cent of the population of over 34,000,000 enumerated in the 1941 census. In the west they were markedly predominant: in the east both their numbers and dominance fell away. Here lay the homelands of the Sikhs who had ruled over most of the province only some hundred years earlier, and of the Hindu Jats, a peasantry also with martial traditions. In the city of Lahore, almost equally balanced populations pressed their rival claims. The city of Amritsar, built around the Golden Temple, was the main religious and political centre of the Sikhs, who numbered some six million, concentrated mostly in the Punjab. And beyond these cities was the province's 'mosaic of communal pockets set haphazardly amongst one another'.
Inevitably, partition into a Muslim west and a Hindu east was highly disruptive. Lahore went to Pakistan, Amritsar to India. The Sikhs, split in two by partition, became the principal actors in the tragedy of the Punjab. Five million Sikhs and Hindus were left in Pakistan's half of the Punjab, over five million Muslims in India's half. It was an invitation to massacre.
Massacre in the Punjab had preceded partition. In the village of Kahuta, where 2,000 Hindus and Sikhs and 1,500 Muslims lived in peace, a Muslim horde had set fire to the houses in its Sikh and Hindu quarters with buckets of gasoline. Entire families were consumed by the flames. Those who escaped were caught, tied together, soaked with gasoline and burnt alive like torches. 'A few Hindu women, yanked from their beds to be raped and converted to Islam, had survived; others had broken away from their captors and hurled themselves back into the fire to perish with their families.' In Lahore, a tolerant city of some 500,000 Hindus, 100,000 Sikhs and 600,000 Muslims, a Sikh leader had precipitated violence by hacking down a Muslim League banner with a cry of death to Pakistan. In the riots which followed, more than 3,000 were killed, most of them Sikh. On the eve of independence, 15 August 1947, the city was a scene of desolation. 'Almost a hundred thousand Hindus and Sikhs were trapped inside Old Lahore's walled city, their water cut, fires raging around them, mobs of Muslims stalking the alleys outside their mahallas, waiting to pounce on anyone venturing out.' In Amritsar, 'murder was as routine an occurrence in its bazaars and alleyways as public defecation. The city's Hindus devised the cruel tactic of walking up to an unsuspecting Muslim and splashing his face with a vial of nitric or sulphuric acid. Arsonists were in action everywhere.' While the city authorities were performing the independence day rituals, 'an enraged horde of Sikhs was ravaging a Muslim neighbourhood less than a mile away. They slaughtered its male inhabitants without mercy or exception. The women were stripped, repeatedly raped, then paraded shaking and terrified through the city to the Golden Temple, where most had their throats cut.' In the countryside, Sikh bands attacked Muslim villages and neighbourhoods. 'A particular savagery characterized their killings. The circumcised penises of their Muslim male victims were hacked off and stuffed into their mouths or into the mouths of murdered Muslim women.'
Campbell-Johnson, Press Attaché to the last British Viceroy of India, wrote that perhaps the most horrifying feature of the communal insanity was the lust of the strong to seek out the weak for massacre: hospitals and refugee trains were the special targets of these crazed assassins. There were periods of four and five days at a stretch during which not a single train reached Lahore or Amritsar without its complement of dead and wounded. In some of the trains, almost all the passengers had been most horribly slaughtered. So too, the refugee columns on the roads became an easy target for loot and massacre.
Many of these genocidal massacres were carried out by mobs in murderous frenzy. They were not a centrally organized government-directed type of genocide. Hindu and Muslim leaders gave assurances of protection to minority communities, and on 22 July 1947, shortly before partition, spokesmen for the prospective governments of India and Pakistan in a joint statement solemnly guaranteed protection to all citizens. This guarantee, it was stated, 'implies that in no circumstances will violence be tolerated in any form in either territory. The two Governments wish to emphasize that they are united in this determination'. There was seemingly a remarkable faith in the effectiveness of the projected boundary force. But the leaders had greatly underestimated the extent and destructiveness of the communal passions unleashed by partition, and they were powerless to control the conflagration in the Punjab.
