Knockout game knocks out a litany of leftist lies in one fell swoop, er, punch

The knockout game phenomenon really, really makes the Establishment uncomfortable. Although it took several years, the seemingly senseless savagery it displayed finally forced the knockout game from being a subject covered almost exclusively by the alternative right to something the mainstream media found increasingly difficult to ignore. Sure, Fox News still does ten minute segments on it without once mentioning race, but at least they're raising awareness. That counts for something!

Four major reasons why the knockout game causes Establishment pontiffs such anxiety:

1) It validates the Derb's non-black version of "The Talk". Be weary around blacks who are unknown to you, especially when they outnumber your group, especially especially if you're a female or a man aged 40+, and especially especially especially if you're alone.

2) It makes a mockery of the mendacious hate crime Narrative the Establishment perpetually pushes. It's as familiar as it is diametrically opposed to reality--the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman saga being the most recent highly visible illustration, but it's pervasive presence can be detected in virtually every case in which putative irrational -isms are involved.

Instead, the knockout game displays the reality of interracial crime--it is an overwhelmingly black-on-white affair, with blacks nearly 40 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than viceversa. Blacks are even significantly more likely to be convicted of federally designated hate crimes than whites are (and that "white" number includes relatively more criminally prone Hispanics).

3) Relatedly, the knockout game reveals that one of the left's favorite tropes--that crime is an unfortunate but essentially unavoidable consequence of poverty--is bullshit. Correlation isn't causation, heh. The game's perpetrators aren't acting out of desperation, they're not stealing anything, and they're not enjoying any material gain from their vicious assaults--instead, they're acting out of a mix of boredom (poor people have a lot of free time on their hands), social posturing, racial animosity, and animalistic impulsivity.

4) It is about the most effective argument in favor of gun rights imaginable. The police can't protect potential victims from knockouts and contemporary American communities won't organically protect their fellow citizens, either. Only you can prevent knockouts, and the surest way of preventing them (or second surest--see item #1) is by packing heat.

Trayvon Martin Day

The administration of Carrick high school in Pittsburgh planned and subsequently scrapped "Trayvon Martin Day" in which students would be encouraged to wear hoodies in celebration and remembrance of the dead teenager. The school stepped back after opposition from several parents who publicly expressed concerns over the day, specifically with the consequences it would bring to students who chose not to participate.

If this were a school on Martin Luther King boulevard or in a plush area of Belmont, there would likely still be media 'controversy' surrounding the proposed honorific day, but visceral fears for the safety of the students from parents at said schools probably wouldn't be a part of it.

Why so much worry about violent fallout among the student body at Carrick? Diversity. In addition to strength, it's also social combustibility! A pie chart of the racial composition of Carrick's student body:

Residuals are 5% two or more races, 1% Hispanic, 1% Asian. Despite Zimmerman's Hispanic heritage, his persecution and the coverage surrounding it operated upon the old binary racial template of oppressed black America under the thumb of oppressive white America. Too fitting.

And the school's unsurprising scholastic profile (Carrick students' proficiency rates, Pennsylvania's statewide proficiency rates):

Math -- 38%, 60%
Reading -- 57%, 68%

Science -- 16%, 42%

Writing -- 80%, 83%

Race and anarcho-tyranny

My knowledge of the world beyond my own front yard being inchoate at best upon Sam Francis' passing, my fellowship with the term "anarcho-tyranny" is superficial, but the contemporary popular portrayal of Racism in America seems like one illustration after another of soft anarcho-tyranny in action. Without delving into the well of mendacity that George Zimmerman has been dunked into head first, held underwater for over a year, consider a couple of other extremely high profile examples:

- Multibillionairess Oprah Winfrey claims, after the fact, that she was denied access to a $37,000 handbag by a store clerk because said clerk, who is white, is racist. There were apparently no other witnesses to the exchange and the putative racism was implicit, as Oprah didn't even accuse the clerk of saying anything explicitly racist. In this she said, she said story, the Establishment took the side of rich and famous media mogul and pointed both barrels at the hapless, powerless prole, operating on the Occident's time-tested rule that the accused must always be presumed guilty until proven innocent. It reacted with an outpouring of sympathy for the hardship Oprah suffered alongside its many lamentations over the fact that, even in places acculturated in cosmopolitanism and even in situations in which world renowned people are involved, irrational bigotry and ugly stereotypes still lurk.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of whites and especially Asians aspiring to be admitted as students at exclusive colleges are denied enrollment at the schools they aspire to because less capable Hispanic and especially black applicants are given preferential treatment at the former groups' expense.

While the latter evinces a blatant disregard for isonomy--which is, perhaps ironically, the foundation upon which our Proposition Nation is built upon--the triviality of the former, even if veracious (which is questionable, as Oprah happens to be promoting an almost too perfectly germane black grievance porn movie at the moment), is well captured in the words of the Derb:

The less blacks have to complain about — and for us working stiffs, it's hard to see that a person with 2.9 billion dollars in the bank has anything to complain about — the more they want to whine and guilt-trip us non-blacks over tiny or imaginary slights.

It would be interesting if an organization like Pew, which is honest enough to conduct this sort of thing, surveyed the public's level of awareness of the perceived snubbing Oprah received and compared it to awareness of widespread favorable admissions sun people receive at the expense of ice people who are denied them. More familiarity with the tyranny than the anarchy, I'd bet.

- A clown in flyover country is figuratively crucified and literally banished for clowning around:

At the rodeo here last Saturday night, a clown wearing an Obama mask stood on the arena’s dirt floor, propped up like a straw man with the appearance that a broom stick was going up his backside. A second clown called him “ya big goober.” Before letting the bull loose to charge at the clown with the Obama mask, the second clown provided live narration over the loudspeakers: 

“Obama, they’re coming for you this time.”

“He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha.” 

“Yahoo! We’re gonna smoke Obama.”

The president of the Missouri NAACP accused the first clown of committing a hate crime.

Tyranny first, again. Poor form on my part, I know.

Anyway, the anarchy stretches from sea to shining sea, encapsulated in FBI crime statistics showing blacks to be some 40 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are to commit violent crimes against blacks. Blacks are even 220% more likely to commit federally designated hate crimes than whites are. Blacks are more likely to identify racially than are whites, and they are more likely than whites are to be influenced in how they cast their votes by the racial compositions of the political candidates they are voting for. Indeed, ornery rodeo clowns are the nation's most pressing problem!

