Remember back to Charlottesville when the racists were chanting “Jews will not replace us"? I think a lot of people shrugged this off because they didn’t know how to take it seriously. Obviously, Jews aren’t going to become the dominant strand of white people.
Most white people aren’t familiar enough with white supremacist tropes to recognize this, at least not in this form. But now, Tucker Carlson is spending time most nights talking about “the Great Replacement,” and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida is out here tweeting about how the Anti-Defamation League is racist and replacement theory is real. And now the full scope of the theory is out in public — the theory being that Jews are arranging American policy (everything from abortion laws to immigration quotas to support for LGBTQ people and the demasculinization of white boys) in order make white people a minority in “our” own country.
As some readers may know, I’m working on a book about three unsolved integration-era bombings that took place here in Nashville in the late 1950s and early ’60s. (Read more about that here.) This has incidentally resulted in me spending a lot of time studying the rise of this particular conspiracy theory. In fact, the factor that resulted in bombings of Black schools, churches and homes in the South was the involvement of racists who were anti-Semites. A community could have everything else — integrating schools, prominent Black civil rights attorneys, extremely pissed-off violent racists — but without this belief that they were at war with Jews over the role of Black people in American society, racists were not bombing things.
When I tell people this now, it often shocks them. But this was known by the FBI and by the Southern state governments who attended the Southern Conference on Bombings in 1958. Let me repeat this, because here we are in the waning months of 2021, 63 years later, still dealing with this: The FBI and Southern state governments have known since 1958 that the key ingredient for deadly violence against Black people was a belief that Jewish people were manipulating Black people in order to loosen the stranglehold that white, mostly Protestant, people have on power in this country.
And here we still are, because we never learn from history. Shit happens, and we as a country rush to forget it as soon as possible. Then we're confused when the problem we ignored is still a problem and is still hurting people.
But there are other things we can learn from history, because we see it play out over and over and over again. White supremacists, I’m talking to you.
White supremacy is a pyramid scheme. Sometimes, like during the Ku Klux Klan's second wave, it was just a straight-up multilevel marketing scheme. But it is always a pyramid scheme. I mean, you can see the shape of it in the concept itself: A discernible group of people is "better than" other people in their society. Other members of that society are ranked according to their acceptability — white people on top, then Asian people, then Middle Eastern people, then Black people, or whatever org chart your particular brand of racism uses.
But there are the two things that racists really need to sit with in their hearts: 1. The pyramid scheme does not disappear when it wins. Why would it? It’s the winning configuration. 2. Most racist leaders are really shitty people using racism as an outlet for all their terrible impulses. This isn’t to say that they’re not racist. It’s to say that they’re bad people who are not suddenly going to become good people if all non-white people magically disappear. KKK member John Kasper led riots against integration in Clinton, Tenn., back in the 1950s, and it was other racists who blew up his headquarters — because Kasper kept getting involved with their wives and daughters. Matt Heimbach is a well-known white supremacist now who was allegedly having an affair with his mother-in-law. These are not upstanding folks.
OK, white supremacists, now that you’ve sat with those two truths in your hearts for just a second, let me ask you something: If racists win, what happens to you?
Every time white Americans get nervous about non-white people outnumbering them, the definition of “white” expands. Irish people became white; Eastern European people became white; hell, it’s pretty common these days to see Greek-descended white supremacists, and there’s no way Greeks or Italians were considered “truly white” by bigots until very recently.
So, you’ve created this system for sorting people where the people who are white are the best. And you have to at least suspect that the sorting will continue until the white race is "purified." I mean, 1930s Germany was pretty damn white, and the Nazis still came up with a lot of people who weren’t white enough and needed to be killed. So the historical precedent is that there will be purging of the not-white-enough. Are you sure you’re white enough to get yourself a spot in the middle, toward the top of the new white supremacist hierarchy? You have a last name like Martinez or Sunic and you think you’re truly going to be white enough? If America really is a white country founded by and for white people, what was considered white when the country was founded didn’t even wholly include Germans or Swedes. Founder Benjamin Franklin said this:
That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.
"Purely white people," according to our traditions of white supremacy, are Saxons and English. How many of you still count?
OK then, let’s say that you are wholly English and/or Saxon. Take a look at the likes of Donald Davidson and Richard Spencer. Do you have a good enough college education? Do you have the right social networks? Are you special enough to get invited to hobnob with “thought leaders”? Or even if you’re the right kind of white, are you getting relegated to the underclass because you don’t have the right education?
It’s a pyramid scheme. There’s not room at the top for all of you.
And here’s the real kicker: Most of you already are the Great Replacement. You are the non-whites who have come in and changed our country and taken spots that were intended for white people. You are the nightmare your evil idiot friends are terrifying you with. You just became white to do it. (Hello, Scots-Irish Southerners!)
So you can either embrace the multicultural society that you already represent, that you are already evidence of, and enjoy the nation as it is, you included — or you can continue to be the foot soldiers in a movement that will turn on you when the time comes. But mark my words: It will turn on you when the time comes.
