John Engelman, American Renaissance, December 4, 2014

Face to Face with Race, edited by Jared Taylor, New Century Books, 2014, 211 pp., $17.95.

Face to Face with Race brings the reader face to face with the realities that justify race realism. These realities are conveyed in 14 essays about personal experiences that originally appeared in American Renaissance, either in the print version or on the website. The message of each of these essays is that racial differences are real and innate, and mean that the presence of blacks in this country is a perpetual burden.

In his introduction to this collection, Jared Taylor writes that he likes statistics more than anecdotes but that sometimes anecdotes offer insights that statistics cannot:

Statistics are not reality; they are only a way to try to interpret reality. It is useful to know that the average black IQ is one standard deviation lower than the average white IQ, but what does that mean?

Some of the essays suggest answers to that question. In Christopher Jackson’s “A White Teacher Speaks Out,” he includes a poignant quotation from a black student who is struggling with an assignment: “I cain’t do dis Mr. Jackson. I black.” When Mr. Jackson asked his students what would happen to them if whites suddenly disappeared, one answered candidly, “We screwed.” The others laughed in agreement.

African blacks reportedly have the same view. In an article called “South Africa under Black Rule,” Gedaliah Braun wrote, “Ask any African why blacks can’t, for example, make airplanes or computers and he’ll look at you as if you were foolish for asking, since the answer is obvious: ‘The white man has the brains for it, and we don’t.’ ”

Black incompetence sometimes appears in places where one might not expect it. Black athletic prominence, as well as high black rates of violent crime, might suggest that blacks would be good combat soldiers. This does not seem to be the case.

In “Diversity in the Army,” retired Army officer Duncan Hengest writes that “in Iraq, I was repeatedly astonished by the inability of many senior black officers to think through problems.” One of the examples he gives is a suggestion by a black officer in Iraq to put “snipers in trees.” That officer apparently had not noticed that there not many trees in Iraq, and that the few one finds there are mostly palm trees–which are of no use to snipers.

Another problem in the Army is that blacks usually require remedial training. Weapons are more complex than in the past, and it takes intelligence to learn how to use them.

Some blacks are unwilling to fight. Mr. Hengest writes that “one cannot read about the Korean War without running into tales of black units that were unable to hold together under fire.” He adds that “the all-black 24th Infantry was notorious for hasty retreats.”

Finally, black soldiers are more likely than whites to commit serious crimes. “As a peacetime platoon leader, I was always being roped into rape investigations,” writes Mr. Hengest. “Invariably the suspects were black. Whites would get drunk and rowdy, but I never knew one to be a rapist.”

In an article called “Fighting ‘Discrimination’ Rather Than Fires,” Ray Batz writes that firefighting requires more intelligence than most blacks have, and more strength than most women have. Political pressure to increase the numbers of blacks and women in departments has resulted in drastically lowered hiring standards. Mr. Batz notes that “some women are simply too weak to raise even the 24 foot ladder, one of the lightest in use.”

Mr. Batz claims that “it is impossible to know” how much the quality of firefighting has declined since departments have been forced to hire blacks and women, but concludes that “quota hiring has undoubtedly meant that people have died who did not have to die. Buildings burned that did not have to burn.” This is probably true, but it would be interesting to know if there are any studies that throw light on this.

Many people have a strong desire to believe that blacks are equal to whites in every way, and that race preferences are a legitimate way to make up for past discrimination. It is therefore useful to read about the actual consequences of preference policies.

In “Blacks and High Steel,” Tom Dilberger writes that when apprenticeships in steel frame construction for skyscrapers were opened to blacks, “they all failed.” This was unacceptable, so a judge who knew nothing about steel framing ruled that the standards had to be changed so blacks could succeed in the apprentice program.

“When black men started filtering on to the job,” writes Mr. Dilberger, “it was clear from the beginning that they had no ability to do the work.” He continues:

Before long, it became impossible to fire any but the very worst. Courts mandated that a certain percentage of the workforce, especially on government jobs, be made up of black men.

Denis Ruiz writes about the changes in Fairview Village, New Jersey, where he grew up. What was a pleasant white community changed drastically after blacks moved in and is now, in Mr. Ruiz’s words, “a wasteland.” His mother has been unable to move away: “Recently, a black teenager knocked my mother to the ground, injuring her, and took her purse. That sort of thing was unheard of in the old neighborhood, but it is common now.” This is an example of the terrible reality many people encounter when they come face to face with race.

There are two articles in this anthology about what life is like for white prisoners. There are many fascinating details about the enforced racial intimacy that prison means for whites, but a number of observations stand out. One is that blacks are so loud that most whites–and even a few blacks–wear ear plugs 24 hours a day. Another is that black prisoners masturbate publicly whenever they see a female prison guard. At least in the Texas prison system, this has been so common that prison trousers are made without flies.

Prison is a place where illusions cannot last. Fantasies are stripped away when people of different races are forced together, and these articles describe the resulting racial conflicts in blunt terms. It is no surprise that virtually all inmates of all races would like to be segregated, but out-of-touch judges have ruled against this obvious solution to prison conflict.

My chief regret about this collection is that it does not include anything by Mary Morrison. She is a public school teacher in the Los Angeles area who has written several articles for American Renaissance about such things as the race gap in achievement, the yearly and futile efforts to close that gap, and how teachers, rather than racial reality, are always blamed for the gap. Her articles could have provided a worthy addition to this book.

I also wish that some of the essays were not limited to personal experiences–fascinating though these are–but included more general observations. For example, Gedaliah Braun, who has lived for many years in South Africa, writes that “probably the most significant direct effect of black rule has been the dramatic rise in crime, primarily black-on-white crime.” There must be statistics on how such things as murder rates, median income, and per capita GDP have changed since blacks started running the country.

I understand that the purpose of this collection was to let people speak from experience rather than present research results, but I think the book would have been stronger if it had not been quite so subjective. Even so, the cumulative impact of these articles–all of which have the ring of authenticity–is a forceful demonstration of the folly of pretending that race is anything but a terrible fault line in American society.