Trading Places

The problem with coming to the conclusion that a particular viewpoint is unintelligent or nonsensical is that it’s then a simple matter to not bother with understanding why it might not be so. I’m going to quote here at length, as I sometimes do, because I would like to present an argument in as much of its context as I can, without simply resorting to asking all of you to read the complete Prindle Post column.

In any event, Nicholas Kreuder is seeking to explain why “replacement theory” is, at its core racist, with the goal being to offer up an explanation that avoids falling back on simply labeling any wrongthink about race with the pejorative.

Some fear “replacement” for a different reason, claiming that changing demographics will result in new majorities exacting revenge. The idea being that, after white citizens become a political minority, the new political majority will engage in retributive measures for past injustices.

This view of the dangers of “replacement” indicates that a majority can use our political institutions in ways that unjustly harm minorities. In fact, it seems to even acknowledge that this has occurred. So, why leave that system intact? The far better response would be to reform or maybe even replace current systems that allow a majority to perpetuate injustices against a minority.

And we now see clearly why fear of “replacement” stems from racism. Being afraid of changing demographics requires denying that all citizens of a nation deserve an equal say in how it is run. It means conceiving of a particular culture as superior to another. And, ultimately, it involves thinking our institutions ought to be designed in ways that allow a majority to commit injustices against a minority. In these ways, the person who fears “replacement” endorses a hierarchical worldview where some deserve to count for more, are superior to, and deserve power over, others. It is only through this lens that a change in racial and ethnic demographics can be worrisome.
Nicholas Kreuder “Why Some Fear ‘Replacement’”

I’m going to start with the third paragraph, and work from there. There is nothing about a fear of changing demographics that “requires denying that all citizens of a nation deserve an equal say in how it is run.” In point of fact, it can be an absolute commitment to the ideal that provokes such a fear. Here is where the two sentences of the first paragraph quoted become important. The fact that a believe may be nakedly self-serving does not make it insincerely held, and if one honestly believes in the idea that once Black, Hispanic and/or Native Americans become the majority, they are going to set about recreating the injustices of the past, only with themselves reaping the benefits at the expense of White (and possibly Asian) Americans it is not at all necessary that one believe that “institutions ought to be designed in ways that allow a majority to commit injustices against a minority.” Likewise, simply reforming or replacing the legal framework that allows for same is not foolproof. White police officers, attorneys, judges and juries were quite capable of ignoring the law when it suited them to do so; why would anyone think that it couldn’t occur to others to do the same?

There is more to racism than the idea that one group of people counts for more, are superior to, and deserve power over others by dint of the color of their skin or the nation their distant ancestors were born on. The idea that others believe in the ideologies of racial superiority due to the color of their skin also qualifies. Culturally speaking, Americans have very short historical memories, and sometimes lack them entirely. When I was in high school, classmates would piously inform me that racism had died at the end of the Civil Rights movement; even though that end was just coming about when we were born. Combine this with the American myth that all babies are born equally impoverished, and it’s easy to understand the conclusion that as grievous as the crimes of the pre-Civil Rights era may have been, they were no longer relevant to anyone’s day-to-day life.

And people who understand themselves to be innocent (and not even the unwitting beneficiaries) of past injustices don’t see retribution as justified. Instead, they see it as hateful, and a repeat of the wrongs that had been perpetrated in the past. In other words, for those people who see Black anger as unjustified, that anger becomes little more than a self-serving cover for an expectation of inequality.

Whatever racism exists in the minds of those who believe in Replacement Theory need not be due to a feeling that they deserve to be superior. It can also be an understanding that they are the only ones who don’t feel that they deserve to be superior. There is a sense in which Replacement Theory rests on the idea that only those threatened with replacement are enlightened enough to not wish unwarranted harm upon their fellow men.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Replacement Theory is racist or not. It is corrosive, and that is bad enough. The heroic stories of an America gone by where everyone was united in a common project of liberty and justice for all are misremembrances at best and outright fabrications at worst. I would like to think that admitting to that would go at least some way in allowing people to set aside their grudges and resentments, but that’s likely asking more than can be delivered. Instead, I suspect that it will take a lifting of the sense of pervasive and unjust poverty that people carry around with them for things to change. But I’m not confident in that happening, either.

