State Department Advertises Interpreting Services of White Nationalist

Among the white nationalist intellectual vanguard, few figures are as widely known as Jared Taylor, founder of the New Century Foundation and editor of its racist journal American Renaissance. Despite his infamy, the State Department advertises the polyglot’s language skills on the website of the U.S. embassy in Japan.

Taylor’s name, E-mail address and home address in Virginia appear on the Tokyo embassy’s Language Services webpage, intended for U.S. citizens who need such services while in Japan. He’s one of the few individual interpreters for hire who are listed along with more than a dozen companies that provide translation services. A State Department spokesman said Monday he was not aware of Taylor’s associations and had no immediate comment.

Born to missionary parents in Japan, Taylor lived in that country until he was 16, then studied at Yale and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He is fluent in both Japanese and French.

Taylor has written extensively on the nature of race relations. In 1994, he founded the New Century Foundation, a pseudo-intellectual think tank that promotes “research” on racial differences in intelligence and other matters. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group the foundation and American Renaissance, which bills itself as “America’s premiere publication of racial-realist thought” and has fulminated extensively on the “psychopathology” of black people.

Despite his ivory tower veneer, Taylor has a long history of racially disparaging comments – perhaps most notably in 2005, when he wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization – any kind of civilization – disappears.”

He added: “Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites… . [But m]any whites will realize – some for the first time – that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.”

In 1992, he wrote Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America, a book expounding on the idea that blacks are “crime-prone,” “dissipated,” “pathological” and “defiant.” A year later, Taylor spoke at a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group that has described black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.”

The State Department does not suggest that its listing of Taylor’s translation services is a stamp of approval. In fact, the webpage includes this disclaimer: “The Embassy in no way endorses any of these organizations.” Still, officials may want to take note of Taylor’s racist history, especially those tarnished roots at the base of his less-than-sterling pedigree.

UPDATE 04/13/11: Hatewatch, on Tuesday, contacted the State Department and requested comment regarding Jared Taylor’s work as a translator through the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. As of April 13, 2011, Taylor was no longer listed on the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo’s "Language Services" webpage.