Posted on July 2, 2009

How I Saw the Light (Part I)

Various, American Renaissance, May 2003

The White Children Were Totally Unprepared

I grew up in a white neighborhood in Akron, Ohio. I watched “The Little Rascals” on TV, and the black child on this program was my only exposure to blacks. In 1961, I graduated from grade school and was happy to be going to Jennings Junior High School, which also served a small section of a black neighborhood. Finally, I was going to have black friends.

I don’t remember my parents having any opinion about the school, or about blacks. They told me that when I was a baby, Mom had a black lady who helped with chores. They also told me the lady got into a fight with her husband and bit off one of his fingers, but they told this story in a way that did not degrade blacks.

So here I am, walking to school, excited at the thought of new adventure. I was also a little shy and nervous. As I got near the school, which was located just inside the black neighborhood, I started seeing blacks. Then I heard screams and yelling like I had never heard before. I could see a group of agitated blacks swarming like bees. I was uneasy and moved to the opposite side of the street.

There were white children watching at a distance, and I asked what the blacks were doing. Someone said this group of 15 to 20 blacks was attacking a white child. There were so many blacks I could not see the person they were attacking. I had never seen such a frenzy, and was quick to get into the safety of the school. I never heard what happened to that white child; maybe he is an AR subscriber now.

The school turned out to be anything but safe. Although only 20 percent of the students were black, they all stuck together as a race, and they had control. All of them had flunked at least once, some twice, and one was reported to be 19 years old. Lunch time was pure hell. Blacks would get in the lunch line and intimidate the whites into buying them lunch. Some blacks would simply wait until a white child sat down to eat, and then take his lunch from him. When you left the lunch room you had to walk down a hall that was flanked by blacks on both sides. The intimidation was so great that many whites gave up money and other valuables without objection. The white children had come from completely different backgrounds, and were totally unprepared for this kind of treatment.

Several times a year all the students were sent to stand by their lockers while teachers patted you down and searched your locker. My teacher told me they couldn’t search and take weapons from blacks without searching us, too.

One day, a black kid named Roger was tormenting a white kid. I was hearing it all and was so fed up with it! Without thinking, I got up and attacked Roger, beating him only as well as a 7th grader could. I survived the rest of the day without being mobbed, but I went home and made some crude weapons. I found a steel bar in my dad’s shop to use as a club, and shaped one end of it into a handle. I also cut a piece of chain in case I needed to extend my reach. I went to school the next day and waited for the attack, since blacks had a history of ganging up on whites. The weapons would not save me, but I wasn’t going to go down without doing as much damage as possible.

To my surprise, the blacks slapped me on the back, and called me “Roger’s Man.” All the blacks knew me, and I got their protection. This came as quite a surprise, and saved a lot of money. The other white kids had to pay for protection. Apparently, the blacks were so stunned that a white would fight, that they gave me free protection.

I was the oldest of five children, and my parents were not going to let us all go through three years of this school, so we moved to the country. What amazes me to this day is that in 1960 a 20-percent black population could terrorize the whole school. All the school officials were white. They must have been in as much fear as we were. It was my experience with blacks at Jennings Junior High that formed my racial views.

Jack Minick, Mt.Vernon, Ind.

A Genuine Lefty

I began as a genuine lefty: member of the ACLU and People for the American Way, contributor to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a subscriber to the Washington Post Weekly Edition, The New Republic, The Nation, etc.

My conversion to reality was incremental, though not all increments were equal. Three events remain strongly in my memory, so I will credit them with my conversion, although they may only be representative of many similar events.

(1) Decades ago I read in the Washington Post Weekly Edition a story written by a woman on the editorial staff. It described how a group of young blacks had invaded her “fashionable Georgetown home,” burgled the place, beat up and hog-tied her husband, and gang-raped her. She wrote of how, during the oral-sex phase of the gang-rape, she told her attackers her mouth was too dry to continue. They brought her a glass of water and “touchingly” waited for her to drink it so she could continue. Her view was that these were poor, oppressed victims of white villainy, striking out in the only way they knew how, and she refused to cooperate in their apprehension and prosecution. Such idiocy led me to believe there was something sick about American liberalism.