Monday, 24 August 2009
Taylor and the Little Picture
In an otherwise strong review of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, Jared Taylor makes a common error of specialists. Because his professional focus is entirely on the symptoms of mass non-White immigration into the West Taylor rationalises that Europe’s political leaders are reluctantly compelled by the principle of non-discrimination to impose their solution for immigrant related problems on all communities:
If Taylor did not choose to limit his study to the effect and ignore the cause he might have concluded that Europe’s rulers find ‘managing diversity’ a useful excuse for imposing the policies they prefer but that would otherwise have little justification.
By contrast, Europeans act on principle. When the French decided they couldn’t have Arab girls wearing veils to school, they felt compelled to ban yarmulkes and ‘large crucifixes’ as well. Italians and Germans couldn’t ban veils without taking down classroom crucifixes that may have been up for centuries.
Europeans therefore cannot bring themselves to combat alien practices head-on. When the Danes got sick of Muslims fetching brides from the old country, they had to ban young spouses rather than illiterate Third Worlders. By forbidding the import of marriage partners under the age of 24, the Danes mostly stopped the practice, but they had to pretend they had an underage-spouse problem rather than an immigration problem.
Measures like this bother people who shouldn’t be bothered. If the authorities step up surveillance on fire-breathing imams, they think they have to keep tabs on other people, too. If they cut back on welfare because of immigrant chiselers, they have to change the rules for everyone. Although it came to nothing, one Swedish bureaucrat, shocked to discover female genital mutilation was going on in her country, argued for mandatory checkups for every Swedish girl.
If Taylor did not choose to limit his study to the effect and ignore the cause he might have concluded that Europe’s rulers find ‘managing diversity’ a useful excuse for imposing the policies they prefer but that would otherwise have little justification.
Wednesday, 19 August 2009
The ‘Latinoization’ of Miami
Here’s an eye-opening history of the ‘Latinoization’ of Miami. It’s disturbing enough in what it says, calling attention to the way ‘Miami’s old-line, non-Hispanic white political and business elite’ subsidised its own dispossession assisted by the CIA pursuing its imperial goals, but I suspect the deeper truth is even worse: that the ‘Cold War’ was largely a phoney war whose primary purpose was domestic social control and Military Industrial profit; and that the ‘American’ state considered the presence of Cubans in Miami beneficial not only for their anti-Communist views but because they contributed to ‘diversity,’ i.e., social division, so adding to pressure that America’s racial and cultural identity be redefined. But like I say, if the truth is only as bad as presented here, that’s quite bad enough.
Latinos: Remaking America, Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University and University of California Press, 2002) pp. 75-81
Chapter 3: Power and Identity: Miami Cubans
by Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick
The Building of Cuban Miami
Latinos: Remaking America, Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University and University of California Press, 2002) pp. 75-81
Chapter 3: Power and Identity: Miami Cubans
by Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick
The Building of Cuban Miami
We Cubans made Miami. Before us, Miami was nothing but a decaying winter vacation spot and swamp. Now, it’s the capital of Latin America. And, we Cubans did it!
-- A Miami Cuban businessman
Indeed, Cubans do deserve much of the credit for shifting Miami’s economic focus from northern tourists to international southern trade. But their stories of self-congratulation usually fail to acknowledge the critical political context that encouraged them—even permitted their success.
Cubans fleeing Castro’s Cuba began arriving in significant numbers in the 1960s, following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Their arrival reflected both the failure of a U.S.-backed military invasion of Cuba and the failure of a socialist revolution to retain those who had the most skills and resources for reconstructing Cuba. The Cubans’ arrival also coincided with the construction of Great Society programs that provided extensive benefits to minority populations and that were quickly expanded to include Cuban refugees. The U.S. government created the Cuban Refugee Program, which spent nearly $1 billion between 1965 and 1976. Through this program, the federal government paid transportation costs from Cuba and offered financial assistance to needy refugees and to state and local public agencies that provided refugee services. Even in programs not especially designed for them, Cubans seemed to benefit. From 1968 to 1980, Latinos (almost all Cubans) received 46.9 percent of all Small Business Administration loans in Dade County.
