Miami Does Not Have A General Interest Book Store

In the 1950s, Miami non-hispanic whites were more than 80% of the population. Now they are under 20%. To find a book store in Miami, you have to drive to a white area like Coral Gables.

If you go to an airport in Central and South America (with the exception of Argentina and Chile), you will rarely find anyone reading a book.

The Miami Herald reports:

Why the lack of stores? No one is quite sure, but many factors may play a role, including high rents, a large non-English speaking population and the absence of a retail district with foot traffic sufficiently heavy and deep-pocketed to sustain the low-margin business of bookselling.

“It’s tough,” said Miami Book Fair co-founder Raquel Roque, owner of the tiny Downtown Book Center, which her father opened in 1965 after arriving from Cuba. Though she still carries some English-language books, newspapers and magazines, she said, “we’ve had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population.”

Her store’s clientele, she said, is mostly now recently arrived immigrants looking for English-instruction books and bargain novels. She keeps the doors open thanks to a thriving wholesale Spanish-language book distribution business.

Other Spanish-language bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal’s broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat.

The trend is clear, Salvat said: General-interest bookstores, especially those trading principally in English, have gone where the biggest concentrations of book-buyers are, in well-off enclaves like Pinecrest, Coral Gables and Aventura.

Census estimates tell part of the story. Book-buying is closely linked to education, experts say. In 2006, only 22 percent of adult Miamians had a bachelor’s degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent.

Chain stores in particular have developed location formulas that demand lots of well-heeled, well-educated people, said Gibbs, the Michigan consultant: within a five-mile radius, 75,000 people with a bachelor’s degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more.

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Illegal Aliens Impose Crushing Costs On American Healthcare

More than one in five births in California are to illegal aliens. Their children born in the US are automatic American citizens and at age 21 can sponsor their parents.

Jared Taylor writes in White Identity: “Americans who fall sick in Mexico do not get free treatment. The State Department warns that Mexican doctors routinely refuse to treat foreign patients unless paid in advance, and that they often charge Americans for services not rendered.”

Mexican medics take sick to U.S.

By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES 2002

Mexican ambulance drivers are transporting hospital patients unable to pay for medical care or emergency-room services in their country to facilities in the United States, where their treatment is mandated by federal law, authorities said yesterday. The border crossings have been reported from Brownsville, Texas, to Douglas, Ariz., and involve Mexican ambulance companies whose drivers have been instructed by hospital officials in Mexico to take ailing and uninsured patients to the United States, the authorities said. The patients are being transported through the U.S.-Mexico border’s many unguarded crossings when hospitals along the border are reporting losses of more than $200 million in unreimbursed costs for treating illegal aliens, and the numbers continue to rise.

“It’s a phenomenon we noticed some time ago, one that has expanded very rapidly,” said a federal law-enforcement official familiar with the problem. “Hospitals in Mexico are pointing the ambulances north when they discover a patient can’t pay for services and has no insurance. They know they can get treatment in this country.”

The federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act mandates that U.S. hospitals with emergency-room services treat anyone who presents themselves for care, including illegal aliens. The act does not say who is liable for the costs. Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and sponsor of legislation to reimburse border hospitals for their mounting losses, said the influx of illegal aliens had “severely” affected Arizona’s health care system and that increased demands would make matters worse. Mr. Kyl said the federal government “has not been willing” to provide financial support to health care providers along the border to pay for the federally mandated treatment of illegal aliens. “Some emergency rooms have shut down, and others will close because they simply cannot afford to stay open,” he said. “Meanwhile, taxpaying American citizens are denied care or have to wait an inordinate time to receive emergency care. “We have the opportunity to welcome thousands of legal visitors to our state every day who provide a boost to tourism, help us increase awareness of our two nations’ cultures and contribute to our state’s economy and we will continue to do so while addressing the issues that arise from those seeking to cross our border in violation of federal law,” he said.