(2) In 1993 I was living in South Texas. I worked late one evening, and as I was driving home in the dark a carload of Mexican kids forced me off the road and attacked me with baseball bats. They nearly killed me. Of the many cars that drove by, one elderly couple stopped, and with flashing lights and honking horn, scared the Mexicans away. The couple was, of course, white. They were apologetic for having wisely stayed in their car with the doors locked, but since they probably saved my life I felt extremely grateful to them.

The Mexican cop who arrived found my situation humorous, and chuckled and spoke Spanish with the emergency medical technicians (Mexican also) who treated me. At the hospital, X-rays showed that, amazingly, my skull was not fractured. I had a concussion, a lacerated cornea, and needed 30-odd stitches to resecure my scalp, but I lived.

To follow up on my case I was to contact “Sgt. Rodriguez.” I called a dozen times, but he was never there and never returned my calls. A friend from work knew a former Texas Ranger, then a private investigator. The PI laughed at me for going through channels. The police report had pretty well described the perpetrators (thanks to the elderly couple — I was a little foggy) and the car, including license number. He suggested that for $500 he could get another Mexican gang to kill my assailants. I didn’t care to end up in front of a Mexican jury, so I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind. It cost me about $1,000 in medical expenses after my insurance paid its share.

(3) Growing up among the historical markers in Middle Tennessee, I became an amateur War Between the States historian at the age of seven (when I bought R. S. Henry’s Story of the Confederacy). I have continued to collect books and artifacts of the Confederacy ever since. Many of my ancestors fought for the Confederacy. While browsing the Internet one day in the late 1990s, I stumbled across the story of the vandalization of Robert E. Lee’s portrait in Richmond. I have read a great deal about Lee, and was outraged. Via the Internet I found American Renaissance, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Nationalist Times, Southern Patriot, etc. and have not turned back.

My older brother and father are cowards. They live in the hills, isolated (for the time being) from the real world. When I bring up, even obliquely, what is happening to our country their ears fold forward and they tremble in horror, as if the FBI had bugged every space in America and will throw people into jail just for listening to non-PC opinions. I am afraid most white Americans share the mentality of my brother and father. I am not hopeful. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.

John Buchanan

What Pushed Me Over the Edge

My racial consciousness had been quietly forming for years before I became fully aware of the fallacy of egalitarianism and the folly of integration. What pushed me over the edge were the differing reactions of blacks and whites to the O. J. Simpson verdict.

Terrence Silva, Columbus, Ohio

Assumptions Put to the Test

Like most white Americans, I was taught to believe in assimilation. I felt a certain sympathy for blacks because I thought many were treated badly. I sincerely believed integration and civil rights would let blacks compete successfully in American society, and that the only thing holding them back was racism.

These assumptions were put to the test when I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and on three different occasions was subject to criminal attacks or harassment by blacks. Once I was almost raped by a young black man. Another time I got into a physical confrontation with one. I was also held up at gun point by a black man and his Hispanic girlfriend. Later I moved from the Bay Area to a safer part of the state, and tried to put those incidents behind me, but I was reminded once again of the incompatibility of blacks and whites by two pivotal events: the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, and the O.J. Simpson trial.

The riots in LA stunned me as I watched a cowardly white-run government cave in to arson, looting, and the wanton murder of whites. It was also instructive to see that the only people who had the sense to defend themselves were Koreans who — unhindered by white guilt — armed themselves and stood guard over their businesses. They did not apologize for wanting to survive nor did they scurry off like rats when the riots were over. This is what whites have been reduced to: A population in a constant state of flight.