Even more important was indirect assistance. Through the 1960s, the private University of Miami had the largest Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in the world, outside of the organization’s headquarters in Virginia. With perhaps as many as twelve thousand Cubans in Miami on its payroll at one point in the early 1960s, the CIA was one of the largest employers in the state of Florida. It supported what was described as the third largest navy in the world and over fifty front businesses: CIA boat shops, gun shops, travel agencies, detective agencies, and real estate agencies. Ultimately, this investment did much more to boost Cubans in Miami economically than it did to destabilize the Castro regime.
The state of Florida also passed laws that made it easier for Cuban professionals to recertify themselves to practice in the United States. At the county level, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 53 percent of minority contracts for Dade County’s rapid transit system went to Latino-owned firms. Dade County Schools led the nation in introducing bilingual education for the first wave of Cuban refugees in 1960. The Dade County Commission also designated the county officially bilingual in the mid-1970s. With about 75 percent of Cuban arrivals before 1974 directly taking advantage of some kind of state-provided benefits, and with virtually everyone profiting from indirect aid, the total benefits available to the Cuban community appear to surpass those available to any other U.S. minority group.
The first wave of Cubans has been labeled the “Golden Exiles,” the top of Cuban society who were most immediately threatened by a socialist revolution. These new arrivals were different from other minorities in the United States. They were not only white but also predominantly middle or upper class. The presence of entrepreneurs and professionals in the Cuban refugee flow provided a trained and experienced core who knew how to access and use the extraordinary benefits provided by the U.S. government. Some had already established a footing in the United States and, when the revolution came, abandoned one of their residences for another across the straits of Florida. A Cuban shoe manufacturer, for example, produced footwear for a major U.S. retail chain before the Cuban revolution. He obtained his working capital from New York financial houses. After the revolution, the only change was that the manufacturing was done in Miami rather than Havana. He even was able to keep some of the same employees.
The earlier-arriving, higher-status refugees created the first enterprises in what came to be known as the Cuban enclave and allowed Miami to be the only U.S. city where Latino immigrants created a successful and self-sustained ethnic enclave economy. Miami has proportionally the largest concentration of Latino businesses (over fifty-five thousand) and of large Latino enterprises in the country. Although Miami-Dade County has only 5 percent of the total U.S. Latino population, thirty-one of the top one hundred Latino businesses in the United States are located there. U.S. Cubans’ rate of business ownership is more than three times that of Mexicans and nearly six times that of Puerto Ricans.
The Cuban enclave benefits not only Cuban business owners but also the broader Miami Cuban community. Most later-arriving Cuban immigrants from more modest origins than the Golden Exiles are employed by Cuban Miami enclave firms in various entry-level positions, which may offer low wages but can often be apprenticeships rather than dead-end jobs. Miami Cuban employers frequently provide training to their Miami Cuban workers and may even help them establish their own independent businesses. Miami Cuban garment workers become subcontractors, establishing informal workshops in their homes. Miami Cuban construction workers become contractors or subcontractors, also working out of their homes. For financing, workers who have turned entrepreneurs can go to banks (sometimes owned by Miami Cubans and certainly staffed by Miami Cubans) where they are likely to find sympathetic loan officers. For markets, they rely on the Miami Cuban community’s loyalty and preference for buying from “their own.”
The result has been a most economically successful immigrant community. A comparison of Cubans and Mexicans who came to the United States in the mid-1970s, for example, revealed that the Cubans not only had higher wages than the Mexicans, even Cubans with the same educational level as Mexicans received higher wages.
