“”As far as I can tell, practically the only thing that white supremacists don’t consider genocide is the actual Holocaust.
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—David Futrelle[1] |
“”[I]f we don't look out the white race [...] will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved. [...] It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.
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—Tom Buchanan, The Great Gatsby[2] |
Frogs, clowns, and swastikas Alt-right |
Chuds |
Rebuilding the Reich, one meme at a time |
Buzzwords and dogwhistles |
Some dare call it Conspiracy |
What THEY don't want you to know! |
Sheeple wakers |
The idea of a white genocide (or white extinction scenario) refers to any of several made-up bullshit doomsday scenarios describing Caucasians or some demographic group associated with white people (typically Westerners, Protestants, or Christians, with perceived "pure" white ancestry) would be heading towards a demographic crisis, becoming a minority in some or all countries, possibly followed by extinction. The term was coined by racist ex-Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management Bob Whitaker.[3] Whitaker, unsurprisingly, also coined the strawman phrase, "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white." Every white nationalist believes in this, be it Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi, white power skinheads, alt-right, identitarian, and others.
These scenarios are a kind of framing used to promote white supremacy or similar movements as self-defense, by describing non-whites, mixed-whites, non-Christians, and/or non-Westerners (notably Arabs, Hispanics, and black people, depending on context) as the aggressors in a clash of races or civilizations. When it comes to Arabs or Muslims, claims about white extinction might be associated with the Eurabia scenario. These scenarios can draw a parallel with genocides that have really happened, such as the Holocaust. A similar canard focuses on the perceived decline in specific genetic traits associated with white people, such as blue eyes or blonde hair, rather than the "white race" itself.[4] Some variants of the white genocide scenario are the South African genocide conspiracy in South Africa and The Great Replacement in France and Europe.
The canard of white genocide was pioneered by Benito Mussolini as part of his racial purity campaign,[5]:70-71 who wrote in a book preface in 1928:[6]:10,19
“”This will happen not only between cities or nations, but on an infinitely larger scale: the entire white race, the race of the West, may be submerged by other colored races that are multiplying at a rate unknown to ours.
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“”The cradles are empty and the cemeteries are expanding. All the cities of Central and Northern Italy suffer the same deficit.
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Let's begin with some statistics on population change in Europe and the United States:
A frequent (usually deliberate) mistake people make in discussing whites as a minority is lumping every non-white race as a blob of indistinguishable other. This mistake usually betrays the prejudices of the speaker. In actuality, given the 2010 United States Census with whites at 223.5 million and the next largest demographic of African Americans at 38.9 million, it's going to be a very, very long time before whites could potentially become a minority for legal purposes.[11]
Some claims usually made together with the white extinction scenarios are that:
Let's examine the United Nations' Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide' definition of "genocide"; namely, one or more of the following:
Contrary to what some may believe (or shout about on message boards and comment sections), there are currently few places in the world where such events are taking place against white or fair-skinned people.[17] The change in the demographics of a nation over time due to migration, immigration, and emigration are not the same thing as systematically and deliberately exterminating a group of people in a somewhat organized fashion. These demographic changes do not even come close to meeting any of the definitions above.[18]
While there have been historic genocides against people who would be classified as "white" by some today, they were not targeted due to being "white" and the perpetrators were often (a different kind of) "white" themselves. For instance, victims and perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust were both mostly white, as long as one doesn't subscribe to the belief that Jews and the Slavic peoples are somehow non-white.
The UN definition of genocide has been criticized for not including cultural genocide, which refers to attempts to destroy a culture through methods of forced assimilation and suppression of cultural symbols like languages, art, and traditional clothing (the Uighur genocide and Canadian residential schools being two illustrative examples of cultural genocide). However, trying to apply the concept of cultural genocide to white people falls completely flat, simply because white people don't have one unified culture; instead, there are a variety of different cultures among different groups, and again, the vast majority of examples of cultural genocide against white people were committed by other groups of white people (e.g. Francisco Franco's targeting of Catalan culture, British suppression of Irish culture, etc.).
