Antifa during an alt-right rally. Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty
For years, the idea of a “Great Replacement” — that white Americans and Europeans are purposefully being replaced through immigration — has obsessed many on the extreme Right. It’s a fringe belief, but concerns will doubtless have been exacerbated by a recent headline in the Washington Post: “Number of White people falls for first time”.
The article stated that the results of last year’s census marked “the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790”. Similar refrains rang out across numerous other news outlets: “America’s white population set to shrink”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.
There was jubilation among the Left. Michael Moore called the announcement “the best day ever in US history”. For cultural radicals such as he, the census marked the end of “white supremacy” and the start of a millennium of progressive dominance and racial equity. Similarly, Neocon-turned-Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin gushed that “this is fabulous news — now we need to prevent minority White rule”.
Meanwhile, on the Right, Tucker Carlson, while condemning the Left’s gloating, went on to claim, without evidence, that the opioid crisis in white communities explained the decline. Likewise, the news will only confirm views held by the far-Right, whereby white nationalists have warned that white decline is being orchestrated by globalist elites and minorities, and which will lead to dire consequences for white people and their children.
However, despite the charged rhetoric doing the rounds, the number of people American society considers to be white has almost certainly increased since 2010. White America is not shrinking, and whites are not being racially supplanted. It’s a false narrative with serious political repercussions: study after study has found that reminding white Americans about their impending minority status shifts their policy attitudes in a conservative direction and increases support for Right-wing populism. So while this announcement may make the cultural Left feel good, it largely benefits the Trumpist Right.
But what do the actual findings indicate? Isn’t the census reporting the facts as they stand, that the number of white people in the country is declining? Well, it’s certainly true 5.1 million fewer non-Hispanic Americans ticked their race as “white alone” in 2020 compared to 2010. But to take this number out of context is to paint a misleading picture of social reality.
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Subscribe“… it largely benefits the Trumpist Right.”
Well, we can’t have any of that, can we? God help us if pointing out the decline of an ethnicity HELPS a political movement that says ‘hey, maybe massive demographic change in a short time frame is actually a bad idea.’
I am absolutely sick of ‘thinkpieces’ that bury their heads in the sand, and pretend demographic change is not happening, or never has happened in history. The original ‘great replacement theory’ has been extended to USA and Australia, but really, it was about France. Look at the demographics of Paris in the last 50 years. You may not like what you see, but you can’t stop anyone else from looking. Demographics may not matter to you, but they matter to others. And it’s about time the ‘classical liberals’ and mainstream conversatives stopped acting so offended when others point this out. Grow a spine, for crying out loud.
Anyone who is against demographic change is called a white nationalist, compared to the Christchurch killer. But demographic change is an actual fear throughout human history, especially in parts of Eastern Europe which experienced Ottoman rule and vast amounts of ethnic violence. Likewise, we only need to look at the history of Crimea to know how demographics can be used as a weapon. There are many things wrong with the current academic discourse about colonisation, but professors who point out how demographic decline or replacement can drastly change the character of a nation are absolutely correct.
For those who are so against what I have said, here’s a question. Point to one time in human history where demographic change or decline in a short time period was a good thing. Throughout history, rapid demographic change is violent and awful. And you are absolutely naive if you think this time will be different. It never is.
… and measuring demographic change nationally – rather than locally – misses the real point.
The average rainfall across a country might stay stable, but if in that year most of the rain fell in only 5 counties, then it may well have been disastrous for those counties.
You would be more convincing if you were a little calmer, but you have a good point.
Taking one step back I think the problem is that for a democratic society to work, you need people to feel they belong to a single group with shared norms and fate. Otherwise it becomes a question of one group ruling and the others feeling excluded. You can have multi-ethnic empires, with all groups being subjects and competing for influence with the sultan or dictator, but when you move to democracy people refuse to be part of a society dominated by what they see as a foreign group. There are countless examples: Syria, Iraq, Yugoslavia. My favourite is Denmark in 1848, where the end of absolute monarchy and introduction of democracy led to an immediate separatist rebellion by the German-speaking parts of the kingdom who refused to live in a Danish nation-state.
Trouble is, we are where we are. The US was always a mixture of immigrants, and Europe may have had a choice in Enoch Powell’s day, but it is too late now. The best we can do is to work towards building a feeling of belonging one way or the other to a common people with shared myths etc. that can keep a democratic society together. And here catastrophist talk about ‘white replacement’ is harmful, just like BLM is: Both promote division and racial strife, and undermine the foundations of democratic society.
Do they “promote” it or recognise it? Your position seems to amount to this: don’t tell uncomfortable truths to a restless, divided population for fear of disaster. Well, it’s not an unreasonable view; but it is, I suspect, unsustainable, not to mention undemocratic. Conspiracies of silence always are.
More than that, your proposals represent the actual approach and policy of the elite. Is it working? It may be holding the line for now, but into the future? And are you really sure that all the elements in your mix are willing to play your pacific games? Already we have evidence of differential policing, based not only on the loaded “woke” principles of our left-elite but on anxiety as to the “community response” in certain districts. In short, of certain groups they are afraid.
And this raises your “shared myths”. Myths indeed! Football, perhaps? Are you sure that people reared in ancient, compelling cultures will resign them for the ersatz “togetherness” of modern showbiz? And how far are you willing to go in enforcing this togetherness? And which group will end by giving up most? Why, the weakest of course.
To conclude: if you are reduced to recommending a semi-authoritarian silence then you acknowledge the peril of our condition, the folly involved in creating it and – sadly – some form or other of disaster ahead. You also stifle truth. If Powell was right, as you allow, not being able to say so must mean that we are no longer genuinely free. And unfree societies decline.