Mr. Kyl’s reimbursement bill, which he plans to reintroduce, languished in committee, and the Bush administration showed little interest in it. Illegal aliens, particularly in Arizona, have inundated hospitals along the border. The Southeast Arizona Medical Center in Douglas is on the verge of bankruptcy because of uncompensated care to undocumented aliens; the Cochise County Health Department spends as much as 30 percent of its annual $9 million budget on illegal aliens; and the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee was hit for $200,000 in uncompensated services out of a net operating income of $300,000. The University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz., faces up to $10 million this year “in uncompensated care to foreign nationals,” and the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in the city lost $1 million treating illegal immigrants in the first quarter of fiscal 2002.

A recent study by the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health on the treatment of undocumented aliens said the “routine transfer” of patients by Mexican ambulances from Agua Prieta, Mexico, to Douglas remains a problem, adding that the drivers encountered “little resistance” at border crossings. The committee said that contributing to the “already excessive cost of treating illegal immigrants” was the price of transporting by helicopter those patients in Douglas who need further treatment to medical facilities in Tucson and Phoenix. The panel said the cost ranged from $7,000 to $20,000 a trip.

“If rural hospitals in the area become financially strapped and are unable to pay for this type of transportation, helicopter services will be forced out of business, plummeting health care services in rural areas back to their 1980s status,” it said. A recent study by the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties Coalition said 77 hospitals along the border in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas face “a medical emergency.” The study said one in four dollars of uncompensated emergency medical costs for the Southwest border hospitals was attributable to undocumented migrants. It calculated the losses at $79 million in California, $74 million in Texas, $31 million in Arizona and $6 million in New Mexico. It also said that emergency service providers incurred an additional $13 million in uncompensated costs.

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Health Problems By Race

Jared Taylor writes in White Identity: “Eighty percent of black women are overweight or obese. During the period 2006 to 2008, blacks were 51% more likely than whites to be obese and Hispanics were 21% more likely. The CDC found that blacks and Hispanics exercise less than whites, and that black and Hispanic women care less than white women about being overweight and therefore do not try as hard to lose weight.”

Asian children are 19% less likely than white children to be obese.

More than 2% of adult Hispanics in the US are infected with tapeworms.

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 21 (UPI) —
A pageant mom in Florida is the subject of an upcoming episode of Untold Stories of the E.R. after forcing her daughter to ingest tapeworms in order to slim down for competition.

Upon checking into the emergency room with severe stomach pains, nurse Maricar Cabral-Osorio thought the teen was pregnant. But an ultrasound showed no fetus — although there was an inexplicable growth in her intestines.

Recounted and reenacted for Discovery Fit & Health’s anything-but-subtle medical scare docudrama, the unfortunate teenage contestant’s condition became clear upon a fateful trip to the bathroom.

“It was a toilet bowl full of tapeworms,” Cabral-Osorio recalled.

“It was so gross and she had pooped all these tapeworms. There were a couple that were very long and wiggling around trying to get out of the toilet bowl.”

Having passed the parasites, the teen was then assumed to be fine. But one question remained — how did she get the tapeworms in the first place?

After an apparent fight between the mother and daughter, it became clear the mother bought a pill of tapeworm eggs in Mexico and forced her daughter to take it to lose weight for an upcoming pageant.

“We were wondering how did she get those tapeworms, and then you saw the mom turn white,” Cabral-Osorio said.

“The mom was apologizing to the girl. It’s like ‘I’m so sorry. You know, I did it just to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on to the pageant.”

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Will Muslim Family Values Save Us?

Report: A refugee from Somalia was accused of trying to sell her 16-year-old daughter into marriage against her will.

Social Services took another Somali couple’s six children because the father belt-whipped his 8-year-old son and tied him up for misbehaving in school.

A Yemeni husband beat his wife and threw her down the stairs for talking back to him in front of the family.

“How else can I teach her how to behave?” the bewildered man asked in court.