Redux: Surprise, surprise--blacks more 'racist' than whites, Hispanics are

For my 30th birthday, Rasmussen conducted a straightforward poll on perceived racism in the US by race. The results:

Thirty-seven percent (37%) of American Adults think most black Americans are racist, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 15% consider most white Americans racist, while 18% say the same of most Hispanic Americans.

...

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

Among white adults, 10% think most white Americans are racist; 38% believe most blacks are racist, and 17% say most Hispanics are racist.

The reaction on the left (to the extent that it the poll has been acknowledged at all) has been predictably dismissive and disparaging of Rasmussen as an organization. Individuals aren't the only ones susceptible to Watsoning or Richwining.

Note that these results are not merely due to each group thinking other groups are more racist than they themselves are--even blacks recognize blacks to be more racist than are whites or Hispanics. The high standing in pop culture of a Chris Rock, anyone? I don't need to detail the double standard on display here--if a white comedian was to be one-tenth as candid about race as Rock is, he'd be blacklisted by the entire entertainment wing of the Cathedral and forced to exist exclusively on the internet if he existed at all. Speaking of double standards, racial epithets are of course off limits for some groups but not so much for others. And on and on and on.

The data, to the extent that they are gathered, confirms as much. In the 2008 Democratic primaries, when the media narrative revolved around whether or not whites would vote for a black candidate or not--we're talking Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton here--exit polling clearly showed that even (especially?) among Democrats, blacks were more influenced by the races of the candidates than whites were, and of course blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama. In 2004, the GSS showed blacks to be nearly four times as likely as whites were to choose race as one of the three most important ways they self-identify from a list of ten possible choices.

As a self-styled race realist, the term "racist" is a difficult one for me to define with much utility. What is generally considered to be "racist" in polite 21st century American parlance would be, in a sane world, prefixed by the adverb "irrationally"--someone who despises an affable, industrious black man for no other reason than the color of his skin fits this definition, for example. A rational racism (or rational racialism), in contrast, is the more common and commonsensical realization that, on average, different groups of people behave differently from one another and have different characteristics than other groups of people do, and consequently said groups shouldn't be presumed to be indistinguishable from one another. In reality, though, both varieties of racism are merged under the umbrella term "racism" in which rational variety of racism is at least as despicable as irrational variety is (if not worse, as the Cathedral is aware that the former aligns strikingly well with the information people's own lying eyes are conveying to them and is, as a consequence, more threatening than the latter, which just sounds off-putting and buffoonish).

That digression aside, these results should come as little surprise to red pill poppers. Blacks are perpetually encouraged, from both within the 'black community' and from without, to view everything that happens around them through a racial lens. More recently, Hispanics have been offered similarly tinted spectacles, but as Hispanics in the US are, relative to blacks, less pathological, racially more dissimilar, and less civically engaged, the results haven't been nearly as 'effective' (at least not yet--give it a couple more amnesties and majority-minority status and we'll revisit my evaluation).

As the Inductivist illustrated years ago, the less prosperous and less put together a racial or ethnic group is, the more pride (and thus more awareness) it has in being member to said race or ethnicity. Well, blacks are the least prosperous, least put together racial group in the country. The very starkness of this black failure accentuates black racism by making it so blatantly obvious to blacks and non-blacks alike--if only whispered in private in the case of the latter--that blacks are underachievers. Always have been, always will be?

Blacks have more historical grievances to air against the (former) WASP majority than other minority groups do, so their moral claim to victimhood putatively dwarfs that of other groups. Use what you've got and exploit that white guilt to the hilt! Never mind that not only today do whites (and other non-blacks) have far more to fear from blacks than blacks do from whites (or other non-blacks), it's also highly probable that in all of the nation's history, blacks have killed more whites than whites have killed blacks*.

In closing, note that becoming the most powerful person in the world isn't enough--not nearly enough, and quite possibly counterproductive--to reduce perceptions of racial tension in the US:

Overall, just 30% of all Americans now rate race relations in the United States as good or excellent. Fourteen percent (14%) describe them as poor. Twenty-nine percent (29%) think race relations are getting better, while 32% believe they are getting worse. Thirty-five percent (35%) feel they are staying about the same.

It never ends. It just gets worse. Really, though, in the words of that great sage, what do we expect when, upon finding ourselves in a hole, our collective solution is to keep on digging?

* Doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, the contemporary figures show that each year around 1,500 more whites are killed by blacks in the US than blacks are killed by whites (homicidally, that is). In contrast, in the 85 years from 1882 to 1968--the era of Jim Crow laws--there was a total of just under 3,500 lynchings of blacks (presumably almost exclusively by whites). Okay, so maybe in the last decade blacks have spilled more white blood than whites spilled black blood in the first couple of centuries of the country's existence, but we're talking about lynching here for crying out loud, what could be more brutal than that?! Well, I'm no expert, but I think if I had to pick my poison I'd opt for hanging over this.

Good old fashioned family values, on which we used to rely

Pew Research delivers some inspiring Saturday morning reading, of the diversity-is-strength variety:

Never married mothers are significantly younger, disproportionally non-white, and have lower education and income. Close to half of never married mothers in 2011 (46%) are ages 30 and younger, six-in-ten are either black (40%) or Hispanic (24%), and nearly half (49%) have a high school education or less [sic*]. Their median family income was $17,400 in 2011, the lowest among all families with children.

In fidelity to the blog's raison d'etre, let's look at the risk factors among women of becoming never-married single mothers by comparing non-whites to the non-Hispanic white rate of bastard birthing. The following table shows the rates of this strain of alternative family formation (that is, one in which the state and/or extended family serve as substantial providers, since no one is providing for themselves and their spawn on less than $20k a year) relative to the non-Hispanic white rate:

Illegitimacy	vs. whites
Black	608.5%
Hispanic	258.2%
Asian/PI	49.6%

The Pew figures excluded those aged 65 or older, so I've made the necessary corresponding adjustments using 2010 Census data.

Look, my fellow Republicans, if we stop comparing Hispanics to our own voters and instead compare them to other minorities--which, since we must exclude Asians as they are too inconvenient to think about when we use the term "minority", means blacks--we see that indeed they do display both a penchant for traditional family values and a propensity to vote for the GOP. We need to pass the comprehensive immigration reform now, or, as Bill O'Reilly argues so convincingly, we'll "lose the Hispanic vote and never win another national election, ever!"

