White genocide

The idea of a white genocide (or white extinction scenario) refers to any of several doomsday scenarios describing Caucasians or some demographic group associated with white people (typically Westerners, Protestants, or Christians, with perceived "pure" white ancestry) would be heading towards a demographic crisis, becoming a minority in some or all countries, possibly followed by extinction. The term was coined by racist ex-Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management Bob Whitaker.[2] Whitaker, unsurprisingly, also coined the strawman phrase, "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white." Every white nationalist believes in this be it Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, white power skinheads, alt-right, Identitarian and others.

We're going to link this as many times as we goddamn have to.
“”As far as I can tell, practically the only thing that white supremacists don’t consider genocide is the actual Holocaust.
—David Futrelle[1]
Frogs, clowns and swastikas
Alt-right
Chuds
Rebuilding the Reich, one meme at a time
Buzzwords and dogwhistles
v - t - e

These scenarios are a kind of framing used to promote white supremacy or similar movements as self-defense, by describing non-whites, mixed-whites, non-Christians, and/or non-Westerners (notably Arabs, Hispanics, and black people, depending on context) as the aggressors in a clash of races or civilizations. When it comes to Arabs or Muslims, claims about white extinction might be associated with the Eurabia scenario. These scenarios can draw a parallel with genocides that have really happened, such as the Holocaust. A similar canard focuses on the perceived decline in specific genetic traits associated with white people, such as blue eyes or blonde hair, rather than the "white race" itself.[3] Some variants of the white genocide scenario are the South African genocide conspiracy in South Africa and The Great Replacement in France and Europe.

Some statistics and definition of genocide

Let's begin with some statistics on population change in Europe and the United States:

  • Graph #1
  • Graph #2
  • Graph #3
  1. Predicted European population by religion, without adherence to race. As most European countries neither keep census records for race nor religion, the Muslim identity is usually based on country of origin. The number of "Muslims" almost certainly includes non-Muslims from Muslim countries, as they are more likely to emigrate to secular countries.[4]
  2. Predicted Muslim population in Europe, without adherence to race.[5]
  3. Predicted population in the United States by race, without adherence to religion. As people of mixed origin, as well as white Hispanics are categorized as non-white, the ratio of whites is deflated. The US census definition of "white" is also the unusually broad "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa." [6][7]

A frequent (usually deliberate) mistake people make in discussing whites as a minority is lumping every non-white race as a blob of indistinguishable other. This mistake usually betrays the prejudices of the speaker. In actuality, given the 2010 United States Census with whites at 223.5 million and the next largest demographic of African Americans at 38.9 million, it's going to be a very, very long time before whites could potentially become a minority for legal purposes.[8]

Purported tactics

Some claims usually made together with the white extinction scenarios are that:

  • Low birth rates among white/Western communities could lead them to extinction, caused by abortion and family planning. Claimants might argue to restrict abortion or contraception to increase birth rates.
  • Immigration could decrease the ratio of white people/Christians/Westerners in certain countries. According to conspiracy theories such as Eurabia, immigration into Western countries might be a deliberate strategy for colonization and/or demographic warfare.
  • Miscegenation could cause a decline in "racial purity," leaving fewer unmixed white people with each generation.
  • Multiculturalism could erode "white" or Western identity or values perceived as Western, including cultural traditions, "family values" or even democracy.
  • Unorganized violence against white people, Christians or certain ethnic groups (such as the South African farm attacks) could be part of a persecution campaign.

Actual genocide

Let's examine the United Nations' Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide' definition of "genocide"; namely, one or more of the following:

  • (a) Killing members of the group;
  • (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  • (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  • (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  • (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[9]

Contrary to what some may believe (or shout about on message boards and comment sections), there are currently few places in the world where such events are taking place against white or fair-skinned people.[10] The change in the demographics of a nation over time due to migration, immigration, and emigration are not the same thing as systematically and deliberately exterminating a group of people in a somewhat organized fashion. These demographic changes do not even come close to meeting any of the definitions above.[11]

While there have been historic genocides against people who would be classified as "white" by some today, they were not targeted due to being "white" and the perpetrators were often (a different kind of) "white" themselves. For instance, victims and perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust were both mostly white, as long as one doesn't subscribe to the belief that Jews and the Slavic peoples are somehow non-white.

Immigration

Brought to you by Christian Miller of the "White Genocide Evidence Project":

“”Many realize the 'open borders' movement is a thinly-veiled attempt to dilute and thereby destroy all white nations — Africa for the Africans, Asia for the Asians, White countries for everybody ... White people are libeled and demonized by cultural Marxists in academia, vilified by public slander and robbed of the right to self-identify all in order to instill a destructive sense of false white guilt... These malevolent social engineers yearn for a blended humanity in white nations — mocha-skinned people and societies without race by homogenous default. What they never mention — and what is left to nationalists to publicly emphasize — is that this plan for 'diversity' only applies to white nations.[12]

"White Genocide Project" declares that "White Genocide", in addition to Christian Miller's comment, is:

“” Legally chasing down and forcing White areas to accept diversity. [13]

If you're not white, you can't be British!

