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Published : 23 Mar 2019, 03:08 AM
"The Great Replacement" is a racist and misogynistic conspiracy theory that holds that white people face existential decline, even extinction, because of rising immigration in the West and falling birthrates among white women (caused, of course, by feminism).
That's pretty much the whole argument; as a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group's scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable, and demography is an imprecise science.
Demography is not destiny, either. Even if, several decades from now, whites do become a racial minority, they will not automatically lose much of their vast economic and political power, because this is America, where inequality is tolerated and an aggrieved and wealthy political minority can hold sway indefinitely, thanks to the Senate and the Electoral College.
But what "The Great Replacement" lacks in any factual basis it makes up for in digital branding appeal. The white-extinction theory plays well online. It has found its greatest purchase among a certain type of basement-dwelling incel edgelord, to whom it offers both an explanation for self-pitying personal circumstance and a set of convenient antagonists (roughly, the blame falls on race-betraying, sexually empowered women; immigrants; and the Jews said to control the whole system).
The theory has also found a foothold in more mainstream political circles. Donald Trump has flirted with Twitter users who espouse white-extinction theory, Tucker Carlson caresses it lovingly every now and then, and Steve King grabs it by the baby.
Still, to really pop, the theory needed a hashtag, something catchy. "White genocide" was one branding possibility, but that label has failed to take off — perhaps because a claim of "genocide" requires unmistakable mass death, and what we're talking about here is gradual, peaceful demographic change. As one pseudonymous YouTuber who has made a fantastic video debunking the white-extinction theory notes tartly: "That's white privilege for you: We even get the nice version of genocide."
Enter "The Great Replacement." For white supremacists, the new term offers several branding advantages. First, it sounds kind of smart. The phrase was coined in 2012, as "le grand remplacement," by French writer Renaud Camus, giving the whole movement a patina of ivory tower intellectualism. "Replacement" is also more polite than "genocide," which fits with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves (that's why the hipster new term for "white supremacist" is "identitarian," though to me that sounds like a Brooklyn dietary preference.)
But for budding racist influencers, perhaps the best marketing feature of "the Great Replacement" is that it offered fantastic possibilities in search results. On Google and YouTube, there are not a lot of sites and videos tied to that keyword — and, in particular, there are not that many sources countering their arguments.
Which brings us to why I'm writing to debunk the theory now: When a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto "The Great Replacement."
"The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms," said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. "'The Great Replacement' is a 'data void,' in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google."
Which is just what happened. After the shooting, Google searches for "great replacement" spiked. And although Google returns several sceptical articles and videos for the term, it also gives a lot of pro-conspiracy content — including, for much of the weekend, the shooter's manifesto on the first page of search results.
Consider this column, then, an attempt to fill that data void. Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change.
So, to anyone who got to this piece after searching "great replacement," here are some facts:
Nobody really knows if whites will become a minority in the United States.
Racial categories are blurry, and there's a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as "white." It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children and generally become "absorbed" into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely.
White Americans are not facing a social and economic dead end.
It's true that there are some pernicious social problems affecting white Americans, among them a rise in death rates from drug overdoses and suicide, known as "deaths of despair."
But these negative trends are not racially existential. Overall, across a range of health measures like infant mortality and life expectancy, white Americans are neither the least nor the most healthy Americans — they are somewhere in the middle. And white people are still by far the wealthiest Americans. The net worth of the median black American family is only around 15 percent of that of the median white American family. While most other groups experienced a net decrease in wealth in the six years after the Great Recession, "white families' net worth was essentially unchanged," according to government surveys. Whites are also less likely than people of other races to live in poverty, and they are more likely to be among the superrich. Just about every American chief executive billionaire and large political donor is a white person.
White Americans will continue to hold a lot of political power.
The current Congress is the most racially diverse in history — and about 8 of 10 members are white. Every single one of our 45 presidents has been a white man, except one, who was half white. By my count, there are now 17 candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination; 11 of them, or almost two-thirds, are white, including the two who have raised the most money so far.
Sure, white political overrepresentation is likely to fall. But not quickly, and not drastically. According to one projection, in the 2036 election, 59 percent of voters will be white.
The Great Replacement is a lie. The country is becoming more diverse, but white people are not losing their grip on America, nor on the world, not by a long shot.
© 2019 New York Times News Service