Well, what is your solution? Mass expulsions? Of whom? to where? Population exchange and ethnic cleansing? Apartheid? Jim Crow? Civil war – real or metaphorical? Realistically we are going to have in the future racially and religiously mixed societies in Europe. It would be easier if that were not the case, but we do not have that choice. So either we work towards some kind of shared fellow-feeling that everybody can more or less join into, or we all arm ourselves to win the coming fights a nd subdue the competition. As they say “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other.”
As for the weakest having to give up most: well, of course! The meek shall inherit the earth, but they are not going to rule it in the meantime. Both weak and strong are still likely to be better off settling for peace and a working democracy, rather than perpetual fighting in the hope of dominating everybody else.
Your immediate recourse to “so, what are you going to do about it, then?”, couched in an accusation that one is proposing pogroms, is itself a sign of the hysteria which you reprove in others. And you miss – or dodge – the point about weakness and strength – which is, to spell it out, that populations with chauvinist self-confidence will prevail in dominating the cultural consensus over those which endlessly apologise and retreat. Hence the de facto ban on certain cartoons, a process which will only accelerate and deepen. To this you say “Of course!” Which is a case of assumed cynicism covering for argumentative exposure. And since my whole point was that the “peace and working democracy” you want to “settle for” is – given the fissiparous nature of our circumstances – impossible, your hopes and assertions ring more and more hollow every time you repeat them. What am I going to do about it? God knows. That’s the trouble. The ship is sinking and we’re short of life boats. But here’s a few proposals which might prime the pump. Immigration to zero for now; restoration of impartial policing; stripping out any loaded legislation designed to “promote togetherness”; massive reduction in the size of the state together with its pretensions to police opinion; cutting all “arts” funding across the board to flush out the propagandists and the rapid pursuit of energy security. And permission to all cultural groupings, including the old indigenes, to promote and celebrate their particular world, along with its history. This may – just may – avert the disaster.
White people, or Christians, are not inherently weak. We are the majority, after all, and built all the existing institutions (not to mention a few empires, historically). We just have to get our sh*t together and stop apologing for our own existence. Surely that is not impossible?
As for ‘drastic reduction of the state’ etc. that sound to me like giving up on having a shared society in the first place, and replacing it with separate and warring clans or ethnic groups. There is no really good parallel, but Northern ireland, Lebanon, or maybe Malaysia might come closest. Does not sound like a peaceful future to me – and anyway, how sure are you that (like the Malays in Malaysia) you can keep dominating the other groups forever? But we are not gong to agree here.
Spontaneous separation is better than enforced togetherness – hence the reduction of obstacles to divorce. And the “shared society” you speak of does not exist; those pockets of mingling to which you might point are in upper middle class enclaves. Therefore, we should quite simply recognised the reality: that society IS culture and necessarily involves an ethnic backbone; that “sharing” requires kinship and / or similarity; that states are therefore stable when broadly homogeneous and break into smaller states when their population is massively diversified. It happened to the western Roman empire; it is happening to the modern west. Refusing to recognise this process will simply delay the only rational way of coping – which is to grant a large degree of discretion to everyone to mix with whomsoever they please; and when it is found, as found it will be, that “birds of a feather flock together”, to settle for it as the usual, human choice.
Re: The Stability of Population Homogeneity – In the USA, at least for a while, we seemed to achieve stability and became the ‘Melting Pot’ by being somewhat nationalistic; Anyone could be an American by learning and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem and embracing the flag. However, today, The Left disdains the elements that kept the country together, while the Right continues to embrace the symbolism of the ‘Red, White & Blue’. In fact, the more the Right embraces the flag, the more the Left seems to reject it. Also instead of ‘blending’ various groups, universities and colleges (which mostly lean left) are promoting segregating blacks again in dormitories and student associations. Each ethnic group now has to be called out and acknowledged. Republicans reject all of these gestures, but they have little or no presence in higher education so the young are learning how to stand apart, to find ‘their own truths’ rather than reaching an understanding as to the importance of blending and ‘the whole’.
Interesting points. Of course, enforced separation is as bad as enforced togetherness, especially if – as now – it is laced with bigoted bitterness with regard to one group. The other point I would make is that “flag togetherness” of the kind you describe, only works on two bases: one, that demographic change is slow; two, that the culture which invented the flag in the first place, together with its history, its great figures, its established annual customs and forms of politeness are all respected. As you say, the modern left has declared war on all of that.
Thank you for so much wisdom and clarity Simon Denis. And the analogy to the fractious late Roman Empire whose ethnic divisions took the form of civil wars and religious controversies is very pertinent to the West now.
Fogh seems an unwilling (perhaps) idealist, unable to accept the reality of current western societies, which is that multiple ethnicities maintain firm links to their mother ships while demanding the dilution of the host culture in order to accommodate theirs.
This requires western societies to negate and even reject their own at the command of a small elite of ideological bureaucrats motivated at the same time by both self-loathing and a sense of moral superiority. It is both toxic and unsustainable.
Where do I sign
I believe immigration levels are too high, and this does pose strains on housing, health and other public services but there is a huge exaggeration among some right wing people about just how different second and third generation minority populations actually are from the majority. That is why we see them behave in such a similar way, such as moving out from inner cities, buying suburban houses etc when they are rich enough to do so, exactly as many white people do. As for integration, well this may be a real issue, but it does tend to take ‘two to tango’ and it is much easier to say than to do.
More controversially, I feel that even Islam is just a bogey to many people; they know very little about it and tend to oppose (apparently) its social conservatism, while at the same time promoting their own indigenous, Christian-derived version. Constantly demanding that all Muslims take responsibility for and to denounce terrorism is for example, no doubt just as grating (and possibly counter-productive) as it was to Irish people to do the same for the IRA, or to asking you to be sorry for slavery or colonialism or the bombing of Dresden… or whatever. As a gay man anyway I have perhaps more to worry about there than others, but I don’t see any real moves to reverse liberal social change.
