Late Friday afternoon, there were reports that the Gang of Eight’s secret plotting to work out the details of the bipartisan 2013 Obama/ Rubio Amnesty/ Immigration surge is stalled—because labor unions are balking at a business lobbyist/ Republican attempt to add a massive low-skilled guest worker program below prevailing wages. [Immigration Talks Hit Snag Over Business and Labor Concerns, by Ashley Parker, New York Times, March 22, 2013.]
But regardless of this theater, here’s my personal testimony that the white working class in America is in trouble—which this proposed amnesty and increased workplace competition can only exacerbate.
Four weeks ago, I saw a local contractor doing recovery work in my neighborhood in New York’s Rockaways. An old, bald Irishman, he was running a bulldozer or similar rig, clearing out one of the storefronts that had burned down between Beach 113th and Beach 115th Street in Rockaway Park the night of October 29, when Hurricane Sandy hit. All of the other contractors had been from out of state.
I remarked on how he was the first local guy I’d seen. We exchanged waves.
The company was called Concannon, and was located nearby, in Breezy Point, the affluent gated community at the western tip of The Rockaways, overwhelmingly Irish (and accordingly recently smeared by the New York Times) which got hit the worst by Sandy. [New York Times Slimes Hurricane Sandy Victim Neighborhood as “Apartheid” for Being Too White, By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMag, February 20, 2013 ]
The driver (Concannon himself?), had a couple of workers—little, chubby, brown-skinned guys.
There are plenty of young blue collar Irishmen and Italians with strong backs in this area. Why couldn’t he have hired a couple of them? Where was his loyalty?
In fact, since the Sandy crisis, I have not seen any white, New York workingmen doing repair work in my Rockaway neighborhood. Most of the workers were Hispanic “immigrants” a.k.a illegals with a couple of black West Indians sprinkled in.
Many of my neighbors get their lawns mowed by a man named Castellano. Nice Italian name. Except that Castellano hires only Hispanic “immigrants.”
Black propagandist Ta-Nehisi Coates recently pulled a racial profiling hoax in the pages of the New York Times. [The Good, Racist People, March 7, 2013]
Coates implied that some racist white worker in a deli in his Manhattan neighborhood near Columbia University had racially profiled actor Forrest Whitaker.
I’ve lived in New York City since August, 1985 and though I’ve bought stuff in Manhattan delis hundreds of times, only once can I recall being served by a white worker (downtown, about 20 years ago).
And, indeed, a Manhattan-based friend of my VDARE.com colleague Steve Sailer confirmed that the deli in question, Milano Market, had no white employees.
That’s what it means to be white and working class in New York today—you get refused work and blamed for the crimes of non-whites.
This is not a recent development.
Back in the mid-to-late 1980s when I attended grad school at CUNY, although I was officially on a “full ride” through a fellowship (at its height, $6,000, less $2,000 for tuition), I used to run out of money every spring semester, and have to disappear from classes, scrounging for work.
I learned the hard way that, between Affirmative Action and ethnic nepotism, if you were a white man, and neither well-to-do nor well-connected, many workplaces would never consider you for full-time work. (My personal doctor, who died in 1990, may she rest in peace, used to tell me, “You’re a writer. You need a civil service job!”)
During the late 1980s or early ‘90s, I interviewed for a job at a drug counseling agency. The interview was a group situation, and the interviewer, who if memory serves was Hispanic, told me in front of the other candidates that he would never consider me for the job, because I was white. He clearly felt he had nothing to fear.
And he was right.
Getting hired wasn’t always much better. Already in the late 1980s, New York’s “voluntary” (private) social work agencies hired mostly, even overwhelmingly, blacks and Hispanics—and some white females; but almost no white men.
The workplace was hostile—to white men. A Black female screamed racial epithets (“I’ll kick your white ass”) in front of a white female Irish-American director, who suddenly became deaf, dumb, and blind. Another assaulted me in front of a suddenly blind black female supervisor.
White females, Jewish and gentile alike, would act as if I were invisible. The only time I ever saw a supervisor tell a race-baiting worker to lay off me, the supe was a black woman.
For whatever reason—Political Correctness, social pressure, Corporate’s fear of litigation—white bosses in New York City would go out of their way to discriminate against whites in hiring, instead filling their workplace with blacks and Hispanics who hated the bosses’ guts. And there would be no troupe of loyal white workers to back them up.
I saw some of this up close while teaching college in 1997-1998, when I moonlighted as a security guard at the Toys ‘R Us store on Sixth Avenue and West 34th Street—then the world’s biggest toy store.
The store director, whom I’ll call David, was a tough-talking Jew. (I guess this was to make him sound working class, which he was not.) Outside of one of his assistant directors, a short, chubby blonde of about 30, he did not hire any whites. (The other AD was a tall, slender, Hispanic woman about the same age.) The only other white employee I can recall, out of 100 or so, was a pleasant, tall, thin lady cashier who was hitting 60, and had been there forever.