Erie County Family Court judges say they have seen a startling rise in the number of domestic abuse and juvenile delinquency cases involving immigrant, refugee and Muslim families who want help but fear police intervention.

In the immigrants’ native countries, these incidents would be considered common social and cultural practices. But in their new home, they are classified as abuse and felony assault.

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — Shameen’s brown eyes seem lost as she thinks about the one day she wants to forget, but it is all she can think about.

Still traumatized, she recounts the events that led her to a safe house in Kabul.

She was raped and nearly stabbed to death by her husband just seven days before we met her.

Her lips are quivering and her eyes full of fear.

“He forced himself on me,” she said. “All I could do was scream.”

She was married off 15 years ago when she was a teenager.

Throughout those years she was tortured and abused, suffering daily beatings with an electrical wire or the metal end of a hammer.

This was her normal life.

“He chased after me with a hammer. He said if I made any noise he would put holes through me,” Shameen said.

Shameen and her husband could not conceive a child. And in Afghan society, it seems, the blame always falls on the woman.

After one severe beating, she ran from her home and to the police station. Her husband promised the police he would not attack her anymore, so she gave in and agreed to go back home with him.

Days later, Shameen’s husband took her on a trip to visit her sister’s grave — a 15-year-old sister who was burned to death for displeasing her husband.

Shameen says her younger sister was 11 years old when she was forced to marry an older man. He would beat and abuse her until one day he killed her.

As Shameen walked along the graveyard with her husband he took her near a shrine where he forced her to the ground, lifted her burqa and raped her. He then threatened her with a knife and asked her who was going to help her now. She was screaming as he slashed her throat and body.

A passerby saved her.

Now, she has no one to turn to — not even her own parents. In their eyes, she has brought them shame, an offense punishable by death. […]

Afghanistan is a country where for centuries women have been considered property — not equals, like the constitution states. They are often beaten, raped and even sold to the highest bidder. There are very few places women can turn to.

Nearly 90 percent of Afghan women suffer from domestic abuse, according to the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Despite that, there are less than a dozen shelters like this one in Afghanistan, usually run by non-governmental organizations.

Abusers are rarely prosecuted or convicted, and most women are afraid to say anything.

“Their mothers are beaten by their fathers. They’re beaten by their fathers, by their brothers. It’s a way of life,” said Manizha Naderi, director of WAW.

Naderi is an Afghan-American who grew up in New York and has returned to Afghanistan to work with other women in hopes of bringing a change, although she said it will take generations.

“They see their mothers being beaten, they see their sisters their aunts, everybody,” Naderi said. “So that’s what they expect.”…

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Will Hispanic Family Values Save Us?

Heather MacDonald writes: Hispanic women are with some regularity their uncles, not necessarily seen as a bad thing by the mother’s family. Alternatively, the father may be the boyfriend of the girl’s mother, who then continues to stay with the grandmother. Older men seek out young girls in the belief that a virgin cannot get pregnant during her first intercourse, and to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

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How Did Whites Lose Their Racial Identity And How Can They Save Themselves?

Greg Johnson writes about Jared Taylor’s book White Identity:

The trouble is that Taylor gives no indication of what, precisely, whites need to do to save ourselves, or any indication that it is even possible at this stage. And without a specific and appealing vision of an alternative and some indication of how we might get from here to there, most readers will sensibly conclude that the white race is doomed.

Of course, Taylor may be betting that leaving these matters open will be less discouraging than leveling with people about the harsh and terrible measures necessary to save us. For instance, halting all non-white immigration will slow but not halt our demographic eclipse, since the non-whites who are already here are outbreeding us handily. And do we really want to live in a constant breeding race until the natural world is completely despoiled? The white race has a future in North America only if we can separate ourselves from more than 100 million non-whites, for example through expulsion or territorial partition.

Yes, the book is long enough already, but even a few historical examples of conquered and colonized white peoples who have regained control of their destinies—the Irish, the Spanish, the Russians—would be enough to convince people that all is not lost.

