This is not my story of racial awakening. It is my wife’s. I knew the truth from a young age, as I grew up in a lower-middle class town on Long Island with a significant black population in the 1970s.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a black majority Southern town. My parents were both Appalachian “hillbillies” who had gone away to college and become liberals. They moved to a large coastal town for work. Our new home was the site of a large “historically black college,” which had been recently absorbed into the state university system. Most of the local public school system’s teachers and administrators were graduates of this college, and they were well versed in the kind of militant black rage we have come to call critical race theory and African American Studies. I don’t know if it had a name back then. We called it “the extremely angry teacher is on another rampage.”

I have run two nightclubs in South Carolina. One was robbed at gunpoint by blacks two different times. The second time, they robbed the customers, too. The other club became popular with blacks, especially on Saturdays, when almost all our clients were black. There was no end to the serious problems they caused. Gunfire would ring out from the parking lot. One time, a fight started, and afterwards, a black guy ran out to his car, grabbed a gun, came back in and shot the man he’d been fighting with . . . then he started shooting into the crowd at random. A month later, some black girls started a fight inside, and a black guy ran outside and shot someone in the parking lot.