On May 14, 2022, an 18 year old male traveled four hours to a supermarket in a predominantly African neighborhood and killed ten people. We all want to know the reason, the motive. . No matter how repellent, if a suspected killer leaves 180 pages in the wake of his killings, they must be read to find the answers. Will we find the reasons for the other mass shootings?
However much we might want to move beyond these mass shootings and hope for racial unity, equality and peace, we cannot ignore that there are many people who are so afraid and angry about the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural world we live in today that they demand to return to a world “gone by” because they fear that they are losing everything and being replaced
History records that in early 20th century France, French Nationalism predicted the eventual annihilation and replacement of the native while European race by immigrants and nonwhites. . In recent years, French writer Renaud Camus espoused the notion (as reported by the ADL Anti-Defamation League) that immigration from Africa and the Middle East would lead to the eventual extinction of the native white European race. White “replacement theory” and “white genocide” were among the foundations upon which the Nazis built their ideology and it’s not over. In a sense, it’s only grown over the past seventy-five years
The fear of annihilation is found throughout the conspiracy theories of white supremacy and Nazi programming. Could these theories actually be igniting these lonely, depressed, misguided shooters to over identify with angry ideology of being replaced. Think about the nearly two dozen people killed in a 2019 El Paso, Texas event by a gunman claiming he was fighting against a “Hispanic Invasion.” Think of the 2021 murders at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a killer who commanded that all the people there needed to die. At a 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, participants marched on the University of Virginia campus, carrying Tiki torches and crying out “Jews will not replace us!”
Spectacle sometimes gets in the way of understanding these shooters, especially as these mass shootings come at us in such a quick succession. There’s no time to think, only to back away in repulsion. But if we listen, and we sift through the manure of their racist manifestos, we can isolate strands that connect to Great Replacement thought.
Unfortunately, this maligned ideology is not exclusive to message boards and internet forums that are the benchmark of “The Dark Web.” As noted in a May 18, 2022 analysis by Philip Bump, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has espoused the theory in over 400 episodes of his program since 2016. Carlson fully embraced it in early 2021 and Republicans m. ade it mainstream. They include New York Representative Elise Stefanik, third-ranking House Republican, who attacked President Biden for securing baby formula for only undocumented immigrants (not true) while “American mothers” suffered during a nationwide formula shortage. Stefanik plays into QAnon theories and attacks Democrats as “pedo grifters. She circulates the “Great Replacement” ideas that a Jewish-controlled elite class wants to replace and disempower (if not disembowel) white Americans.
Adolphus Belk, Jr., a professor of political science and African American studies at Winthrop University, sees white nationalists like those mentioned here (and let’s not hesitate calling them what they are) as worried that “they will no longer be a majority of the general population, but a plurality, and [they] see that as a threat to their own well-being and the well-being of the nation.”
What can we do about a mindset that is rooted in white supremacy, a belief that in order to maintain a status quo we must remove the “other”? It’s unfortunately the darkest stain on the American Dream that’s been with us from the beginning.
We need only to go back to Donald Trump’s seemingly benign motto “Make America Great Again” which loses its apparent innocence when we juxtapose it with his war cry, “We Will Not Be Replaced.” We can start fighting white nationalists and centuries-old hate-filled ideologies by staying awake to all injustice, speaking up whenever necessary, and voting out the politicians who control through paranoid rhetoric and scare tactics.