It's Marge Simpson's weight loss logic at work: "For low-fat, this pudding is pretty good. Mmm, mmm, I can just feel the pounds melting off."

* This probably should read "less than a high school education", compared to a national high school graduation rate of nearly 80%. As is, it insinuates that 51% of single mothers have gone to college, which, in a country where one-fourth of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, would be quite 'impressive' (at least from the contemporary education-as-panacea viewpoint).

Geography, race, religion, and class

... is a ridiculously audacious title for the post it introduces.

Anyway, previously, Dan commented:

Poor inner city people go to church more than everyone else, and they theoretically believe in marriage. But they don't believe in losing the government checks.

Having read Charles Murray's Coming Apart, that assertion struck me as inaccurate, with the caveat in mind that, as Murray did through most of The Bell Curve, so as to avoid racial confounding, the relevant research includes only whites. I did a quick check of the GSS, confirming what Murray found--affluent people from rural and suburban areas go to church more than poor urban folks do.

However, Dan correctly pointed out that blacks attend worship services at significantly higher rates than whites do.

I ran the same GSS test, this time for whites exclusively and for blacks exclusively and found the same patterns for both racial groups--wealthy suburban and rural blacks go to church more than poor inner-city blacks do, and wealthy suburban and rural whites attend more than poor inner-city whites do. The rub is that poor urban blacks still attend more than wealthy suburban and rural whites do. Here are the averages. The higher the figure, the more frequently the group attends worship services (n = 2,468, one SD = 2.76):

Group	Attend
Wealthy country blacks	5.64
Poor urban blacks	4.12
Wealthy country whites	3.59
Poor urban whites	3.24

The "wealthy country blacks" row is only comprised of 23 respondents, so take it with caution, but the overall results pass the smell test.

If Dan's in error, it is in the assumption that urban poor = black. While the urban poor are far more likely to be black than the rest of the country is, in absolute terms I don't think blacks comprise an absolute majority of the country's poor city dwellers. As an empirical question, it's tough to get a straight answer because the definitions of "urban" and "poor" aren't standardized, with the idea of "urban" being a lot more expansive at the US Census office than the idea of "ghetto" is in the vernacular.

GSS variables used: RES16(1-4)(6), REALINC(0-30000)(100000-999999), YEAR(2000-2010), ATTEND, RACECEN1(1)(2)

Menthol preference by race

Some follow up on the previous post looking at racial distributions of smokers of the top cigarette brands in the US. Firstly, a couple of commenters asserted that Parliaments are the SWPL brand of choice. Here's the breakdown:

Primarily white with a nice Asian showing and a correspondingly weak NAM share. Looks like we have a winner. Rescued pit bulls suffer secondhand smoke from Newports and then from Parliaments, poor creatures.

Secondly, Billy Bob noted the accusation that by disguising the harshness of cigarette smoke, menthol-flavored cigarettes encourage younger people to take up the vice who might otherwise not if their options were limited to non-menthol options. The FDA applied the same line of reasoning when it banned the sale of other flavored cigarettes in 2009.

Fortunately, the NSHDU survey asked participants whether they've primarily smoked menthols or non-menthols in the past month. Cross referencing these responses to the age ranges of said respondents allows us to look at the relationship of age and menthol preference among smokers. The following graph shows the percentages of smokers who primarily smoked menthols in the last month by age range (and specific age, to the extent the survey data allows for it to be reported). To avoid racial confounding, only non-Hispanic whites are considered:

Tough to argue with the claim that younger smokers are relatively more inclined towards menthols than older (and, by extension, more veteran) smokers are. There is some expected noise, especially among 12 and 13 year-olds, but the trend is clear. The question of whether or not young smokers who take up menthols would be willing to smoke non-menthols at the same age remains, but surely some portion of them would not be apt to do so. Seems plausible to presume that banning menthols would reduce smoking rates (obviously), but more importantly, would disproportionately reduce smoking rates among young people.

There is a racial component to the question of banning menthols, of course. Namely, blacks of all ages are far more likely to smoke menthols than non-blacks are. The following graph shows the menthol/non-menthol distribution of smokers by race:

The idea of banning menthols is akin to prosecuting crack cocaine more aggressively than powder cocaine, and that sets off all kinds of PC alarm bells.

National Survey on Health and Drug Use variables used: CIG30MEN, AGE2, CIG30BR2(120), NEWRACE2(1)(2)(3)(4-5)(6)(7)

Black homicide rates by state

++Addition++In response to Anthony's comment regarding the variances in the New Hampshire and Vermont black offender rates being the difference between one black murderer over five years in the former and five black murderers over the same period of time in the latter, I've noted by asterisk states in which there were fewer than five black murderers per year over the years considered.

Parenthetically, the correlation between a state's white and black offender rates is a statistically significant .52 (p = 0). Removing the low-end black offending states actually mitigates the relationship slightly to .48 (p = 0).

---

We've taken a look at white homicide rates by state. Now let's give black rates a gander. Using an online database out of the University of Michigan that utilizes the familiar SDA interface to pull figures from the Uniform Crime Reporting Data Series' homicide reports from 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2003 is how we'll go about it.

Murder rates among the total population are a lot easier to determine definitively than murder rates by subgroups within a population are. Murder is unlikely to go unreported--a corpse usually provides pretty good evidence of a homicide if it occurred. Take the number of murders by the overall population over a year and, voila, we have the homicide rate. However, the perpetrator(s) is sometimes unknown. Consequently, the sum rates of any number of non-overlapping subgroups is always going to fall short of the rate for the total population, even if the entire population falls into one of the various non-overlapping subgroups being considered.

To address this, for each state I figured the percentage of homicides perpetrated by blacks among those homicides for which the race of the killer was known and then assigned this percentage of the unknown perpetrator number to the black total. This assumes that the racial breakdown of unidentified murderers mirrors that of their identified brethren. Shows like CSI would have us believe that lots of the hard-to-catch killers are white. On the other hand, structural racism suggests that society often turns a blind eye to blacks killing blacks in the ghetto. Who knows? My guess is that this method understates the true black rates but that the effects of said understatements are pretty uniform across states.

Because 2006 is conveniently both the mean and median year employed, the black homicide rate per 100,000 people is calculated by averaging the number of murders in each state over the included five years and comparing it to a state's total black population in 2006. Both numerator and denominator include Hispanics who racially identify as black.

Only non-negligible homicides, which constitute the vast majority of all murders, are included.