British "Freedom" Party leader Paul Weston has claimed that mass immigration into England is a form of genocide by demographics [14]

Ex-BNP leader Nick Griffin has argued that identifying non-white people as British, is "a sort of bloodless genocide."[15]

Fallacies

White extinction scenarios usually rest on several logical fallacies, to feign an urgent threat towards white people.

Definition of race and ethnicity

The concept of separate races is, by itself, controversial. Add to that the difficulty of defining racial categories. Many Western racial concepts, such as the racist and arbitrary one-drop rule, would see people of mixed origin classified as non-white. As miscegenation has occurred through centuries, such definitions would make the ratio of white people smaller than more neutral definitions. The claims might rest on a confusion between race, religion or nationality, to inflate the ratio of non-whites. Some examples are defining ethnic groups that are traditionally Muslims and white (Albanians, Bosniaks,[16] Tatars, Turks, Levantines, etc.), or white Hispanics, as non-whites or excluding non-whites from a particular nationality (e.g. assuming any nonwhite British citizen is not British).

While some polities (United States, United Kingdom, etc) record self-identified race and religion in census data, other countries (France, Sweden, etc.) have no such records; one reason is the experience from World War II, where the Nazis used census records to facilitate the Holocaust. Therefore the statistics of people of a specific race or religion in a country might be an estimate, based on place of birth, parents' place of birth, etc. A Christian person descending from Iraqis could count as a Muslim. A white person in Europe descending from white colonists in Africa could count as an African, or as a black person.

The term "white" can vary by country and so can "percentage", and also the perception of who a white person is. For example, a person of white and mestizo (i.e., part-Native American) ancestry would be classified as white in Latin America, but probably not in the United States of America. Supporters of white-genocide theories might regard colonized territories, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa, as "white homelands," to find more case studies for the hypothesis. One can find a declining ratio of white people in parts of the western United States, but one should also be aware that whites have only been the majority population in those areas for 150 to 200 years. South Africa has never had a white majority population. And various people who are today classified as "white" would have historically been discriminated against (and viewed as a threat) due to being "German", "Irish", Catholic, Jewish or whatever.

The definition of white also confounds the conclusions. Ignoring that many white people whose families have been in the US for several hundred years also likely contain "Cherokee" ancestors and other euphemisms for having notably darker features, defining mixed-race people as completely non-white is misleading. If an "interracial" couple has kids, all the offspring are "non-white" in spite of being genetically half-white. A town with 50 white couples and 50 interracial couples is 75% white, but according to the stats the next generation is only half white. Even if the interracial couples have half the number of kids, the stats will say that the next generation is 2/3 white, less than the previous generation, in spite of non-white genes being squeezed out.

This all assumes the one-drop rule applies only to whites too, a case of racist special pleading. Logically, the one-drop rule should also apply to other races and those mixed Asians should be technically non-Asians and mixed blacks should be non-blacks, so there should be less of those races too in the long run.

An immigrant might be broadly defined as a person with one parent born abroad (or two, in some countries). This would count a natural-born British citizen with parents born in Ireland as an immigrant, no matter how white and English-speaking they might be. Of course, this kind of definition inflates the ratio of immigrants. Countries with significant (former) diasporas may also have "immigrants" that were only let into the country because of their supposed ethnic similarity to the native population. There are for example more Irish citizens outside the Republic of Ireland than inside it, and during the 1990s the vast majority of immigrants to Germany were classified as "ethnic Germans".[17]

Problems

Even if the above were all incorrect, there are several problems with worry about a "white genocide".

Definition of religious groups

There is no universal demographic measure for the size of a religion in a country. Different countries can use any of these variables:

  • Membership of religious congregations
  • Country of origin (see above)
  • Self-identification in census
  • Self-identification in opinion polls
  • Reported attendance to church (or other house or worship)

In the United States, statistics for number of Christians are based on church membership. However, up to the late 19th century, only a minority of Americans were members of a church.[18]

Demographic factors
  • The tempo effect: as the age of childbearing is increasing (which it is, in most high-income countries), the birth rate per capita, or current number of children per woman, declines, even though the total number of children per woman during fertile life stays largely constant.
  • Most of the world's nations pass through a demographic transition, where family size decreases from 4-8 children per woman, to stable reproduction around 2 children per woman. Several countries (most of Asia and Latin America) have a birth rate at or below 2 children per woman; however, due to increasing life expectancy, and high birth rates a generation ago, their population is increasing.
  • Their equivocation of decrease in the percentage of white people with decrease in the actual number. If we look at US census results, we see that whites comprised 75.1% of the total US population in 2000, and 72.4% in 2010 — giving the impression that whites have declined in number. But if we look at the actual population numbers we see that, between the ten years, the total number of whites actually rose from 211,460,626 to 223,553,265.[19]

