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

Never in 1,000 years did I imagine that I would end up the person that I am today: a black race realist — someone who believes IQ is normally distributed and that averages may differ among races the same way other genetic variables do. Over the years, I noticed that people are fired up about this or that aspect of evolution, but that the question of genetic differences in race and IQ were off limits. And after many years of painful experience, I gradually went from “Why not?” to “This is the way it is.”

Two things contributed to my conversion to race realism. The first was my training — I have an MS in chemistry — and the second was a lot of life experience.

To start at the beginning, I grew up in a two-parent family in Michigan, and went to church every Sunday. Both my parents worked at decent jobs with good benefits. One thing that my late father always taught me is that “life is about thinking for yourself and doing what is good, right, and best for you.” A necessary consequence of this was making up my own mind on what was relevant to me.

I graduated from high school in the top 10 percent of my class and was offered a full scholarship at a university in a neighboring state. I graduated, and after taking a break from school, went back to complete a master’s degree.

How did my training help lead to my conversion? A chemist looks at a system, without prejudice, and in a process called abductive reasoning, tries to choose the best explanation. If I had to distill my most life-changing experiences and what I learned from them, they would be as follows:

Going to church (ages 12 to 18)

We went to a small church that was not as most people imagine black churches — no whooping and hollering and fainting. It was a very conservative Church of Christ congregation that did not even allow instrumental music. In my years there I saw a great deal of inept leadership. For example, although the church had ample funds, it took two years to put in a new door because the leadership spent so much time bickering. Even though I was only 13 years old, I spent an afternoon making calls to get prices on the installation on a new door, but that still was not enough to get them take action.

At that time I didn’t know it, but I was observing an experiment with a control group. There were two nearby Churches of Christ, one in the same town and one in the town next door. One was white and flourished, and the other was black and collapsed a few years after getting together enough money for a new building.

I thought to myself, “OK. Maybe I’ve had some bad luck and the problem is these particular black people.” When I went to college, I left the church, never to return, but that led to my next experience.

Getting a job (ages 18 to 21)

Like many college students, I needed to work during the summers, so I got a job at a nearby airport. In that county, airport businesses had to have minority ownership, and there were two major concessions at the airport. The one I worked for (let’s call it Company A) sold gifts and the other one, Company B, sold food. The general manager at Company A was black and so were most of the store managers. Much of the management of Company B’s food stalls was also black. What did I see? Disaster.

Although my company had 18 to 20 gift shops, there was not a single day on which every store could open, because employees would not show up for work. There was not a single week in which someone was not led off in handcuffs for stealing. There was not a single week in which someone from Company B did not walk into my store to buy candy and gifts with gift certificates he had stolen right out of the cash register of his store. (The airlines gave customers gift certificates when planes were delayed, which happened a lot. Apparently the managers at Company B thought that stealing vouchers out of the register was not quite the same thing as stealing cash.)

Cash receipts from sales were regularly taken to the central office and put in a cash room. What wasn’t stolen out of the registers by employees would just get stolen right out of the cash room by the loss prevention manager. He lasted only a year, and was fired for stealing tens of thousands of dollars.

It is almost impossible for a store to lose money when it sells at airport prices, but eventually that chain of stores had to downsize because of losses.

I thought to myself, “OK. Maybe I’m just working around the wrong type of black people.” And that led to the next life-changing event.

Finishing my bachelor’s degree (ages 18 to 22)

When I went to college, I noticed that out of 120 chemistry majors, I was one of only two blacks. I noticed that in the “lighter” disciplines, such as ethnic studies, the students got a lot blacker. I spent one college year in England and I took an elective black studies course there on the assumption — correct — that there would be fewer political overtones. When I came back to the US and visited the Black Studies Department, I got a lot of hostility when I suggested that black studies would not help anyone get a job, and that it might be better to learn how to live with all kinds of people. One of the faculty members told me, “Kiss my black ass.”

I thought to myself, “OK. So maybe I didn’t go to the right school. Maybe I need to go someplace else.” Years later, I went to another school to get my graduate degree, and that led to the next event.

Finishing my graduate degree (ages 25 to 26)

As a graduate student, to make ends meet, I took a job at a filling station several miles from school. It was in a poor area, and about half the patrons were black. At that time, you could buy blunt cigarillos for $2.87 for a pack of five, or you could pay $0.99 for just one. (For those of you who don’t know, some people smoke cigarillos but others cut out the tobacco and fill them with marijuana.) So, night after night, I sold single cigarillos to the same people who paid more to buy them one at a time. Night after night, I swiped Food Stamp cards for black customers to buy one ice cream at a time. Everything that you buy one at a time in a gas station is usually 50 percent more per item than just buying a pack of five, six, or ten, but the math skills needed to make that calculation were too much for my customers.

There was also a lot of shoplifting, and 99 percent of it was by blacks. A common trick was to distract me, by asking for a price check, and then stealing something. It was also common to pump gas and drive off without paying. I called the police a couple of times, and they would go through the motions of telling the perps never to come back to the store again. A week later, the perps would be right back. The police never made any arrests because cops must actually witness the crime. They won’t just take someone’s word for it.

There were a lot of Mexican day laborers, roofers and landscapers, who came to buy things. Most of them had just come from work and just wanted to get a beer and sit down. They were different from most of the black customers, who didn’t work at all, and were just trying to think of a way to steal something.

While I lived in that state, I made a visit to a rheumatologist for a checkup. All the doctors at the hospital were Jewish. Everyone who was mopping a floor or tending a cash register was black.