Data are available from all states for each of the five years under consideration with the exception of DC (2009 data only) and Florida, which apparently doesn't participate in the UCR. Estimated black murder rates during the aughts per 100,000 blacks, by state:

State	Rate
1. District of Columbia	38.68
2. Pennsylvania	34.16
3. Wisconsin	30.93
4. Michigan	30.89
5. Indiana	30.74
6. Arizona	29.90
7. Louisiana	29.28
8. Nevada	27.71
9. Oklahoma	27.06
10. Missouri	27.01
11. Tennessee	25.20
12. California	25.13
13. Kansas	24.10
14. Maryland	23.73
15. Arkansas	22.79
16. Ohio	22.34
17. Minnesota	21.58
18. Vermont*	21.24
19. West Virginia	19.70
20. Alabama	19.61
21. Illinois	18.62
22. New Jersey	18.19
23. Texas	18.00
24. Colorado	17.89
25. South Carolina	16.64
26. Virginia	16.26
27. Kentucky	16.16
28. New Mexico	16.00
29. North Carolina	15.40
30. Alaska*	15.39
31. Utah*	15.02
32. New York	14.76
33. Washington	14.53
34. Iowa	14.29
35. Delaware	14.00
36. Oregon	13.94
37. Georgia	13.54
38. Massachusetts	13.45
39. Wyoming*	12.57
40. Rhode Island*	11.77
41. Mississippi	11.20
42. Connecticut	10.57
43. Hawaii*	9.14
44. Montana*	8.78
45. South Dakota*	8.69
46. North Dakota*	8.41
47. Idaho*	8.28
48. Maine*	4.42
49. Nebraska*	3.68
50. New Hampshire*	2.23

An accompanying visualization is available here.

States without areas of high black population density generally appear to do the best. Mississippi is an impressive exception to that rule. If asked to take a stab at which American cities have the most dangerous black populations, I bet people answering candidly would heavily include Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit in their short-lists. Well, there you have it. I hear echoes of the unmentionable here, as well.

Not afraid to die, just don't want to be there when it happens

++Addition++Initially, I forgot to include Italians because I was asleep at the wheel. Looking through all the GSS categories for sample sizes sufficient to include, I apparently just missed them, and though people of Italian descent are on the low end (n = 81), it's still worth including them, for suggestive reasons if nothing else. Thanks to St. Louis for pointing it out.

---

Commenting on an article by Daniel Smith in the NYT about the putative nervousness of Jews, Steve Sailer brings up the collective angst associated with Germans, in contrast to say, Slavs, and discusses what distinguishes inward-looking Teutonic anxiety from entertaining, professionalized contemporary Jewish-branded anxiety. That Smith concedes without objection to the notion that Jews are "the only ethnic group I know of that members of other ethnic groups will unabashedly declare to be suffering from collective neurosis," (never mind the veracity of the claim, which is more about accentuating Jewish victim status than representing reality. You know, reality, that place where non-NAMs are terrified of saying anything negative about Jews and only Jews like Daniel Smith are allowed to write articles discussing Jewish tendencies), shows that it's a stereotype elite Jews are more proud than ashamed of, a point Smith makes explicit later in the piece. Our minds are always racing, juggling all the concerns of the world, that we can't ever just relax in the backyard on the hammock on a lazy summer afternoon. How horrible that we must suffer so!

The archetypal Woody Allen character (not the actual man, as Steve points out) didn't just fashion a stereotype out of thin air, though, it constructed the golem's traits based on real life attributes. Perceptions usually persist because there is at least some element of truth to them. The GSS posed a couple of questions relevant to the topic in 1996, on anxiety, and 1998, on nervousness, to survey participants. The following table shows the average number of days respondents, grouped by religious affiliation, reported feeling "anxious and tense" over the last week and also shows how they assessed their own levels of nervousness over the previous month*:

Anxious	Days	Nervousness	Score
Jewish	2.59	Jewish	2.30
Catholic	2.40	Catholic	2.25
No affiliation	2.40	Other	2.26
Protestant	2.11	Protestant	2.18
Other	2.04	No affiliation	2.01

There's justification for Woody Allen's character. One standard deviation is 2.21 days and 1.02 points, respectively, so we're looking at differences of less than one-fourth a SD between Jews and Protestants on both measures, however. Political differences between Jews and Gentiles are a lot more pronounced, for example, than differences in anxiety levels are.

Since we're here, let's do the same, this time by ancestry:

Anxious	Days	Nervousness	Score
Italian	3.03	Native American	2.36
Native American	2.58	Italian	2.31
Irish	2.48	Mexican	2.30
German	2.27	Scottish	2.26
French	2.14	Irish	2.22
Scottish	2.11	French	2.13
English/Welsh	2.06	German	2.12
Mexican	2.01	English/Welsh	2.09
African	1.75	African	1.93

That Native Americans collectively show nearly the highest levels of angst doesn't surprise me. Taciturn, yes, and in my experience also demure, insecure, and always up for a sedative.

I don't have much intelligent to say regarding the high Italian numbers. Sample sizes aren't large enough for any other Mediterranean groups. Would we expect Greeks and the Turks to be similarly high on the anxiety scale?
Excepting Italians, it's difficult to distinguish much between people of European stock, other than English oppressors tending less towards neuroticism than the oppressed Irish do.

While blacks often play the leading role when SWPLs talk about things like diversity and minorities, Jews, with whom they often compete for most oppressed status, are capable of willfully forgetting them. After all, other than conceived distinctness from the white majority, Jews and blacks don't have much in common. Case in point, Smith, in attempting to universalize Jewish tendencies as the tendencies expressed by minorities of all stripes, writes:

As Jewish-Americans, the participants were highly susceptible to the kind of ironic, self-deprecatory ethnic pride that many American minorities — not just Jews — like to indulge in. ... Ask a Korean-American or a Greek-American or an Italian-American or an Arab-American who the nuttiest, most nervous, most irreparably self-conflicted people in the world are, and he will invariably point to the members of his own tribe.

Blacks are notably absent. As the preceding table shows, they aren't anxious or nervous, and they aren't self-deprecating, either. When blacks do poke fun of themselves, other blacks are the intended recipients, as even the audience of a Chris Rock (who's about as racially self-deprecating as blacks get) stand up routine illustrates.

GSS variables used: ETHNIC, RELIG, ANXIOUS, NERVOUS

* Scores, on a 5-point scale, are inverted for ease of viewing. The higher the mean value, the more collectively nervous the group is.

