Day of the Yoot

June 15, 2000

John Rocker, take a bow. The other day New York City once more surpassed your unflattering portrait of it.

Rocker has been called a racist for his description of New York’s social pathologies and plain bad manners, in which he actually said nothing about race. But though the media reports on New York’s latest racial incident said nothing about race either, everyone knows what it was about.

During and after the Puerto Rican National Day Parade near Central Park, dozens of “youths,” as tactful journalists prefer to call them (Joe Pesci would call them “yoots”), all of them apparently “minorities” (often pronounced “minawties” by their spokesmen), attacked women of the Caucasian persuasion, tearing off their blouses and grabbing their breasts (and other parts), in some cases robbing them for good measure. Some were tourists; one Frenchman was held back by some yoots while other yoots molested his wife.

Meanwhile, New York’s Finest, even when the women pleaded for help, allowed the molesters to proceed unmolested, thereby avoiding charges of racism, brutality, civil rights violations, and general insensitivity. The crowd seemed indisposed to stop the criminals or help the victims, in at least one case joining the fun by taunting a fleeing woman.

The fact that nonwhites were singling out white women — these weren’t “random” attacks, racially speaking — was lost on nobody who paid attention, but the prevailing ethnic prudery made this angle unmentionable in the respectable media. Still, pictures of the assailants and their victims, along with other emergent data, made it clear enough. Even a properly stern editorial in the New York Times managed to sidestep the clear racial animus of the criminals.

Which is amusing, in a grim sort of way. If the Times can’t bear to mention the race of the parties involved, why does it mention their sex? After all, it could have edited its reporters’ accounts to say: “Several persons at the parade tore the upper garments off other persons, exposing and touching their chests. Some of the attackers held back the spouse of one of the victims as they stripped and fondled the pectoral protuberances of the other spouse.”

That would avoid the danger of stereotyping males as sexual assaulters. But the fact that the criminals and the victims were of different races is as pertinent as the fact that they were of opposite sexes. There was a clear “pattern of discrimination,” as they say, in the attacks.

The double standard is amazing. White atrocities against nonwhites, committed decades or centuries ago, are endlessly memorialized, with explicit attention to the race of both aggressors and victims. But we must omit race from accounts of nonwhite crimes against whites, which are being committed in the present, every day.

In a way, all this points up the Procrustean absurdity of treating race, “gender,” and “sexual orientation” as parallel categories, equally in need of “civil rights” legislation and “remedies.” These are radically different categories, as I was recently reminded when I wandered absent-mindedly into a women’s rest room in Maryland. (The startled ladies were very nice about it, and I escaped before I could be apprehended. Please do not allow this column to fall into the hands of the police.)

For all our prattle about “multiculturalism,” we — we whites, that is — are strangely reluctant to observe real differences among cultures and subcultures, including radically different attitudes toward sex and violence. We persist in pretending that people of all races aspire to be like white suburbanite professional folks, if only they get the opportunity. They don’t. A lot of them are quite content with the deep-seated attitudes they have inherited. There is no use trying to “cure” them, because they don’t think they’re sick. They feel quite normal. They think it’s white people who are saddled with needless inhibitions that take all the fun out of life.

And many whites are moral relativists who agree that one way of life is really no better than another. Such people often manage to be quite “nonjudgmental,” until they need a cop.

Our racial problems will never be solved unless the mainstream press covers interracial crime frankly — and not just when whites are the perpetrators.

Joseph Sobran

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