Even more enlightening was the O.J. Simpson trial and its aftermath. I watched much of the trial on television. Mr. Simpson was obviously guilty but he got away with it because he was black, rich, and could afford to hire the best lawyers who blatantly used race to deflect attention from the evidence. As I watched blacks cheer the verdict, I realized that these people hate us. And they hate us because we are white. Who planted that hatred and nourishes it even today via the media, academia, and the government? That would be America’s ruling class. One can only conclude that, white or not, America’s ruling class hates white people nearly as much as any minority group does. Some of them may look like us, but they are not us.

There are calls for breaking away and forming a new country, and that may be our last hope. Barring that, I see whites disappearing as they interbreed, are killed off by minorities, or are reduced to a state of servitude by our ruling class. Many whites are so blinded by guilt that they can hardly wait to sign up for their own destruction. What do I have in common with these people even if they are white? Nothing.

Dawn H., Ventura, Calif.

‘What a Bunch of Weirdo Nazis!’

I am the child of two professors, who are, like most of their profession, dogmatically multiculturalist. From 1993 to 2002, I was a graduate student in comparative literature, and when I started out, I agreed with the Marxist, deconstructionist, multiculturalist intellectual orientation of the field. Although I soon began to be irritated by the mindless celebration of diversity, the lack of intellectual rigor, and the obscurantism of my field, it was not until much later that I started seriously to doubt the orthodox view of race that is at the basis of all contemporary work in literary studies.

Race is a major preoccupation of today’s literary critics. Look at any one of the countless introductions to literary theory, and you will find at least one chapter devoted to work on the representation of race in literature. Such literary criticism, whose premises are unchallenged within the field, is devoted to exposing the ways in which whites have misrepresented people of other races in the interests of dominating them. For literary critics, racial differences are entirely the result of our cultural history, and they see it as their duty to change our culture in ways that will make these differences disappear.

My shift away from racial orthodoxy began when I became familiar with evolutionary psychology, the field that argues that all aspects of human behavior have an innate cause and that culture merely influences the unfolding of our innate nature. I began to go to conferences and read Internet discussion groups that dealt with evolutionary psychology. J. P. Rushton, Glayde Whitney, and Charles Murray regularly posted on Ian Pitchford’s evolutionary psychology listserv, where other research on human racial differences, such as that of Richard Lynn, was discussed. I read some of the books of these thinkers. Although I felt a bemused revulsion for them at first, I soon came to realize how plausible they were. I read other books about the links between genetics and behavior, and learned that all human personality traits show substantial heritability; even how we hold our hands, how often we laugh, and the strength of our religious beliefs appear to be heritable.

So, when you see that there is an average difference of 15 points between the IQs of American whites and American blacks, and of 25 points between American whites and African blacks, the conclusion that at least some of this variance must be due to biology naturally follows. The same conclusion follows from the large and well-documented variances between whites and blacks in criminal behavior. I started to realize that my culture is founded on a massive denial of the truth that is sustained by what must be the most pervasive and successful propaganda campaign in history.

I began to notice confirmations of the ideas of the “racist scientists” in the world around me. For example, as J. P. Rushton shows, blacks are higher in self-esteem than whites and willing to deny the most obvious facts about the world in order to maintain their high opinions of themselves. I witnessed a striking instance of this trait. I taught an English composition class, and I had many black students. A few were decent, and a very few even outstanding students, but most were not. About half were abysmally dull and unteachable, but they had no problems finding ways to blame me for their troubles.

Slowly, I came to realize the true meaning of black culture. Although I live in a neighborhood of downtown Buffalo that is still majority-white, the ghettoes are very close, and one feels their influence everywhere. Blacks had heckled me many times, had bullied me once, and even mugged me once. But I had not reflected on these experiences before I started reading about race. I now became fully conscious of the insecurity and disgust that my neighborhood inspired in me. Blacks were the primary reasons for these feelings, but I found the Hispanics and Arabs who also congregated in my neighborhood scarcely better.

