Why I’m a Race Realist

When others in their twenties learn of my dissident opinions on race, their reactions are often laughable.

“What do you mean? I thought you were an atheist?”

“You sure don’t look like a Republican!”

“Didn’t you say the other day that you hated Bill O’Reilly?”

As Jared Taylor has pointed out, when most people find out that you believe there are important differences between WASPs and pygmies, they immediately want to discover what other crazy things you believe. Hailing from a very blue state, people invariably want to know what I think about “the gays” and the various wars the US has embroiled itself in since my tenth birthday.

The disappointment on their faces is palpable when I tell them I voted for gay marriage when it was on the ballot in my state, and supported the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. And just like them, I hate the post-9/11 wars and the PATRIOT Act, and have donated money to anti-war groups, such as antiwar.com.

In the leftwing imagination, everything at odds with Salon.com is supposed to be one big bad thing. Any disruption of this preconceived notion threatens their worldview. Your average college-educated Democrat firmly believes all people who disagree with him are illiterate and obese Mike Huckabee supporters who attend neo-Nazi gatherings. That’s what I was raised to believe, in a city where most everyone believed that, so it was a long journey for me to discover racial identity.

Like leftists who are shocked when they learn that I like Albert Camus as well as the rock band Of Montreal but am interested in forming a white ethno-state, I am shocked when I meet Identitarians who grew up in circumstances very different from my own: who went to private schools and always lived in white areas. I don’t think I would ever have ever developed a racial consciousness if I had come of age in a “whiteopia” — no matter how much Nietzsche I read in college — because my consciousness was born of direct experience.

I always went to public schools — the forced-integration kind — that gave me a sense of race well before my age hit double-digits. All those horror stories you can find in the archives of American Renaissance are true. I went to schools with both private security and armed city police, schools that make the news at least once a year, schools where security cameras were installed everywhere, schools where students sent teachers to the hospital, schools with gang graffiti on the desks, etc. etc. That is why people who went to public schools and managed to stay liberal are even more surprising to me than Identitarians from the suburbs.

Through all my years in school, we were taught to believe the opposite of what we were observing. In elementary school we got to draw pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. in February. In middle school we started reading endless non-white sob stories for English class. By high school we were being assigned to write five-page papers on what a bad guy Andrew Jackson was.

The contradictions were apparent, even in liberal terms. The only people I ever saw bully gays were blacks. They used to shout “Ew” at them in the halls but, of course, were never punished for it. Similarly, I was horrified by the way blacks would taunt and cat-call the girls who were just starting to bloom. It was a far cry from the supposed dynamics of white men humiliating black women in the stories by Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison that we were assigned to read.

In short, the schools were trying to turn our minds against the evidence of our senses. They tried to inculcate the conviction that all groups are equal in every way. I knew that wasn’t true. Blacks were menacing. They were dangerous. My understanding of white identity came from the desire for safety, and the realization that safety meant the company of people like me. I have seen this over and over in public schools and parks, on buses and subways, and in neighborhoods in every city I ever lived in. My lived experience is not something that can be deconstructed by critical race theory or an opinion piece at Huffington Post.

Theoretically, the relationship between race and IQ could be debunked, and one could argue about the weakness in the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle or Julius Evola. But there is something much more basic, even primal, about wanting physical safety for yourself and those you care about. The urge for safety explains the behavior of all kinds of whites. As the late Joe Sobran said, “In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan.”

No one argues that white neighborhoods, white public transit, and white public spaces are not safer than ones filled with blacks or Hispanics. People refuse even to think about it. Whites are always seeking safety in each other’s company — but as quietly and coincidentally as possible. As Joe Sobran also said, “The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.”

When some people answer the question “How did you come to these beliefs?” they may be tempted to wax philosophical, delve into metaphysics, or quote Houston Stewart Chamberlin. But tying white identity to opaque interpretations of René Guénon or Aleksandr Dugin is the rightwing version of liberals who insist on tying white identity to Republican warmongering: it overlooks basic truths in favor of academic theories.

Red state partisans are implicitly very white, but so are hard-left hipsters. And it is true that those of us who discover the truth about “the color of crime” tend to start reading academic books on race. But for those of us raised in the multiracial cesspools that will soon spread to the whole country, the question of identity always boils down to the question of safety. To me, it is safety that makes white identity so important, so meaningful, and so long lasting.

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.