And so many people on the Right (I assume) just don’t seem to get this, but ‘woke’ just has very little to do with the inherited cultures of immigrant populations, but is (as was Marxism) an entirely European-derived set of beliefs, now strongly mediated and transformed in the United States, of course. I think your points about cultural confidence are completely right; white people should not be made to feel ashamed about some utterly misplaced desire to make minority groups welcome, but ordinary people in those groups do not believe this anyway, as we saw at the street parties at the recent Jubilee.
Yes, I got angsty in my reply. I’ll try to word this in a more balanced way.
The problem with your approach of ‘building a feeling of belonging’ is that for large swaths of people, they are motivated by history, the past, their experiences – not a grand narrative about belonging that has little substance. This is too kumbaya – why would I believe it? I am not saying that it’s impossible as an immigrant or outsider to integrate. Lots do. But so many don’t. If anything causes racial strife and division, it is weakness in policy. As Douglas Murray points out in The Strange Death of Europe – a society hell-bent on suicide and loathing of their history will have a poor justice system. This is why the grooming gangs and sexual assaults in Germany, Sweden were so awful. It wasn’t just the perpretators, but it was the society itself that failed young women.
The US is a nation of immigrants, okay – but that doesn’t mean it must have mass immigration. Likewise, Europe is in the 21st century. It can, and should, have tight borders and deport criminals. The logic of ‘oh, it’s too late to change demographics’ is alarmingly defeatist and will make things worse.
Yes, talking about demographics will stir up racial division and strife. But so will silence and self-censorship. Doing this won’t make the problem go away because they make people uncomfortable. On a more emotive note, I am sick of ‘don’t bring up this issue, it will cause racial division.’ It is not my job to maintain a falsehood of absolute multiculturalism.
Precisely. I have the feeling that Mr Fogh is whistling in the dark and resents anyone pointing out the absence of light.
I mostly agree with you here. Indeed, I blame BLM rather more than I blame people talking about ‘replacement’. And you certainly do not have to promote mass immigration. Only I think there are already too many non-white people in the UK to allow an all-white culture to flourish in peace. So one way or the other the choice is between people of different origins living in harmony – or the other thing. Multiculturalism is very definitely not the answer, and a feeling of belonging can certainly not be created in the abstract. Some comes with shared language, culture, experiences (hard to change) or shared enemies, and some through shared history. But while you do have to stick more or less to the truth, here the story you tell does leave some flexibility. There are memorials for both Cromwell and Charles the 2., trade union leaders and exploitative industrialists, Catholics can still feel as fully English in spite of centuries of persecution. We could keep the statues of Colston and Sir Thomas Picton, and put up some new ones to honour their victims and the slaves who rebelled against them. Each group – white aborigines very much included – certainly has the right to push for their share of the whole. But to achieve some kind of peace, the goal would have to be a version where each has a share, not a zero-sum apprioach where the groups of the UK see each other as historical enemies.
As for black people in the US I have no comment, except to say that I would not start from there.
To clarify, understanding demographics doesn’t automatically mean advocacy for an ‘all-white’ society. Even Japan and Switerzerland don’t have 100% of the population belonging to a single race. I do not identify with those pushing etho-nationalism. Just want a space to talk about demographic change.
Here we definitely agree.
Question for Madelaine: Is it impossible to have a rational debate about demographics in Australia right now? It sounds from your sense of exasperation that you are required among the chattering classes to celebrate white demographic decline or be called a racist – am I reading this right?
No, it’s not – especially when one considers the Christchurch killer was an Aussie. This puts demographic discussions in an automatic hostile light. But still, there is a general consensus that mass immigration has changed Australia. Whether that is positive or negative is up for discussion.
Tbh, Aussies are more likely to talk about the side effects of demographic change. For example, I’ll rant hours about how ‘we need more people’ had turned Sydney into a high density, crowded and congestured hell with ugly buildings. But some may argue I’m talking about population growth, not demographics.
A search of the Australian Dept. of Immigration statistics, just pre-Covid, showed immigrants from ‘non-white’ countries made up around 73% of the total, year on year. The main source countries were China and India. Providing immigrants are skilled, prepared to integrate, work and develop some allegiance to Australia does it matter from where they originate? What does matter are total numbers, and permanent residence visas from all sources should be reduced to a maximum of 100,000 per year.
Japan and China are extremely homogeneous. Japan even resettled its Ainu population in one place. China recently threw out 30000 African traders, because of the ‘ risk to their gene pool,’ as did Israel. Saudi Arabia does not allow its nationals to bring in foreign Arab wives. Switzerland did take in non ethnic Swiss, btw.
I have actually long thought that the statues issue could be resolved by putting up statues of generic human figures and simply changing the nameplate periodically to reflect whatever woke neurosis is making the pi11ock demographic cry this week.
So a generic statue could be put up and labelled ‘Margaret Thatcher’. When the fascist mob objects, you just unscrew the nameplate and replace it with one reading “George Floyd”, or whichever common criminal they’re bigging up this week. When they’ve forgotten about it, you change it back.
It’s a way of having permanent statues without a permanent row about who they depict. You could perfectly well decree a statue of Margaret Thatcher to be a statue of George Floyd. If Tracey Emin’s dirty knickers can be art, then a white woman’s figure in bronze can clearly depict a black man. In fact, this would probably be considered quite edgy and clever by the luvvie art establishment, which thinks that figurative art is bourgeois anyway.
Ideally the “art” would simply have a QR code which you would scan, designate who you want it to be a statue of, and thereafter to you that’s who it is.
The 4th plinth! The ultimate collapse into relativism of conceptual art. Perfect.
Good work today Madeleine, I for one completely agree.
