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 first year of middle school I learned how awfully evil and oppressive white people were — they slaughtered the Indians; they slaughtered the Mexicans; they slaughtered the Jews; they enslaved and discriminated against blacks; they destroyed non-white cultures through colonialism. Needless to say, I left junior high school saddled with white guilt, a strong dislike for my own people, and great sympathy for the plight of blacks and non-whites. I believed that if blacks and non-whites were less successful in our society, it was because of white racism.

My new-found guilt and resentment of my own race grew stronger with each new media account of “white wickedness” — past and present — against blacks and non-whites. Every time the TV showed a starving black African face, a white policeman “brutalizing” a poor innocent black, or an explicitly graphic account of slavery, Jim Crow or lynching, my guilt and anger toward my own kind grew. It didn’t take long before I became an anti-white activist sincerely promoting non-white interests.

What made me see the light? Unlike liberal integrationists who refused to live among the people they championed, I did — and suffered for it. One day, when I was carrying groceries home from the store, a group of black gang members robbed and beat me half to death. After that, in spite of my conventional views on race, whenever I encountered a group of blacks, I increasingly began to think I might be robbed, killed, or forced to fight. I didn’t feel this way with whites.

My developing racial consciousness was greatly reinforced the second time blacks jumped and robbed me, and after the third time, I was pretty much convinced that “past injustices” and “discrimination” were poor excuses for targeting innocent people.

I began to approach the racial literature with an honest desire to discover whether there was any factual or scientific truth to the white racialist point of view. The first thing I learned was that since the end of segregation and legal discrimination, and the implementation of affirmative action and the promotion of black culture through the media and in schools, black crime, poverty, and failure actually increased. Freedom, social and cultural equality, and race-based preferences seem to have “unleashed the beast.”

What really convinced me finally to change my mind was the scientific evidence of racial difference, in books like The Bell Curve or in studies like Scarr and Weinberg’s Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. The racial literature also showed me the extreme bias found in the mainstream media, which overplay rare instances of white-on-black crime while virtually ignoring black-on-white crimes, and explained the deliberate distortion of any topic, issue, or fact that doesn’t conform to their egalitarian point of view.

It was the combination of experience with non-whites, the study of scientific literature, and increased skepticism toward conventional media accounts of race that led to me to full racial consciousness.

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.