We’re all going to be replaced. Get over it.
According to news reports regarding the mass shooter who entered a Buffalo grocery store today (14 May 2022), the killer posted a manifesto—unavailable to the public at this time—to explain that his desire to murder the minority customers came out of his belief that white people are being overwhelmed by non-white immigrants coming to countries that historically have had populations that were mainly of European heritage. This notion, named the Great Replacement Theory by French novelist, Renaud Camus, inspired the slogan, “You will not replace us. Jews will not replace us,” at the Charlottesville, Virginia Unite the Right rally, a protest that resulted in three deaths and multiple injuries, and has become a prominent part of right-wing political ideology with the rise of Donald Trump. It is, of course, nothing new, forming the basis of Jean Raspail’s novel, The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 story about waves of non-white migrants coming to take over countries such as South Africa, the United States, and the nations of Europe. It is reportedly and unsurprisingly one of Steve Bannon’s favorite books. All of this sounds very much like Nazi claims about the Jews, lies in part stirred up by the publication of the forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and going farther back to the blood libels of the Middle Ages, nonsense that can all be summed up as the notion that the superior race, from the point of view of the conspiracy theorist, is somehow being exploited and will ultimately be dominated by whatever particular minority is currently convenient to be treated as a nefarious Other.
Oh, the persecuted majority. To be a white, cis, straight Christian in the United States of America must be an intolerable burden, one that I am grateful to have escaped as an infidel—with the hope that this will save me from the strikes of race, sex, and gender identity that would otherwise subject me to oppression.
I cannot continue that parody of contemporary right-wing thinking, especially as it is more quotation than anything else. The white nationalist must maintain the belief that whiteness is biologically superior, while simultaneously feeling vulnerable to the slightest mixture of someone else’s blood in one’s ancestry. Or to the briefest of exposures to music with a backbeat. Or to capsaicin in one’s food. The list goes on an on, a catalogue of existential risks to the asserted master race. If we are genuinely in some straw man version of an evolutionary struggle of the phenotypes, the strongest, smartest, quickest, etc. ought to win, ceteris paribus, and if the group that has lorded itself over others for centuries cannot hold on to that exalted position, is that not a sign that its time has gone?
There is a small fact buried in the fears of replacement theorists, namely the reality that we in majority white nations have brought upon ourselves a reduction in birth rates, thanks to improved standards of living, job opportunities more advanced than agricultural labor, and the liberation of women. Given the weedy nature of the human species, an organism that expands into all niches and exploits every resource while creating new means of exploitation, this is a necessary result and one that is not happening soon enough. Population increases in the developing world are still too high to be sustainable—i.e. to have a world in which trees still exist and the global average temperature is sufficiently low for a habitable planet—and the worry is the plot of The Camp of the Saints, the expectation that people from poor countries will want the rich life and rich possessions that developed countries hoard for ourselves. That would only seem fair, considering how many of the benefits we enjoy came from extracting resources from regions that had historically non-white inhabitants, but greed can only be excused in the mind of the greedy on the basis of making possession the only meaningful point of the law: I have it, and it is right for me to have it. If what I have pillaged for myself is taken back, I might have to wonder if I acted wrongly in the first place.
Rather than living in fear, however, the better answer is to extend the blessings of development and freedom to all. I mentioned above the liberation of women, something that angers white nationalists as well, since it means that said group cannot be forced into producing more babies of the desired race, among other weakenings of the patriarchy—and thus in part the decades-long assault on abortion rights. But the reality is that bringing women into more equal opportunity with men has meant an expansion of the number of workers, of customers, of businesses, and of innovators in our economy. Doing the same with the nations of the world promises orders of magnitude of growth in those areas.
And what is more, the notion of race is an artificial one. Certain minor characteristics do tend to group together by one’s ancestry—skin color, hair texture, and the like—and some internal differences such as lactose tolerance or resistance to malaria come along, but biologically, each one of us is either one person among more than eight billion (and rising) or a part of one overall species. The things that matter—moral character, initiative, curiosity, intelligence, and so forth—are distributed across the globe without reference to a person’s political classification as one or another race.
So far as I am aware—and I refuse to submit my DNA to companies that will distribute its data to anyone willing to pay for it or to ask for it by warrant—my ancestors all came from northern Europe, at least in the intermediate stage between me and all of our Great Rift Valley forebears, and I find myself unable to be worried about the majority skin color in a hundred years. What does trouble me is the thought that humanity may sink back into widespread authoritarian rule, a rule made all the worse by the technological progress that we have experienced since the rise of science and industry following the Renaissance. Tyranny is a pernicious cultural virus, and it is not unique to any of the supposed races, nor are any groups immune to it without struggle.