Your last paragraph is spot on. Good job of showing the way forward. Dividing a population up by race and then egging them on against the “Other Race” can only destroy the social fabric of a country.
That this is done every 4 years for political advantage in the U.S. is absolutely reckless.
Calm down dear? It was a clear and rational posting.
Quite so. One has the impression of an author eagerly peering at individual trees the better to avoid acknowledging the wood. Rightly, he values statistics. Therefore, if European populations are no longer replacing themselves, and migration from populations which do continues at current rates, we are looking at “replacement” – and replacement within the century. I understand that a once well known demographer from Oxford – now retired and silent for the usual reasons – has predicted that indigenous Britons will be a minority in their island by the 2060s. Indeed, an article of his on this very subject was entitled “Finis Britanniae”. Beside this salient fact, a morass of verbal legerdemain as to what exactly people mean by black and white strikes me as pedantic, or a form of displacement activity. Displacement to disguise replacement, so to speak.
I think you’re shooting the messenger. Kauffman is not stating in any way that demographic change is a good thing, he is merely pointing out that it is not happening in the way that many people claim it is, and he presents, to my view, some reasonably compelling data.
Another point for you to consider, perhaps, is this: is it more important that people look the same, or have some common grounding in values and beliefs? For me, I am pleased to see that more people identify as white, regardless of their skin tone, because, the whole idea of whiteness is tied up with some notion of thinking in a classically Western way and, at least to me, this represents a degree of assimilation and common purpose.
Conversely, it is frequent for people who look very similar to each other to have completely incompatible ideas and to kill each other. Just look at the Culture Wars happening in the West, the wars within Europe and Africa.
You, I suspect, would have much more in common with someone who shared your political belief system than someone who shared some superficial skin tone with you, but had a vastly different world view.
Of course, it’s preferable to have the same values as another. As someone who lives in a high-immigrant city, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many polite and kind-hearted migrants. But this is culture and individual decisions – not the colour of their skin. I also understand that there are many migrants who don’t share the same values, and actually despise the country they are in. We’ve already seen the worst result – Paris Massacre 2015, Grooming Gangs in the UK, etc. Yes, the West has strife with cultural issues, but that doesn’t justify more strife through demographic change.
My problem isn’t ‘how people look.’ It’s weak policy, high immigration rates and media snobs such as Jennifer Rubin who cheer on demographic decline. I understand your point about Kauffmann – I’ll admit to getting emotional in the original post.
Kaufman, we must recall, is a scrupulous scholar apprehensive of giving comfort to the “far right”; and quite possibly anxious as to his standing among fellow academics, most of whom are nowadays left wing. He has attracted their malign opprobrium for challenging them at all; and I cannot help feeling that his contribution here represents an olive branch.
It is also an attempt to foster peaceful policy options with regard to our perilous situation – an attempt one has to respect. But the sad fact remains that events are beginning to outrun this approach.
Thanks to the blanket control of media and opinion by the left, the degree to which people are discontent, upset, alarmed has been hidden from view – perhaps, even from their own view! But other warning signs leak through – the higher rates of suicide, general indigenous infertility, subtle population shifts within the country and so on. He is fully aware of all these points. But he can surely accept that the heavy blanket of restraint is not being used by a wise establishment to buy time for rescue; rather, it is abused by the left in order to make the situation even worse.
For perspective, will you share which country you are living in? US v. UK would make a lot of difference here.
Sure! I’m an Australian who lives in Sydney. You know, it’s interesting because one of the biggest debates in Oz has always been ‘are we more British or American?’ But unlike those countries, Australia’s immigration levels are much higher. The population, however, is much lower.
I’ll admit to having more familiarity and interest with Britain & Europe. More likely to pick up a book on French history than one on America. I implore anyone from America or Europe & Britain to comment on previous posts from me if anything needed further context.
Madeleine, I think we can likely both agree then that there are two problems at play in many Western countries:
1. Too much immigration in general (ie more than systems can reasonably cope with and more than the demand for skills requires) and
2. Not enough checks and balances on the culture of immigrants that are taken. We need to urgently select those who share our values and urgently exclude those who don’t.
What you raise are very real cultural issues that I agree we should take seriously. It is, however, a demographic problem only in so far as culturally hostile migrants balkanise and scale up their belief systems within the confines of their de facto parallel states. I think, therefore, we likely also agree that this outcome is a policy failure of imigration rather than immigration in and of itself.
Where I find Kauffman interesting is that his point is precisely that there is more cultural assimilation with the host than is imagined. Hispanics in the USA defining themselves as white is very interesting to me because it suggests two things:
1. They see and value Western ideals more than most Americans,
2: That they are unconcerned with the Left’s politicisation of race. They will be white, in short, in spite of of popular intellectual culture demonising whiteness.
To me this suggests that the Left may be undoing themselves by imagining that immigrant cultures will preferentially adopt leftwing ideas, when in fact they may well adopt a more conservative and traditional conception of the host country, which I think is good news for those of us who believe in the importance of Western cultural traditions and enlightenment values.
I’d argue that there is also a third point: How to set up rules, culture, … to try to amalgamate the natives and the newcomers into something that can work as a coherent society. that all groups can feel they share in. Not an easy job, but necessary. If the only consideration is how to keep undesirables out, how can you avoid having large groups that feel separate from and in opposition to mainstream society?
Good point Rasmus and one I wish I had a satisfactory answer to.
Conservative Islam is nothing like conservative Western culture.
The Enlightenment is not valued by them, nor are the cultural products of our history. In fact, they’re despised.
