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

In my teenage years, I learned to hate my white skin. When I was about 15, I befriended a group of black coworkers. They introduced me to the concepts of white privilege, systemic racism, and racial inequality. I had a crush on one of the black girls at the time, so I eagerly accepted their views about race in order to gain further acceptance from her and the group. Joining social media around the same time, and entering into the online world, I heard the voices of pop culture using a lot of the same language as my black friends did. In every sentence that the word white was mentioned it always seemed to be associated with a negative meaning: “You’re surprisingly athletic for a white boy.” “You’re too white to dance to that song.” “That’s the whitest thing I’ve ever seen you do.” Soon I was even making fun of my whiteness along with them.

Black people are very quick to recognize negativity towards their race and are never afraid to call it out. White people, on the other hand, never bat an eye when their race is made fun of. I was no exception. I had no reason to defend myself when I had internalized the belief that the very whiteness I possessed was directly responsible for every misfortune experienced by non-whites. Like any teenage boy, I wanted to be cool, and the attitude towards whiteness held by everyone I thought was cool told me that my whiteness was a major hindrance. I reasoned that in order to be cool, I needed to be “less white.”

It became my goal to distance myself from my whiteness as much as I possibly could. I ditched rock and roll music for gangster rap. I made an effort to adopt black slang and carefully refined my speech to expel any words or phrases that sounded too white. I made sure people knew that I hung out mostly with non-whites. I even got to the point where I no longer found white women attractive. I truly wished that I could be any color other than white. The question I never asked myself was, if it was supposed to be so great to be white, why did I want so badly not to be?

During my studies in college at a small liberal arts university in the Midwest, I encountered even more anti-white sentiment. School assemblies and academic seminars about diversity, color awareness, and anti-racism training where whites were bashed for their privilege were regular occurrences. Multicultural associations dedicated to each major racial group on campus (except whites) hosted regular pride events, serving as channels for lecturing white people about racism while lobbying for increased special treatment for themselves. I eagerly soaked in all these ideas, continuing to distance myself from whiteness and to cleanse myself from its guilt. I became friends with both leaders and members of these multicultural groups and worked to make myself known as someone who was an advocate for diversity.

My thinking about race began to shift during my sophomore year. Majoring in intercultural studies, I began to dive deeper into the fields of social science. I read several books over the course of a summer on the sociology of inner city blacks, hoping to immerse myself in knowledge that would impress my black friends. Instead, what I read surprised me and led me to wildly different conclusions than what I had heard from them. Under the evidence I could not deny that the problems that plagued the black community were not, in fact, due to racism by whites — but by a culture that encourages crime, drug use, welfare dependency, and broken families. The books I had thought would confirm the worldview I was being taught instead led me to question everything about it.

Over the next year, I continued to do more research into racial issues and found even more conflicting conclusions. I found myself moving further and further away from the beliefs of my liberal peers. The ridiculousness of trying to impress people with my white self-hatred was slowly becoming clear to me, as what I pretended to believe on the outside was not matching up with the facts I had come to know. I realized how I had been deceived into accepting the shame of white privilege and how damaging it was to my self-esteem. I kept my new beliefs to myself, after quickly discovering that if I brought them up, I would be shut down right away.

During my junior year, I ran a small meme account on Instagram, popular with a lot of students at my school. One day I made a post poking fun at some of the absurd beliefs that the Black Student Union had recently expressed. Since I was dating a black girl at the time, I thought that it was harmless and I would be safe from criticism. I was wrong. I received immense backlash within minutes of the post. Several of my professors including the dean of students himself contacted me, and forced me to issue a public apology and delete my Instagram account. Word spread that I was “racist” and had insulted the entire black community at my school. My black girlfriend dumped me. I had been “cancelled” and my reputation had been permanently tarnished. I became afraid to walk around campus for fear of who I might run into and what judgmental looks I might get. I had tried to convince everybody that I was the least racist person there was — but they didn’t care. One careless post had made me the enemy, and just like that I knew I was done trying to earn their approval.

The following semester I decided to drop out. I realized that staff and students alike were less concerned with fostering meaningful intellectual debate than with conforming to a politically correct ideology, where dissent from the status quo resulted in immediate social ridicule. Fear of this ridicule gone, I began to publicly criticize the absurdness of the diversity doctrine being implemented at my school and received even more hate in the process.

Up until this point, I had believed in the idea of diversity, that it was a good and virtuous thing to strive for. I saw ethnocentricity as the evil that hindered us from living in a multicultural utopia. That ideal is what I had believed my liberal friends wanted. That to simply “not judge people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” was all that was needed for racism to disappear and everyone to live in harmony. I learned that this principle sounds nice in theory, but in practicality, it is impossible. Moreover, that wasn’t really what people wanted.

Each of the ethnic student unions calling only for increased ethnic pride and solidarity. All of my non-white friends actively embraced their heritage and took pride in their skin color. To embrace racial identity for them was heroic and encouraged. For me, and for every other white, it was racist and deplorable. Preaching the value of racial diversity to others while pursuing ethnocentrism for themselves was hypocritical at best.

The months after I left college led me to white advocacy. It began with Stefan Molyneux videos on YouTube (before his channel was banned) and Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve. As dedicated to the anti-ethnocentric ideal as I had been, I had to face the fact that throughout history, groups have organized and behaved in the interests of their group, and that that’s a natural part of human nature. Today’s whites have shed their racial consciousness for the sake of creating a multiracial utopia, but we cannot expect anyone else to do the same. I decided that I would no longer continue to apologize for my race and that I would not continue to let others around me tell me it’s wrong for me to identify with my race while they go about posting #melaninpride and #blackisking all over the place.

Today, I still struggle with accepting that it is okay to be white. My psyche is still healing from the years of being indoctrinated to hate my skin color. I still find the urge to prove I’m not racist to others. I still find the desire to distance myself from certain elements of white culture. And it still feels wrong to feel pride for my race. It is difficult to reclaim a healthy racial consciousness when almost everyone around me is against it. Where simply writing an article such as this could cost me my job. Although many of my conservative friends are highly critical of things like Cultural Marxism, mass immigration, and Black Lives Matter, they remain blind to the need to reclaim white racial consciousness.

Some days I wonder if I should just let it go and accept the decline we are facing. But if I do, then I become partly responsible for it, and continue to subconsciously hate myself and allow society to demean me. My race is important to me — even if it’s not the first and last word on my personal identity. We must stand tall — or we will fall hard.