Miami Cubans also transformed Miami by attracting investment and migration from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, turning Miami into a diverse, dynamic Latino economic center of the Americas. Only New York has more foreign-owned banks than Miami. Nearly 50 percent of U.S. exports to the Caribbean and Central America and over 30 percent of U.S. exports to South America pass through Miami. Miami’s Free Trade Zone is the first and largest privately owned trade zone in the world. With more non-stop cargo flights to Latin America and the Caribbean than Orlando, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tampa, and New York’s Kennedy combined, Miami’s airport is the top U.S. airport for international freight. The airport has more airlines than any other in the Western hemisphere; it is frequently easier to get from one Latin American country to another by going through Miami than by going directly. Miami also has the largest cruise port in the world, ironically transporting primarily U.S. passengers on vacations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America while many of the citizens of those countries are immigrating to Miami. Miami may not be a global city equal to New York or London, but it is assuredly the economic capital of Latin America, and its Cuban immigrants made it so.
The economic transformation has also altered much of Miami’s culture. For example, at a 1998 event held by the University of Miami and the state of Florida to discuss plans for educating a “multilingual workforce for the 21st Century,” the university’s newly installed dean of education, an import from a university up north, spoke of language diversity as a problem that people where he came from would soon be encountering. The faculty member who was moderating the conference gently reminded the dean that in Florida multilingualism is viewed as an asset and promised to continue to educate him.
Antibilingual-education measures such as those that passed in the late 1990s in California no longer have a chance in Miami. It is easier to find a job, to shop, and just to get things done if one knows Spanish. It is also much easier to advance economically if one knows English. Miami is truly bilingual and multicultural. Miami Dade Community College has more foreign students, mostly Latino, than any other college or university in the nation. One of the three Spanish-language local television newscasts has more viewers than any of the local English-language television stations. The main Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald, reprints articles from eleven Latin American newspapers. The 1990 census showed that Spanish had replaced English in Miami-Dade as the language most often spoken at home. Even at work, the language most frequently spoken by Latinos in South Florida is Spanish (42.2 percent).
It is not just the number of Latinos and the pervasive use of Spanish that makes Miami the de facto capital of Latin America. Latinos are also the demographic majority in some Texas cities, such as Laredo, El Paso, and San Antonio, and in other border areas such as California’s Imperial Valley, but there they lack the political and economic clout exercised by Miami Cubans.
Miami Cubans translated the favorable reception by the U.S. government and the millions of dollars of resettlement assistance not only into a self-sufficient economic enclave and thriving international economic city but also into a “direct line” to the centers of political power in Washington. Despite considerable political diversity among Miami Cubans in the early 1960s, by the 1970s politics and profits had become fused. Anti-Castro, anticommunist Miami Cubans invested locally and also enforced political consensus by harassing, boycotting, and even terrorizing their more liberal political and economic compatriots, a process referred to as enforceable solidarity.
The outcome was a profound economic and political solidarity. From the 1960s on, most Miami Cubans, despite their diverse class origins and social views, patronized other Miami Cuban-owned businesses and preferred conationals as business associates at the same time that they shared a coherent anti-Castro, anticommunist ideology. Expelled and despised by the government of their country, abandoned at the Bay of Pigs by a supposedly friendly host government, bartered away during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and ridiculed by Latin American intellectuals, the exiles had few to trust but each other. As illustrated in a full-page advertisement in the Miami Herald that was paid for by the most powerful Miami Cuban organization, the Cuban American National Foundation, resentment and a sense of persecution had evolved:All our achievements have been accomplished with a national press coverage that has often portrayed us as extremists. This has been the most unfair and prejudiced perception we have experienced in America. . . . The Miami Herald is aggressive in its ignorance of our people. It refuses to understand that Cuban Americans see the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy as a personal, ever-present struggle. We live the struggle daily because our friends and families enslaved in communist Cuba live it daily. (Cuban American National Foundation 1987)
Unlike other minorities, which usually adopt antiestablishment, progressive positions, Miami Cubans have been militant conservatives on foreign policy, specifically on anticommunism issues. As a result, anticommunist policy positions and anticommunist rhetoric are de rigueur for local political candidates. For example, in the mid-1980s the City Commission passed a resolution barring any expenditure of “funds of the City of Miami . . . where representatives of Communist-Marxist countries have either been scheduled to participate or invited to attend.” Subsequently, Miami-Dade County passed a similar resolution. In an effort to win Miami Cuban readership, the Miami Herald created an entirely new Spanish-language edition run almost exclusively by Cuban exiles who seldom have a favorable word for the Castro government.
