Category Archives: Culture

I am a Heretic. I openly defy the State Religion currently in power over America and across the Western world. A faith fanatically enforced with Speech Codes, social ostracism, government harassment, mob violence, and in many countries “Hate Crimes” legislation leading to imprisonment. Yet I was not always a Heretic. At one time I was a True Believer. [caption id="attachment_2320" align="alignright" width="281" caption="Once a hero of mine"][/caption]

Born and raised in the post-60’s Northeast this was inevitable. Growing up I was always taught that race didn’t exist; that one should judge a person by the content of their character and not the color of their skin; that Martin Luther King was one of history’s greatest men; and that the worst thing you could possible do was to hate a person because they were different, to be “racist”. All of those things were part of my worldview as a child. How could they not be? I was taught them in school, by my parents, by my peers, and by the media. Vividly I remember in sixth grade the first time I was exposed to the racism leading The Holocaust. Watching the video of skeletal corpses stacked up and buried by bulldozers I burst into tears and had to be consoled in the hallway; my boyish sense of justice brutalized.

This colorblind worldview wasn’t simply abstract however; it was deeply personal. Growing up and still to this day there are a number of extremely close and loving relationships with non-whites in my life. For the purposes of this essay I’ll focus on one of my childhood best friends, Jerry. As the two of us use to joke Jerry was “worldly”, being mixed Italian, Puerto Rican, and native Hawaiian. From the first time we met in second grade to high school graduation we were over the course of many summers and school days inseparable. Having people such as Jerry in my life only solidified the colorblind, “we’re all the same” worldview I was taught. And so I went about the first two decades of my life the typical member of my generation: colorblind, idolizing Martin Luther King, listening to Michael Jackson and popular Hip-Hop, joining the Democratic Party at 18, and ready to be reviled by and denounce the slightest hint of “racism”.

But then something shattered my worldview. I went to college. During my sophomore year at my Upstate New York community college I was introduced for the very first time to the concepts of Diversity and Multiculturalism. Never in my life had I heard these words before. Never had these concepts been introduced to my thinking. I was stunned. My entire life I had been told that to be a good person I had to ignore a person’s race because it was only skin deep and judge them by their character. Now I was being told that to be a good person I had to not only notice that they were a different race but to love them and indeed gain strength from the mere fact they were a different race. Again I was stunned. What made it worse was that it wasn’t some Klansman or Nazi teaching me this, but the same people that told me to be colorblind. My entire life they had told me to believe something, which I did dutifully, but now they wanted me to believe the exact opposite at the same time. The Liberalism of college contradicted the Liberalism of my childhood. [caption id="attachment_2349" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="College Liberalism"][/caption] Continue reading →