Thomas Henricks :
On May 14, an 18-year-old gunman shot 13 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Ten of them died. The gunman, who had driven 200 miles to the crime scene, was white. The people he killed, chosen because of their race, were Black.
Common to these assaults is the belief that certain groups in society, typically those who have been dominant, are now threatened by other groups, marked out as different on terms of race, religion, nationality, and ethnicity. These “others,” some claim, are replacing the dominant group and its way of life through immigration, intermarriage, integration of workplaces and schools, and diverse cultural expressions. Just not shifts in population, these changes result from the machinations of politically affiliated groups, who feel their own power will expand through the rise of previously disenfranchised groups. Such are the tenets of replacement theory.
Others can write about the connection of replacement theory to the white supremacy movement. Instead, this essay reminds readers about the role of “outsiders” and “foreigners” in the building of this nation. Be clear: We are a nation of immigrants who have long dealt with markings of “us” and “them.” Saying this does not minimize the challenges of current times. If history teaches anything, it is that people in every generation must be vigilant regarding the dangers of intergroup conflict and oppression.
Ponder also the treatment of Africans, so many brought here in chains beginning in 1619. Four centuries bear witness to the struggles of an enslaved people for freedom, economic stability, and public respect. We who are older remember well that long-segregated world with its divisions, insults, threats, and curtailments. Would anyone claim that African-Americans today have achieved parity with whites?
Add to this the discrimination faced by Asian-Americans. Laws banned Chinese immigrants in 1882, and for the next 60 years! Others from Asia found themselves excluded through a series of laws and policies between 1907 and 1934. Japanese-Americans, declared an “enemy race” during World War II, were taken from their homes on the West Coast and interned in concentration camps.
Nearly half of all US immigration is now from the Western Hemisphere. People from Mexico in particular (about 25 percent of the total immigrant population) have been encouraged to cross those borders when labor was in short supply, and then removed forcibly, at various times in our history. Many of them are part of the more than 10 million unauthorized immigrants currently living here. Because they work at employment that most natives choose to avoid, it is difficult to imagine, as a popular film has it, “a day without Mexicans.”
Many Americans have ancestors who came here fairly recently-that is, during the great wave of European immigration at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. (This author includes himself in that mix.) How odd then for such people to denounce others for being “foreign” or “un-American”? Especially curious is the rejection of African-Americans (whose ancestry here is commonly older than that of most whites and who, like most other Americans, express mixtures of various populations).
It is the essence of minority status to be “put down” (subordination) and “put back” (marginalization). People who resist subordination commonly are asked to leave. What minority group has not had its right to citizenship challenged, has not been told to “go back to where you came from”? Apart from the Native Americans, who came thousands of years ago, the rest of us would say that our ancestors once came from “there.” Now we come from “here.”
Building an Inclusive America
It is not helpful to demonize any group of people, such as the set of white Americans who fear that demographic and social changes are turning “us” into “them.” Quite the opposite, the challenge is to build an inclusive America that supports people of every description and welcomes their contributions to the common good.
Reformation of individual psychology is not enough. People must acknowledge who they have been and what they can become, collectively. Such is Liberty’s challenge.
(Thomas Henricks, PhD is Danieley Professor of Sociology and Distinguished University Professor at Elon University).
