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 Sofia, Bulgaria, and was an ardent believer in “egalitarianism” as a child. A lack of first-hand experience with non-whites and nothing but textbooks from Communist times can do that to a person. It was my encounters with Gypsies, Bulgaria’s largest non-white population, that made me see the light.

My first taste of racial conflict came when I was still young. While playing with some local kids near my father’s store, I got attacked by a Gypsy my own age and his older brother — Gypsies never fight one-on-one. I held my own, but was pretty well bruised up by the end of it. From then on, my dad forbade me from playing in that neighborhood.

Years later I attended a high school in Bankya. Though the school itself and the surrounding areas were mostly white, to get to it I had to pass through the Lyulin district, which has the largest concentration of Gypsies in all of Bulgaria. The subway station near the bus stop for Bankya was especially dangerous. There Gypsies would hassle anyone and everyone for money, food, and cigarettes. They made no effort to be polite about their begging, and at times were even willing to make threats in the hope of getting something out of you.

The few Gypsies who attended my school weren’t much better. Many seemed unwilling to ever shower and stank up entire classrooms, some stole from other students and the school as well, almost none of them paid attention in class, foul language was their preferred method of communication, and some even tried peddling drugs to the white students. Part of the reason Gypsies got away with so much malfeasance was that they always stuck together, while whites didn’t, leaving us to be targeted one after another for pickpocketing, muggings, and intimidation. I am proud to say that one day I decided to buck that trend. I had noticed that a shy white boy was being regularly bullied into buying lunch for two Gypsies, and decided to hang around him, hoping to imply some level of protection. To make a long story short, that subtlety was either not picked up on or not appreciated, and the matter came to blows. I’ll never forget how surprised the Gypsies looked when I punched back. Nothing dramatic came of it though, as school employees were soon on the scene.

All in all, the relationship between whites and Gypsies in Bulgaria was bad, but not terrible — and seemed easy enough to ignore, or at least manage.

Then “Katunitsa” happened.

Katunitsa is a town in central Bulgaria with a large Gypsy ghetto. “King Kiro,” an infamous Gypsy mafia boss, lived there and terrorized the entire area. One evening in September of 2011, his sons got into an altercation with a few white boys, and ran one of them down with a car. The boy died in his father’s arms. The white Bulgarians in the town flew into a rage and burned down King Kiro’s mansion that very night. The next morning, young whites from Sofia and other cities poured into Katunitsa and joined the locals in destroying everything in the ghetto the Gypsies (who had fled only hours earlier) had left behind. By the time the police arrived, there wasn’t much of anything left.

This marked an escalation in racial conflict to levels unheard of for generations, as Gypsies began a nationwide revenge campaign aimed at Bulgaria’s young whites. Violence increased exponentially and many students became afraid to walk to school. A friend of mine was beaten nearly to death in broad daylight in the center of Bankya. Up until then, it had been rare for a Gypsy to dare sexually assault a white girl, but suddenly it became commonplace. Things got so bad during my senior year that students started walking in groups of no fewer than five, and when we got off the bus in Lyulin, we went straight to the subway, no stopping for any reason. Us boys sometimes had to form a circle around the girls, protecting them from a group of particularly nasty Gypsies that liked to loiter at the station. After graduation, I’ve been back there only once, and it hasn’t improved much — though there is a bigger police presence. Today I live in the same white neighborhood I did as a child, but have every intention of sending my future children to schools far away from the ghetto.

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.