One day, two black workers about 20 years old were malingering. One worker, whom I’ll call Dakwon, was explaining the black-on-black crime problem to his buddy, regarding Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani: “They makin’ us kill each other.”
David came by and greeted them. As soon as he’d passed by, Dakwon continued: “They go another one.”
Did David fire Dakwon for malingering, and stirring up racial animosity all day long? Not exactly: he promoted him to supervisor.
And Dakwon was not unusual for Toys ‘R Us. On the weekends, which was when I typically worked there, the young black workers would hide out from the customers all morning, listening to music on a radio in the bicycle department.
Back in 1987, a Hispanic acting supervisor at New York City Technical College said of the black women he supervised: “I can’t get any work out of them.” He said he had a mortgage to pay, and so he didn’t make any waves.
During the early-to-mid 1990s, I observed one chain store after another on the Ladies’ Shopping Mile that had apparently enacted an unwritten rule forbidding the hiring of white workers: Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Barnes & Noble, Staples, Toys ‘R Us, etc. In Barnes & Noble, virtually all of the customers would be white, but virtually none of the workers. But all of these businesses were owned by whites.
Circa 1995, I stopped giving my money to any of the chain stores on the Mile.
And, alas, my doctor was behind the times. Nowadays, most public agencies in New York pursue the same unwritten anti-white policy at every level—city, county, state, federal. Enter an office, and you see a sea of non-white, above all, black and Hispanic faces.
Joe Kearney, the veteran New York City fireman who funded Merit Matters, and who blogs at Working-Class Conservative, reports on city agencies that are anywhere from 61-78 percent black.
During the early 1990s, the Transit Authority had 52 station managers, only two of whom were white men. (For a time, the TA tactfully removed the pictures of the managers.)
Whites are being cleansed from almost every imaginable position in New York: subway station cleaners, conductors, motormen, track repairmen, TA bus drivers, token clerks, school security guards, teacher aides, store security guards.
In the light of such policies, the claim by federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis that the New York Fire Department is permitting “disparate impact” for not hiring blacks based on their proportion of the population, rather than based on merit, is transparently dishonest.
Like other leftists, Garaufis selectively cries “disparate impact,” when he sees whites in the majority—but ignores it where blacks and/or Hispanics predominate.
The dispossession of the white working class began as a response by ruling elites to black insurrection a.k.a. the Civil Rights movement. However, I believe there is often more to it.
That “more” is class hatred.
A few years ago, I attended meetings of a Manhattan libertarian group. At one, a respected libertarian economist made the usual specious arguments in support of Open Borders—such as the average amount of space per American resident, in contrast to cramped Britain—refusing to deal with the social and environmental costs of mass immigration.
But one audience member drew especially warm support from the crowd when he asserted that it was morally wrong for the government to say that he didn’t have the right to “contract” with a Mexican national in Mexico to cross the border to work for him.
Talking the same way that businessmen used to speak of union workers, audience members expressed sheer hatred towards American workers, whom they said supported immigration and labor laws as “protectionism” in order to bid up their wages.
As far as they were concerned, American citizens qua citizens had no rights.
For these people, libertarianism wasn’t really about philosophical principles, but merely a rationalization of rich people’s right to get richer at ordinary Americans’ expense.
Similarly, some libertarians are now so openly hostile towards the American working class that they would prefer that jobs get sent to Communist China, rather than stay here.
A classic example: libertarian Katherine Mangu-Ward [Email her] supported an ironing board company that was owned by the Communist Chinese state and engaged in an illegal dumping scheme (PDF), selling under cost, in order to put an American firm out of business, at which point it would have raised prices.
Econ 101 aside, though, there's a more compelling moral reason to condemn this kind of tariff…Jobs lost at home are usually jobs created elsewhere, typically in poorer countries. If anything, jobs are likely to be gained when an industry moves to China, where more aspects of the manufacturing and assembly process are done by hand. They just won't be created here. If that's your focus, you have to make the case that American jobs are intrinsically better or more valuable than Chinese jobs.
[The Last Ironing Board to Die for a Mistake, By Katherine Mangu-Ward, The Atlantic, June 23, 2010.]
Well, yes—I do think American jobs are “intrinsically better or more valuable.”
My VDARE.com colleague Edwin Rubenstein has for years charted immigration’s dispossession of American workers in their own country.
Whatever happens over this latest Amnesty sellout, American labor unions have totally failed to protect the working class.
But, at the risk of sounding like a Marxist, white American workers are going to have to organize to pursue their interests…or die.
Nicholas Stix [email him] is a New York City-based journalist and researcher, much of whose work focuses on the nexus of race, crime, and education. He spent much of the 1990s teaching college in New York and New Jersey. His work has appeared in Chronicles, The New York Post, Weekly Standard, Daily News, New York Newsday, American Renaissance, Academic Questions, Ideas on Liberty and many other publications. Stix was the project director and principal author of the NPI report, The State of White America-2007. He blogs at Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.
