Replacement theory is racist

Posted on 31 March 2019

This should not be up for debate

Bashir Mohamed wrote an extended piece on Alberta media’s largely inadequate coverage of a political candidate resigning over what has been repeatedly described as “controversial comments”.

For those who are unaware, the “controversial” comments were blatant white supremacist rhetoric. The following image is from Press Progress.

This is followed by one of the quotes (taken from a leaked Facebook messenger conversation) that caused the candidate to resign, reading:

“I am somehow saddened by the demographic replacement of white people in their homelands — more in Europe than in American — because it’s clear that it will not be a peaceful transition, and partly because the loss of demographic diversity in the human race is sad.”

There has been plenty of equivocating over whether or not the former candidate herself is racist, but there should be no debate over whether this specific comment is. It is very clearly tied to the misguided, pseudoscientific replacement theory favoured by white supremacists as a more academic-sounding way to say they are worried about too many dark-skinned people in white-majority countries.

If you aren’t familiar with this theory and its faults, a good place to start is Farhid Manjoo’s piece in the New York Times titled “The White Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers.”

“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.

Manjoo goes on to explain why this theory is wrong — the complexity of demographics, the fact that no, white people will not disappear. It’s a good piece. But I think it misses another key element — yes, this theory is bonkers. But even it it weren’t, being worried about it would still be racist.

For this I turn to Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail, and a very notable exception in mainstream Canadian media’s willingness to take these ideas on head-on (his book The Myth of The Muslim Tide is a well-researched, award-winning refutation of replacement theory well before it was gaining the traction it has today). Here is a key section from his recent column on the notion that white people are being replaced:

“There is no innocent or moderate version of these ideas. The ideas that motivate these killers are often glibly characterized as “anti-immigration.” That is not the point. People hold all sorts of legitimate views about immigration, and believing that it should be slowed or stopped is a valid policy opinion.
“On the other hand, any notion of ‘population replacement’ or demographic ‘invasion’ or ‘genocide’ is not an opinion about immigration at all. It is race hatred.
“There is no other interpretation of those ideas, and there is no moderate or acceptable version of them. If you believe there is something called a ‘Christian civilization’ or a ‘white European people’ or even simply ‘our people,’ and if you believe that your neighbours who are Jewish or Muslim or brown or black are capable of ‘replacing’ it, that means you see your fellow citizens who worship differently or have different skin colours, and their future children, as something permanently other than yourself.
That is the very definition of racial intolerance.”

Back to Bashir Mohamed’s piece: in it, he laments the fact that very few in Alberta media (and Canadian media more broadly) have called the replacement theory comments out for what they are, and instead basically swept it under the “controversial online comments” rug which, hey, who hasn’t been there.

In Maclean’s, Andray Domise grapples with what he calls his own inadequate response to these topics, and that of broader Canadian journalism:

“Again and again this happens in Canada, where political figures and movements flirt openly with the very same white nationalist figures and rhetoric that have been cited by multiple anti-racism organizations as catalysts for the surge in hate crimes and mass violence in recent years. But they are only held to account by journalists for as long as their latest faux-pas can carry a headline. After the news cycle has passed, we’re back to square one. This interminable loop not only puts the onus of writing and talking about this problem on journalists of colour, but exposes us and our communities to the opprobrium, and too often the violence, that is increasingly being legitimized under the shifting auspices of normal political dialogue and free speech in this country.”

My only addendum to all this is I think there is some value in proceeding with caution when it comes to shining a light on these ideas. A piece I think about a lot is this Q&A with researcher Felix Harcourt on how American media covered the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s — in particular the revelation that while newspapers they thought they were exposing the public to just how toxic the Klan was, they were actually helping recruit new members:

Q. So they’re saying, “Here is the Klan’s secret membership application form. Isn’t it terrible that this is what hate looks like in the United States?” and people cut that out of their newspapers and say, “I’m going to join.”
A. Indeed, yes.

And so we go back to Manjoo and Saunders: if we are going to talk about these ideas (and it seems we are, so long as they keep coming into the edges of our mainstream politics), we need to be prepared to not simply give them an airing and assume audiences will understand why these notions of demographic replacement are both incorrect and racist — it is vital that we be prepared to explain that, too.

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Filed under: Canada, media