Perspective
  • Why does it matter what color your descendants are? Your black ancestors didn't seem to care,[20] and even then, their descendants who eventually became "whiter" mingled like crazy with basically everyone near them. At this point, "racial purity" is a nonsensical concept.
  • Proponents might compare the claimed decline of white people to genocide (as in a conspiracy), while diminishing real genocides, such as in Holocaust denial.
  • Many far-right proponents of this concept in Western Europe also, somewhat bizarrely, oppose the immigration to their countries of white Eastern Europeans such as Poles almost as vehemently as they oppose non-white immigration, even though this is increasing the white population they claim to be so concerned for.
  • Proponents also often chalk the scenario up to non-white immigration, ignoring the role of declining birth rates amongst whites. William Beveridge (a eugenics supporter) spoke of a need to "ensure the continuation of the British race [which at] its present rate of reproduction… cannot continue" as early as 1942,[21][22] long before there was a substantial non-white presence in the United Kingdom.
  • Even if you accept the dubious premises that the entire argument rests upon, there is no way of preventing the situation without banning international travel, banning international students and eliminating international lust. A substantial number of immigrants to "white" countries are on marriage visas, because some white person couldn't maintain their "commitment to racial purity" and fell in love with a non-white.
  • Skin lightening occurred independently from different gene alleles in east vs. west Eurasia due to similar genetic pressure (the need for more vitamin D from reduced Sun exposure), i.e. convergent evolution.[23]
  • The false attribution by proponents of white genocide conspiracy theories of literally genocidal motives to others who do not share their poisonous ideology - typically focusing explicitly or implicitly on Jews - is likely a case of psychological projection of far-right motives onto others. They, or at least many of their ideological brethren, support the exact same kinds of virulent racial hatred and ethnonationalism that have actually lead to ethnic cleansing, and genocides such as the Holocaust, in the past, when they became widespread in a population through fake news and other propaganda.
  • It is similar to, and feeds into, other bizarre reality inversions deployed by the far right, such as claims like "by criticising what they say is racist behaviour from white people like me, anti-racists are the real racists!"
gollark: There are multiple kinds of tech enthusiast.
gollark: A lot of the time you're just doing boring drudgery integrating other already-existing things, which will soon be significantly automated I think. Sometimes you actually need to spend time thinking about clever algorithms to do a thing, or how to make your thing go faster, or why your code mysteriously doesn't work, which is harder.
gollark: It's mentally challenging, sometimes, but obviously not particularly physically hard.
gollark: There are lots of cool applications now. Automatic generation of art, protein folding, human-level competitive programming, good OCR.
gollark: Ah, but it's *very complicated* curve fitting which can sometimes do interesting things.

See also
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References
  1. http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/11/17/do-these-sweatpants-make-me-look-like-im-supporting-white-genocide/
  2. Bob Whitaker, Author of the Racist 'Mantra' on White Genocide, Has Died
  3. See the Wikipedia article on disappearing blonde gene. See also "Blonde Extinction" at Snopes.com for examples of the meme, some of them dating back to the 19th century.
  4. http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/
  5. http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/
  6. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/percentage-non-hispanic-whites-hits-all-time-63-article-1.1371772
  7. https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
  8. If you look at this graphic's total box, it lists Whites as 72.4% (223,553,265) while the second largest racial group are Black Americans at 12.6 (38,929,319)
  9. http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm
  10. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131011-albino-killings-witch-doctors-tanzania-superstition/
  11. White Genocide, Eurabia, and Other Denialist Nonsense. Debunking Denialism. http://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/01/11/white-genocide-eurabia-and-other-white-supremacist-nonsense/
  12. White Genocide Evidence Project
  13. White Genocide Project
  14. Liberty Great Britain
  15. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8011878.stm
  16. See the Wikipedia article on Bosniaks.
  17. See the Wikipedia article on Volksdeutsche.
  18. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/is-the-end-of-white-christian-america-a-good-thing/article/2599494?custom_click=rss
  19. "Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010" (PDF).
  20. A lot of Southern whites are a little bit black] by Christopher Ingraham (December 22, 2014) The Washington Post.
  21. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (London, Bloomsbury, 2008) p. 25
  22. Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 123.
  23. Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians by Heather L. Norton et al. Mol. Biol. Evol. 24(3):710–722. 2007. doi:10.1093/molbev/msl203
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