How I Became Racist

hint: it wasn't the internet

I am a racist. I like my people, my culture, my people’s music and fashion and literature, better than that found anywhere else in the world. I find our women to be the most beautiful in the world, our men the most admirable. Our languages are pleasing to my ears, while the languages of other races are jarring and harsh. I am not a supremacist – I don’t think that our superiority awards us the privilege (or responsibility) of ruling over other races. I honestly don’t care about them at all. What I am is entirely prejudiced, bigoted, preferential for people of my own race. I am a racist.

I wasn’t raised to be racist. As a relatively normal Gen-X kid, I was raised to view Martin Luther King as a modern-day saint. Shows like Different Strokes, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and the A-Team taught me that Blacks and Whites can all get along if we just treat each other with respect. My family went to Protestant churches that taught the virtues of brotherly love, not judging people by the color of their skin, and the Brotherhood of Man. Our churches would go out in the community and help people of any race or creed. I worked in soup kitchens, renovated community centers, cleaned up trash from poor neighborhoods, and built houses with Habitat for Humanity, while never giving any thought to the race of the people we were helping.

So, what changed? Simple: experiences with other races. I discovered two undeniable facts about the races and cultures in this world, that anyone who’s had extensive time with them can tell you: first, not all races are equal; and second, the idea that one should not be racist, to prefer your race over all others, that one should strive to be, as we say in the US, color-blind, is entirely exclusive to the White race. Let’s examine each of these in turn.

Experience Hardened My Heart

When I was in high school, I spent a year or so working as a life-guard at a local community center. The town I lived in, indeed that entire part of the state, was almost exclusively White, so naturally all of the people who used the pool were White. There was the occasional problem of young kids running on wet tiles, teenagers sneaking friends in without paying, and once a man brought a bottle of rum into the sauna and got so drunk he threw up. In a year of working there, I never had a single problem more serious than these. On the whole it was a perfect job for a teenager: boring, easy, and I had a lot of spare time to flirt with girls and talk to my friends. That is, except for one Saturday a month, when the “youth” from a “youth facility” down in Milwaukee would make the several hour-long drive north to visit our town for God-knows-what stupid reason. Dozens of black kids would descend on our sleepy community center and for a few hours, turn it into a chaotic hell-scape. Within minutes of their arrival, they were sprinting through the halls, howling like wolves, fighting, terrifying kids, and dry-humping each other in plain sight of everyone. The difference was so laughably over the top that it could have been set up as a parody by the Daily Stormer. Still, I thought to myself, these kids have had a difficult life. They’re all incarcerated for some reason or another. They don’t represent their race.

As I got older and had more experiences, I learned that this was not true. I enlisted in the Navy right after I turned 18 and was immediately thrown into a world where Blacks made up a sizable minority. In some specialties (administrative work, supply, hospitality – basically anything where they were guaranteed to not be in any physical danger) they were an overwhelming majority. Because of my job I traveled around a lot and sometimes spent as little as two weeks on a ship or at a base. Sometimes I would sleep in engineering berthing, which was almost all Whites and Asians. Other times I slept in deck berthing, filled with Blacks, Latinos, and a smattering of Whites and Asians. It was like living in a minimum security prison. Fights would break out regularly over the most minor of things. I once saw a guy start a fight over what video game to play. This isn’t to say that Whites never caused problems or that they didn’t sometimes resort to violence; anyone who’s been enlisted and lived in male-only quarters knows that it just comes with the territory. It was the frequency and casualness that it happened that was so different.

As a young man I dated women of different races. Some Black, some Indian, some Latina. When we went out in public, we’d generally get no attention at all. My White friends were friendly and welcoming to them. We’d go to restaurants, parties, and bars and not get odd looks. That is, unless we went to a Black bar, or went to a party thrown by Latinos, etc. Men and women would shout out questions, “Hey, why you datin’ that White boy?” Men tried to start fights with me on more than one occasion. Women would pointedly ask why I didn’t want to date someone of my own race. We never – and I mean never – experienced anything remotely like that from Whites.

Nothing that I have seen over my life has ever disabused me of these early lessons. Every city I’ve lived in, every town, has just reinforced them. Everyone who is reading this knows what I mean, even if they don’t want to admit it. When I say, “the Black part of town,” you and I both have the exact same image in mind. This isn’t due to social engineering or propaganda. If anything, your resistance to what you know is true is due to the propaganda we’ve lived under for decades. We hear so many platitudes about these parts of town and why they are the way they are, but have you ever stopped to ask yourself: why don’t the White parts of town require constant surveillance, community outreach, volunteer work, and social programs?

The more committed of you might be thinking, Well sure WCB, but there are poor White towns and neighborhoods as well. What about meth-riddled towns throughout rural America? To this I will say, of course we have our poor people. Of course problems can affect White society. But have you ever stopped to consider how odd it is that Whites will beggar themselves with outreach programs to Black and Brown communities, but in this entire country there is not a single Black-funded program that has as its stated goal to help poor White communities? Not a single, solitary one. Nor is there an Asian group with that as its goal, nor a Latino one. And this brings me to my second point.

It's Only Us; It’s Only Ever Been Us; It Will Only Ever Be Us

Other races do not suffer from this strange malady, this aversion to in-group preference. I’ve never met a Japanese person who didn’t want their child to marry another Japanese person. I’ve never met a Black person who didn’t think that the L.A. Riots were justified. I’ve never met a Mexican who isn’t proud of being Mexican, and who doesn’t love his country’s music, food, and history. How many times have you worked for a company with a department that is mysteriously comprised of only Filipinos, or Pakis, or Guatemalans? Why do you think that is? Do you honestly think that over the years, no one of any other race has applied? Or could it just possibly be that the person in charge of hiring for that department just so happens to be of the same race?

No one thinks that it is strange for a Black man to exclusively prefer Black women. No one bats an eye when a local community of minorities holds a beauty contest that’s restricted to women of their race. I’ve heard Native Americans say things that, were the races different, would not be out of place in the most blistering works of the Nazis. And this is the reality of the difficult state that us Whites are find ourselves. Not only are we not allowed to express any preference for our own, but we must simultaneously accept and even applaud the preferences that other groups show for their own.

We all know this is true. Even people who, right now, are cracking their knuckles and planning to write a blistering rebuttal to my essay know that it’s true. The true power of propaganda isn’t just that it makes you believe what the Establishment wants you to believe. It’s that it allows your mind to operate on two levels using doublethink, so on one level you can understand reality and act accordingly, but on another level you can believe the orthodoxy and thereby maintain your status with the tribe. This is what has finally allowed me to accept and acknowledge myself as a racist White man. It’s the fact that over my life I’ve lived and worked with many people of different races. Some of them were good, some bad, some indifferent. But what they all were is racist. There is nothing inherently immoral about racism. It’s a totally normal, even universal human condition. Of course, you should still treat people with dignity and respect, but it’s absurd to pretend that everyone is the same and that you can’t have a preference for one group over another. The only truly immoral act, in my opinion, is to hate your group over others. To me that speaks of such a level of self-hatred that it borders on madness.