“the Left may be undoing themselves by imagining that immigrant cultures will preferentially adopt leftwing ideas, when in fact they may well adopt a more conservative and traditional conception of the host country”
I almost fell over when my Ecuadoran- American house cleaner said she voted for Trump. Admittedly, I was thrilled but surprised. Her reasoning was rather complex as well. She said back in Ecuador, the country was being inundated by desperate Venezuelans and others who were looking for jobs. Her family was complaining about ‘the invasion’; she also informed me that the country uses American dollars for currency (which I did not know) which was also attractive. To that end, it made her feel empathetic about what she perceived Americans were feeling about their own country being overrun by immigrants. Hence, she understood ‘The Trump Phenomenon’ which garnered her support.
Indeed. Academia is not called ‘an ivory tower’ for nothing. Academics have long been known to cheer on policies that are destructive to themselves and others simply because they fit their narrow ideological agenda.
Rasmus Fogh says you would be more convincing if you were “calmer”. I disagree. I found you very convincing and a touch of emotion is no bad thing. You were calm but concerned that we are sleepwalking, or rather being “sleepwalked”, into existential changes to who “we” are and therefore the society in which we live, with no explicit mandate for it. The consequences risk being catastrophic. The former Yugoslavia and failed multi ethnic states should teach us that a shared history, and the shared basic values that flow from it, are precious beyond measure. Giving in to the kumbaya crowd won’t end well.
This sounds pretty over-the-top to me. Your comments about history over thousands of years are so generalised it is difficult to make any particular sense of them. Ok, there are tribal movements, states make war, conquer territories. Yes, at times, and at other times not. By far the biggest demographic collapse was of Native American populations after 1492, largely due the importation of European diseases. Has the increase in ethnic minority populations in the UK, for example, been ‘violent and awful’? That is an awfully big claim, and I would say a massive overstretch. And anyway, it has happened, and there is nothing to be done about it now, we have Tory candidates from minority backgrounds, which is a good thing and whom I accept as British.
I live in London, where British people certainly are a minority. I’d say the biggest single cause of friction is related to cultural rather than racial factors.
OMG, what an article.
I left my home in London mid 1970s when I left school, I returned most years to stay with my parents and watched the City change, the change was amazing, London now less than 49% native British. My old parts of London are not like when I left, they are pretty much race replaced to an amazing degree. This writer would try to prove this is not true, and even if it was that it was only perception, and likely the problem was me anyway.
I watched USA change over the fifty years – I would say the pace was the same.
From this guy’s link
“Specifically, Shelby County’s Hispanic population grew over 2000% between 1990–2011 [7]. This type of growth is, of course, consistent with national trends, such that non-Hispanic Whites are expected to be less than 50% of the United States population by mid-century”
and of the study – which is some woke thing showing perceptions are truth, and reality is subjective
“MethodParticipants.One hundred and seventy-nine White undergraduates”
OK. This study is to show, basically race perception… Sounds…..well, crazy.
“many WASP Americans, such as Elizabeth Warren, have some Native American ancestry” this sentence gives the link which I quote below…..
““strong evidence” she (Warren) had a Native American ancestor approximately six to 10 generations ago”
My opinion of this above, and the links, are exactly proof of what dozens of Jordon Peterson Youtube videos claim – the University System is destroyed by Woke and holds no legitimacy at all. Post Modernism; the death of science, and the utter destruction of social science, and culture, has made academia the enemy of reason and truth.
I include a Jordon Peterson short video, he is widely regarded as one of the top minds in the world, his talks at the Oxford University are excellent (he has hundreds of youtubes – they are great fun) this is a short one on If Academia does more harm than good. If you do not know the topic of the underlying philosophy of University thinking today it sounds like a poor argument, but is all which is upending the West today – but put down the degenerate entertainment streaming an hour a day and watch this caliber of debate – youtube has millions of hours of such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-d35_5Istw
A couple exist with Bret Weinstein and Peterson, who Freddy did here on Unherd, on University going rogue, and on Covid – great fun. I think this sort of article pretty much proves Peterson right.
Keep cool, man! The article makes a specific and surely correct point: The decline in the number of people who tick ‘white’ at this census does not mean that there are fewer ‘white’ people than ten years ago, but that people are ticking different boxes than they used to. The key sentence is this: “So even while the share of “unmixed” whites will probably dip below 50% by 2050, the share who are considered socially white is likely to be a majority into the foreseeable future.” The ‘white majority’ will include more people who identify as mixed race, and probably ever more Hispanics, but it will still be a majority. After all, Irish and Italians are ‘white majority’ now, which was not the case when they came over.
Certainly things change, and some groups lose by those changes, but surely we should we should look at reality, not try to misunderstand it.
Hispanics and mixed race people aren’t white.
Are Spanish people in the UK white? Are they different to Hispanics in the US?
Are Mexicans and Guatemalans white?
They are people like us. After all, white is also a color.
Yes, and yes they are different. Hence “white Hispanic” (mainly European heritage) as opposed to those who are mainly native South American (but also Spanish-speaking).
Spanish are white. The term Hispanic is racially meaningless, as the quote says in the article. But Spanish speaking populations from Puerto Rico, Mexico and other Central American countries are mostly non white, if one includes Amerindians as non white. But class country too, something not on the census. Many rich families in Central America did not mix at all.
Plenty of Hispanics are 100% white although maybe they don’t always emigrate to the US.
Indeed, I was wondering whether I’d read the same article as the first two comments.
A story for you:
I had a American friend in South Africa who identified as black. By his own admission, however, he was genetically only about 40% black. In America, this was enough to be classified as “black” but in South Africa, where I knew him, he was not black by any stretch, but “coloured” or even “white”. In South Africa, to be black you must be about 95% black and, further to that, have some kind of Bantu cultural belief systems.
In South Africa, coloureds and blacks do not get on with each other. Coloureds consistently vote for white parties and fear black people. On my first trip to Cape Town n 1998 when I had just finished school in Zimbabwe, I asked my coloured taxi driver what he made of the new South Africa. “It’s terrible”, he said. “That terrorist [Mandela] is in now charge and already blacks are moving into our area. That’s why when we see them at our beaches, we chase them away with guns.”
