ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes historical and contemporary white fears about racial change. These racial fears typically arise from a white view that Americans of color—and their communities, values, and democratic desires—are an existential threat to a white-controlled society. This view of an existential threat is exemplified in increasingly prominent narratives of ongoing “white replacement” and “white genocide.” Solutions for this existential threat require not only continuing white control of U.S. culture and institutions but also white numerical dominance. This racial fear manifests in many ways, including frequent denial by many whites of centuries of systemic U.S. racism. A contemporary example is seen in the aggressive movement to ban honest racial histories from U.S. libraries and schools. This fear was evident early in the views of U.S. founders like the famous Benjamin Franklin, who expressed great distress at the large-scale in-migration of German and Irish immigrants. At the time they were viewed as inferior in quasi-racial terms. Enslaved Africans and Native Americans frequently outnumbered whites in numerous communities. Their ongoing resistance to white oppression regularly stoked white racial fears, and whites organized police and military forces to protect against this resistance. Later, after slavery’s end, white racial fears continued in a Jim Crow and increased immigration era, including in the explicit narrative that whites were not having enough children to counter increasing numbers of “undesirable” immigrants and foreigners. This fear is palpable in white-supremacist writings of influential whites like Harvard-educated scholar Lothrop Stoddard, who calls for aggressive racial segregation and elimination of those deemed “unfit”—a racist perspective that even later on played a key role in German Nazis’ formulation of race laws leading to the Holocaust. The chapter then moves to an analysis of contemporary white racist reactions to the ongoing demographic shift and growing numbers of people of color. Major white politicians like commentator Patrick Buchanan and ex-president Donald Trump have increasingly pushed the white supremacist narrative such as ongoing “white replacement.” The chapter concludes by discussing how ordinary whites have reacted, including violently, to the fears of replacement stoked by influential white politicians. These fears have led to white mass shooters and to the 2021 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
