My convoluted path to racial awareness.
“How did it happen?”
“Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.”
This dialogue from Hemingway’s The Sun Always Rises comes to mind when I reflect on my own journey from “normie” to “race realist thought criminal.” The character in the novel is describing his bankruptcy. The evolution of my thinking about race was similar: acknowledging, accepting and incorporating into my worldview uncomfortable facts and truths about nature, Man, and the world, even when I accepted them reluctantly. While this process was gradual, I can also more or less point to the moment of satori, the “suddenly” following the “gradually,” after which my view of the world radically changed.
Growing up in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s, everyone was aware of race. There were neighborhoods you did not go into, situations where one kept up one’s guard, patterns in who qualified for school merit programs, and so forth. While the racial component of this was clear, very few people talked about it openly; one did not get “the talk” about race from one’s parents. Despite underlying racial awareness, one was almost certainly a liberal—though not strongly ideological—on political matters, which ensured that one was utterly unequipped to make sense of that awareness. Racial tensions and inequalities of outcome existed, but they were unfortunate accidents, attributable to historical circumstances that were improving through education and other policies, after which the underlying equality of all peoples would become evident. ...
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