My Awakening to Race Realism

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This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

My awakening to the reality of race came relatively early in life. I was raised in a patriotic American family and attended an all-boys Catholic high school in a major northeast US city way back in the 1970s. Our high school was socially progressive, and the religious education program was centered around the “gospel” of MLK Jr. From my early childhood in the 1960s, I was raised to be colorblind, and as a young student-athlete, I had posters of black and white sports stars on my wall. The “n-word” was considered a sinful curse word and was never to be uttered by one of my parents’ kids. I was thoroughly conditioned to give blacks every benefit of the doubt and did so. 

My high school was roughly 50-50 black and white students when I matriculated and approximately 60 percent black when I graduated four years later. My AP Physics and Calculus classes were virtually all-white, while the football team I played on was mostly black. The suburban county I grew up in saw one of the greatest demographic shifts in US history during the 1970s, experiencing a massive influx of blacks from the Old South. Largely as a function of the teams I played on, I knew and befriended many young blacks, believing as I was taught that we should judge others “by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”

The world I experienced during my late teens, however, caused me to begin to question the progressive MLK philosophy I had been indoctrinated in. Over time, it became clear that different standards of behavior were being applied depending on one’s race. The more lenient standards being applied to young blacks were allegedly justified by virtue of the legacy of oppression previous generations had experienced. This justification grew less sustainable over time. It occurred to me that slavery had ended more than 100 years before I started high school and that using oppression experienced by distant ancestors as an excuse for general incivility, poor academic performance, and criminal behavior was a self-reinforcing copout.

If we were truly equal in all important respects, then it was imperative that we be held to the same standards. But that was clearly not what was happening. Instead, during the 1970s and ’80s, virtually every American institution adopted some form of “affirmative action” to help blacks up the socio-economic ladder, whether it was in college admissions, scholarships, public and private sector hiring, or government contracting set-asides. And yet while majority-white America was bestowing ever more advantages upon our minority-black population at the expense of lower- and middle-class whites, the hue and cry of black America (stoked by the media, academics, and other Marxists) grew ever more discontented.

What also became increasingly clear was that I had been raised on the “Great American Lie” of racial equality, the lie that continues to erode and destroy America. The Great American Lie asserts that were it not for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, socio-economic outcomes of black and white Americans would be statistically equivalent. This holiest of American Civil Rights dogmas holds (despite the fact that we’re supposed to celebrate our diversity) that in all important respects the races are equal and should have equal outcomes, except perhaps where blacks are allowed to be considered superior (for example, dancing rhythm). Yet there was literally a world of evidence before me to support significant racial differences in virtually all fields of human endeavor. And I had eyes — I could see it!

People understand as a matter of course that individuals are innately different in many ways besides skin color and hair texture. As an extreme example to underscore the point, no amount of gym time (environmental factors) could have made actor Danny DeVito comparable to Michael Jordan on the basketball court, even if Jordan had spent only one one-hundredth the time DeVito spent shooting hoops. God made them different in the extreme, and not just the one-and-a-half-foot difference in height. On an individual basis, it is obvious a million times a day that individuals are different in their physical composition, skills, and aptitudes. Virtually all empirical data show the differences. So what in the world makes us hold fast to the lie that all racial and ethnic groups must be innately equal in all important respects?

Once upon a time, the average American was smarter. We had not yet been collectively lobotomized by the anti-white dogma that came of age during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s-60s and which then metastasized like a cancer across the American body politic. Trained by Marxist professors in our colleges and universities, leftist graduates then went out into America to indoctrinate millions in the Great American Lie and fundamentally change our culture. All socio-economic inequalities among races became the fault of a racist white society. All statistical correlations between race and performance that reflected negatively on blacks were blamed on environmental factors (racism). In 1969, it became de facto, career-endingly “racist” to suggest otherwise. (In that year, Professor Arthur Jensen was crucified, figuratively speaking, for his seminal article on IQ in the Harvard Educational Review.)

Since the 1960s, this cancer has been slowly destroying our beloved and once great nation. Many among us think that “cancel culture” is a recent phenomenon, but that is not true. Permissible debate on the actual causes of behavioral differences among races — the single most important sociological issue in American history — has been shut down for more than half a century. This cancellation of strongly supported opposing arguments has resulted in many blaming “white racism” and “white supremacy” for keeping the black man poor, oppressed, jailed in disproportionate numbers, and otherwise down.

For more than 50 years, the only permissible explanation for socio-economic differences among races, including academic performance and criminal behavior, has been evil white racism. You cannot debate it, no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary. Science has been “settled” on race since the Left sought to destroy Dr. Jensen, though his evidence remains as strong today as it was in 1969. When academics were still allowed to study comparative intelligence, the average difference of one standard deviation between black and white IQs explained so much of the world we experienced. And if you think this statistically massive difference in average IQ was the product of several generations of slavery, how do you account for the extraordinary differences in intellectual achievement reflected in the comparative civilizations of Europe and Africa in the 16th Century? You cannot.

What has been the consequence of this acceptance of the Great American Lie? I’ll tell you. It has been fifty-plus years of increasing levels of white self-loathing, especially among our young who have been thoroughly and brutally indoctrinated in a lie that asserts they and their ancestors are to blame for black social pathologies and other behavioral deficiencies. Simultaneously, there has been an equivalent increase in black ill-will and outright hatred for whites, despite all that white America has given to blacks during this same period.

My awakening to race realism came relatively early in this period and was later fortified by the courageous voices of Dr. Samuel Francis, Joseph Sobran, Jared Taylor, and others. These great men made clear to me that it was imperative that white America regain our self-awareness and a positive sense of identity, something that was once implicit. Since the ascendance of the Great American Lie, literally every non-white racial and ethnic group has been explicitly encouraged to celebrate their group identity and advance their group’s interests, while white Americans have been simultaneously scorned and encouraged to loathe their identity. This cannot continue or we will perish along with the great country our forefathers built. We owe this to our ancestors like Washington, Jefferson, and Lee, who are being actively erased from our history, but even more so to our children and grandchildren.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, or about your firsthand experience with race, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Please feel free to use a pen name and send it to us here.