Second, Taylor’s chapter on “White Racial Consciousness” offers nary a clue as to how in the last fifty years or so, healthy white racial consciousness around the globe has become almost completely perverted, setting our race on the path to extinction. But if racial consciousness is so soundly rooted in nature, how can something so contrary to nature even take place? The explanation is to be found in the work of Kevin MacDonald, particularly The Culture of Critique and Cultural Insurrections: white ethnocentrism, and only white ethnocentrism, has been pathologized by the organized Jewish community as a tool of ethnic warfare against whites. Without the perspective afforded by MacDonald’s work, the shift Taylor chronicles is ultimately mysterious and may give rise to the mistaken view that the white race has essentially been seized by a suicidal impulse.

I discussed this with a Jew I know and he responded:

I would caution against any enthusiasm that would explain a complicated situation by reference to one factor. Like, “the Jews were responsible for this.” Because the world is a very complicated place with few correct master theories of anything. E.g., for real, having studied the history of Europe exhaustively, the Jews did not bring on either WW 1 or WW 2. Nor did Jewish bankers, politicians etc.

I think Nazism was a matter of a particular man at a particular time in a particular nation dealing with the aftermath of World War 1, the Great Depression and Paul von Hindenberg’s miscalculation. If you look at the details of how German Jews lived, and believe me, they may have included a few perverts but were super patriotic.

This is why Jews today are so messed up. The advanced civilization the Jews had in central Europe was obliterated.

Walthur Rathenau was no open border liberal.

My ancestors fought in WW 1. On the side of Central Powers.

I do not agree that Germany’s biggest [internal] enemies were disproportionately Jews. It was, after all, the all Christian ruling family that fucked things up over there, in Germany and in Austria Hungary. Not a Jew among them. Nor among the foreign services of each nation that blundered into war, nor among the general staffs that waged it.

Also, but for the Jew by birth Haber’s invention of a method for fixing nitrogen, Germany would have lost the war inside of six months.

The trouble with the reds and such came after defeat. Also, it was the Christian Kaiser who unleashed the not-Jewish Lenin on the people of Russia as though he were a baccillus.

And closer to home, it was Ted Kennedy who pried open the doors to this nation through his immigration reform of 1966. And I don’t think the Jews had much inflence on this in the UK, France, or Australia (so far as I know). It was Christians with a death wish.

I define “nazi” in the sense that they defined it, the platform of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparte (NSDAP). I think that had there been no antisemitic component to the platform, they’d have come to power possibly sooner and with large majority (which they never won in an open election, certainly not in 33). By and large, the Jew-hatred part was mostly Hitler’s doing, and I don’t think the Germans of 1932 were especially antisemitic by the standards of the day.

As for the Chinese, who knows? They have a language barrier (Jews have always been part of the West and known how things work), and perhaps it is not in their culture or genes to seek influence beyond money. HOWEVER I suspect that non-Chinese Indonesians, Africans now taking their money and others might have a different perspective.

In many respects, in Asia outside of China, the Chinese are analagous to the jews including in political terms.

Chalk the decline of the West up to the weakness of the WASP. And what of the Christian leaders of the UK, were they made of such flaccid stuff that they felt compelled to listen to any dumb thing any Jew tells them? Jesus, sometimes it seems that goyim will believe anything a Jew tells them.

“Oh yeah? You think I’m a fatherless bastard? Well, I’ve got news for you. My dad is GOD! What does your dad do, eh?”

ANOTHER JEW TELLS ME: If Nazism means belief that a German “Volk”or ethnic German should be united under one Government despite the fact that the ethnic Germans were spread out in a number of countries other than Germany proper, then at least in part it was reaction to Judaism. (Because of the desire to have an ethnically homogeneous or “pure” nation, and Jews were an obvious, but not the only, non-Germanic group within that geographic region) But are Jews and Judaism indistinguishable?