I also began to notice the genetic deterioration in our society. My neighborhood thronged with the retarded, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the homeless, who were housed in downtown “group homes.” It added to the offense that rich bureaucrats who lived in upper-class neighborhoods would put these people in my midst and keep them away from their own homes. It horrified me that these people might be reproducing. I am amazed that people consider eugenic sterilization inhumane, but don’t consider it inhumane to subject residents of downtown neighborhoods to a parade of freaks.

Were these people — the blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, the handicapped, and the homeless — making my life richer and more vibrant, as liberal propaganda claimed they were? I had been inclined to think so before. I had thought it rather romantic to live in such a cosmopolitan environment, and I had even taken a sort of pleasure in the presence of freaks. But I came to realize that I had never genuinely enjoyed the daily sight of these people; they were offensive, discouraging, and alienating. The vibrancy and richness that remained came from the white people who were still clinging to their downtown neighborhoods.

The consequence of the American racial problem that was most personally relevant to me was its utter desolation of the humanities. When I started graduate school, I thought multiculturalist activism in literary studies was a peripheral phenomenon. Surely, underneath it all, I thought, remained some of the great intelligence that one sees in the classic works of literary scholarship written before the 1970s.

For nine long years, I persisted in the belief that there was something at the core of my field that was worthwhile. But when I finally finished my Ph.D., after having written a 350-page dissertation on Scott and Byron, published three research papers in scholarly journals, and gained the respect and friendship of the most intelligent people in the field, I realized I had been wrong. In fact, it was the intelligent people who were at the periphery of the field; the core was rotten.

People in my field have, by and large, ceased to be interested in producing interesting and challenging readings of texts. Rather, literary studies boils down to a competition among whites in which each tries to prove that he loves blacks more than his colleagues do. After reading hundreds of vapid books and articles in academic journals, I concluded that the only way to get ahead in today’s academy was to argue that some classic literary text was even more racist than previous critics had believed. I had no interest in spending any more time in such an abominably trivial community.

Like a few other people in literary studies, I had tried to integrate the interpretation of literature with evolutionary psychology. I found that evolutionary psychology had the potential to bring about a sea-change in the interpretation of literature because it offers theories of sexual behavior, social relations, perception, and language that are vastly more interesting and well-grounded than the established ones. As an example, I wrote an article that examined the way in which innate aggressive impulses were reconciled with modern norms forbidding violence in the historical novels of Scott. The evolutionary psychologists that I talked to took such interpretations to be obviously plausible, but I could never get most of my colleagues to grant my premise that a biological human nature existed, no matter how much hard evidence I gave them.

There are many reasons why people reject evolutionary psychology, but surely the primary reason is that multiculturalists believe that once people start thinking seriously about the biology of human behavior, they will start to have subversive ideas about the causes of racial differences. They are right about this; that had, in fact, been my own experience. I came to realize that I was in a field that had effectively barred the way against any progress in the understanding of its subject matter, because of its practitioners’ need to uphold the dogma of racial equality.

I found that, in order to be accepted in literary studies today, one must not only tolerate the fallacious view of race that inspires so much of the work in the field, but one must actively affirm it. The academy is pervaded by a nasty, policing atmosphere. My colleagues were always prying to make sure that I held the correct view of race. A conversational gambit they frequently use is asking someone how his ideas relate to racial issues. A propos of nothing, literary critics say things like, “Well, I think we should bring race into this discussion” or “We should look at that argument from a post-colonial perspective.”

I became aware of AR’s website in 2001, late in my graduate career. I learned of it through one of my evolutionary psychology listservs. At that time, even though I had come to accept the reality of racial differences in behavior, I had not yet accepted the idea of a political project based on these ideas. My initial reaction to AR was therefore the same as my initial reaction to so-called “racist science” — bemused revulsion.

