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Growing up in a suburban commuter colony of Canada’s federal capital in the 1980s was good, for the most part. The first house that I lived in was an attached garden home in a brand-new neighborhood. Houses were in rows of five or six units. Every unit had a modest, fenced backyard; our house featured a beautiful Russian olive tree out front as well. Everyone had surface parking spots for their family vehicles.

The first few years of life there were idyllic; the residents were predominantly white, albeit from a range of European backgrounds. There were many children our age, so my sister and I had lots of opportunity to make friends and play outside.

That was until a black family moved in next door to us. It was immediately apparent that they were very different. The family, consisting of a mother, father, and an only son, had emigrated from Jamaica. They caused problems almost immediately. The mother had a habit of lying about things and sending her volatile husband into fits of rage. They also kept their son, Tyrone, shut in the house for days at a time; when they finally let him loose, his bound-up energy made him a manic force of pent-up fury unleashed on the other children of the neighborhood.

Tyrone was difficult for teachers to deal with as well. He refused to stand up for the national anthem on multiple occasions; he constantly caused fights inside the classroom and outside in the playground at recess.

During one class, a supply teacher asked us all to describe what we had for breakfast that morning. Tyrone said he had coffee for breakfast. The teacher was a bit shocked and said that a young person in elementary school should not be having coffee, let alone coffee without any food.

There were several instances when Tyrone’s mother asked mine if she could watch him for five minutes. Oftentimes those five minutes stretched to an hour or more, with Tyrone eating lunch at our house. We quickly learned that lying was second nature to them.

It came to our attention by way of another neighbor who worked with Tyrone’s mother that she was prone to bouts of rage at work. Tyrone’s mother worked at a retirement home. She apparently had the habit of going off on irrational, expletive-laced tirades whenever she misconstrued a comment or perceived some sort of injustice.

Tyrone’s father at one point decided that it would be a good idea to have the neighborhood children race against his son — undoubtedly to prove that Tyrone was the fastest kid on the block. He produced a stopwatch and raced us in heats. My sister, who was very fleet of foot, beat him and surprised Tyrone’s father, as he thought his son would win every race handily.

Another black student transferred to our elementary school from Kenya. I did not know him very well, but I do know that he didn’t hesitate to punch me in the face when we had a momentary power outage.

After the proprietors of our neighborhood decided to get lax with their vetting of potential tenants, some other unsavory characters moved in. A group of young men rented a house nearby; we could see their place from our front window. It wasn’t long before black drug dealers, sporting Rastafarian headgear, showed up. This of course made the neighborhood feel less safe, and it angered my father. One day he decided to confront them with a bat in hand. Fortunately, nothing happened except for an extended standoff and a glaring contest. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best thing to do, but he felt compelled to do something out of a sense of honor.

Luckily, it wasn’t too long before the ne’er-do-wells moved out — but not before they had ruined the house they were renting. My family decided it was best that we move house as well. So, my parents bought a home in a new, remote suburb surrounded by farmland. It wasn’t until much later that I became aware of the term “white flight,” but this was an example of the phenomenon.

In middle school it became apparent that students of other racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds were aware of their differences. I remember a seemingly assimilated student of Chinese extraction becoming strident about the quality of Japanese automobiles. I guess he was unaware of the mutual enmity the Japanese and Chinese had for one another.

Jewish students were there as well; they stuck together, with some of them refusing to sing Christmas carols out of fear of assimilation. Our teacher was noticeably disgusted by their behavior at the time.

When I got to high school, it had a majority white student body with a sizeable Jewish population and some blacks, east Indians, and Asians. I remember one Somalian immigrant who had enrolled in our high school and who constantly played basketball in the gym along with the rest of us. Despite fleeing his war-torn home country, he didn’t seem to be very appreciative of his adopted home. I remember him saying to me, “What have white Canadians done for me lately?” I should’ve come up with something clever, but at the time I wasn’t able to.

Another thing that comes to mind when I remember my interactions with blacks in high school was their reverence for black rappers who exulted in the nihilistic gangster lifestyle. It was a growing segment of what was being pushed by the music industry in the 1990s, just as it is now. Even though there were not many blacks at my high school, the vast majority of them identified with and sympathized with black public figures of dubious characters.

A black fellow whom everyone seemed to despise was constantly picking fights in gym class. I saw him get into a vicious, grappling-fistfight with a tough white student that had to be broken up by teachers.

It wasn’t until university that I became aware of a pervasive anti-white bias in many of my instructors and their zealous student acolytes. At the time I felt ill-equipped to counter many of their anti-white, anti-Western arguments. I just knew that what I was hearing was wrong.

When I eventually found websites such as American Renaissance, Counter-Currents, The Occidental Observer, Red Ice, and White Rabbit Radio, I finally realized that I wasn’t alone in the world — and that there was hope for the future.