A Chronicle of Race in our Nation’s Capital
Mark Helmi, American Renaissance, August 20, 2022
This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.
I grew up in a small college town that was almost completely white. Both of my parents were professors at the local university, as were many of my friends. Located in the mountain west, the town had a nearby ski resort and a beautiful national park. I would often go hiking with my parents as a child, and in the winter they would pay for a season skiing pass for all of us. Here amongst the wilderness is where I first noticed the reality of race.
My college town had almost no blacks, but it did have an Asian minority, because many of the faculty, graduate students and undergraduates came from countries like China, South Korea, and India. I noticed as a teenager that none of these people or their offspring would ever go hiking or skiing. They preferred to stay in town or drive several hours to go shopping in the city.
Furthermore, they did not understand that man could coexist with wildlife. My hometown had a preponderance of deer, as well as wolves and bears. None of the Asian immigrants knew how to properly store trash so as to not attract bears. They resented the idea that they might wake up and find deer in their yards, eating their grass. I even had a Chinese neighbor who would set traps to kill the harmless snakes in his front lawn.
I later realized that the concept of environmental preservation and conservation is a fundamentally European idea. Countries like the US, Canada, New Zealand, Iceland, and many others set aside massive tracts of land as wilderness areas or national parks. What all these countries have in common is the European heritage of their people. South Africa and a few other nations in Sub-Saharan Africa have similar wildlife refuges, but these areas were all created by South Africa’s defunct white government or by the old colonial regimes elsewhere. Now that whites are no longer in control, Africa’s national parks are beset with out-of-control poaching, trespassing and squatting. The rhinoceros population of Kruger National Park in South Africa has dropped 70 percent in the last decade alone. Most Asian countries like China, Indonesia, and India don’t even pretend to care about our environment, sacrificing the long-term health of our planet for short term expansion of heavy industry.
After high school, I went off to a college in a New England city very similar to the one I grew up in. There were the same aloof Asians who stuck to themselves, but there was also a noticeable black and Hispanic population. Throughout my four years there, I cannot recall a non-trivial conversation I had with anyone who was not white, although I did have a few non-white professors. In college I studied mechanical engineering, and I had a dream of working in the aerospace industry for an organization like NASA, SpaceX, or United Launch Alliance. I wanted to design rockets that would fly humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Soon after graduating I found a job as a defense contractor in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Here, rather than designing futuristic spacecraft, I instead worked on a specific component of a certain military jet that has faced an incredible number of delays, cost increases, and scandals. As I would find out in the coming years, doing something truly revolutionary like exploring the cosmos is no longer a feat our wasteful, incompetent, “diverse and inclusive” government would or could pull off.
I decided that I would live in Washington, DC, but commute to my job in the suburbs. I enjoy living in lively urban areas that have good restaurants, bars, and attractions. I moved into DC as did many other whites, rapidly gentrifying the city as crime fell. I got married and purchased a townhouse with my wife and we now have a young daughter. It was at this point in my life that I truly began to grapple with the question of racial differences.
It started when my wife pointed out that our daughter, of course, could not attend DC public schools. She would not learn much, and would be surrounded by criminal violence. Of course, I knew that this was because DC public schools are about 70 percent black. Blacks have been shown to have lower IQs, even when adopted by white parents. Furthermore, they are more prone to crime, especially when they feel frustrated living adjacent to functioning white communities that they cannot emulate. My liberal, Joe Biden-supporting wife, of course, would never admit this, but like all of us on this planet she has an innate desire to preserve herself and her offspring. She proposed that we send our daughter to a private Catholic school in the suburbs near my workplace, and I agreed. That school is nearly two-thirds white, and while I would prefer my daughter have access to the free, quality public education that myself and my ancestors had, I believe she will do well there.
However, two years ago came a much more pressing concern. After the coronavirus lockdowns, violent crime spiked in Washington, DC and nearly every other city in the country. There was a huge surge in gun sales during this time. Of course, some subset of legal guns purchased by responsible, mostly-white citizens who wish to protect themselves or have fun inevitably flow to dangerous, mostly-black criminals. This is exactly what happened all across America. At the same time, there was a push by left-wing district attorneys to no longer enforce many violent crimes, and to release criminals without bail, except in exceptional cases. The third ingredient in the potion is the delinquent, anti-social character of most sub-saharan Africans and Hispanics (or at least those who carry a great deal of Amerindian DNA). These three catalysts have resulted in a deadly explosion of violence across the United States.
I now contemplate leaving DC for one of the surrounding quieter and whiter suburbs. My only question is where I will go when these suburbs inherit the problems of their respective inner cities as blacks and Hispanics leave the destruction they themselves have created. I also question how the great challenge of our time, anthropogenic climate change, will be solved when only the small white minority on our planet has the foresight to care about dear Mother Earth.
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.