WHEN WHITE SUPREMACISTS GATHER, THEIR TALKS CAN GET VERY DETAILED
St. Louis Post-Dispatch April 6, 2000, Thursday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION SECTION: NEWS, Pg. A6 BYLINE: Terence Samuel; Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau DATELINE: WASHINGTON
A recent conference in Virginia was a reminder that the harsh rhetoric and extremist views that fuel racial divisions are hardly things of the past. Speakers claimed that the culture of white Americans is under attack; that science shows the races are intellectually and physically unequal; that embracing diversity is a mistake. A White House official who focuses on race relations found the gathering "disheartening."
At the fourth annual American Renaissance conference, participants heard that white women have larger birth canals and blacks have narrower hips and back jaws, proving, the speaker said, that whites' brains are superior.
Jared Taylor is a cordial man, courteous to a fault. He speaks in full paragraphs, and much of what he has to say is about race in America. He believes that white people and their culture are under threat by what he calls the "cult of egalitarianism and diversity" and he is out to destroy that cult.
All men are not created equal in his view, and white people ought to reassert their rightful place as leaders of the world. To listen to him is to hear a voice screaming from the farthest extremes of American political thought, and the voices swelled into a chorus last week in a hotel ballroom in Reston, Va., just outside Washington, where Taylor held the fourth annual American Renaissance conference.
Taylor believes that those like President Bill Clinton who preach diversity are deluding themselves and are also hypocrites. He believes John Rocker was right. Rocker is a pitcher for the Atlanta Braves who was suspended and fined for inflammatory comments he made last year about minorities.
The loss of confidence
At a time when rapid demographic change promises to change the face of America, and maybe further complicate difficult racial issues, the American Renaissance conference was a stark reminder that the harsh rhetoric and extremist views that increase racial divisions have not gone away.
The conference was sponsored by the Virginia-based Century Foundation, of which Taylor is the president. He is also editor of a magazine, American Renaissance, after which the conference is named.
The overall tone of the event was one of crisis, with many participants claiming that their culture, European culture, is disappearing. "For those of us who love European people and their heritage, the hundred years we have just gone through have been an absolute horror," Taylor said. "How different the world was in 1900. That's the time when Europeans and their overseas brethren were the only cultural, military, economic force that mattered to the world."
Taylor lays the blame for his theory of white decline at the feet of the two world wars, which he described as fratricidal wars, and communism. But the biggest culprit was that white people simply lost their nerve, he said.
"The worst thing that happened, I believe, was a terrible loss of co nfidence that afflicted whites all over the world," Taylor said. "World wars were terrible, but the West rebuilt, and communism was terrible too, but it was finally done to death. But a loss of confidence so profound that it begins to border on self-loathing; that is what makes the 20th century one of unprecedented losses."
Over two days last weekend, a group of about 200 whites, mostly men, listened as speakers denounced the Republican Party for not being sufficiently conscious about race. They heard a Canadian psychologist lay out in laborious detail his views on how differences in brain size make whites superior to blacks. They heard about the "encouraging signs of change" in Europe-Austria, France, Britain- where white nationalist movements are reasserting themselves on the political stage in ways that, the speakers claimed, American whites are too timid to do.
"It's kind of disheartening that there are people who still have these kinds of ideas," said Ben Johnson, who heads the One America office at the White House. The office was established in the aftermath of Clinton's Race Initiative, which sought to improve racial dialogue across the country. "I don't think there is any place in our society for this kind of division."
But in Reston last week, there was no couching of explanations and no apologies.
Among the participants was Gordon Lee Baum, a St. Louis lawyer and head of the Council of Conservative Citizens. He said he found the conference an intellectual exercise.
"I think there is a legitimate concern," said Baum. "We are an endangered species. It is perfectly OK in our society if you're black, or Asian or American Indian to be proud of the fact, but if people say the same thing, and they are of European descent, it's racist. It's kind of a bafflement to me; it's intellectually dishonest. Why shouldn't everybody have the same right to be proud of their background?"
The birth-canal theory
But the theme of the conference was why whites have so much more to be proud of than anyone else.
J. Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario who has preached that superior genes in whites have made them intellectually and culturally superior to blacks. On the first day of the conference he declared that "whites have, on average, more neurons and cranial size than blacks." And brain size is a very good predictor of IQ, Rushton added.
He said that white women have larger birth canals than black women, an average of 1.1 inches. "This is an accommodation in evolutionary terms to give birth to large brain babies," Rushton said.
And there was more. According to Rushton: Blacks have narrower back jaws, which serves to inhibit brain expansion, and therefore reduce IQs. "Blacks have more teeth, larger teeth and a bigger jaw," he said. He went on to allege a relationship between brain size and arrest rates, insisting on "an incredibly linear relationship between the number of blacks in a state and the number of homicides."
That audience listened in awed silence.
Then Rushton turned his presentation to sports. "Blacks have an advantage in sports because they have narrower hips, but they have narrower hips because they have smaller brains."
In an interesting twist, Rushton said his research showed that East Asians have larger brains than whites. That finding did not always sit too well with his audience.
During the question-and-answer period after Rushton's talk, one participant rose with a question. "Given the higher IQs of Asians, do you have any theory about why they haven't given as much to the world as whites?"
Rushton said that in the case of whites and Asians, the difference in brain size is "not that meaningful." He said he did not know why East Asians were not as "culturally innovative" as whites, but he speculated: "They have a more cautious temperament."
There were no challenges to these theories. But David Duke, a former Louisiana state senator and former Ku Klux Klan leader, rose to address the IQ differences between white and Asians. Isn't it true, he asked Rushton, that while Asians have on average a high IQ, most of them cluster around the average, while there is a wider range of IQ scores among whites? So, he suggested, while the average Asian might be smarter than the average white person, "We've got more geniuses than they do?" Rushton said that was a possibility.
Feeling abandoned by GOP
When the discussion turned to politics, there was general frustration about what many saw as a lack of representation for their views in the political mainstream. Some said they felt abandoned by Republicans. "We have to keep falling down one stair at a time until we hit bottom," said Samuel Francis, editor in chief of Citizens Informer, a newspaper published by the St. Louis-based Council of Conservative Citizens: "We have to find an alternative to the Republican Party, even if it means putting up with the Democrats for a while."
In a survey of Council of Conservative Citizens members, the Citizens Informer found that 58.2 percent would vote for Pat Buchanan in the presidential race, 23.6 percent for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, and less than 1 percent for Vice President Al Gore.
Still, not every one was happy with Buchanan. Duke, even as he pledged his support for Buchanan's White House bid as the Reform Party nominee, did so with reservations.
"I don't think that he would agree with the ideas that we are hearing here today," Duke said. "I just don't think he has that much racial consciousness."
While it is difficult in American politics to find people who believe that Buchanan may be too liberal on any issue, that was just one of the startling elements of the gathering.
It was Taylor, in a Saturday afternoon speech, who seemed to sum up the essence of the movement.
"What we have lost is a firm sense of legitimate people-hood," he said, "We have lost the ability to say 'us' or 'we.' . . . Most whites simply cannot bring themselves to say this is our culture, this is our people, this is our nation; it belongs to us and no one else's."
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