Spoke not a word, though it meant my life

On the question of justice, the contemporary Western world [or Anglosphere, anyway] is collectively more repulsed by a type I error than it is by an error of the second kind, and our judicial system is organized in a way reflecting that. The bar is set high when it comes to demonstrating a person's guilt, the consequences being that people are more likely to go unpunished for committing a crime than they are to be punished for a crime they didn't commit.

But dissent from that societal more is not equally distributed across all groups. On four occasions, the GSS has asked respondents which miscarriage of justice is worse--convicting the innocent or allowing the guilty to go free. Blacks and liberals tilt more heavily in their preference for allowing some guilty people to walk as a cost of ensuring that the innocent aren't convicted (76.3% and 74.9%, respectively, saying that convicting the innocent is worse than letting the guilty off is) than whites and conservatives (71.6% and 70.7%) do.

As Steve Sailer regularly reminds us and the Trayvon Martin case illustrates, though, the "Who? Whom?" question is of paramount importance. In a Florida poll conducted last month, 79% of blacks but only 21% of whites were confident in George Zimmerman's guilt. On the political front, 49% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans asserted that he is guilty of murder. Better lock Zimmerman up to ensure the guilty won't walk!

Getting back to the philosophical, ideological realm, which people hastily evacuate when "Who? Whom?" becomes relevant, it is by intelligence rather than political orientation, sex, or race where divergence in opinion on the question is most pronounced. The percentages of people, by IQ grouping*, who would prefer to see a guilty man let go than an innocent man locked up rather than the other way around:

IQ	Free
Real dumbs	66.0%
Pretty dumbs	68.1%
Normals	67.0%
Pretty smarts	75.3%
Really smarts	88.6%

No, dummy, Barabbas' release wasn't the real tragedy!

GSS variables used: VERDICT, WORDSUM, POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7), RACE

* Respondents are broken up into five categories in a way that approximates a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%).

Gay bashing by race

We know from exit polling on California's Proposition 8 that blacks see gays as second-class citizens, but does this civic form of disenfranchisement also manifest itself in less genteel ways?!

FBI statistics offer an answer. The following table shows offender rates by race for designated hate crimes committed against homosexuals as a percentage of the white (including Hispanic) offender rate, so anything over 100% indicates a higher propensity for gay bashing than whites display and anything under 100% shows less of one:

Race	Rate
Black	288%
White	100%
American Indian	66%
Asian/P.I.	30%

In the conception of many, the diversity tower starts with white women on the bottom floor and works its way to the top story where blacks reside. When it comes to special benefits conferred, this conception is pretty accurate. Yet when blacks and gays tussle, gays often win (figuratively speaking, of course--as these crime stats show, they don't actually get the better of a physical confrontation).

Oh, she sees just fine

What to make of this:

Blacks are more than twice as likely as nonblacks (72 to 32 percent) to believe that Mr. Zimmerman (who is white and Hispanic) is guilty of a crime in shooting Trayvon, according to an April 2-4 Gallup survey of 3,006 Americans.

... and this?:

In a landmark ruling, a North Carolina judge on Friday vacated the death penalty of a black man convicted of murder, saying prosecutors across the state had engaged in deliberate and systematic racial discrimination when striking black potential jurors in death penalty cases.

First and foremost, that justice is most certainly not colorblind.

Black shoots unarmed Hispanic. Whatever, stuff happens. Now, justice for Travyon!

Given the utter lack of national media attention devoted to this story out of Phoenix, I'm not surprised to only be reading about it in the Steveosphere a week after it happened:

About 7:30 p.m., a 22-year-old man and his girlfriend ordered food at the Taco Bell drive-thru and were told to pull up while their order was prepared.

At the same time, Adkins stepped around a corner into the path of the vehicle and angry words were exchanged between he and the driver.

They got into an altercation and Adkins was shot once by the driver. He died at the scene.

The driver, a 22-year-old black male, called police but has not been arrested.

At first, the couple claimed that Adkins had a metal pipe that he swung at them -- but it turns out he was holding a dog leash with his yellow lab on the other end.

Family members want that driver arrested, but he's claiming self-defense.

As Blode explains, this case is quite similar to the Trayvon Martin one, except that in the Taco Bell tussle, the victim--a mentally-disabled 'white Hispanic' man, presumably of Mexican descent--appears to be less culpable than Martin was. While Martin allegedly broke Zimmerman's nose, subjugated him, and then pummeled a supine Zimmerman, it sounds like Adkins swung at and possibly pounded the shooter's car with his fist a few times before being shot. Arizona, like Florida, has a stand-your-ground-law on the books, and perhaps unlike the Martin case, it could conceivably turn out to be relevant here.

Despite (or, more cynically, because of) the potential racial angles the Phoenix shooting presents, the national media aren't running with it. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party are nowhere to be found. President Obama hasn't said a word. As Steve Sailer soberly notes, in a huge country of over 300 million people, tragedies like this occur with much greater regularity than we'd like them to, and it's of course absurd to expect nationally known figures to descend on every crime scene braying righteously about the need for justice.

More interesting than the predictable indifference of the usual suspects, however, is the lack of grassroots outrage in the Phoenix case as compared to the Martin case. With the latter, we're seeing bounties being announced, cop cars being shot up, random whites being savagely attacked by blacks as a way, I guess, of avenging Martin's death, and public gatherings clamoring for the shooter to be shackled up or killed. In the former, the slain man's sister sounds pretty upset about the whole thing, but that's about it.

The contrasts between what has transpired in the wakes of the Phoenix and Sanford incidents highlight the differences between the cohesiveness, or lack thereof, of the black and Hispanic 'communities' in contemporary America. There are plenty of self-anointed Hispanic activists willing to spit out foam-flecked hysteria to a soliciting media organ, as a recent profile piece on Kris Kobach in my local paper demonstrated last weekend:

"He definitely is very focused on putting forth at the local and state level anti-immigrant proposals that seem to be progressively more punitive and more and more repressive," said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration at the National Council of La Raza.

"From our perspective, it just seems he is more interested in pursuing the scorched-Earth, anti-immigrant tactics that he believes in than in the well-being -- economic or otherwise -- of the jurisdictions that follow his misguided lead on these issues," Martinez added.

But the people they claim to represent aren't much stirred by their war cries, if they even know who they are at all. The Pew Hispanic Center found that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, Hispanics in the US do not think of themselves as sharing a broad social culture with other Hispanics, but instead as being comprised of lots of different communities tracing back to their particular countries (or regions within those countries) of descent.

