Posted on February 20, 2021

Could the Last Person to Leave the Street Please Turn the Light Out

Clara Lander, American Renaissance, February 20, 2021

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

I was born in New Zealand to English parents. They had travelled separately to New Zealand in the early 1960s looking for adventure. They met and married, then went back home to England, living in Birmingham for some three years before going back to New Zealand, this time, permanently.

I recorded my father’s memoirs before he died. He wrote:

I could see street after street gradually become occupied by the migrants, each group in their own ghetto around Birmingham. Having come from the northeast where the population density was quite low compared with the rest of the country, and having seen Wellington [NZ] where there was a sense of openness all the time, I knew we had to get out. I could see the general direction that Britain was heading in — a cultural shift in which the communities that had been there for many years were being destroyed. There was a catchphrase at the time: ‘Could the last person to leave the street please turn the light out.’

I got talking one day during lunchtime to some old men sitting on a bench outside Joseph Lucas [my father’s workplace, a company that manufactured motor industry and aerospace industry components]. We discussed the incoming migrants and my return to New Zealand, and the old men wished they could go with me. They had seen all of Smethwick become migrant communities and didn’t feel at home anymore. My workmates couldn’t understand my leaving in terms of Joseph Lucas being a good employer paying good wages, but they did understand why I was leaving the country. Everybody had that undercurrent of feeling that the England they knew was changing.

A politician by the name of Enoch Powell advised that Britain should cut down on immigration, but he was labelled as racist. I was one of the million people who wrote to him in agreement with his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. Enoch Powell had served in the British Army in India and was a good linguist. His referencing his own foreboding, as the Roman seeing ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’ highlighted his background as a Latin scholar. He could also speak Urdu, and did so with his constituents. He was approached and supported by the Urdu communities who were getting on well in Britain at the time, as they didn’t want a flood of their confreres coming in either. Like Powell, I had also been abroad and seen various cultures and how different they were from the British, as well as from each other.

My mother reported that the best streets became slums, the place her parents had done their weekly shopping became unrecognizable and they started going elsewhere.

In New Zealand I grew up in a majority white, but still multicultural, society. In high school, I noticed that although all the students in my classes interacted with each other, their friend groups were mostly based on race. There was one girl from the Islands who moved seamlessly between the other Islanders and the whites (or “Pākehā,” as the Māori Indians call us), getting along well with both groups. I later found out that her father was English. The dux of my year group was a Chinese girl. Everybody knew that the Chinese were especially intelligent and did well at school.

When I was a young adult it was common for New Zealanders of that age to embark upon an “Overseas Experience” or “OE,” which would often meant working in Britain. My younger sister and I set off and did just this for about a year and a half — working in London, a base from where we made trips around the United Kingdom and Europe.

While visiting an aunt in Sandwell, West Bromwich, we decided that we would go for a walk around Sutton Park, as our mother told us she used to do. It was a lovely day for it, and we caught public transport and walked in through the gates — then simply stopped and looked around in awe. Other than the location, it was simply unrecognizable as English. We were the only white people there, and although it was a happy and peaceful scene and we didn’t feel threatened, we instinctively felt that something was terribly wrong. After just standing there for a while, gobsmacked, my sister suggested that perhaps Sutton Park had changed quite a bit. Soon one of us ventured, “Well, shall we just go, then?” And we did. We walked silently and I can’t even remember what we decided to do next, but we never did go for a walk around the park. We didn’t talk about it at all, and my thoughts were limited by the injunctions of the multicultural taboos we grew up with.

It made me sad to think that England would one day no longer be England, and Scotland no longer Scotland, and I couldn’t fathom why any country would voluntarily do this to itself. I assumed that I was one of only a few who saw the gain of a vibrant multi-culture as a loss for my own people. It seemed that the general populace welcomed it. I have since come to see that opposition is kept firmly in check by the socially enforced “logic” that disagreement to the multicultural juggernaut is evidence of “racism” — the belief that one’s race is superior to all others. I am opposed to multiculturalism only because I wish for a space in which my people can preserve our unique ethnicities and cultures, and enjoy the benefits of living in socially cohesive societies, rather than debating which peoples are better or worse.

Later in life I became aware of the changing demographics in New Zealand; Auckland was already minority white. I also noticed how the use of the word “diversity” and the phrase “celebrate diversity” are used over and over again in the media and school system. One day my youngest son came home from primary school abuzz with having learned about diversity and confidently told me that the only difference between people was the amount of melanin in their skin. It was obvious that we were being prepared for a demographic shift, and disconcerted, I went online looking for answers. I can’t even remember what, specifically, I searched for, but the results brought up people such as Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. I soon found Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, too. I found that the demographic replacement of Europeans I was worried about was being talked about, and had been talked about, for many years. A whole new world opened up for me, and I discovered that I was not alone in my fears and doubts about the strengths of multiculturalism and what it meant for the future of my own people.

One afternoon I attended a family gathering on my husband’s side. His nephew was engaged and we were all going to meet the bride’s parents, who lived in Christchurch. I asked her English father what had brought him to New Zealand. In his Cockney accent, he went into a tirade about how immigrants in the UK were lavished with all manner of benefits and prioritized over the indigenous whites, who were stuck footing the bill. He eventually got so disgusted with the situation that he moved to New Zealand. International white flight.

Later, I chatted with a woman at the shop I work at. She told me how she grew up just north of Auckland, but that the area has changed dramatically. She told me how her mother had recently purchased a property in one of the new housing developments around there —  then she leaned in and whispered: “It’s all Asian.” Perhaps this woman’s mother, like the men on the bench outside Joseph Lucas, feels too old to flee.

In the wake of Brenton Tarrant’s rampage in Christchurch, all New Zealanders were urged to take responsibility for their own racism, as well as to “call out” racism whenever they observed it. Some women donned headscarves to show solidarity with the Muslim community, while copies of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life were hastily removed from bookstore shelves. I don’t believe the outpouring of grief and support shown from New Zealanders has been paralleled by Muslims in the aftermath of an Islamic attack in Europe. Instead, shortly after the attack, the Otago Muslim Association’s Facebook page, which had showcased a video about demographic replacement and the spread of Islam into the West, captioned “For Muslim eyes only,” was also hastily removed.

I had been vocal in my concerns about the Islamization of Europe, as well as the effects of multiculturalism in general on Europe’s indigenous populations for years. So in the resulting post-Christchurch hysteria, it didn’t take long for my older sister to “expose” me, our younger sister, and our deceased father as racists on Facebook. When my younger sister called our aunt to wish her a happy birthday, the aunt informed her that she would no longer have anything to do with her because of her “political beliefs” and told her that this applied to me as well.

The love that other races have for their own, shown through their open advocacy for their respective “communities,” becomes more obvious the more multicultural our countries become. Today I embrace the natural love I have for my people and no longer struggle with the mental gymnastics that only white people must contort themselves with to conclude that if we prefer to live amongst our own people and put their interests first, we are “racist.”

Despite all “education” to the contrary, I have come to view multiculturalism not as part of the progression of humanity, but as an ethnic cleansing of the original population. A people without a racial consciousness and a love for their own will simply be overwhelmed and absorbed by the multi-culture. As birth rates continue to decline, mixed relationships become more popular, and immigration continues apace, I envisage that the light of our people will slowly and surely continue to go out, street by street.

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.