The first thing I remember reading on the website was an article called “Rearing Honorable White Children.” It was about families that had entirely seceded from American culture because they could no longer recognize it as having anything to do with themselves. They discouraged their children from watching television and blocked out most of the programming that came in through it because they didn’t want their children to be exposed to our culture’s massively distorted values. Instead, during the evening they played chess, watched classic films, and read and listened to classic Western literature and music. They home-schooled their children because they hated the anti-white atmosphere of our schools, and did not want their children to consort with the children of criminals.

My initial reaction, which had been programmed into me by years of multiculturalist propaganda, was, “What a bunch of weirdo Nazis!” But my impulse as an intellectual, an impulse that is so rarely in evidence in the academy today, is to get past the obvious and ready-made reaction, and to consider problems with some objectivity, to try to see things from a different perspective. And I realized that I couldn’t stand most of what was on TV either, that I disliked the version of history taught at American schools, and that what these parents enjoyed — playing chess, reading 19th century literature, listening to Beethoven — was exactly what I enjoyed doing myself. These people were, in fact, very much like me.

Not only that, they were like many of the white intellectuals I knew who had never doubted the orthodox view of race. My father, for example, is a professor of religious studies who is always going off to Africa or the Caribbean to teach blacks “liberation theology,” a sort of commingling of Marxism and Christianity. But what does he do in the evening? Listen to rap music? Watch Martin Lawrence movies? No, he reads Dickens, plays chess, and listens to the great 19th century German composers. Without knowing it, he too acts according to a spirit of racial loyalty, and while the expressed purpose of his life is to liberate blacks, he has no real sympathy with their lives and culture.

After I finished my Ph.D. last summer, I took a job doing low-level office work. I don’t like the pay, and I don’t like the tedium, but I do like the anonymity. No one cares what I think, so no one pressures me to engage in ritualistic affirmations of multicultural dogma, as I was forced to do in the academy. So I bide my time, wondering whether I am just a disappointed and bewildered crank approaching middle age or the harbinger of a coming Renaissance.

Ian Jobling, Buffalo, New York

Yggdrasil Caught My Attention

I am from a small town in the Pacific Northwest and had almost no contact with people of other races until after age 21. I am in my forties now. I was completely “liberal” about race until my early thirties. I was aware since my teens that the average IQ score of blacks is 15 points lower than that of whites, but I thought the cause was cultural factors. I remember thinking that there are different subspecies (races) of birds, but they all fly well even if they have distinctive colors, and that it was therefore unlikely that different races of people would have a significant difference in the most essential characteristic of humans: intelligence. In my upbringing race was never mentioned at all. My family hardly ever spoke about politics, either, but I am sure they were Democrats.

When I was a child I remember seeing television footage of black protesters being pushed back with fire hoses, and hearing that they were excluded from Southern “whites-only” restaurants. I remember thinking that we Yankees were morally superior, since it was obvious that all you had to do to get along with black people was treat them courteously and fairly.

I learned Spanish and went to live in Mexico for a year after dropping out of college. I was amazed at the corruption. I had to pay many bribes to police despite having done nothing wrong. Ordinary people were very dishonest, too. I don’t remember thinking about immigration at all. This was the early 1980s, before immigration became really massive. I was still “liberal” on race but I wasn’t afraid to recognize negative cultural differences between us and Mexicans. When I returned to the US I found people were uncomfortable if I told them about my experiences with corruption, even though I refrained from making any racial or cultural generalizations.

I moved to the Southwest and attended a trade school that was about 40 percent black. That was the first time I had been around large numbers of black people. I dated black women and even wound up living with one for three years. Race was not a factor in our eventual break up and (thank goodness!) we had no children. At that time I worked in a company where 50 percent of the workers were black. My opinion of black people was starting to erode but I still clung to the idea that blacks are culturally deprived. Ebonics and cursing grated on me, but I attributed all “differences” to social class and deprivation.