Brought to you by Christian Miller of the "White Genocide Evidence Project":
“”Many realize the 'open borders' movement is a thinly-veiled attempt to dilute and thereby destroy all white nations — Africa for the Africans, Asia for the Asians, White countries for everybody ... White people are libeled and demonized by cultural Marxists in academia, vilified by public slander and robbed of the right to self-identify all in order to instill a destructive sense of false white guilt... These malevolent social engineers yearn for a blended humanity in white nations — mocha-skinned people and societies without race by homogenous default. What they never mention — and what is left to nationalists to publicly emphasize — is that this plan for 'diversity' only applies to white nations.[19]
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"White Genocide Project" declares that "White Genocide", in addition to Christian Miller's comment, is:
British "Freedom" Party leader Paul Weston has claimed that mass immigration into England is a form of genocide by demographics,[21] while ex-British National Party leader Nick Griffin has argued that identifying non-white people as British is "a sort of bloodless genocide."[22] This is rather ironic, given the fact that the British Empire was founded on the colonization of other countries, whose citizens became subjects of Britain. "The British Nationality Act of 1948 conferred the status of British citizen on all Commonwealth subjects and recognised their right to work and settle in the UK and to bring their families with them."[23] However, this act was later superseded by the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, and the Immigration Act 1971, which were introduced to control and restrict immigration from the Commonwealth to Britain.[24] This policy was intended to mollify voters who agreed with Enoch Powell, the patron saint of politicians like Griffin and Nigel Farage.
In addition to the dubious nature of the underlying concept, white extinction scenarios usually rest on several logical fallacies in order to feign an urgent threat towards white people.
The concept of separate races is, by itself, controversial. Add to that the difficulty of defining racial categories. Many Western racial concepts, such as the racist and arbitrary one-drop rule, would see people of mixed origin classified as non-white. As miscegenation has occurred through centuries, such definitions would make the ratio of white people smaller than more neutral definitions. The claims might rest on a confusion between race, religion, or nationality, to inflate the ratio of non-whites. Some examples are defining ethnic groups that are traditionally Muslims and white (Albanians, Bosniaks, Tatars, Turks, Levantines, etc.), or white Hispanics, as non-whites or excluding non-whites from a particular nationality (e.g. assuming any nonwhite British citizen is not British).
While some polities (United States, United Kingdom, etc) record self-identified race and religion in census data, other countries (France, Sweden, etc.) have no such records; one reason is the experience from World War II, where the Nazis used census records to facilitate the Holocaust.[note 3] Therefore, the statistics of people of a specific race or religion in a country might be an estimate, based on place of birth, parents' place of birth, etc. A Christian person descending from Iraqis could count as a Muslim. A white person in Europe descending from white colonists in Africa could count as an African, or as a black person.
The term "white" can vary by country and so can "percentage", and also the perception of who a white person is. For example, a person of white and mestizo (i.e., part-Native American) ancestry would be classified as white in Latin America, but probably not in the United States of America. Supporters of white genocide theories might regard colonized territories, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, as "white homelands", to find more case studies for the hypothesis. One can find a declining ratio of white people in parts of the western United States, but one should also be aware that whites have only been the majority population in those areas for 150 to 200 years. South Africa has never had a white majority population. And various people who are today classified as "white" would have historically been discriminated against (and viewed as a threat) due to being "German", "Irish", Catholic, Jewish, or whatever.
Ignoring that many White people whose families have been in the US for several hundred years also likely contain "Cherokee" ancestors and other euphemisms for having notably darker features, defining mixed-race people as completely non-White is extremely misleading, and the one-drop rule is a rather blatant case of racist special pleading. If a White man and Black woman have two kids together, by population genetics, the kids are 50% White, but according to how we classify race, they could be 100% Black, but logically, if the kids aren't White because they are half Black, they aren't Black either because they are half White. A town with half White couples and half interracial couples is 75% White, yet according to the stats, the next generation would only be "half" White, and then the generation after will be a "quarter" White, in spite of the town being genetically 3/4ths White. Even if the interracial couples have half the number of kids, the stats will still say that the next generation is "less" White.
An immigrant might be broadly defined as a person with one parent born abroad (or two, in some countries). This would count a natural-born British citizen with parents born in Ireland as an immigrant, no matter how white and English-speaking they might be. Of course, this kind of definition inflates the ratio of immigrants. Countries with significant (former) diasporas may also have "immigrants" that were only let into the country because of their supposed ethnic similarity to the native population. There are, for example, more Irish citizens outside the Republic of Ireland than inside it, and during the 1990s, the vast majority of immigrants to Germany were classified as "ethnic Germans".[25]
Even if the above were all incorrect, there are several problems with worry about a "white genocide".
There is no universal demographic measure for the size of a religion in a country. Different countries can use any of these variables:
In the United States, statistics for number of Christians are based on church membership. However, up to the late 19th century, only a minority of Americans were members of a church.[26]