LIBERALISM is the sea in which we swim. For many of us, it takes some stark encounter with reality to get us out of the water. Here is one reader’s story of how she changed from a “lunatic liberal” to a traditionalist. All her problems are not solved, but her life has been renewed. She has shed many illusions.

Josaphine writes:

I am white, 42, and married to a black man. My husband is a fine art painter by trade, and a corporate accounts manager by day. We are celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary this year. We met in college in 1988 and married in 1995. After I earned a master’s degree, we married and had three children and moved to a midwestern city. My oldest daughter is 14, and I have been a homemaker and homeschooling parent since her birth.

My husband and I are former lunatic liberals. We promoted multiculturalism, the arts and diversity, and we have been involved in our neighborhood association, “urban renewal,” and the urban homesteading movement in our city. We always thought our interracial relationship was progressive. After marriage we associated with a local group of liberals who dug up their yards to plant food, composted, built rain barrels, breastfed their babies, practiced attachment parenting, planned community gardens, used clotheslines, etc. We did these things too, and in our liberalism, we felt very progressive. We were very popular with our white liberal friends because we were the token interracial couple.

We found a big old house in the neighborhood where my husband grew up. Our neighborhood was one of the original suburbs of downtown where the white folks built their summer homes before desegregation of the schools. Racially the neighborhood is 70/30 percent black and white respectively. We bought our old home, and as liberals, we were sure that we would be exposing our multiracial family to a very diverse and healthy environment. We wanted them to know both sides of their family.

Things have not worked out as planned.

Living in a mostly black neighborhood has cast a very harsh light on black culture for me. All of my liberal illusions have been shattered. I have realized how much hatred and anger blacks have for white people. I have lost so much hope and innocence just by living here for nine years. I often feel that I have been beaten over the head with a big stick. I have read so much about HBD (Human Biodiversity), race, black culture, white culture, white nationalism, and other topics that I had never even known about. I have struggled to have a voice, and to use it without choking up.

We have never experienced white racism as a couple, only intolerance from blacks. All of our friends comment about how annoying it is that we still like each other so much, and that our children are so well adjusted and sociable. We still have date night on Tuesdays and leave the kids on our anniversary to travel to a far off place. My mother-in-law teases that we are always talking about each other fondly and she makes fun of us. But she still denounces our marriage. I don’t blame her. She wants her grandchildren to look like her. I have realized that that is normal for everyone.

Several incidents have contributed to my racial awakening.

I once received a call from an older black woman who had at some point been an associate of my husband’s in the arts. They were working on an artist grant program together. She was trying to locate my husband so that she could return a portfolio of his work that she had borrowed a few years back. I told her that she could dispose of the items, that he did not need them. She became offended by this, and mentioned that she could tell that I was white by my “accent,” and that she did not trust me to make that decision FOR my husband (I often work as his office assistant in the sale of his paintings). She demanded to speak with him personally. This black woman continued to tell me that she was a black poetess, and very knowledgable of the “black experience,” and that she did not approve of interracial relationships. She said that her son had married a white woman and that there were children “produced” in the marriage and she could never bond with them. They were not authentically black to her. She asked me if I was going to teach my children about their black heritage. I realized at that moment that I was absolutely not going to teach my children to identify with a sub-culture that was filled with criminality, lies, illegitimacy, and a legacy of slavery and victimology. American black culture today is nothing to be proud of and we should all denounce it and demand assimilation.

My marriage is a success story, but neither of us have figured out a way to celebrate our family openly. My husband has struggled with our racial differences, his family’s rejection of our union, and his own racial identity, and we often had heated discussions during our transition. Our parents are both divorced, and so our children have very little interaction with their grandparents. My mother was a radical feminist and a liberal, and fought for the rights of gays. She has been divorced twice and I have met my father only once when I was 16. While I remember my Southern conservative grandmother telling me how different blacks were from whites and that I should avoid mingling with them, I always felt that she was just a mean old racist. My mother taught me that the races are all alike, and she and my stepfather sent me to mostly black inner-city schools to show everyone how tolerant they were. I have had to figure it all out for myself.

Now here we are! What my mother taught me is not true. The rejection of my marriage and children by my black in-laws, and the complete destruction of our entire extended family by divorce, has helped me to turn inward to my immediate family in order to protect them. I realized at some point that I was on a mission placed before me and that I had a job to do. We have been led, I believe by God, into a new way of thinking. Since last year, we have turned 180 degrees politically, and have adopted very conservative values. We have lost all of our liberal friends in the process, but have strengthened our family in many ways. We have become religious and very concerned with the future of our country.

I have felt very strongly that I am to be an advocate for marriage, family, and traditional values. I have never taken the time to acknowledge my white heritage. I would love to know more about my own white family and their traditions. I feel at age 42 that I am so far behind, and that I am creating a new heritage as I go along. I plant the same vegetables that my great grandmother, Vernie, used to feed to me from her garden. I have her photo in my kitchen, and I talk to her from time to time. I believe that she pushes me along to be a dutiful wife and mother and do God’s work. She was fat and wore a big apron and always had a supply of day-old iced doughnuts, frozen in knotted old bread wrappers. I loved her and now I miss her terribly. She died when I was 16. She was the epitome of my white heritage, and of true strength and femininity, and I try to honor her with my work.

My daughter was born just before the disaster of 9/11, and my entire existence was knocked out of balance. I became politically motivated. I suddenly felt the true power of submission and femininity like never before. I began to feel the need to submit to my husband, who up until that point had acted like a teenager in a man’s body. My feminist upbringing taught me how to fill in the gaps for him and literally perform his duties when he would not. The more I acted like a real woman, the more he in turn behaved like a real man. I think we fell into very traditional roles when our children came and it made us mature very quickly as man and wife.

I love my husband and my beautiful children dearly. They are smart, obedient, caring and compassionate. I do not regret the choices that I have made. I have realized that we have been brought together for a very important reason. I just don’t know what it is yet, but I am learning. My life has been turned upside down with the truth, and I am trying to read and learn all I can. I used to blame my liberal white friends for living in the expensive suburbs and worrying about “safe schools”, but now I have great compassion for them. I too long for a safe and friendly place to raise my children.

I know this is quite long, but I have many thoughts on this issue and don’t get a chance to talk about it often. I enjoy your blog greatly because I feel that my place is at home with my children. I openly reject feminism and homosexuality. I do not identify as a liberal any longer. I believe that white people are silenced in the open discussion of race and I don’t like it one bit. I teach my children the truth about race, and look to God for guidance in all things. I do not openly support mixed-race relationships, but now that I am in one, I have to do the best I can to just be honest and truthful about it.

Please follow and like us: