Black People Want the Hate to Stop. But It Is Only Getting Worse.

I keep telling my Black friends that it’s just going to get worse.

I keep telling them that some White men, fed a steady diet of nonsense and statistics about the state of Whiteness in the United States, will only grow more convinced that people of color are the enemy. Which means the sort of violence that we saw over the weekend at a supermarket in Buffalo will get worse.

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It is easy to draw a straight line between the hateful actions of white supremacists and popular right-wing conservatives. It seems that neither group can imagine a world where all people are equal. In their minds, one group must be on top. And the fear of losing the top spot has mutated into an ideology known as the great replacement theory. Which, in short, argues that Black and brown people will one day overtake White people in number and subject them to all the evils that Whites have long inflicted on people who are not White. And this fear-fueled, binary thinking will continue to bring harm to people of color.

The same sort of thinking about race and birthrates now dominates the conservative Supreme Court. The leaked draft opinion isn’t about protecting babies. It is about protecting Whiteness. Specifically, White babies. Many others have pointed out that if Republicans really cared about babies and children, they’d help provide help for poor infants, child care, health care, better funding for schools, and the like. But their concern is not about babies and children in general — only certain babies. The Supreme Court draft decision is about protecting what conservatives believe is a diminishing demographic and their most valuable resource: White people.

Some will accuse me here of indulging in conspiracy theories — or of believing the worst in people. But, as a Black American living in a racist society, I don’t find it difficult to believe in the worst in people. {snip}

The real agenda here is to boost White birthrates, because among the biggest fears of conservatives is the fear of being outnumbered. {snip}

Critical race theory frightens conservatives for a related reason. They imagine that, if schools teach the real American history, White people will be as hated and reviled as the other races in this country. {snip}

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