I can remember a few incidents that roused the first traces of race-consciousness. I remember telling a dirty joke to one of my black co-workers, which included the word “prostitute,” and it dawned on me that he didn’t know the meaning of the word! I know he understood the concept because he once invited me to go look for “hos” after work, which I found repugnant.

I once told another black co-worker I had lived in Mexico and spoke Spanish, and it became clear he didn’t know where Mexico was, and didn’t know that Mexican-Americans speak Spanish rather than “Mexican.” He also didn’t know the locations of any of the states in the Pacific Northwest. The change in my thinking was taking place on a more or less unconscious level.

I was still living with my black girlfriend. She had an IQ of 105 and spoke Standard English, so gave me no reasons to re-examine my thinking, but I do remember something that made me wonder whether our relationship was a good idea. I was watching a television talk show about racially-mixed people, and a woman in the audience said she was mixed because some slave master raped one of his female slaves. It occurred to me that she probably knew nothing about her ancestors, and that it was just as likely she had an ancestor who was a prostitute impregnated by a white customer. It was striking to me that even mixed-race people demonize whites. I could imagine my great-great-grandchildren with this black woman being just as anti-white, and saying they were mixed because I had raped her.

Some time after I broke up with her I got a new job in a place with full-blown affirmative action. The workforce was 80 percent black, in an area that was about 20 percent black. Management was 80 percent black, too, and blacks seemed to feel freer to be themselves in such an environment. Every day I would hear the word “mother-f*r” shouted out within 30 seconds of coming to work. I once saw a middle-aged black man pantomime anal rape, saying “Ah’m gonna be oooon yo’ ass, m*f*r, Ah’m gonna be f*ing on yo’ mother-f*ing ass!!” I had been making allowances for blacks but now I began to see an unmistakable, dramatic difference between blacks and whites of the same socioeconomic class.

Affirmative action completed my mental transformation. I had uncritically accepted the media view that it was an extra effort to search for qualified minorities, but at this new job it was obviously about lowering standards. I saw a white man with a BA passed over for a promotion that went to a black nincompoop who must have had an IQ of 75. I was enraged at how the mass media insist whites are not hurt by affirmative action. My first full-blown heretical thought was: “They really are as stupid as they sound!!”

I started looking for information — on the Internet because I didn’t want to have to explain ordering a “racist” book in a bookstore. I started lurking in the Usenet group alt.politics.nationalism.white. The posts of someone calling himself Yggdrasil caught my attention and I started collecting them. I had been thinking of getting some of the books he mentioned, and by chance I came across a couple of them in a used book store. The first racialist book I read was Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions and the next was America Balkanized by Brent Nelson. Since that time, almost ten years ago, my interest in ethnic conflict has prompted me to read about 200 books, though many of them are on broader subjects, like general political science.

I haven’t had much success in changing anybody’s mind. I’ve tried talking with relatives about immigration but it just makes them uncomfortable. Most people are committed to conformity. I did get one person to read about a dozen carefully selected books, but his reaction was very odd. He started babbling about how at one time the Irish weren’t even considered white, which was hilarious because none of the books said anything about the Irish. It was like trying to deprogram a cult member.

I have moved back to the Pacific Northwest.

Anonymous

I Was a Red-Diaper-Baby

If the definition of a liberal is someone who has never been mugged, then to know my history is to understand my political journey.

I was a red-diaper-baby. That is, my father was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA. Years later, he came partly to his senses, but remained a liberal on all issues, including race. Predictably, my parents encouraged their children to go forth and enjoy the multi-racial joys of New York City. I even marched with Martin Luther King when he made his famous speech, but his dream became our nightmare. Multi-racialism resulted in a private, and on some level deserved, holocaust for my family and me.

I am the eldest of five. One of my sisters, who was 13 at the time, was raped when she attended a party on our block. One of the blacks repeatedly asked her to go upstairs to see his apartment. After several rejections, he accused my sister of racism. As a well-indoctrinated, guilt-ridden liberal, she had no choice but to go with him. Out of fear and shame, my sister did not share her story with us until she landed in a mental ward a couple of years later.