In contrast, every urban hip hop station evinces just how plugged in blacks are to the concerns and going-ons of the 'black community'. The black guy on the street knows who Juicy J, MLK, Barack Obama, and Taye Diggs are. Precious few blacks could identify any policy differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating process, but no doubt existed in their minds as to who they had to support.

The Hispanic on the street probably can't do much better than Jennifer Lopez or maybe Cesar Chavez since the Cesar Chavez Boulevard trend has started picking up (though it has a long way to go before it attains Martin Luther King Boulevard infamy). As for voting, si, Democrat is berry good, if they bother voting at all.

I'm making some assumptions here, but the gist is that when black cultural kingpins say "jump", blacks around the country start hopping. When Hispanic activists say whatever it is that they say, Puerto Ricans in New York, Cubans in Florida, and Mexicans in California don't know they're speaking and don't make an effort to hear them. By persistently clamoring about the coming Hispanic electoral tidal wave and censuring Republican pols who say anything about border security, the media establishment is trying to get Hispanics to adopt the same kind of visceral tribalism blacks exhibit in the US, but up to this point it hasn't had much of an impact.

Justice for Trayvon? Looks like it's already been served

Because life is about trade-offs, I generally don't read the comments to news articles. OneSTDV has been changing my mind on the value of doing so, and after my brother pointed out the unanimous hostility among the commentariat to a recent story on Yahoo about reverends and churchgoers wearing hoodies in "solidarity" with Trayvon Martin, I need to rethink that. As the Derb explained last week, often times news is noteworthy not on account of what actually happened, but because of the way it is reported as having happened and the way others react to that reporting.

The cynical, hostile responses are, again, not just overwhelming, but nearly unanimous. A sampling:

Trayvon Martin was killed because he was beating the crap out of a guy who had a gun.

Hoodies in church??? calls for justice???? sharpton shows up and starts another race war... where's the FACTS????? before the "call for justice"????

Your liberal news media is serving the cool aid again. And liberals always take the side of blacks against whites. You are the dumbed down masses and you believe every bit of how the media spins this story. Ask yourself, why does the media never sensationalize black on white crime?

Remember Tawana Brawley, Big Al?? Never about facts and justice, always about playing the race card and getting face time. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are the worst kind of role models for Black Americans. They have gone too far now, as has Obama, to even consider what really happened.

Blacks Set Thirteen-Year-Old Kansas Boy Set on Fire For Being White. Notice how this is being censored and most of America will not hear this news or they will read that the black assailants only said “This is what you get.” instead of the full truth which is reported they said "“This is what you get for being white.”

"Blah-blah-blah-blah-racism. Blah-blah-guilt projection. Blah-blah-blah-let's keep pretending that whites are racist and we aren't so I can have a job. Blah-blah-blah-yes, we know that blacks kill blacks every day in every city, but let's continue whining about this because it was a non-black that pulled the trigger". WHERE IS THEIR OUTRAGE WHEN THEY KILL? Trayvon Martin is but one of many young black males killed on the same day, but his death is the only one they are outraged by? FYI, According to The USDOJ/FBI/NCIC Statistics on Crime and Race, "Black males between the ages of 14 and 35, while comprising only 3% of the US Populace, commit annually 48% of ALL US MURDERS and 56% of ALL US SEX ASSAULTS".

Maybe the media might want to put ALL the facts out there; including a CURRENT picture of the kid, NOT one of when he was 13(?) years old; one which shows him as a strapping 6' 2" football player, which at that size would demonstrate him to be a much more formidable foe; AND how about printing some additional FACTS of the police report, such as the fact that Zimmerman had a broken nose; bleeding o n the back of his head, and the back of his shirt being wet. The latter obviously suggesting the man was DOWN on his back, and the BROKEN NOSE and BLEEDING head that jest maybe, I’m saying maybe, it might be that Zimmerman WAS attacked.....by a SIX FOOT 2 INCH tall, and obviously HEAVY young man, and not some freak’n li’l teenie kid as all the media pics. show??!! Of course it’s possible Zimmerman broke his own nose, bashed in the back of his own head, and then rolled on the grass

It's encouraging to see this vehement pushback against the media narrative of "white man guns down black kid eating skittles". One commenter was just a baby step away from pointing out that blacks are 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against whites than whites are to commit violent crime against blacks.

Initially, it was reported that Trayvon Martin was a model student. Then it was revealed he was on a five day suspension (which was subsequently revised upwards to a ten day suspension, one of multiple he had received), a drug user (and possible dealer), and a petty criminal. It was also initially reported that Zimmerman was white, when in actuality he is as Latino as Obama is black.

While Martin was unarmed, as a 6'2'' football player, he was hardly defenseless--Zimmerman is half a foot shorter and overweight. Zimmerman had a broken and bloody nose, a contusion on the back of his head, and grass stains on his clothes, presumably from being pounded by Martin, who Zimmerman managed to shoot while he was being pummeled. The blather about Florida's stand your ground law doesn't even appear to be applicable, since it doesn't look like Zimmerman was able to stand at the time, let alone escape the situation.

The 911 call that Martin's family and their sympathizers claim records Martin screaming for help actually reveals that it was Zimmerman who was calling for help according to witnesses and the police. As the desperate crying out for aid from a person physically struggling stops right after the gunshot rings out, it's difficult to imagine how it could've been Martin screaming, as there's no conceivable way Zimmerman would have had Martin in a submissive position before shooting him. If the screaming commenced after the shot was fired, it might have plausibly been Martin wailing in agony from having been shot, but that's not what happened.

Of course I don't know all the facts of the case, but neither do the knee-jerk blowhards who are clamoring for Zimmerman to arrested when there is no clear evidence indicating that he should be. Indeed, as Half Sigma points out, the state attorney's office elected not to press chargers due to a lack of evidence that Zimmerman did anything illegal.

Since we're on the topic of media news creation, consider how frequently the narrative errantly asserts that rhetoric from the right influenced the perpetrator of some heinous crime (in Toulouse last week, or in Tucson last year). Well, this time, in twisting the story so much that it no longer even appears to resemble what actually transpired, the race agitators and their media sympathizers really are whipping up a violent frenzy:

It was announced by Mikhail Muhammad, leader of a small militant organisation called the New Black Panther Party, who said he was seeking up to 10,000 black men willing to form a militia to find Mr Zimmerman and administer what they regard as justice.

