Racial Consciousness

What does it take to turn a garden-variety, pro-civil rights, historically-aware racial liberal into a white man proudly conscious of his race and the injustices commited against it in contemporary America? Let me attempt to list a few reasons, for, Reader, I am that man.

I can remember as a teenager becoming aware of the historical injustices, from slavery to lynching to segregation, done to blacks in this country, most of it completely legal and with the full collusion, if not instigation, of various federal, state, and local governments. I can remember my shock when I first heard (after my childhood) the word "nigger" used in earnest. (And just to get it out of the way, I still think it an extremely crass and insulting expression.) In adulthood, I've read and admired the books by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, among others; they were men in the normative sense: strong, determined, honest, upright, fighters, who refused to let obstacles which would have stopped ten ordinary men stop them. I've had what is for many American men a not untypical interracial dating life, including dating many Hispanics, Asians, even a Christian Arab girl from Lebanon. When I lived in Sierra Leone, I had a semi-chaste liaison with a local girl.

But I'm off track, my point being merely that I never had a prejudiced bone in my body. And racial hate is something foreign to me as well; that's not what I'm getting at. But one gets older, and hopefully wiser, and one sees patterns that one was blind to before. Can one fail to notice that murder is committed by blacks at eight times the rate of whites? (I won't bother to cite statistics; these are well known, and the reader can Google away.) Or that Mexicans have a propensity towards forming street gangs?

But even more to the point, whites such as myself are now the object of officially-sanctioned discrimination. Universities and colleges openly, brazenly, advertise their prejudice against whites. At the local college, innumerable scholarships are directed at "minorities", while anyone who proposed a whites-only scholarship would be lucky to escape with his life. (And liberals keep changing their rationale: while formerly "affirmative action", i.e. racial discrimination, was meant to somehow redress past wrongs -- to individuals who likely never suffered any, at least any beyond the wrongs which we all suffer - now "diversity" has become the new mantra, thus ensuring that discrimination endures in perpetuity.) I can't remember the author of the quip about "dissolving the people and electing another one", but with the refusal of the U.S. government to enforce the laws against illegal immigration, it has colluded with businesses and employers and race-baiting politicians to do just that: to replace the former majority European-American and Christian populace with one more to their liking. One that will work for less pay, one that will be more dependent on government largesse, one that is not so stubbornly American. My employer can be sued if the EEOC suddenly decides that its racial "mix" is unrepresentative, and since that applies everywhere, I have at least the potential to be deprived of a future job for which I may be highly qualified, all because my skin is the wrong color.

But, Mangan, you will say, how does that affect you? You have a good job, nice house, you're even fairly prosperous these days. Well, I answer, in the first place my family and I must live in a world that discriminates against us; we is being taught at school that the entire history of our native land is nothing but a mass of discrimination, oppression, slavery, segregation, and ethnic cleansing, from Columbus to Bush, and that our glorious Founding Fathers were hypocritical slaveholding white men whose struggle for freedom was nothing but a cover for crass self-interest; that Martin Luther King, a sainted black man (never mind his adultery, plagiarism, lies, and communism) had to come along and show us the error of our ways, from which we had to be dragged kicking and screaming. Our entire national history has been trashed.

In the second place, my freedom is greatly restricted. Because no sane person would choose to live in a bad, crime-ridden part of town -- whose denizens we are not suppose to notice are almost always not of European ancestry -- I am forced to seek out a neighborhood where the prices for housing are high, with all that entails with regard to how much one has to work and what jobs are acceptable. Think about it. That has an overwhelming effect on one's life. Why are millions of people moving out of California? In a nutshell, because millions of illegal aliens are moving in, raising crime and lowering wages and exacerbating the housing shortage.

Most of all, for me, it's about injustice. Society and government and culture should be color-blind, but they have ceased to be. I think it a pity that they have conspired to make a racially-liberal, educated, and even cosmopolitan man such as myself become racially conscious. But they have, and they succeeded.

The culture of the West, i.e. of Europe and its offspring, is without a doubt the greatest the world has seen. From Socrates to Hume, from Archimedes to Newton and Einstein, from Cato to George Washington, we -- we European-Americans -- have much to be proud of. Perhaps belonging to the same race as those men is a least common denominator of pride, and until quite recently I would have said so. But I've become racially conscious, and so I am proud. And angry.