Another sister was raped by a black open-enrollment “student” at City College in a locker room after she attended a co-ed swim class. The prosecuting attorney told my sister it was an open-and-shut case because she did everything she was supposed to do: She reported the event immediately, gave a detailed description of the accused (including a bizarrely shaped goatee), and then went directly to the hospital. However, after all the evidence was given, when the jury was polled, the whites voted to convict, but the tribe hung together and hung the jury.

Ironically, before her trial even began, another black tried to rape her in the elevator of her own building. He entered the elevator after her, and sent it down to the basement. There he cut her neck and was about to have his way with her, when someone luckily brought the elevator back up.

The following term, when my sister attended her first political science class, she found that the black who had raped her after the swim class was to be her classmate. She marched off to the administration office in a fury, where she loudly threatened to sue the school for its lack of security. They settled then and there by agreeing to pay for her to complete her education in Israel.

My mother’s wrist was broken when an African American relieved her of her pocketbook. I, myself, had a gun at my head twice on the streets of New York when blacks mugged me.

During the period of my family’s holocaust in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I was starting my career as a teacher at George W. Wingate High School in Brooklyn. It had recently opened as the city’s first deliberately-integrated high school. At first, it offered a good education, but I was struck by the differences in the abilities, work ethic, and behavior of the races. I also noticed that the students segregated themselves in the cafeteria.

Integration can be defined as the period from when the first black moves in until the last white moves out. As the school began to tip in the expected direction, there was racial violence and several race riots. This festering condition culminated in the infamous Day of Knives. On the last day of the school year, as the students were going home, many blacks menaced their white classmates with knives, and warned them not to come back. The whites got the message and stayed away.

I served as dean of boys during the last of my eight years at that school. We averaged five arrests a day out of a student body of about 3,000. One of my duties was to convince fearful parents of victims to press charges. Every day a paddy wagon came from the local precinct to process the day’s catch. Sometimes we ran out of handcuffs.

There were junkies nodding out in the cafeteria, and the aroma of pot was everywhere. It seemed as if more students roamed the halls than attended class. Every six weeks or so, a teacher could be expected to be sent to the hospital. I remember one young handicapped woman who walked with a cane. Someone pushed her down the stairs, and she did not come back until the following year. After only a few days someone pushed her down the stairs again. She never came back.

I also recall the day a substitute cop was assigned to my office. At first, he put his feet up on the desk and expressed pleasure with such an easy assignment. By the end of the day he was complaining he was working harder than a desk sergeant.

One Senior Day started with water pistol battles, graduated to entire waste baskets full of water, and then fire extinguishers. The school had to be evacuated because the water was ankle deep. In one five month period, five of our students had either committed murder or had been murdered. One teacher who was assigned to the school left for lunch on his first day and never came back.

By the 1980s I had developed an interest in the race question. My family and former friends would call it an obsession. They typically dealt with The Problem by running away from it. To me, how liberal a person is on the topic is usually a function of his geographic distance from it.

I have always been interested in statistics, and my first exposure to racial stats came when I was watching a television program about the Bernie Goetz case. [Mr. Goetz was a white New Yorker who shot several young blacks who were trying to mug him.] I was stunned when the announcer said blacks were ten times more likely to commit a violent crime than whites — stunned not by the number, but to learn that this information was available and being discussed. I sent for the transcript, and found myself compiling a collection of articles on crime. My next great discovery was Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. In 1992, I learned about Jared Taylor’s Paved with Good Intentions from the Bob Grant radio program. The rest, as they say, is history.

It has not been easy for me as a New York Jew, embracing the views that I do. I am regarded as a pariah when I express myself. Mostly by choice, I am estranged from my family. My comrades are my gentile wife and retired former colleagues who have shared my professional experiences and who have drawn similar conclusions from their observations.

Mike Berman, New York, NY

Part 2

Part 3