If you view it as basically an anti-Communist movement, to the extent that the Nazis conflated Bolshevism with Judaism it was also a reaction to Judaism. However, despite the fact that many leading Bolsheviks were Jews and dominated the Soviet regime, they were not practitioners of Judaism, even in the most reform sense. They were atheists. However, most Europeans at that time (and most Jews) believed that Jews were a separate race, (although what was meant by race was more akin to ethnicity) and Judaism was just the religion practiced by many members of that race.

If you view it as an affirmative action program for Germans within Germany, it was a reaction to perceived Jewish domination of important sectors of life-law, publishing, medicine, banking- but this in itself isn’t Judaism.

So at least in part Nazism was a reaction to the threat of Jews interfering with the Germanic Volk, with Jews being active in the leading Communist Regime (as well as unsuccessful ones after WWI in Hungary and parts of Germany) and the rise of Jews to prominence and power in Germany itself.

Without these external stimuli, Nazism probably would just be some sort of cultish Germanic/Aryan pagan group with limited appeal in Germany. Because of the way Hitler manipulated the perception of the threat, coupled with the German resentment and anger about the armistice after WWI and the decadence, both political and social of the Weimar regime, he was able to position the Nazis into the leading political movement that would defend Germany from these threats and lead the German people to greatness.

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Jury Nullification

In 2004, I served on a jury in Inglewood. The case was a young black man who was pulled over while driving on suspicion of being drunk and who then took a blood alcohol test showing he was intoxicated. The facts were clear but the blacks on the jury would not convict a black man and so we ended up with a hung jury.

Patricia Cohen writes about a black former U.S. attorney:

Now, from his fourth-floor office at George Washington University Law School, Paul Butler, 36, has become the leading spokesman for “jury nullification,” urging African American jurors to ignore rock-solid evidence of guilt and set nonviolent black defendants free.

In the backwash of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal, Butler’s calls to put loyalty to race above loyalty to law have fueled anxieties about the nation’s trial system. While fear of renegade jurors has prodded some state legislatures to consider abandoning unanimous jury verdicts, a federal appeals court last week declared that judges have a duty to prevent nullification. In the District, some judges have started issuing what’s become known as an “anti-Butler” warning to jurors; a New York Times editorial this week chided Butler, and angry GW alumni have demanded
unsuccessfully that he be fired.

“I do want to subvert the criminal justice system,” Butler declares unapologetically. A system that treats black crack smokers more harshly than whites who snort powdered cocaine doesn’t deserve respect, he says.

What seems remarkable, however, is not simply that someone is advocating nullification, but that this former prosecutor, this Justice Department veteran, this product of the establishment, is its preeminent champion.

How did Paul Butler move from there to here?

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The Freedom Party vs The American Freedom Party

The Freedom Party in New York state was founded to promote the interests of blacks.

The American Freedom Party, by contrast, seeks a white America.

And now a story from 2000:

In the first 12 days of the Rocker controversy, there were 165 newspaper stories written about him, according to a search of the Dow Jones newspaper database.

(That doesn’t count the thousands of times his name was mentioned on TV or the radio, or in stories in magazines and other publications.)

Now let me tell you about another 12-day cycle, beginning May 15, when Penn State University quarterback Rashard Casey and a buddy made the news.

Casey, who is black, is a talented college quarterback. But like Rocker, it wasn’t his athletic talents that helped him get his name out there.

It wasn’t just what was in his head, the way Rocker earned his nose-pick version of fame.

Instead, it was how Casey allegedly used his fists.

Casey and another black player have been charged with aggravated assault for what happened outside a tavern in Hoboken, N.J.

According to witnesses and police, they smashed a man’s face [because he was with a black woman] until it looked like a broken pomegranate. Then, allegedly, they bounced his head on the concrete, again and again, until he was unconscious. They allegedly did such a thorough job, it’s a good bet that the victim will need extensive reconstructive facial surgery.