This taxi driver, were he in America, with the skin colour that he had, would have been black. As he owuld have been in Europe.
My American friend recounted to me in shock one day how an Afrikaner, next to him at a bar, drink in hand, started complaining to him about black people destroying South Africa (imagining, of course, that my friend was “coloured”, and therefore safe to blow off about such things to.) When my friend protested that he was, in fact, black, the Afrikaner looked at him like he was completely mad.
It happened on the other side, too, when he gave a lift to some Congolese men and started chipping into an unfolding conversation with, “As an African American…” when the Congolese passengers interrupted him with explosive laughter.
As recently as the 1940s marriages between English and Afrikaner people in South Africa were referred to as “inter-racial” marriages, such was the animosity between the two groups at that time.
I hope these stories, above, show that Professor Kauffman is absolutely correct to talk about what we identify as, and why this idea of how we decide race is important. The whole thrust of his book Whiteshift, is that the idea of whiteness itself will change with time, and that this will not necessarily work out for the Left, who imagine that people of a certain skin tone will always construct race in a way that suits the Left’s “them and us” political agenda.
Hispanic Americans (who were supposed to vote against “white supremacy”) in the USA, for example, consistently voted for the white bogeyman, a reality that the Left attribute to dumb Hispanic people not being able to see their own interests, rather than dumb Leftwing people not being able to understand that their ideas about race don’t stretch outside American borders.
I looked at your Youtube clip with Jordan Peterson. I have no idea why you think that’s relevant to this discussion, since it’s about the general corruption of the Arts, rather than anything that directly contradicts what Kauffman is saying.
(You may not be aware of this but Kaufman is someone the left have been trying to cancel for ages. Read some more of his arguments about various issues, you may be surprised by the quality of his arguments, and by how much he in fact agrees with much of what you say).
I would like to think that that’s true but I think Kaufmann is being hopeful. As long as America positions itself in opposition to white supremacy and implements policies according to that doctrine then people won’t want to see themselves, or be seen, as white – if there is any ambiguity.
The black, white and coloured groups in South Africa were sufficiently separated for a very wicked scientist to look at the three groups, and find differences in age of maturation, death and birth rate in each group, with coloureds in the middle. Cant remember the guy’s name.
The definition of “black” to which you refer in your comment may have a lot do with ANC entitlements and hiring polcies.
Africa’s population is currently around 1.2 billion. In just 30 years time it is projected to grow to 2.5 billion. By 2100 4.3 billion. Mind blowingly insane demographic growth, if you understand anything of human history and demographics.
If you want to depress yourself further (and I don’t recommend it)- check out population projections for India and China.
White people currently account for around 10% of the global population, and this is steadily shrinking dramatically by the end of the century. Yet anyone non-white is a ‘minority’ group apparently?
But hey, maybe we ignore the fact that these are actual UN projections, and we can just label me a far-right conspiracy loon, or a white supremacist or something?
It’s all going to s**t, and it’s irreversible now anyway so it doesn’t really matter to me either way
More like 8%, if you deduct non whites % from Europe,the US, and Canada.
There’s a correction mechanism for African overpopulation called “famine”. Whenever the population gets out of hand, Mother Nature comes along and manages it back down to a sustainable level.
It’s a Green policy objective to bring about constructive famine everywhere in the world, so as to get the global human population down to about 100 million. So many Green “initiatives” tend towards this result that it cannot be a coincidence.
This is just not true – USAID and the UN food programme have prevented natural famines from occurring for decades. Niger is a case in point, with 30 million living in a desert and with 8 children per woman. Each and every generation has been fed by the west for close to 4 generations. Your observation was true in the pre colonial period, not so since colonisation, hence Africa’s population predicted to grow by 3 billion by 2100.
Greens currently make common cause with leftist ideologues who want to replace “famine” with Western open borders as the solution for overpopulation.
Just for fun kids look up some of the old “Demographics is Destiny” articles in places like Slate or Vox. Good thing those evil right wingers did not write those or they might be considered rather controversial and racist!
I find it increasingly difficult to take our academic elite seriously. Maybe it’s because they don’t live in the same world as me. Or maybe it’s because they seem to get everything spectacularly wrong – Just talking heads indulging themselves.
I have this tendency to judge articles by how relevant the embedded links are – links that are ostensibly in support of a supposition that is made in the section where the link appears – to the claims they presume to support. This article fails with juvenile precision.
I actually watched nearly four minutes of Tucker Carlson to arrive at the referenced bit. To my dismay, Tucker Carlson does not at any point claim that opioid deaths account for the decline of whites in the new census but that “many of the white people” who disappeared died of a drug overdose – a point, Carlson regrets, is actually CELEBRATED on the left. Since, according to the CDC, 841,000 people have died since 1999 of a drug overdose and the majority of them were white people under the age 30, his statement is objectively reasonable.
In the same paragraph:
The link embedded in the words “far-Right” is to an opinion piece in The Hill by Niall Stanage who drops one luminous, self-serving, transparently partisan observation after another. In the piece Stanage appeals to the measured authority of such unbiased organizations as Global Project Against Hate. In other words, it’s like Eric Kaufmann is linking to his own articles, or the articles of his roommate. It’s like one of those Mother Jones hit pieces where every hyper-link leads to another Mother Jones hit piece. It’s wildly unserious.
I’m sure Eric Kaufmann is a nice guy but he doesn’t really have the horsepower to be writing for Unherd.
It’s interesting to note that if a child has a black father and a white mother, most of society considers him/her to be black. Yet when a child has a black mother and a white father, they also consider him/her to be black.