Asked if he was inciting violence, Mr Muhammad said: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." To the sound of cheers from followers, who wore black uniforms, he promised: "If the government won't do the job, we'll do it."

Of chimps and men

When I came across the video below (not for the squeamish) via OneSTDV, the following passage from Nick Wade's Before the Dawn sprung to mind (p148-9):

Chimp warfare takes the form of bands of males who patrol the borders of their territory, looking for an individual of the neighboring community who has been rash enough to feed alone. ...

Chimpanzees carefully calculate the odds and seek to minimize risk, a very necessary procedure if one fights on a regular basis. They prefer to attack an isolated individual and then retreat to their own territory. ... [Researchers] find that the chimps will approach as long as they number three or more; parties of two will slink away. Three against one is the preferred odds: two to hold the victim down and a third to batter him to death.

Are we really anything more than naked apes? Our primal natures are, as Frans de Waal argues, a hybridization of chimp and bonobo. Some groups, though, more closely resemble chimps; others have more in common with bonobos.

Takes on why blacks fare more poorly than whites do

In response to the release of the 2009 PISA results by country and ethnicity within countries, Steve Sailer wondered if there exists a "silent but sensible majority" that believes, if not on the surface or just below it, that deep-down HBD is a substantial factor in how such things shake out. He excerpts from a reader who puts it in the 90%-100% range of the general population. Steve isn't so sanguine, and Inductivist quickly provided data from the GSS supporting Steve's sentiments, which are expanded upon below.

The GSS has a set of questions it has consistently asked relating to poor outcomes for blacks relative to whites. They compartmentalize neatly into four broad schools of thought on why racial disparities (specifically, why blacks have "worse jobs, income, and housing than white people") exist in contemporary Western society.

1) Blacks face discrimination--favored by whites like Tim Wise and most of black punditry
2) Blacks have less in-born ability to learn than whites do--a brief, crude description of HBD thinking
3) Blacks' lack of education--politically correct conventionalism favored by SWPLs and moderate leftists
4) Blacks' lack of willpower or motivation--many neocons and libertarians are here

The following graph shows the percentage of respondents agreeing with each of the following explanations by race. Whites are further separated by political orientation (split the difference a little closer to the conservative percentage and away from the liberal percentage on each explanation and you have the percentage for all whites). Because adding a legend made the graph feel clustered, bars are instead color-coded. White liberals are blue, white conservatives are white, blacks are black, Hispanics are brown, Asians are yellow, and Native Americans are red. For contemporary relevance, all data are from 2000 onward. The sample size for is 1111 for white liberals, 1631 for white conservatives, 817 for blacks, 318 for Hispanics, 172 for Asians, and 62 for Native Americans.

Despite being the most affirmed explanation, lack of motivation is still almost untouchable on the popular right. Can you imagine Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity agreeing with it? Maybe Michael Savage would, but having even briefly entertained the idea of differences in intelligence distributions by race, he's largely disowned by mainstream conservatives. If the cultural explanation is untouchable, it goes without saying that the HBD explanation is radioactive. Notice how whites, both liberal and conservative, are less likely than any other non-white group to attribute black failure to innate differences in intelligence.

Irrational racism (explanation #1) doesn't even get a majority of white liberals. NAMs have a vested interest in viewing white America's inherent discriminatory practices as a reason for their struggles, so it's not surprising that many Hispanics and Native Americans, who judge blacks relatively harshly elsewhere, show substantial support for the discrimination explanation.

On the mainstream left, that oh-so chronic problem, a lack of educational attainment, is the favored reason for black struggles among white liberals and Asians (who, despite often being thought of as natural intellectual allies of white HBDers, repeatedly show the greatest similarity with SWPLs on culture, politics, economics, etc). On the mainstream right, and among non-black minorities, the laziness explanation is the most favored.

Clearly, culturalism appears to have won out among the general population. The education and laziness explanations (#3 and #4) are the easiest for non-blacks to hold in the sense that they do not morally indict those holding them (as the discrimination explanation does), but they hold out hope that solutions to racial disparities are achievable, and relatively easily--send more blacks to college in the case of #3 and reverse the breakdown of the black family by ending the welfare lifestyle in the case of #4. The horrifying idea that biology might have something to do with the stubborn gaps that have steadily remained over the century they've been measured is something the vast majority of Americans apparently would rather not consider.

As an interesting aside, just over 13% of respondents did not agree with any of the four possible explanations, none of which was asked in a way to insinuate that it necessarily be the primary explanation. Thus it is completely understandable why respondents would've agreed with multiple explanations, but hard to imagine how to rationalize a respondent not favoring any of them. Perhaps this indicates that one in eight people simply refuse to think about racial disparities, even when prodded into doing so. Or is there another valid explanation out there that the GSS left out?

GSS variables used: RACDIF1, RACDIF2, RACDIF3, RACDIF4, RACECEN1(1)(2)(3)(4-10)(15-16), POLVIEWS(1-3)(5-7)

Testing the faith of ignorant blacks

A friend recently told me in his Spring anthropology 101 class at KU during, the state's flagship public university, the professor, in briefly outlining earth's histoical timeline, condescendingly joked that the alternative view is that dinosaur fossils do not actually date from at least 65 million years ago, but are instead there to test the faith. SWPL gold!

How I wish I could've been present to interject that blacks are considerably more likely to believe that God created man within the last 10,000 years than whites are. In fact, according to the results from a GSS question asked in 2004, a majority of blacks (56%, compared to 41% of whites) profess that belief rather than either of the other possible responses, both of which have something to do with evolution. So are we learning today, professor, that most blacks are ignorant?

Squirm, squirm!

GSS variables used: RACECEN1, CREATION

Blacks like socialism and other sundries from Pew's word association survey

About a month ago, Pew Research released the results of a word association survey it conducted in late April. Word association is by some distance removed from anything actionable, but the survey is nonetheless useful in calibrating common perception with the actual feelings of various groups of people. A few instances of this follow.

- Awhile back, I had some fun creating hypothetical electoral maps portraying what the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election would've been if only select demographic groups were allowed to vote. As has been the case for Democrats for decades, Obama performs better if suffrage is extended to women and denied to men.

