Living in Detroit Taught Me Race Realism

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

Growing up in Detroit in the 1990s, adults always told me that whites had left the city simply because they were racist. Even as a child, that explanation always sounded odd to me, but I heard it so often that I just accepted it as fact. Nobody ever mentioned crime as one of the reasons so many whites had fled for the suburbs, but it was everywhere. Shootings, robberies, and carjackings were the norm — and almost always committed by young black men. Violent fights were commonplace at my high school, even though it was across the street from a police precinct. It wasn’t uncommon to see cops ushering students out of the building in handcuffs during a school day. My dad attended that same high school in the 1970s. At the time, it was still majority white and one of the best schools in Detroit. When I attended it in the early 2000s, it was majority black and one of the worst in the city.

Everyone was told that black men are no more dangerous than anyone else and that you are an ignorant racist if you think otherwise. Yet, people called my city “the murder capital of America” and there was no question as to who was committing these murders. Even Detroit’s funeral home directors occasionally got together to beg black men to stop the slaughter as bullet riddled corpses were a daily fixture of their businesses — and they still do.

Eventually, I moved to Milwaukee. It was the same story there. That’s how I discovered that there was nothing unique about the city I was raised in, it was just part of a pattern. In every dangerous city, there was a large population of blacks. But there weren’t any majority white or East Asian areas in America where violent street crime was as rampant. I discovered this was true not only in the US, but around the world. Whether it’s a black neighborhood in London, the nation of Haiti, or the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, you see the exact same issues: crime, corruption, poverty. Seeing this pattern made me realize that there are innate biological differences between the races — and that these differences have consequences.

Anyone with eyes to see could notice all of this, but teachers, pundits, and politicians never addressed it. Instead, I constantly heard about how cops go around arresting and hassling black men for no reason except their hateful bigotry, and that the whites who had fled Detroit decades earlier were motivated by irrational fear and ignorant racism. This “double think” applied to the past, too, not just the present. In school, teachers led us to believe that slavery was a unique evil that only whites had ever committed, and that, aside from the Jews in the Bible, only blacks had ever been victims of slavery. We never learned about the Barbary slave trade, in which Muslim pirates kidnapped and enslaved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Europeans; or the Arab slave trade of millions of Africans. And blacks weren’t the only group that powerful people made excuses for. I was a sophomore in high school on September 11, 2001, and I remember George W. Bush declaring “Islam is Peace” only a few days later. Almost 3,000 Americans had died in the most horrific terrorist attack in our nation’s history, and that was our President’s response.

Even once you’ve finished your education and even if you ignore our pandering politicians, you can see our society’s anti-white double standards in the media. In 2006, the “Duke lacrosse” story broke: a low income black woman had been gang raped by a group of rich, privileged, white jocks. It received coast to coast media coverage and served as a springboard for every pundit in the country to talk about America’s evil racism. Eventually, investigators discovered that the whole thing was a fraud. The black woman had lied. The white college students hadn’t done anything wrong. The next year, five blacks kidnapped, rape, tortured, and finally murdered Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome, a young white couple who didn’t know their attackers and had done nothing to provoke them. This actually happened; there was no fraud. Media coverage of the crime wasn’t even one tenth of what it had been for the fake Duke lacrosse case.

So many people believe that race is a fiction and that the deck is stacked against non-whites. In reality, it’s the other way around.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.