The victim’s name is Patrick Fitzsimmons, 34, a Hoboken police officer.

Since I mentioned the race of the alleged attackers, I should be fair and let you know about Fitzsimmons–he’s a pinkish white guy of Irish extraction.

Fitzsimmons was unarmed and off duty at the time of the beating. But when he’s working, Fitzsimmons is assigned to the community policing division, where he is a “tolerance training” instructor.

In Hoboken, tolerance training is part of the Police Department’s efforts to stop hate crimes.

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Ethiopian Jews In Israel Embrace U.S. Black Culture

Dan writes: “I don’t think Israelis are going out of their way to discriminate against the Ethiopians. They are just involved in their own life’s struggles and don’t have the time or patience to help the newer olim integrate into society. Other immigrant groups didn’t receive such coddling either. They were just expected to integrate by themselves, like the Yemenites, who also came from a primitive culture, yet found a way to blend in. Perhaps if they were exposed to the religious environment of Israel, rather than just the secular, they would not be seeking to adopt an identity they don’t really understand and is antithetical to the Jewish values that drew their parents to Israel in the first place.”

Sari Bashi writes for the AP in 1999:

JERUSALEM – Batya Tadela, a 16-year-old Ethiopian immigrant to Israel, used to be hurt and insulted when people called her “kushi,” a Hebrew word commonly used to refer to blacks.

But now, like many young Ethiopian immigrants weathering tough times, Tadela has found an unlikely source of solace, pride and identity: America’s black culture.

The fact that most of these Ethiopian teenagers have never visited the United States or even met a black American doesn’t prevent them from embracing rap music and hip-hop fashion, along with sometimes misguided stereotypes gleaned from MTV, movies and news reports.

“All the Ethiopians try to imitate the (American) blacks,” said Tadela, who emigrated from the Gondar region of Ethiopia seven years ago and lives near Tel Aviv.

Not-so-promising land

For centuries, Ethiopian Jews dreamed of reaching Israel. Much of the 65,000-member community here arrived in 1985 and 1991 through a series of dramatic airlifts. Thousands of others perished trekking through brutal conditions in the Sudan desert on the way to airlift departure points.

But for many Ethiopians, Israel has proved something less than a promised land. As a group, they remain at the bottommost rung of the country’s economic and educational ladder, still struggling to find social, religious and cultural acceptance. In addition, Ethiopian traditions of indirect communication and quiet respect are often drowned in the din of Israel’s competitive, in-your-face mainstream culture.

Nineteen-year-old Or Masrak uses a good chunk of her pay as a drugstore clerk to dance at a rap-and-reggae nightclub in Tel Aviv.

No feelings of rejection

“When we listen to black music, we don’t have to feel rejected,” she shouted over the pounding beat. “Here, we come together and learn to stand up for our rights.”

While overt racial discrimination is relatively rare, many Ethiopians feel the sting of what they see as Israeli disdain for them as newcomers from a primitive country.

Because many parents can’t provide their children with school supplies or a quiet place to study, some teens attend state-run boarding schools attended by Israeli youngsters from troubled homes. In some neighborhood grade schools, there is de facto segregation that Ethiopians feel has meant a lower standard of education.

The Ethiopians’ high-school dropout rate exceeds 17 percent, or more than double the national average, the Education Ministry says.

Young Ethiopians’ attraction to black American culture worries Ethiopian community elders, who fear teens are distancing themselves from their own traditions.

“To be Ethiopian is not `in,’ ” said Shula Mula, an activist at the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews. “But to be Michael Jackson is to be admired by Israelis.”

Media nurtures black stereotype

Most Ethiopian teenagers are familiar only with stereotypical depictions of black life in the United States: either the despair of drugs and crime or the glamour of sports and music stardom.

For most, this infatuation manifests itself in ardently following black American music and fashion. For a few, it takes the form of hard-edged racial rhetoric.

