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 California in the 1980s. My blue collar suburb was mostly white, but did have a large Mexican minority. For the most part, we all got along. There were gangs in the city, but their battles didn’t affect us. I had some Mexican friends. I didn’t think much about race.

After high school, I attended an exceptionally diverse state college. In English class, we corrected each other’s papers in group sessions. I was shocked by the poor writing skills of the black students. “How did they graduate elementary school, must less get into college,” I’d ask myself. The Chinese students also had terrible grammar, but signed up for ESL tutoring after class. After just a few months in America, these Asians had a far better grasp of the English language than any of our black peers.

After college I moved to Los Angeles, near downtown. It was an open air lesson in race realism. Koreatown was clean but utterly foreign culturally. MacArthur Park, a beautiful area once upon a time, was strewn with half eaten corncobs, Corona bottles, and Central American gangsters. I followed the rule I’d learned as a child: Don’t bother them and they won’t bother you. But adhering to that doesn’t make a difference with blacks. They argued with the Korean storeowners, harassed the heavyset Hispanic women, and threatened me when I passed “their” corner to get home. Still, I shrugged it off as a few bad apples.

As time went on, however, I could no longer ignore my own eyes. One day on the bus, I saw a young black guy sucker punch an older Jewish man for supposed disrespect, knocking him out cold. The black bus driver did nothing to help. In fact, he opened the front doors so the attacker could push the victim’s limp body down the stairwell and onto the curb, like a piece of human trash down the chute. Shaken, I got off at the next stop and went back to help the man, but he was gone. After that, I got a car.

Life went on. I moved up in the world and racial conflict faded from my mind. In a majority white professional world, I had the luxury of being colorblind again. But then 2020 happened. All the bad memories flooded back. But this time, I wanted to know facts. I quickly found out that Black Lives Matter (and the mainstream media) were being less than honest about bias in policing. The global statistics on education achievement and crime were even more stark and incontrovertible. More research led me to American Renaissance and, by George, I became a race realist.

What does race realism mean to me? It means I believe racial differences are real, culture is a product of biology, and different races are largely incompatible. Furthermore, white culture and white people are worth fighting for. During these dark times, we have to be smart and strategic about how we fight, but fight we must.

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.