And why would anyone believe that when a majority is achieved by any particular race or group, other than white people, that racial harmony and equality will exist for the first time in human history?
The Right is not obsessed with ‘white replacement’. I have never, ever spoken with ANYONE who has even mentioned this or cares, and I happen to know many people on The Right. The opioid crisis is largely due to the hollowing out of industrial jobs in the heartland; I highly doubt these folks sit around bemoaning how the ‘white population’ is doing vis a vis non-whites. I can’t imagine it would be high on their list. Trump has/had it right; it was and continues to be about “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS”. Republicans tend to believe in ‘the dignity of work’ (Protestant work ethic) whereas Democrats believe in the largesse of the state and the safety net.
‘White replacement’ is just not ‘a thing’ to conservatives. However, folks on The Left do seem to be hysterical about the issue, insisting that The Right cares. I stopped listening to them years ago. Many folks on the The Left are neurotic and some even mentally unstable.
re: “There’s also the fact that many WASP Americans, such as Elizabeth Warren, have some Native American ancestry and some, such as Brad Pitt, believe they do even when such claims cannot be substantiated.” – DNA analysis proved that Warren had little or no Native American ancestry; Whatever she had, it was a rounding error.
This author is obviously infected with TDS. Trump, Trumpism whatever, the politics of racial division have been around a lot longer than Trump. CRT, although an intellectual argument since the 80’s has now reared its ugly head. Trump is not the one who has demonized Whites.
Another point…since he obviously hasn’t spend much time in America….is we are becoming much more Multi-Ethnic. Kamala Harris is the product of a Black Man and an Indian Women. She seemingly identifies more as a Black American. However she married a White Man and has children. Will her kids say they are White, Black or Multi-Ethnic? Tiger Woods describe himself as some sort of Pan Asian…with a Thai Mother and Black Father. He married a Swede. How will his kids describe themselves? As more and more Americans inter-marry, have children with multiple races the Census is not going to be able to figure it out.
Unlike Rachel Dolezal who is white, but described herself as Black to advance a career…..We will have people who depend from more than one or two racial backgrounds. IF forced to pick a single race they likely will decline to answer a Census question. If however Multi-Ethnic is included that is how they will likely describe themselves…IN which case for the purposes of Racial Politics……you would really have to resort to class as a distinction. In the case of Ms Harris and Woods children they are of mix raced background but surely do not come from oppressed minority backgrounds. To the author it is not always about Trump.
Kamala Harris married a Jew who had children already, so his kids are ‘white’. Harris has never had her own kids (she was busy being Willy Brown’s mistress!).
Great article about statistical quirks in the 2010 and 2020 censuses that have led to the misperception that white U.S. population is declining. One worrisome problem is CRT. Its structure guarantees that no matter what a white person does or says, that person is branded as racist
based solely on skin color. This is very counterproductive and will lead to increased friction between White and Black people. CRT also is connected to Marxism, which has a dismal record of
producing brutal authoritarian regimes that create dismal conditions for all races.
Replacement Migration (UN term) is the process of arresting population decline (due to low birth rates) by means of net immigration. It has been widely studied by the UN who identified a range of scenarios for a range of countries. The idea of the UN’s mass Replacement Migration has been called the Great Replacement – perhaps a bit hyperbolically but hardly a conspiracy theory or right wing ! How much the population is ‘replaced’ and consequent demographic future of a country will depend on future government policy on the level and sources of immigration which are accepted or solicited. Analysis of censuses is a historic detail – the answer to the ongoing question ‘Is this the end of white America?’ , (to which the immediate answer is ‘ not yet’) will depend on future government policy – past history is not necessarily a reliable guide.
Eric Kaufmann is a ‘good liberal’ from Canada and as mixed race has no problem with a post racial society. He is also a commendably honest academic who wants to warn of major demographic change and help to manage it. He’s particularly concerned that the left don’t want to help in this and that they ignore the reasonable anxieties of the current but diminishing white majority and Kaufmann takes flak for this. In this article he wants to reassure the USA for the moment. In his excellent book White Shift he warns that the white British will be no more at the end of the next century but feels that could work if things – immigration – are slowed down and fears addressed. So there is a replacement of sorts, and we can see it in both countries
The question is, is this a good thing. My own view, much less sanguine than Kaufmann’s, is that the whole process is product of a global capitalism which is creating more fragmented and unequal societies. In these, citizens are reduced to consumers and are increasingly managed by a serving liberal elite made up of the economic right and cultural left who operate increasingly coercively. What’s extraordinary is how the left – the Labour Party – have betrayed their white working class and got in bed with big business on immigration, the former for the adolescent rainbow world and the latter for cheap labour What is tragic is that acute class divisions have been added to by ethnic divisions and the post war project of a fairer Britain with good education for all, more interesting work and attractive neighbourhoods has been abandoned. Instead there are more broken homes, duff schools, ugly houses, gig jobs and pervasive alienation than ever. As Scruton put it, on immigration, the British were not consulted but insulted. Incidentally has Unherd really discussed White Shift?
This is an example of that trope about Leftists. First they say (whatever you fear) is not happening. Then they “yes, it’s happening but it’s good). Then they say, “yes, it is happening, and it is bad, but you deserve it).
I have read Whiteshift, probably I would have found it convincing in another era. His premise, as in the article here, is that people who are mixed race but partially white would eventually self identify as white. In this article he is also saying something else, something a bit more dubious, and that is regardless of subjective opinion there would be an objective opinion too – that is someone who is say 3/4 white and looks it would be considered white regardless of self identification.
There is a centripetal force pushing people into wanting to belong to the majority of the population, or the historical people of a nation. However in the US that is counter balanced by the centrifugal of opposition to white supremacy, pushing people into identitarian boxes. People do act in their own self interests, and if it pays to be non white that is how many will identify. This non white identification also has psychological benefits, you go from being despised to being admired.
