How I Became a Race Realist, But Not A White Nationalist

Posted by John Engelman, Raceology October 13 2019.

My parents taught me not to hate blacks. I still try not to. Sometimes some blacks make that difficult for me.  I am ambivalent about the Negro race. I recommend ambivalence. It prevents fanaticism.

When I was eleven years old boys in my Boy Scout Troop harassed some black children during a scout meeting. They told their older brothers. They attacked us. My scout troop fled the scene of battle. They ran in one direction. I ran in the wrong direction. I was one of the few members of that troop who had not harassed the black children. I was the only Boy Scout their older brothers found.

They were about to beat me up. One of them prevented that. I ran to where my mother was waiting to drive me home. I left that scout troop in disgust, and joined the troop at my church. It had a better group of scouts.

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 Negro race. I supported the civil rights movement as a child, a teenager, and a young adult. I did not sympathize with the black ghetto riots that happened from 1964 to 1968. They did not anger me, as they do now in retrospect.

During the riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr in 1968. I took the wrong turn off from the Beltway. That is a freeway that circles Washington, DC. I ended up in South East Washington. That was and is the blackest, poorest, and most dangerous part of Washington, DC. I could smell the smoke from the stores that had been looted and burned. I could see the blacks staring angrily at me. The ignition on our family car was not working properly. Every time I stopped at a stop sign or stop light I had to start the car again.

I was lost, and could not find the Beltway. Fortunately, I found a platoon of soldiers who had been sent to quell the riot. I asked the lieutenant how to find the Beltway. He told me. I drove home.

When I was going to college I became friends with a black college professor who taught freshman English at Howard University. Because he was attractive and charming, most of the girls in his class were infatuated with him. He had too much integrity to exploit that.

Professor Thomas Johnson invited me to parties he gave at his apartment for his friends at Howard. I was usually the only white person there.

He was working on his PhD at the time. For his foreign language requirement he was learning ancient Greek. He showed me some Greek from a Loeb Classics book. He translated each word, 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 Professor Thomas Johnson was typical of black men there would be no racial problems. Thomas, I hope you are well. If you read this, put your cursor on my avatar. Send me an e-mail letter.

In September 1979 Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard had an article published in Atlantic entitled “IQ.” In this article he introduced ideas he was later to combine with Charles Murray in The Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. I found Professor Herrnstein’s article depressing and disturbing, but also convincing.

The new left organization, the Students for a Democratic Society held a convention at Harvard the next spring with the expressed purpose of getting Professors Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen of Berkeley fired. 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.

I attended the convention, although I have never been a member of SDS. I was shocked at what I saw. Until then I had liked SDS because of its work opposing the War in Vietnam. Fortunately, SDS soon ceased to exist. Unfortunately, it had created a precedent for suppressing hereditarianism and race realism. 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.

In 1975 I was writing for a weekly newspaper. A black family in the area had racist graffiti painted on their house. I covered the story. Of course, my sympathies were with the family. I also noticed and disliked the fact that the man and women were not married and did not seem to plan to get married. It was not clear that the man was the father of the children. I began to suspect that perhaps that part of the stereotype was true.

I began to suspect that another part of the stereotype was true two years later when I was robbed at gunpoint by two blacks. In a column that was printed in The Washington Star I wrote:

“Growing up in the fifties I learned how to debate by advocating the integration of Westlawn Elementary School. Now it hurts to learn that most blacks are not like Sidney Poitier.”

That year I moved to the San Francisco Bay area where I learned computer technology. In my first job as a computer programmer, one of the programmers was a black man who was clearly not doing his job. When I learned that he was paid twice my salary I discussed the matter with our boss. Our boss told me, “When I got my job as a supervisor here I was told that I would be judged by my ability to attract and keep blacks, and that I was supposed to expect less from them.”

Several years later I got a better job with a better company. After a slow start there, my boss there told me in a job review that I completed my assignments faster than his other programmers with fewer errors, and that the design engineers always asked that I would code their projects.

That company hired a black programmer. I began mentoring the new guy, although I had not been told to. He told our boss. My boss told me, “It is my job to train the people I hire, but I do not always have the time. You are making my job a lot easier.”

The single most important factor in a job is a good relationship with your immediate supervisor. Unfortunately, that boss left. My next two bosses with the company, who were white, disliked me. The last of these two fired me after I missed a deadline by several days. That was the first deadline I ever missed. A number of people were also responsible for that missed deadline, including the boss who fired me. Events like that keep me from becoming a conservative on all issues. A computer programmer who loses his job after the age of forty will probably never earn as much money again in his life. I was past fifty.

Now I live on the edge of the black ghetto of one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. Since moving here I have been mugged six time, 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.

When I was mugged twice the first pair of muggers stole everything I had. The second pair was angry because I had nothing left to steal. They began beating me to death. By chance a black woman who knows me and likes me was driving by. At the risk of her own life she stopped the attack, and drove me home.

After this event a nice liberal lady who has forgotten nothing about the hopes of the early 1960’s and learned nothing from the eventual disappointments resulting from those hopes, suggested that I read Tim Wise’s essay “The Color of Deception.” This was an effort to refute “The Color of Crime” which has been produced by American Renaissance. In his essay Tim Wise argued that the problem of black crime has been exaggerated. He did not convince me. “The Color of Crime” did convince me. I have been accessing American Renaissance ever since. 

From American Renaissance I have learned of many books. I have bought them, read them, and written book reviews of them for Amazon, which unfortunately no longer sells Jared Taylor’s books. Two of my reviews have been posted on American Renaissance. On American Renaissance I have learned of Professor J. Philippe Rushton’s essay “Race, Evolution, and Behavior.” That presents scientific evidence for what I have learned on my own: the races are intrinsically different in average qualities necessary for civilization; these are 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.

I have always had good experiences with Orientals. I learned that Oriental girls existed when I was six or seven. I remember thinking, “Some white girls are pretty. Some are not. All Oriental girls are pretty.” My two best friends in high school were Chinese Americans. One beat up a white bully who had been hectoring me for two years. I began taking Tang Soo Do lessons. That is Korean Karate. My Korean instructor, Ki Whang Kim, was one of the most charismatic men I have known in my life.

I lived in downtown San Jose, California during the early 1980’s, when the area was engulfed by Vietnamese war refugees. Most were poor. They were good people. I would often get off work at 10:00 pm and walk three miles home. I was safe. If I tried that where I live now I would risk my life. If I did that regularly I would be murdered.

I dated a Vietnamese woman I had met at computer school. Later on I dated two Chinese women who lived at Oakland’s Chinatown. Earlier, I dated a Japanese American girl I met at high school. 

I have had less contact with East Indians, but I like them. I dated a lovely Anglo Indian woman I met at a used book store.

I have dated two Jewish women. I have known a few Jews I disliked. They were not observant, so I did not consider them to be authentically Jewish.

Most of the women I have dated have been white Gentiles.  

I am not a womanizer. I have been terribly in love a few times.

I have known too many blacks I liked to dislike the entire race. I have had too many experiences with black crime to have illusions about it. A conservative is said to be a liberal who has been mugged.

I would add that a liberal is a conservative who has been beaten up by police officers. That happened to me a month after I moved to California. I had not been doing anything wrong. The mistake was theirs. They, who were white, thought I was someone else. They left quickly after looking at my driver’s license.

You could say I have led an exciting life. I would rather watch it on television.