I had a black friend back in the early 1980s. He started a food truck business selling burgers. For a while, he did okay. Then his black friends found out about it and started arriving every day, crowding round his van, begging for free food. He couldn’t make any money after that and had to close down. Black people are often black people’s own worst enemy.

Until about a year ago, I considered myself an “ally” to the Black Lives Matter movement. How could I not? I grew up hearing about the evils of American slavery. My final presentation at my nearly all white middle school was titled “Black People: Struggle and Freedom.” Diversity propaganda wasn’t just part of my education growing up, diversity propaganda was my entire education growing up. It wasn’t only coming from school, either. I had propaganda spewing from my liberal parents as well.

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 1980s and lived in several different places around the US and Europe. The racially-based problems we are seeing in Europe today did not exist when I lived there, but certainly did in the US. However, that is not when I became racially aware.