GOP's 'replacement theory' has long history in U.S.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Joseph Lowndes / Special To The Washington Post

In the wake of the mass shooting in a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, N.Y., public attention has turned to “The Great Replacement,” French writer Renaud Camus’s theory of white racial “genocide by substitution,” and its lethal impact in the United States. In just the last five years, this theory of racial apocalypse has apparently inspired three mass shootings.

But scholars and journalists have noted that in recent years, right-wing pundits and Republican politicians have also begun using the term “replacement” to assert without evidence that there is a liberal plot to outnumber Republicans with Democrats by opening the borders to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. This political version of replacement is neither an exotic import from European white nationalists, nor is it novel. Rather, its logic has deep roots in American democratic beliefs and practices.

Throughout U.S. political history, the fear of racial threats to democracy has emerged repeatedly, albeit in different forms. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, believed the nation would only survive the abolition of slavery through the wholesale deportation of formerly enslaved and free Black people. In the decades before the Civil War, white people without property who fought for political equality also fought to make sure it would not extend to African Americans.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, white people in the South reversed the move toward multiracial democracy during the post-Civil War Reconstruction by violently stripping voting rights from Black men, whom they claimed unfit for franchise. In the same period, Congress enacted new laws barring Chinese immigrants from U.S. citizenship and therefore voting, with proponents arguing that people of Chinese descent had racial characteristics that made them incapable of republican self-rule. And at the turn of the 20th century, voter registration laws aimed at immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (who were not yet considered white) radically reduced voter turnout among poor and working-class people. In all cases, white voters across classes saw non-whites as threatening their hold on political power.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-gops-replacement-theory-has-long-history-in-u-s/

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. The target of this attack has changed over the years but this theory is not new

The Irish and European immigrants have been the target of this attack as well as Asian immigrants

[wnylib]

2. The laws limiting immigration from

eastern Europe were not so much due to not being considered White as to different culture and religion.

Eastern European immigrants, like Poles, at the start of the 20th century were predominantly Roman Catholic or Jewish. From other eastern nations they were Eastern Orthodox. White, Protestant Americans thought that they would not fit in culturally, and would bring "foreign ways" with them.

In the 1850s and after, many working class White Americans feared that the end of slavery would mean free Blacks taking away jobs from them and bringing down wages because Whites would hire Blacks at lower pay.

It wasn't just eastern Europeans who were considered inferior, even though many were obviously White, with blond or light brown hair. Americans of northern European descent did not want southern Europeans, e.g. Italians and Greeks immigrating here due to darker coloring and to not being Protestant.

[Marcuse]

3. Distinctions between "Whites" and "off Whites".

It wasn't just eastern Europeans who were considered inferior, even though many were obviously White, with blond or light brown hair. Americans of northern European descent did not want southern Europeans, e.g. Italians and Greeks immigrating here due to darker coloring and to not being Protestant.