The Miami Cubans’ solidarity has produced tangible political results. Miami’s city and county mayors are foreign-born Cuban immigrants, as are the superintendent of the public schools (the fourth largest district in the nation), the president of the community college (the largest in the nation), and the president of the local state university (one of the country’s most rapidly growing). In the wake of the Elián crisis, the Miami Cuban mayor fired the Anglo police chief and the Anglo city manager. They were replaced by Miami Cubans. Also Cuban-born are the Miami-Dade County police chief, the state prosecutor for Miami-Dade County, two congressional representatives, and the majority of the Miami-Dade County state legislative contingent. Nationally, the two Miami Cubans in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with the Cuban American National Foundation, successfully promoted Radio and T.V. Martí, which broadcasts to Cuba, as well as the Cuban Democracy Act, which tightened U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba. More generally, Miami Cubans have emerged as a group whose support is actively courted by a growing number of officeholders from outside the state—from presidential candidates to members of Congress seeking campaign contributions.
These victories have not been without costs to the image of Miami Cubans and the well-being of the overall community. In response to an intolerance concerning political opinions about Cuba, the Inter-American Press Association and the human rights group Americas Watch in 1992 condemned the Miami exile community for violations of civil liberties. There have been many other lost opportunities. The most recent examples: An international music market conference that focused on the Americas had met in Miami Beach for several years, but in 1998 the county blocked the conference because Cuban musicians were scheduled to attend. Also in 1998, the Miami Light Project, a leading local arts group, had to forgo presenting a Cuban musical group in order not to lose $60,000 in county funding. The July 1999 Junior Pan American Games track and field meet was moved to Tampa after Miami-Dade refused to support it because Cuba would be represented in the games. The Latin Grammys scheduled for September 2000 pulled out of Miami. For similar reasons, a local group bidding to hold the 2007 Pan Am Games in Miami-Dade pulled out after realizing that the county would not support the games because Cuban athletes would participate.
Achieving both economic and political success as a Miami Cuban did not necessarily shield individuals from prejudice and discrimination. Certainly during the early stages of Cuban settlement in the 1960s, Cubans confronted significant prejudice when apartment owners, for example, posted signs declaiming, “No Pets, No Kids, No Cubans.” Moreover, in an effort to prevent the political empowerment of Cubans, local Anglo politicians in the 1960s and 1970s successfully urged federal officials to relocate new Cuban refugees outside of Dade County. Public resentment against Cuban Americans mounted, especially in the wake of the 1980 Mariel boatlift when the Miami Herald editorialized repeatedly against Cubans and when national polls listed Cubans as the least desirable immigrants. This was largely a reaction to Castro’s propaganda about those leaving Cuba in the boatlift. As late as 1993, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that only 19 percent of the respondents believed that immigration from Cuba has benefited the United States. Dade County was also the birthplace of the English-only movement in the United States during the 1980s.
By the late 1980s, after the election of a Cuban-born mayor, a majority on the city council, numerous state representatives, and a congressional representative, and recognizing the business elite’s inability to advance their agenda without the support of the Cuban business community, Miami’s old-line, non-Hispanic white political and business elite switched to a policy of incorporation. In the meantime, the Cuban enclave had been forging itself into the staging ground for a profound Latinoization of Miami.
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