Carol Swain
In 2006, Pat Buchanan wrote about “La Reconquista,” the idea that Latinos, particularly those of Mexican descent, would take over the Southwestern states that the U.S. had annexed more than 150 years prior. Buchanan's State of Emergency predicted that the takeover would be the “cultural transformation of that huge slice of America into a Mexamerican borderland, where the dominant culture is Hispanic and Anglos will feel alienated and begin to emigrate.”
In 2018, as a caravan of migrants worked its way from Central America toward the U.S. border, Donald Trump and his stand-ins said the country was facing an invasion. In 2019 alone, Trump’s Facebook campaign used the word “invasion” in 2,000 ads, according to The New York Times. That shouldn’t surprise anyone who remembers the infamous speech that launched Trump's campaign, in which he called undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.
On Aug. 4, a young man posted a manifesto of sorts on 8chan, a popular site for right-wing trolls. “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. … I am simply defending my culture.” He said he agreed with the Christchurch shooter, who attacked mosques in New Zealand earlier this year, and that he read Renaud Camus' 2011 book The Great Replacement, which makes claims about a Muslim invasion of France similar to Buchanan’s reconquista fears. Twenty minutes after posting the screed, he took his rifle and opened fire on customers at a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and wounding 26 others. Many of the victims were Latinos, including eight Mexican citizens. The shooter wasn’t even from El Paso: He drove 11 hours to the Latino-majority city to carry out the attack.
It seems that racism and xenophobia were the clear motivators behind the mass shooting. But if you lean far enough to the right, you can ignore the obvious. That’s the only explanation for recent failed mayoral candidate Carol Swain’s bizarre piece in The Tennessean’s opinion section.
Swain’s piece offers many flimsy arguments for how progressive ideals and multiculturalism are actually the forces to blame for radicalizing young white men, leaving them with nothing but white guilt, poor job prospects and the fear of displacement. It’s apologia for the shooter’s manifesto, in which he linked immigration to the failing economy and incoming climate disaster, and asserts that killing Latinos will not only reduce the strain on resources but also prevent race-mixing, which, the shooter said, increases factionalism. He also worried that a Latino-majority Texas would result in a Democratic takeover.
Swain says that somewhere in the xenophobic nonsense of the manifesto are the echoes of white people’s fears and anxieties, which result from a world where political correctness has run amok.
“The language and rhetoric of multiculturalism and identity politics furnished the intellectual underpinnings for young whites to think in terms of white identity and white consciousness,” Swain writes. Shooters like the one in El Paso were acting on “the perceived unfairness of racial double standards that permeated campus life, where constant reminders of their privilege were hammered into them.”
But college campuses and affirmative action didn’t invent whiteness. Slavery and colonialism did. Spaniards had 16 racial categories, or castas, that denoted who had European, indigenous or African ancestry and to what degree. There was a one-drop rule — a law that determined a citizen was African American if they had any black ancestry whatsoever — in the U.S. The so-called white consciousness driving the current generation of separatists doesn’t stem from identity politics, but rather from the longstanding white supremacy that established this country.
Swain blames “liberal immigration policies that [are] rapidly changing the nation’s demographic makeup” for “racial unrest.” But the idea that the U.S. has lax immigration policies sounds absurd when ICE just raided factories across Mississippi and detained 680 undocumented immigrants, or when camps at the border are forcing children to live in squalid conditions. She says political leaders “seem hellbent on providing more opportunities to non-Americans than to legit U.S. citizens” when the Republican-led government has slashed taxes for the rich and regulations on corporations. Children have been separated from their parents at the border while seeking refugee status, and six kids have died in U.S. custody at the border — but somehow conditions are not stringent enough.
Pinning the blame on white anxiety also ignores the most common warning signs found among most mass shooters: They’re often domestic abusers. Research by ABC News and by gun control advocates Everytown USA each found links between domestic violence and mass shootings involving four or more people.
Swain even promotes the dubious claim that violent black-on-white crime is a serious problem, something debunked by a 2015 Bureau of Justice Statistics report that found that whites are four times more likely to commit violent crimes against white people than black. (In fact, violent crime in general decreased from 1995-2015.) She never mentions that hate crimes have been on the rise since 2015, the year Trump began his presidential run. In fact, she never mentions racism or prejudice at all, instead preferring terms like “racial unrest.”
Saying that attempts to create a more equal society are the cause of the rise in white nationalist violence is straight-up victim blaming. It’s a sign that the right cares far more about the status quo than the safety and wellbeing of those who have been historically marginalized. It suggests that it doesn't matter how many immigrants, or women, or people of color, or even children and students die — as long as white men can stay comfortable. That’s an argument for appeasement, not unity. And appeasing white supremacy doesn’t stop it — you have to dismantle it from the top down.
