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I was pretty disengaged from politics for the first 25 years of my life. In this state of ignorance, I naturally leaned somewhat to the Left by default. I tell people, “I used to lean a bit Left, until I got into politics.” It was not a passionate leaning, I was rather apathetic about current political affairs. I cared more about my music, weight-lifting, and school. When it came to politics, I was “chill” — that is, apathetic with a smile.

However, throughout this time of my life, there were little signs of racial consciousness. Foremost among them was my utter disdain for all rap music. I was — and still am — a musician. I have such a passion for music that my tolerance for its desecration is far lower than that of your average listener. And that’s exactly what rap and hip hop are — desecration of the raw elements of music. It is a pervasive desecration. You cannot drive down an urban street without overhearing stale electronic hi-hats and painfully rudimentary melodies — if you can even call them “melodies” — being grunted over by blacks that can barely be bothered to part their lips when they speak. Rap music was so prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s that I wonder if its sudden ubiquity was driven by some woke demand for more “representation” on the radio and MTV. Just as repulsion is a healthy reaction to Haitian mud cookies being served as food, repulsion is also a healthy reaction to rap being sold as music.

Part of my disdain for rap music was because of how painful I find it to hear “African American English” (AAE). While I sometimes found amusement in imitating their absurd perversion of the English language, I was always quite angered when I had to listen to someone who genuinely spoke that way by default. So many blacks cannot be bothered to make the “th” sound with their lips, and instead substitute a “d” sound: “dey” instead of “they,” for example. Simply touching one’s tongue to the roof of their mouth to form a “d” sound conserves more energy than extending the tongue all the way to the front of the mouth, between the teeth, to form a “th” sound — give it a try. While just a theory, I’m confident this “linguistic energy conservation” explains most of the ways in which AAE diverges from white English.

Then came some very close encounters with diversity. During the first 25 years of my life, I lived in very white neighborhoods. But then I moved to the Uptown neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What I was thinking, I do not know. Perhaps I was thinking, “Oh, Uptown? That’s got a lot of hippie vegan cafes and fancy little grocery stores, it should be one of the nicer parts of Minneapolis.” And it is one of the nicer parts of Minneapolis — but I’m afraid that’s not saying much these days.

I lived about 30 blocks away from 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd died, during the George Floyd riots of 2020. Even before those race riots, within a month of moving into the neighborhood, I had my car broken into for a bag of ten dollars in change that had been sitting on my passenger seat. I also had upstairs neighbors who would have some pretty colorful characters of African descent skulking about the place, and “bumping” their rap music loud into the night. It was nearly impossible to visit the local gas stations without loud rap music playing across the parking lot from a parked car, or to buy some goods from inside without an earful of hooting and hollering from two or more blacks barking at each other from across the store. Worst of all was having to overhear the way these people talk to each other, the vulgar noises and mumblings that seep out of their mouths and somehow pass as a “language.” At all hours of the day (and night), blacks would just be walking around the neighborhood, seemingly without any place to be in particular, always staring, always sagging, always making a racket, and seemingly always up to no good.

All of this was slowly making it harder and harder to keep saying to myself, “But there are some good ones, so overall they are okay as a group. It’s just culture!” Then George Floyd died. I remember the exact moment I switched, the very moment I dropped my “neutral” stance on political questions regarding race: I was driving past protestors, already quite annoyed with their disruption, seeing sign after sign declaring “WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE.” I also noticed signs hanging in almost every business window that said “minority-owned business” or “black-owned business” — the thinly-veiled implication here being, “We’re not white, so don’t burn down our business.” After being told what a danger “white supremacists” are, it was odd that it was not, in fact, whites who were getting so violent that the city was forced to enact a curfew. After all, NPR told me that whites are the most dangerous race in America! But there we sat, locked in our homes, under curfew because of black violence against our cities.