In the end, it’s easy to understand “Why some fear ‘replacement’.” Numbers are a bulwark against disappearance and political power means safety, plain and simple. It doesn’t take a particularly astute understanding of history to realize the bad things that have happened to disfavored groups that were too small to prevent others from victimizing them. There may be an element of racism in the idea that those not like the self lack a commitment to ideals of justice and equality. But it’s just as easily an understanding (correct or not) of human nature.

Outreach

In the drugstore today was a Limited Edition jar of Vaseline "healing jelly." What, exactly, it is supposed to heal, I don't know. It stood out to me because it had a number of stylized representations of faces on it. It looked as if it were doing some sort of recognition of Black women. And the label read "equitable skincare for all." It caught my attention because I'd seen some complaints about it online. Nothing to rival the teapot tempest that sprung up around Walmart's Juneteenth ice cream, but feathers did appear to have been ruffled.

Personally, nether the "Celebration Edition: Juneteenth Ice Cream" nor the Vaseline Limited Edition bother me. Okay, corporations are looking to show that they're paying attention to the Black community and hoping that this will translate into some combination of sales and ongoing goodwill. This is what corporations do. It should be about as surprising as water making things wet. And their flat and impersonal overtures are also just how corporations do things. The pushback against these things tends to be framed as if it were a personal affront; and the sort of things that corporations would have realized would have been poorly received if they'd been paying attention.

But the Black community in the United States is just that; a community. That's different from a hive mind. Had Unilever asked me if the Vaseline Limited Edition were a good idea, I likely would have shrugged and told them that I didn't have a problem with it. It's not really my thing, but there's nothing wrong with it. I don't have a sense that corporations ought to interact with me with an eye towards making me feel respected and valued. But I also understand that, despite the fact that corporations are always interested primarily in their bottom line, that as clumsy as things like this are, someone meant well. So I'm willing to recognize that for what it is. I understand the things that people, especially activists, want from corporations: more intentional hiring from, and directed investment in, minority communities. And that's fair. Putting out new themed products doesn't satisfy that. But I've also worked in corporate America long enough to understand doing things for communities can be more difficult than people think it is, when those things have to be done in accordance with existing corporate practices and rules. (My recent work on a corporate responsibility project was an education unto itself.)

Of course, I don't really need anything from corporate America in a community sense. I don't live in an area that's suffering from deindustrialization, blighted by crime or impoverished due to high unemployment. I can see these supposed missteps as well-meaning, but ultimately hollow, gestures. I don't need the energy and resources that have gone into their creation to have been put to "better use." And I'm not sure that relying on corporations to wade into social problems is a useful strategy anyway. To the degree that the broader Black community has problems that need solutions, I suspect that the long and grinding process of finding internal solutions will be more fruitful in the end.

Irreplaceable

I used to read The Atlantic quite a lot. Then they adopted a soft paywall for their content, and I find myself reading less of it, never having decided that I would subscribe in order to be allowed to do more than sample the content a few times a month. But I do still like many of the writers at The Atlantic, and so I pop over there from time to time. Like today.

In No, Ann Coulter, I Am Not Responsible for the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory, Ronald Brownstein takes aim at the fact that rightist pundits like Ann Coulter (whom I had not realized was still a thing) and Tucker Carlson (whom I am starting to grow weary of hearing about) were blaming Mr. Brownstein, the authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority (which I have not read) and other Liberal thinkers as the people responsible for White "nativist" Americans' fears that there is a global plot afoot to replace them with voters who are more likely to vote Democratic as a means of stripping them of their rights via democratic processes. But as vapid as I find "Replacement Theory," my disdain for it is not in concept, but in scale. There have been other schemes of this sort, such as the Christian Exodus movement, which planned to move enough people into South Carolina "to establish a government based on the Ten Commandments and conservative Christian values," and possibly even secede from the United States. So the idea of a demographic hostile takeover of a place is not one that always targets Conservative America. But the idea that there could be any sort of coordinated, yet secret, plot to do the same over the whole of the United States is laughable, especially considering that these people would all have to be shuttled in Red states, to vote out their Senators and secure their Electoral College votes.

