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Don’t Be Duped by ‘Replacement Theory.’ Put Race in Its Proper Place

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

As the alleged Buffalo shooter says, he carried out the attack because “all Black people are replacers just by existing in white countries.”

Side note: To those who condemn education about America’s racial history as some sort of dangerous “critical race theory” that makes white children uncomfortable, when you prevent children from learning the truth about history they have more mental space for racist garbage.

So what’s the truth? Are white people not disappearing in America?

Ironically, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who The New York Times identified as having pushed core tenets of the theory in more than 400 episodes, inadvertently poked holes one night in the myth he has been trying to spread about massive white decline.

During a sermon about alleged liberal delight over the “extinction of white people,” he asked, “Where did all these people go?”

Good question. In fact, the millions of missing white Americans did not go anywhere, nor are they being replaced by minorities.

One census statistic in particular that triggered numerous headlines about white decline was a reported 8.6% drop in the number of white Americans since 2010.

That unprecedented white population drop was taken by many as a sign that white America’s long-forecasted minority status was closer than previously thought.

But, as political scientist Morris Levy, sociologist Richard Alba and demographer Dowell Myers explained in The Atlantic in October, the statistic was produced by changes in the way the Census Bureau counts race, particularly white people or, more accurately, people who call themselves “white.”

 

Among other changes, the 2010 census added the ability to check more than one racial box. In 2020 they added the ability to check ethnic labels, such as German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian and other groups.

The era of the “one-drop” rule, when one drop of African blood in your background made you Black, is over. As growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren — and everyone seems to be subscribing to services that track your family ancestry through DNA — counting only those who checked the “white” box as white leads to a big undercount of folks who otherwise look white.

My optimistic lesson from this big snafu is that we need to invest a little less in race as a source of fears and anxieties. New generations are acting on their own to build healthy forms of identity America’s melting pot or, as I prefer to call it, mulligan stew. Demography is not destiny. At least, not like it used to be.

Still we continue to be plagued by marketers of racial fears and anxieties for their own profit. Be cautious, but don’t be duped. Diversity is our strength. Let’s put race in its proper place.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2022 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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