Thursday, July 9, 2020

The Making of an American Trav, by Travis LeBlanc - The Unz Review


I’m not going to claim that I have been totally 1488 from day one or that I came goose-stepping out of the womb. But I think I have always been instinctively and intuitively a race realist. Or at least, I have been since around the age of 8. The first black person I ever met was this kid named Scooter when I was in kindergarten. This would have been in the early 80s……….

My first impression of blacks was, therefore, actually quite positive. Had I remained in that sleepy little Kansas town where my interactions with blacks were limited to the middle-class children of talented 10ths, my worldview today might be very different than it is now. But at the end of 2nd grade, something happened that would change my life forever. My dad sat us down and told us that he had been transferred at his job and we were all moving to St. Louis. The next three years would radically and irreversibly change my perspective on race and I would never be the same again……….

Let’s talk about desegregation bussing………

This was supposed to have two effects. The blacks were supposed to pick up good habits from the white kids but they also expected the white kids, upon meeting the black youths, to quickly learn that we weren’t all that different after all and this would totally BTFO racism. Now, I don’t know about any other school. But my school? That. Did. Not. Happen.

If you were trying to create a government program for the specific purpose of turning white kids racist, I don’t think you could come up with a much better idea than desegregation bussing………

But what was most painfully obvious to everyone was that the blacks were clearly not as smart as the white kids. It took them longer to learn every lesson…

All the white kids started to deeply resent having the black kids around………..

For their part, the black kids didn’t want to be there any more than the white kids wanted them there. The commute was insanely long and they didn’t fit in. Now, there were a few black kids who seemed to understand what was up. They understood that they were given a special opportunity to learn at a good school with no crack dealers where they didn’t have to worry about getting shot, an opportunity that their parents never had. These kids took the opportunity seriously. But these kids were the exception. Most of the black kids just didn’t want to be there……….

Political correctness was not the thing back then that it is now. You heard people say that “all races are the same,” or “all men are created equal,” but I don’t think anyone actually meant it. I always assumed that was just some bullshit that people said for the benefit of blacks to make them feel better. You weren’t actually supposed to believe it. It was a way of being polite, but we all knew the score. It was kind of like being nice to the retarded kid. You treat the retarded kid like he’s not retarded, but everyone knows he’s retarded. Back then, PC was like that. It was just being polite. It would be until decades later that I would encounter people would say shit like “we’re all the same” and actually believe it.

So society was more bullshitting me than outright lying to me. But it was bullshit that I assumed was being done with a wink and a nod.

That said, I was definitely being lied to by the media……..

Now, I won’t say that I’ve been a white nationalist since 3rd grade. I did suffer from some delusions that if we tinkered with the system somewhat, that maybe we could close the racial gaps. If we could get rid of welfare, it would force blacks to pull up their bootstraps. If we could untie the invisible hand of the free market, it could work its magic and lift blacks out of their squalor.

I never believed that blacks could achieve socioeconomic parity with whites. I knew whites had some x-factor that blacks lacked. Even before I knew anything about bell curves, I knew whites were smarter than blacks and would always be doing somewhat better. But I still thought that if we tinkered with the education system, somehow we could smarten them up some. Not white smart, but smart enough to where they would be good enough for jazz. I had some hope that maybe something could be done to get things to a manageable level to where blacks were at least not a burden on society.

It wasn’t until I discovered race realism and the writings of John Derbyshire that it started to dawn on me just how hopeless the race situation really was. This was around 2004. Now here I am.