I thought, “OK. Maybe I need to move to a different country.”

It happened that I had had a Jewish friend who had moved to Japan to work and save money, and through a fortunate series of events I found myself living and working there as an English teacher. Later, I went to Taiwan to do the same work, but the job scheduling was not satisfactory. From there, it was an easy hop to Mainland China, where the work was more abundant and the scheduling was better.

Life in China (since age 26)

I have now lived in China for 11 years, and for the last five, I have been teaching chemistry and writing personal statements for students who need them as part of their applications to get into American colleges. Almost every aspect of living here has been informative from a race-realist point of view, but very negative from a “black” point of view. In this country, everything you see associated with black people is bad. And, of course, how can I fail to understand why Chinese people don’t want to hire me to work for them?

A few observations:

1. Where blacks live. In China, Africans are concentrated in Guangdong Province, which basically makes low-value exports such as shoes and toys. The State Bureau of Foreign Experts, which is the agency that lets foreigners live and work here, does not issue work permits to black people, so the Africans in Guangdong are illegal aliens living in shantytowns. The Guangdong government and the people of the province can’t distinguish African from American or South American blacks, but they don’t want any more of them.

Jiangsu Province makes electronics, and Shandong makes heavy machinery. In these relatively high-tech areas you can go for weeks without seeing any black people. This is exactly what you would expect: Africans working off the books in low value-added industries.

2. Foreign students. Most Chinese higher education is substandard. This is why so many Chinese students who have the means study abroad. Last year 236,000 Chinese were studying in the United States. However, this does not stop second-rate Chinese universities from accepting foreign students. Some even teach medicine in English to students from abroad.

But if they want to offer low-grade education that not even Chinese would pay for, they have to go somewhere to find idiots to fill up the seats. You guessed it: The first place they go to look for students is Africa!

This is actually worse than it sounds. Most Chinese don’t speak English. The number of Chinese who actually know medicine and can teach it in English is bound to be tiny. Half of all Chinese doctors don’t even have a bachelor’s degree. On the other hand, in 22 African countries, English is an official government language. What this means is that Africans can’t set up schools that function in an official language of their own country, so they go overseas to be taught by people in China who can’t speak English.

3. Jewish Temples. There are only about 14 million Jews in the world, and only about 10 percent of them are Orthodox. Yet, in China there are no fewer than five Orthodox temples and Jewish community centers that serve kosher food. A lot of intelligence went into getting around the Chinese government’s ban on non-approved religions, and getting animals slaughtered in a kosher manner for the very few Jews who keep Kosher.

Jews have set up their community centers as business corporations in order to get the proper licenses. Their leaders have also schmoozed the right people. This takes finesse. Kosher slaughter also takes finesse. There is no law against it, but it takes resourcefulness to find a cooperative livestock dealer and fly in a shochet, or trained kosher butcher. The church I used to attend couldn’t even get a door installed.

4. Development assistance. China now offers a lot of development assistance to Africa. It’s easy to forget that just 55 years ago, something like 30 million Chinese people starved to death in a famine. Also, China was unstable from the middle of the Qing Dynasty — about 1793 — until 1976 (the end of the Cultural Revolution). The people had not had a new idea since the Sui Dynasty, that is to say, since the Sixth Century. But even after all that they now manage to build first-class cities.

If you have Chinese people in a fishing village, they will turn it into a city. If you have the same number of black people, it will stay a fishing village. Or if you let them take over a city — Detroit, for example — it will stop from being a functioning, gleaming city and become something more like a fishing village.

Social Media, etc.

1. Facebook is depressing. Probably about 40 percent of my Facebook friends are black, and they share way too much about the minutiae of their lives. You have to read about every single time they pull into McDonald’s. They also come up with about 90 percent of the worst, most poorly reasoned arguments. You name it, I’ve read it: Black Egypt, Marxism, legal pontification on the Trayvon Martin case by people who can’t spell.

2. Trayvon Martin. I’ve argued on Facebook until I was almost blue in the face that when someone attacks you and you fear for your life you are justified in defending yourself. I have also pointed out that most black people are killed by other black people, and that proportionately far more white people are killed by blacks than the other way around. On any given day, about seven black people are killed by other black people. Anyone bright enough to read the statistics from the Department of Justice can find out these things. And there can be no bias in these numbers since the Justice Department is headed by a black man, right?

3. Prislam (prison Islam). Muslims are looking for people of low intelligence to convert. Where do they go to find them? Prison. Who do they find there? Black people.

It just became too much for me. It uses up all your energy to argue with even one unintelligent person. Try arguing with 40 million people, most of whom don’t have it together.

For all these reasons I married a Chinese woman and we have a son. I don’t want him to identify as black. We speak Chinese at home, and I have decided that he can learn English as a second language — maybe after age five. We’ve had his DNA tested, and he is actually more Han Chinese (48.6 percent) than any other race (9.3 percent white, 42.1 percent black).

We are converting to Judaism, and therefore adopting a cultural environment that is as far from black as I can find. My son has options. He can think of himself as strictly Jewish. His names are Hebrew, and can be used in either the Sephardic or Ashkenazi traditions.

Or, he can think of himself as Chinese. Surprisingly, Chinese people have a better attitude towards those they think they are assimilating. My son has a Chinese passport, and if he decides to stay in China and can play the role of someone who accepts the glory of Han culture, he’ll do fine.

Or maybe he can think of himself as American — race unspecified. For his sake, I don’t want him to think of himself as “black,” because that just has too much baggage.

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.