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

I was fortunate enough to attend school in a state that ignored Brown v. Board of Education for as long as possible. Until the fourth grade, all my classmates were white. Even once integration began, the few blacks who enrolled in my school were almost always the children of the teachers, preachers, and other educated blacks. I recall almost no racial conflicts.

But with time, school “consolidation” and white flight to private schools made whites the minority in my district. By my freshman year of high school, of the fifty or so cafeteria tables, whites occupied only two of them. As the number of blacks increased, they became louder, more vulgar, and more belligerent and territorial. I began carrying a knife to school just in case. Academic standards suffered as even college-prep classes had students who read far below grade level.

If the higher achieving blacks had any concerns about the later arrivals, they did not say so. On the contrary, one of the better black students, perhaps compensating for his lighter skin and use of proper English, organized a walkout of the blacks to protest, among other things, the expectation that they be in class when the bell rang. Suspending these “protestors” would have hurt “average daily attendance,” and thus the budget, so none of them were disciplined.

With few exceptions, the black teachers I had were marginally competent at best. One began berating the entire class on the first day of school, before even calling the roll. In fact, everyone was quietly seated before the bell rang. Another was sometimes confused about what class she should be teaching that hour and got mad when students tried to correct her. My younger siblings, now at the formerly all-black school, were even worse off. They received such assignments as a paper on “Are bones formed before or after birth?”

Years later, I enrolled at a historically black college — it was located where I was already living, and it was what I could afford. Many of my peers were no better suited for college than my high school classmates would have been. Here I was exposed to such ideas as the “Cress Welsing” explanation for white racism: That whiteness was a genetic defect for which whites over-compensated for by oppressing blacks. Everything, it seemed, could be traced back to “racism.”

The term “diversity” was not then in widespread use, but one professor taught us that the “Melting Pot” ideal whereby immigrants were expected to assimilate was outdated. “Multiculturalism” was the way to go, as one culture was as good as any other. At times I pointed out that our readings contradicted themselves, both complaining of white values being forced on non-whites while denying that non-white values were any different. Other times I questioned if we should consider a foreign culture “equal,” if, for example, it was based on male dominance. One class presentation involved the “Black Intelligence Test to Combat Honkey-ism” (aka “BITCH”). It was intended to demonstrate that standardized tests are “culturally biased.” To score well one had to know, for example, that Mother’s Day is the day that the welfare checks arrive.”

After graduation, I worked as a teacher at a very “diverse” public school. I was astonished at how long it took to get students to fill out a card with their names, their parents’ names, and their home phone number. I had to teach lessons that I had learned three grade-levels earlier. All of the patterns I’d noticed in high school and college were the same.

I soon quit teaching. I realized it was pointless and I didn’t want to become one of those jaded teachers who takes the new hires aside to tell them, “These kids were dumb when they got here, and they’ll be dumb when they leave.” I remained in the public sector, however, and learned that just like public schools, governmental agencies of all kinds are equally hamstrung by policies that promote affirmative action and diversity above all else. Today, I am happily retired.

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.