Instead, I and other analysts have long argued that Democrats have the opportunity to build a multiracial coalition composed of both the increasing minority population and groups within the white population that are most comfortable with a diversifying America: namely those who are college-educated, secular, urban, and younger, especially women in all of those cohorts. The combination of these white groups (many of which are growing) and the expanding minority population is what I have called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation.”

Fair enough. But there's an assumption there. One that Mr. Brownstein doesn't call out, and one that I think people like Ms. Coulter and Mr. Carlson are well aware of. For the "expanding minority population" to reliably be part of "the Democrats' 'coalition of transformation'," that population, as a whole, has to have different perceived interests than the stereotypical "coalition of restoration" that Mr. Brownstein identifies as making up the Republican base. Otherwise, their growing numbers wouldn't push Democrats towards a majority. And what I think the right-leaning pundits have done is simply doubled down on that assumption, and then laid out a simple scenario: If there are non-White people who could be reliably expected to vote for Democrats, why wouldn't the Democrats want them to come to the United States?

And it's worth pointing out that while Le Grand Remplacement draws upon themes that were around in the 19th century, The Emerging Democratic Majority was published nearly a decade before Renaud Camus published his book. To be sure, I agree with Mr. Brownstein's assessment that it's incorrect to blame people who believe that a more diverse America will favor Democratic policies for the idea that Republicans are being subjected to "'genocide' by substitution," both thought processes involve buying into certain of the same assumptions. And I'm not so certain that those assumptions will hold up in the long run.

But as long as they are in place, there is something of a problem. Granted, people like Mr. Brownstein see newer non-White immigrants to the United States as having different, but interdependent, interests then "White America," but they don't have the ear of Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson's audiences. And they don't appear to have a plan to gain it. Imagining what would happen "if instead of trying to convince older white Americans that younger nonwhite Americans are displacing them, political leaders from both parties emphasized the growing interdependence between these two groups," is pretty much a concession that Mr. Brownstein and company have no means of emphasizing this themselves.

And that's really the problem. The ideas that Mr. Brownstein and those like him have put forward are reaching the ears of others only after being filtered by people who wish to use those ideas for their own political ends. And so it doesn't matter if the theory of demographic change is one of interdependent populations having an ability to enjoy prosperity together. What matters is the United States has never been a unified political body; and visual differences between groups have typically been the dividing lines. Complaining about being misrepresented won't change that. Finding a way to take the message directly to the people one wants to hear it just might.

A Gate Unkept

One of the common clichés one hears about the Internet is that it "Democratizes" things. It removes "gatekeepers" so that "anyone" can be a fill-in-the-blank. And one of the most common words to go into the blank space is "journalist." And this expansion of the ranks of "journalists" has lead to an expansion of the definition of "media" to pretty much anything that bills itself as some sort of news and/or commentary site.

Which is all fine and good, but it makes criticism of "the media" a lot like shooting fish in a barrel. One simply waits for someone to present something stupid, inaccurate or un-sourced, and the pounces. Which is my basic gripe with the NPR opinion piece: "Media coverage of monkeypox paints it as an African virus. That makes me mad". To be sure, I understand Dr. Nsofor's irritation. The stories people read about things can quickly shape opinions that then become very hard to dislodge or change, and it's common for people to seek to protect themselves from perceived threats by attaching those threats to people visibly different from themselves and avoiding (or attacking) those people. There's a reason why the World Health Organization considers naming diseases after the places where they're first identified to be a bad idea.