I was not making a novel observation in pointing out that the female voting behavior is steadily pushing the country in a leftward direction. I first encountered it in John Lott's book Freedonomics. The Pew survey reinforces that argument. "Socialism" is favorably perceived by 33% of women to 25% of men. It is viewed unfavorably by a slim majority of women (54%) compared to two-thirds of men (65%). "Capitalism", in contrast, is viewed favorably by 59% of men but only 47% of women. It invokes negative feelings in 34% of men and 40% of women.

- While the socialist indoctrination that putatively takes place at colleges throughout the country may be a rallying cry for cultural conservatives, it is among those who've never set foot on a university campus that socialism's base of support is the widest. Among those with a high school education or less, 35% view the word "socialism" favorably, compared to only 23% of college graduates.

- Blacks, who stand to benefit from socialist economic policies at the expense of white Americans, are understandably much more favorably inclined toward socialism than whites are. While 53% of blacks view the term "socialism" favorably, just 24% of whites do.

- Despite the attempts by some leftwing activists to portray "states' rights" as code words for racial resegregation, the reinstatement of Jim Crow laws, and even a desire to resurrect the institution of slavery in the US, the vast majority of the population (77% positive, 15% negative) feels an affinity for the phrase. The sentiments are overwhelming across the political spectrum. Among Democrats, 71% view it positively to 21% negatively.

- Militancy is a guy's game. Nearly all the wars in human history have been started by men, etc, and despite the recent strides forward women have made in Afghanistan, terrorism is a masculine line of work. Predictably, men are twice as likely as women (28% to 14%) to have a positive view of the word "militia".

- Surprisingly, Democrats warm to the word "libertarian" more than Republicans do (31% to 39%). TGGP half-heartedly suggested it might be due to some political conservatives being unfamiliar with the term but reacting negatively to it anyway because it sounds similar to the word "liberal". That seems plausible enough to me. Independents like "libertarian" more than anyone else does (44%), of course--it's not liberal or conservative, and neither are they!

Negro? No longer. Black? Bye bye? African-American? Affirmed!

After Harry Reid's remarks about Barack Obama's favorable political utility were revealed, my brother told me that he'd heard a local conservative talk radio host predictably sputtering over the majority leader's comments, which served to illustrate leftist racism and hypocrisy. What Reid said of Obama:

[Reid] was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama --
a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.

After apologizing to the President, he hastily spread his contrition around:

An aide to the senator told CNN that Reid offered apologies to several prominent African-Americans, including House Democrats Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and Barbara Lee of California; the Rev. Al Sharpton; CNN political contributor and Democratic strategist Donna Brazile; NAACP chairman Julian Bond; and the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Wade Henderson.

My reaction was similar to Ward Connerly's. The popular right does those who hold freedom of expression in the highest regard no favors by being leftist-lite in their hysterical seizures over such inconsequential remarks. The next Trent Lott episode has now been cued, and the stupid omertas that support the perpetual fear people have of saying the 'wrong thing' are strengthened instead of sustaining welcome cracks in their foundations. A little candidness is refreshing. Everything Reid said is at least plausible, and in my judgment objectively true.

While many whites pay scant attention to the social consequences of differences in black skin tone, it's salient in the black community. But even in popular culture, melanin matters. Caramel-colored black women tend to rise to the top (Beyonce, Rihanna). When the rare jet does so, it's often by way of association (Michelle Obama) or through sheer merit (the Williams' sisters). And there are reasons nearer the ground for why people tend to associate lighter skin with greater competence. The following table shows the estimated mean IQ (converted from wordsum scores, under the assumption that the average black IQ is 85 with a standard deviation of 15) for three subgroups of black respondents as assessed by interviewers in 1982:

Skin tone	IQ
Light	87.2
Medium	86.4
Dark	81.5

As listening to the radio makes clear, black vocal inflections are usually easily detectable. Obama's strong frame and emphatic delivery are obvious political assets. If his public presence was akin to Ron Paul's, he wouldn't be in the White House.

Finally, "negro" is an antiquated but not necessarily derogatory term to use in describing people of African descent. The US Census uses it alongside "black" and "African-American", as older blacks apparently prefer it to the newer labels.

My brother was incredulous about the last point. I explained to him that "negro" used to be favored over "black". I wasn't sure when the swapping of acceptability occured, but guessed it was sometime in the seventies. Fortunately, Agnostic's clever method of tapping the New York Times' archives to gauge the popular presence of ideas, people, and phrases over time offers the chance for greater precision.

The following graph shows the percentage of total articles containing the word "negroes", "blacks", and "African-Americans" by decade from 1851 to 1959, and then by individual year thereafter*. The blue line tracks "negroes", the black line "blacks", and the red line "African-Americans":


There was a spike during the 1860s as the US Civil War was fought. A century later, focus again shifted to blacks as a separate group of Americans, and stayed there up through most of the previous decade. It's difficult to tell whether or not the decline in reference to blacks as a group has settled around 1 of 100 articles, or if it will drop further still. The decrease in usage may be due to the increasing attention given to Hispanics, leading to the substitution of "blacks" or "African-American" with the broader "minorities".

"Negro" was clearly the word of choice until 1969, the year of the 'culmination' of the black civil rights movement and the year following MLK's assassination. By 1972, "negro"--viewed as having an ugly association with slavery--had essentially fallen out of the respectable media's lexicon, thoroughly replaced by "black". The 20 to 30 articles using the word from that time are mostly referencing historical quotes from books or people.

In the late eighties, Teddy Roosevelt's dreaded hyphenated Americanism was given semantic legitimacy. Up to that point, it had never been used to describe American-born blacks. I was in preschool at the time, and given how inchoate politically correct phraseology doesn't seem to benefit from the most meticulous of record-keeping, I am not sure of the impetus for the third-generation descriptor. Please enlighten in the comments if you are able to [Xenophon has kindly done just that]. It looks as though "African-American" will assume primacy over "black" in the next few years.

Reid was thirty when "negro" went over the precipice. He grew up using it just as I use "black" to describe people today. God forbid that, in my seventies, I momentarily forget an update to the most current version of newspeak and say something I would've innocently said as a young adult. I hate political correctness.

GSS variables used: COLOR(1-2)(3)(4-5), WORDSUM

* The plural form of each term is used to avoid the problem of "black" as an adjective describing the color of something (other than human skin!). It seemed too arbitrary and tedious to run a string of phrases like "black man", "black woman", "black student", etc. The important thing is that each descriptor is plural, so the comparisons are not apples-to-oranges. Also, I made sure "African-Americans" would catch "African Americans" as well. It does.