“I don’t talk to whites,” said a 16-year-old in baggy jeans and sneakers who calls himself Tupac after the slain American rapper Tupac Shakur.

“It’s a form of protest,” Ethiopian lawmaker Addisu Masala said of teens who identify with American blacks. “When a child feels that he’s not wanted here, he looks for an alternative identity.”

Younger Ethiopians see in black American culture a vibrant energy and a chance for success against the odds.

“When I see American movies that show a lot of blacks succeeding, it makes me feel good,” said Shmuel Batla, a 22-year-old cook. “If he can succeed, so can I.”

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The Gifts Of Diversity

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam writes:

In areas of greater diversity, our respondents demonstrate:

* Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.17

* Lower political efficacy – that is, confidence in their own influence.18

* Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.19

* Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).20

* Less likelihood of working on a community project.21

* Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.22
• 
Fewer close friends and confidants.23

* Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.24

* More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment’.25

JONATHAN TILOVE WRITES:

As Gerteis and Mosaic colleagues Douglas Hartmann and Penny Edgell put it in work published this year: “We are at a crucial and unprecedented moment. Across otherwise deep political and social divisions, Americans have come to appreciate diversity and to explicitly promote it.”

In their study, based on a survey in 2003 of more than 2,000 respondents, they found that fewer than 5 percent considered diversity mostly a weakness in American life. Forty-three percent said it was mostly a source of strength, and 50 percent replied that it was equally a source of strength and weakness.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The authors noted that in school and at work, Americans are taught to value difference, and they know by now that a positive reaction to diversity is the culturally acceptable answer.

The authors found disagreement and concern about exactly what diversity means.

“Black or white, happy multiculturalist or ambivalent realist, Americans of all stripes see it as a problem if there are simply groups with no national culture to unify them,” they wrote.

Using the same survey to conduct in-depth interviews with respondents in Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Hartmann and a colleague found that people were often tongue-tied when it came to explaining diversity’s value.

They also seemed unable to talk about issues of race and inequality. Here diversity-speak emerges as a kind of “happy talk” in which “racial differences can be simultaneously acknowledged and even celebrated at the very same time that race and its problems are downplayed and disavowed.”

America has a lot at stake in its capacity deal with diversity.

In 1970, the United States was 83 percent non-Hispanic white, 11 percent black, less than 5 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian. Today, largely as a result of immigration reform in 1965, America is 66 percent non-Hispanic white, 15 percent Hispanic, 13 percent black and a little more than 4 percent Asian.

The younger the population, the less white it is. According to Mark Mather of the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau, in 1980, 26 percent of America’s under-20 population was minority. By 2006, 42 percent of the under-20 population—but only 20 percent of the 60-and-up population—was minority. The gap is only going to widen.

According to an analysis by Mather, those states with the biggest gap in the proportions of the older and younger populations spent the lowest share of their economies on public education. The three most racially homogenous states—Maine, Vermont and West Virginia—had the highest proportional spending on higher education.

Called “the Florida effect,” it is not a new finding. White taxpayers are generally reluctant to support a public sector they view as mostly benefiting people who aren’t white.

In 2002, economists Dora Costa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn at Tufts University surveyed 15 recent economics papers on the impact of diversity on social capital and found that all had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement. In more diverse communities, people participate less as measured by how they allocate their time, their money, their voting and their willingness to take risks to help others.”

STANLEY ROTHMAN WRITES: It is commonly believed that increases in black enrollment will produce positive assessments from students about their educational experience. But in fact the correlations went in the opposite direction. As the proportion of black students rose, student satisfaction with their university experience dropped, as did their assessments of the quality of their education and the work ethic of their peers. In addition, the higher the enrollment diversity, the more likely students were to say that they personally experienced discrimination. The same pattern of negative correlations between educational benefits and increased black enrollment appeared in the responses of faculty and administrators. Both groups perceived decreases in educational quality and academic preparation as the number of black students increased. Faculty members also rated students as less hard-working as diversity increased.

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