But I think that it's worthwhile to be at least somewhat selective in whom one anoints with the title of "the Media." Here's something that Dr. Nsofor took special exception to:

Here's how a story from the publication "Voice from Europe" described the first case of monkeypox in England in 2018: a "horrible Nigerian disease called monkeypox spreads in the United Kingdom for the first time."

I'd never heard of "Voice from Europe" before, but the construction of the headline left me with an immediate suspicion that the author was out to make a racist/nationalist point. So I decided to find the article in question. And couldn't. In fact, the only reference I could find to the article was the paper: "Lay media reporting of monkeypox in Nigeria," co-authored by Dr. Nsofor, which notes "A European headline (from the Voice of Europe) was ‘Horrible Nigerian disease called monkeypox spreads in the United Kingdom for the first time’." Aha. So now I had a more accurate rendering of the name. And that enabled me to find an article titled: "Voice of Europe closes down following Big Tech censorship and ad service ban," on a site call ReMix. Of itself ReMix says: "Remix offers news and commentary from Central Europe, the Visegrád countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia." And it doesn't take long to understand where it stands, politically. The headlines lay it out pretty well:

• Almost 2 gang rapes happen every single day in multicultural Germany, and cases more than doubled in just 3 years
• Turkish migrant dad chokes out teen football player and pulls knife on playing field named after George Floyd in Berlin
• Macron tries to silence non-conformist media in France, but French MSM only worries about lack of media pluralism in Hungary
• US: Google employee admits company manipulates search results in favor of Democrats in Project Veritas video
• Big Tech censorship: YouTube blocks Polish conservatives
• YouTube removes video criticizing LGBT ideology

In any event, ReMix had this to say about Voice of Europe in June of 2020.

In a farewell note posted to its website, Voice of Europe stated that it was ceasing operations due censorship on social media and a decision from ad networks to pull all ads from the site, leaving the publication unable to generate revenue to continue operations.

The publication was widely read for its reporting on Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis, but also covered topics related to the culture wars, economics, and other global news topics.

Despite having been "widely read" there is no immediate trace of the site today. It's apparently been taken down, and mostly lost to history. A direct search on the text of the headline brings up only two pages of Google search, with all of the results being either the paper or Dr. Nsofor's op-ed. Not even an archived copy of the original article pops up. Of course, that might be because I live in the United States, and Google presumes that I'm not interested in European Internet archives. (I also tried Bing, but Bing seems not to understand that placing text in quotes means "search for this string exactly as presented," and I wasn't going to sift through page after page of unrelated Monkeypox stories to maybe find what I was looking for.)

I don't disagree with Dr. Nsofor's impression that Voice of Europe's headline was designed to cast Africa in a bad light. But I do disagree with the good Doctor being willing to grant Voice of Europe a status equal to that of "BBC, the Independent, CNBC and ABC News" and labeling them all as simply "Western journalists." Sure the stock photo of a Black African covered in blisters from the disease doesn't help people understand that other people have it, and can spread it (albeit with some amount of difficulty). But a stereotypical choice of stock photo does not rise to the same level as intentionally attempting to create a link in people's minds between Nigeria and Monkeypox. It doesn't count as the "echo" that Dr. Nsofor says it is. Voice of Europe set out to create a "Blame Africa" message. As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem with using a few stock photos of infected Africans in Europe and the United States is that it likely doesn't give an accurate expectation of what people should expect to see, should they somehow encounter someone with Monkeypox.

"Colonialism" is a convenient villain, but "thoughtlessness" is a more likely culprit in many cases. And one worth calling people out for. Not that it's likely to do any more good. The media is drawn to drama; and people who are suffering from severe, untreated cases of the pox make for more dramatic images than people whose infections are under control. A few angry op-eds is not going to change that. So rather than a passive-aggressive missive on racism in the media, I suspect that a crash course on medical media literacy would be more helpful. But anger drives more clicks. (Guilty as charged.)

Morning Bloom

A rose, after an overnight rainfall.