Increasingly then the US is likely to divide into two racial groups, the whites voting for the republicans, and the non whites voting for the Democrats. The “whites” voting for the republicans will included some light skinned hispanics, and maybe some asians. There will be, as there are now, “non whites” who came over on the MayFlower who will vote for the democrats.
However over time all the whites will trend in an even larger majority to vote for the republicans, and the non whites will vote for the Democrats. This is clearly how the Democratic Party is now positioning itself – the scourge of anti white nationalism. Biden has said from day one that white supremacy is the gravest threat to the Republic. There is clear political logic here, he understands the demographics will benefit his party.
What might benefit the Democrats will probably destroy the country, the whites will become more radicalised, they will, as the article says “ shift their policy attitudes in a conservative direction and increases support for Right-wing populism”. Then there will be a counter reaction. The politics will come to resemble Belfast.
Oh dear, expect another deranged rant from Jonathan Portes on his Twitter page.
If all diversityis good, during the last 600 years there have been societies which have practised cannibalism, human sacrifice, Muti, FGM, slavery and belief their religion or cast makes them superior to others.
Why is there no discussion on what practices are acceptable by immigrants? Should immigrants assimilate ? Perhaps if these discussion took place and there there clearly defined requirements for assimilation and loyalty to host country, then immigration would be less of an issue.
Peoples from the Indian sub-continent have been readily accepted in public schools, universities, cricket teams and officers mess since the 19th century because they assimilated. Officers such as Squadron Leader Puji DFC, fighter pilot, thoroughly enjoyed his time in the RAF in WW2, saying his turban gave him privileges.
Sikh Fighter Pilots.
Sikh Fighter Pilots – YouTube
The first Sikh fighter came dowm from Oxford in 1916 and joined the RFC.
Now do France.
Anyway Kaufman is possibly right that somebody who is mixed but majority white would now declare themselves non white, while in the past they might have chosen white, but why does he think that process would stop in the future?
Thanks Professor for explaining to us what the “far-Right” is “obsessed” with. The only problem is that you neglected to provide any substantiation of this supposed obsession. Imagine my shock and disappointment, expecting to be provided ample quotes from prominent right-wingers supporting your comic-book assertion (which I had somehow apparently missed on my own), when the only supporting evidence you provide is your claim that Tucker Carlson said the decline is due to the drug crisis (a claim which has almost nothing whatsoever to do with your premise.) Your claim about Tucker’s claim we are expected to accept at face value of course as you provide no quotes, just a link to a video. Really weak for a Professor.
Then you give us “However, despite the charged rhetoric doing the rounds”.. at which point I’m done with you. This belongs on the Daily Beast or one of those cheeseball sites which love to write breathless articles on the supposed obsessions and associated evil intentions of the “far-right”.
Makes me wonder whether this article is about anything more than your own obsessions. Maybe take this up as a private matter with someone who can help you sort it all out. After which you can perhaps come back with an article about the fascinatingly bizarre takes by Michael Moore, the Jimmy Fallon audience, etc., etc. Seems to me like that would be a topic of interest to an academic with your stated interests. “Race of people cheering their own decline.” Nothing interesting in that Professor?
“Non-hispanic whites”? So, Hispanics aren’t white?
Amusing that the author uses so many words to come to no useful conclusion. A waste of space.
Is there some irony in that “alba” (as in Richard Alba) has Latin roots meaning “white”?
VP Harris is a mix of a Black father and an Indian (India) mother. She has married a White man and they have children. While VP Harris seemingly identifies more as a Black Women…..Can anyone predict which box her children will pick? Tiger Woods is a product of a Black Father and Thai mother. He identifies as more of a Pan Asian. He married a Swede. Can anyone predict which box his children will pick?
Hispanics have largely identified as White over the years….with their ethnicity being Hispanic. I suspect if we continue to build a world around which race you choose to be and matters in terms of University attendance or Job acceptance, Federal Benefits or Political Identity it will make choosing identity even harder.
Certainly a country where a huge number of people do not care how much or how little melanin is in your skin, marriages and children will screw up any ability to put people in racial silos. In the case of VP Harris’s and Tiger Woods children it likely will not matter by the time they have to choose a box. Particularly when one is mixture of 4 or even 5 ethnicities. Progressive desire to pin a race on someone so they can be aggrieved will be thwarted by love and sex…..How dare they!
There is no truth to this article. The author only listens to leftist coastal elites. It has nothing to do with reality. Many of us work hand to hand with immigrants. Something the author would know nothing about. We don’t hate them. The large majority of immigrants who come here legally agree with us. We hate leftists and we hate their totalitarian intentions for the world. That is who we hate.
Here’s one old guy who prefers to check “Other” whenever possible, as a strategy to de-emphasize racial classifications.
Or even better yet, if it were possible . . . “human” race.
Just when we reached the point where we were beginning to judge people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin, Critical Racist Theory comes along to tell us to judge only by skin color. Sorry, but I refuse to do that. I still believe anyone who makes a big deal of skin color is a racist.
Like my ancestors on both my mother’s and father’s sides of the family, I’m an abolitionist. I’m a conservative Republican that’s noticed Democrats think white teachers’ union patronage jobs are more important than teaching inner city black children to read.
Articles like this one are malarkey on steroids. They assume everyone judges by skin color, and that conservatives are unrepentant racists. Neither is true. In actuality, Progressives depend on racial devisions for votes, and conservatives just prefer the Constitution and the rule of law to the rule of Marxist “experts” who generally claim expertise they ain’t got.
Please stop publishing “think pieces” like this. They’re racist!
Who cares? Fuhgedabowdit. ‘T’is all noise and haste signifying nothing. Gotta roll with the punches.
What a poor article. Proved nothing.