Don’t be duped by ‘replacement theory.’ Put race in proper place

I know it happens a lot, but we in the news media perform a public disservice when we run headlines like “The US white majority will soon disappear forever” and “America is becoming a white-minority nation.”

I am not sorry to report that this change, such as it is, is not happening overnight. But some people for reasons of their own are using that interpretation to inflame racial anxieties in our country, which already has more than enough anxieties about our diversity.

I thought we might be insulated by our history as a diverse nation from the anti-immigrant politics that have roiled European politics in recent decades.

But the tragedy in which a deranged gunman, whom I prefer to leave nameless, killed 10 Black Americans and wounded three others at a store on May 14 in Buffalo, offers further evidence, as if we needed any, that we can no longer view racial-ethnic madness as local.

That’s what many of us wanted to think three years ago, when a white supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas.

Large sections of his rambling so-called manifesto were lifted directly from the writings of the perpetrator of another social network-driven racist massacre in New Zealand.

Both promoted the white supremacist notion that violence against nonwhite people is justified to prevent “white genocide” or the “replacement” of white Americans by nonwhite immigrants.

That age-old “replacement” garbage reemerged in a 2011 book, “The Great Replacement” by Frenchman Renaud Camus in which he pushed a theory embraced by white supremacists, publicized via the internet and cited by racial terrorists from New Zealand to Texas.

As the alleged Buffalo shooter says, he carried out the attack because “all Black people are replacers just by existing in white countries.”

So what’s the truth? Are white people not disappearing in America?

Ironically, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who The New York Times identified as having pushed core tenets of the theory in more than 400 episodes, inadvertently poked holes one night in the myth he has been trying to spread about massive white decline.

During a sermon about alleged liberal delight over the “extinction of white people,” he asked, “Where did all these people go?”

Good question. In fact, the millions of missing white Americans did not go anywhere, nor are they being replaced by minorities. One census statistic in particular that triggered numerous headlines about white decline was a reported 8.6% drop in the number of white Americans since 2010.

That unprecedented white population drop was taken by many as a sign that white America’s long-forecasted minority status was closer than previously thought.

The era of the “one-drop” rule, when one drop of African blood in your background made you Black, is over. As growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren counting only those who checked the “white” box as white leads to a big undercount of folks who otherwise look white.

My optimistic lesson from this big snafu is that we need to invest a little less in race as a source of fears and anxieties. New generations are acting on their own to build healthy forms of identity America’s melting pot or, as I prefer to call it, mulligan stew. Demography is not destiny. At least, not like it used to be.

Still we continue to be plagued by marketers of racial fears and anxieties for their own profit. Be cautious, but don’t be duped. Diversity is our strength. Let’s put race in its proper place.