The Failures of Conservative Inc. Led Me to Racial Consciousness

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

I largely escaped pop-culture’s curated presentation of the black race. My parents kept a careful watch on the quality of media that their children consumed, and there were enforced limits on television time. In the late 1990s, my neighborhood was mostly white, my private Christian school was overwhelmingly white, and we roundly avoided any “bad part of town,” but the avoidance was only explained in terms of risk. We attended a Baptist church regularly, and it was here that my experience with and perception of blacks, though nominal, was almost entirely developed.

In adolescence, my father introduced me to the “lovable little fuzzball,” Rush Limbaugh. I learned that my father, a former campaign staffer for President George Bush Sr. (which he now deeply regrets having done), daily listened to the bloviations that exuded from the “Attila the Hun chair” behind the golden microphone. It was through a combination of Mr. Limbaugh and Fox News that my father received most of his information regarding the current political landscape. Naturally, I began to copy him and soon found Conservative Inc. to be a comfortable place where all my budding sensibilities were reinforced and slightly expanded.

I listened to Rush defensively react to every outrageous Washington Post and New York Times headlines, as if his commentary was enough refutation to render their effect null and void. His confidence was contagious and addictive. It was pleasant, humorous, and satisfying to hear the absurdity of the American Left lampooned and riffed upon. Reflecting later, I noted that though he claimed to be fighting liberalism, there were no effective, practical instructions as to what each listener could do to help end left-wing insanity. The only admonition was to vote Republican, as if that alone would suffice. Certainly, there were no pleas to maintain and conserve white racial integrity and sustain the culture that built this country.

To the chagrin of my parents, I attended the University of Louisville after high school. I came to feel that I didn’t belong in this liberal urban environment, but tried to assure myself that these were just jitters occurring because I was out on my own for the first time. Initially, race was a non-factor in my college life, as I lived in the mostly white and Asian honors dorm.

Then suddenly, that changed. One Saturday, I saw members of one of the black fraternities marching around campus, shouting pro-black, anti-white chants. I watched, spellbound. I couldn’t believe this was allowed to happen on the campus of a public university. I wanted to laugh this spectacle off the way Rush Limbaugh would, but it felt too serious to dismiss as merely an embarrassing display of liberalism. These blacks were asserting cultural and territorial dominance, and it was directed against me and my race. Horrified, I realized that no one around me seemed to care or take notice. It was obviously just business as usual on campus. These roving blacks also must have known that their rhetoric was permitted — if not completely supported — by the university administration.

This event was a turning point for me. I realized that if this was happening here, it could happen anywhere. If my university permitted this kind of behavior, what public university wouldn’t? Why would mine be an outlier? Then, I wondered what right-wing talk radio, Fox News, National Review, etc. were going to do to fight this? Was the Hoover Institution really going to tackle this problem and effectively neutralize it? Thinking it over, it struck me that mainstream conservative figures and academics would never be able to fight back against this sort of thing, as they never diagnosed societal maladies in terms of race.

Following this realization, I swore off relying on Conservative Inc. Mainstream conservatism is basically a security blanket that white Americans can cling onto, cry into, and feel vaguely comforted by while the country their forefathers built is viciously dismantled before their eyes. In a way, the mainstream Right is worse than the Left, because it provides false comfort to, and an ideological quagmire for, common-sense, law-abiding, racially unconscious white people. And with that conclusion, I became a white advocate and a race realist. I am still learning what my role is in this fight, but I had my first white child recently, and my beautiful white wife and I plan on having more. We are Christian, we are white, and we are not ashamed.

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.