. . . and the stupidity of race-based predictions in American politics.
So, the replacement theory, the conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement,” claims that there’s this deliberate attempt to replace the U.S. population that this will put whites in the minority and then everything will change. That is a crazy conspiracy theory.
But I want to go a step further than that. Because to apply the one-drop rule, which has an obvious historical salience in the United States because of its role in slavery—and I’ve assumed that it will always buy into the self-conception of somebody who might be let’s say, three quarters white and one-quarter black, might have three white and one black grandparents—is to make a hazardous prediction about what the future will look like.
To try and apply it to immigrant groups that don’t share that same history, to apply it to the many mixed-race Americans who don’t have black ancestors, starts to make little sense. To assume that people who have European ancestry, but who’ve lived in Mexico or South America for a number of generations, and who are very much considered white within their own political system, who very much now consider themselves white if asked the question, will somehow metaphysically be part of a monolithic group of “people of color” is not sociology—it’s a form of magical thinking.
And I think that on this point, we should be much, much more careful precisely because the sometimes triumphalist or sometimes alarmist predictions of this demographic change bear this eerie similarity to conspiracy theories of the far right. Thankfully, it doesn’t, in fact, describe the most fundamental divisions in our society, which are often based on race in certain respects, but much, much more complicated than this division of America into ‘whites vs. people of color.’