Seeing the Light, Darkly

My parents taught me not to hate blacks. I still try not to. Sometimes, certain blacks make that difficult for me. I am ambivalent about the black race. I recommend ambivalence. It prevents fanaticism. I never attended a school where blacks made up more than five percent of the student body. That gave me an unrealistically benign opinion of the black race. I supported the civil rights movement as a child, a teenager, and a young adult. Although I did not sympathize with the black riots that happened between 1964 to 1968, they did not anger me either. In retrospect, they should have.

During the riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968, I took the wrong exit off the freeway that circles Washington, DC and ended up in Anacostia, the blackest, poorest, and most dangerous part of the city. I could smell the smoke from the stores that had been looted and burned. I could see blacks staring angrily at me. I was lost, and couldn’t find the freeway. The car I was driving was on the fritz and I was terrified. Fortunately, I found a platoon of soldiers who had been sent to quell the riot. I got good directions from the lieutenant and drove home.

But I have had good experiences with blacks as well. At Howard University, there was a black English professor I befriended. He would invite me to parties at his apartment, which I always happily attended. I was usually the only white person, and there were never any problems with that. One day I found out that Prof. Johnson was learning ancient Greek. He showed me some Greek from a Loeb Classics book, and read aloud from it, translating as he went, word for word. I asked him, “You are already fluent in French and German. Why are you learning a language as difficult as ancient Greek?” He answered, “I want to show those white boys what I can do.” If Prof. Johnson was typical of black men, there would be no racial problems.

My path towards race realism began in September of 1971, when I read an article by Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard in the Atlantic entitled “IQ.” In it, he made the case for cognitive differences being profound, genetic, and racial. I found the article depressing and disturbing, but convincing. The New Left organization, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), held a convention at Harvard the next spring with the expressed purpose of getting Professors Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen of Berkeley fired for their research on intelligence. This disturbed me even more than Professor Herrnstein’s article. Until then, I had seen the right as the offender against intellectual freedom with loyalty oaths, witch hunts, and black lists. Although SDS soon ceased to exist, a precedent for suppressing hereditarianism and race realism had been set. The fact that hereditarians and race realists were suppressed rather than rationally refuted inclined me to think the hereditarians and the race realists were right.

Today I live on the edge of the black ghetto in one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. Since moving here, I have been mugged six times, twice on the same night, when I was nearly murdered. Blacks did it every time. Don’t tell me to move. I can’t afford to. Two of the muggings were fairly typical: while walking home, “youths” threw me to the ground, and stole the money in my wallet before I could respond.

The third time was on the grounds of my apartment complex. The black mugger was larger, stronger, and younger than I am. This time I tried to resist, but to no avail. He kept punching me in the face yelling, “Where’s the money?” He beat me up worse than Trayvon Martin beat up George Zimmerman. I had black eyes for a week, and my left eye was bloodshot for just as long. I am fortunate I did lose my sight in that eye.

A year later, I was attacked by two blacks as I walked home from a neighborhood tavern one evening. They stole everything I had. Dazed, I walked back to the bar hoping to find help, but they had already closed and the door was locked. Then two more blacks attacked me. When they realized I had nothing left to steal, they got angry and began to beat me. Luckily, the bartender, a black woman, drove by on her way home from work and saw what was happening. She stopped her car, and put an end to the beating at the risk of her own life, then took me home.

Two Sundays later, two blacks attacked me as I walked to a drug store. By then, I had started carrying pepper foam with me for self-defense. I used it for the first time on these two attackers, but unfortunately, the stream of foam I shot at them was too thin, and they blocked it with their hands, so I was mugged all the same.

My repeated victimization at the hands of blacks caused me to start discussing the sensitive topic of race and crime. One liberal woman I spoke to about this suggested I read Tim Wise’s essay “The Color of Deception: Race, Crime and Sloppy Social Science.” This was an effort to refute the American Renaissance report, “The Color of Crime.” In his essay, Mr. Wise argued that the problem of black crime is exaggerated. He did not convince me. “The Color of Crime” did convince me. I have been reading American Renaissance ever since. I know now just how much scientific evidence there is that backs up what I have learned on my own: the races are intrinsically different in the qualities necessary for civilization: intelligence, obedience to the law, and monogamy. Unfortunately, and as Jared Taylor has said, race is an area where the more one ignores scientific evidence, the more enlightened one is said to be.

In addition to knowledge about genetics and heredity, I have acquired some street smarts. I never needed to take any precautions when I lived with whites, or poor Vietnamese war refugees — but living near blacks requires readiness. I now have a larger canister of pepper spray with a range of nine feet. A mugger cannot block it, and I have it with me every time I leave my apartment. It has served me well. The first time I used it was when a black man asked me for money. When I took out my wallet to give him some, he grabbed for the wallet itself. I sprayed him in the face, and got home with all my possessions still on my person. On another occasion, a black man grabbed me as I walked home. I took out my pepper spray. He let me go. Most recently was when I was walking past two blacks and one told me menacingly, “Give me your money.” When I took out my pepper spray, he shouted, “He’s got pepper spray. Leave him alone!”

I have known too many blacks I liked to dislike the entire race. I have had too many experiences with black crime to have any illusions about them. You could say I have led an exciting life. I would rather watch it on television.