Racism and American identity

Chances are, deluded mass murderer Payton Gendron doesn’t actually know any Black people to speak of. According to the 2020 census, his hometown of Conklin, N.Y., roughly 200 miles from the Buffalo supermarket where he acted out his deadly fantasies, has an African American population smaller than 1%. Gendron needed to drive for hours to locate a Black neighborhood to shoot up.

No matter. The killer wasn’t shooting individual human beings. He was shooting symbols, imaginary projections in his own twisted mind.

Republican thinkers today call it “Replacement Theory,” the notion that Democrats are scheming to subvert American democracy by importing nonwhite immigrants to support leftist ideology. It’s the particular passion of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

has documented more than 400 mentions of the theory on his program since 2016 — keeping his suspicious audience sitting there anxiously clutching the TV remote.

There’s no sign Gendron was directly influenced by Carlson. This particular delusional system has a long history in the United States. Only the identity of the racial enemy changes. Back in the 1840s, it was my own Irish Catholic forbearers that threatened to contaminate the nation’s precious bodily fluids. According to the Know-Nothing party, the pope was conspiring to destroy America’s Protestant democracy by flooding the country with Irish and German immigrants.

Blacks, of course, were already here centuries earlier. Indeed, the Know-Nothings died out as a party partly because they could never agree about slavery. Abraham Lincoln once wrote a private letter to a friend explaining why he couldn’t join the movement: “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the KnowNothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’”

Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a Know-Nothing.

The idea of subversive immigrants has never gone away. The Ku Klux Klan exploited many of the same impulses; so did George Wallace’s American Independent Party in 1968. More recently, Donald Trump’s “birther” movement portrayed President Barack Obama as racially and religiously unfit.

What’s more, you don’t have to be an exponent of critical race theory to notice that as other immigrants (such as the Irish) become honorary white people, Blacks remain permanently suspect to the kinds of losers who populate the fringes of the online, nativist far right.

Which brings us back to Gendron with his soldier costume, his largely plagiarized 180-page manifesto and his arsenal of semi-automatic rifles. At 18, he’s too young to buy a six-pack, but Gendron had no difficulty arming himself like a one-man infantry platoon. It’s entirely mad, yes, but it’s the American Way: the Second Amendment as a constitutional death pact.

“White supremacy is a poison,” President Joe Biden said in an impassioned speech in Buffalo, “and it’s been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more.”

Well, it’s a nice thought. Alas, I fear that for a substantial fraction of the population, race remains a key component of American identity. An avid consumer of what I call “race porn” Gendron saw himself as a hero, linking himself with killers worldwide: the man who killed 51 Muslims in a New Zealand mosque; the white supremacist who murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., in 2015; the antisemite who slaughtered 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and the shooter who killed 23 at an El Paso Walmart in an effort to defeat the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Saner minds, of course, recognize these deadly sad sacks for what they are: fearful weaklings whose only legacy is sorrow and

What’s more, you don’t have to be an exponent of critical race theory to notice that … Blacks remain permanently suspect to the kinds of losers who populate the fringes of the online, nativist far right

destruction.

Meanwhile, what is there to say about cynical opportunists like Carlson and his Fox News colleagues who peddle this poison for fun and profit? GOP politicians such as J.D. Vance, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have gotten aboard as well, painting imaginary targets on real people for self-intoxicated young men to shoot.

One prominent Republican has dissented. “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism,” Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.”