The United States woke up in mourning after the massacre perpetrated this weekend by a white man who murdered 10 African Americans and left scores of others injured in Buffalo, New York State.
Authorities have begun investigating the case as a racial crime. Based, of course, on the fact that the victims were all people of color, but also on the fact that Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old killer after the massacre, apparently left a manifesto published in which he decanted his intentions.
(Also read: ‘racially motivated’ shooting leaves 10 dead in a US supermarket)
In that manifesto, Gendron talks about the “Great Replacement” theory, an idea that has been dormant for decades in ultra-nationalist and far-right sectors, but has begun to become more popular in recent years.
The heart of the idea behind the Great Replacement is that white americans are being replaced or replaced by people of color who immigrate to the US and who have higher birth rates.
Additionally, these ultra-radical sectors see it as a plan by certain elites – the Democrats – who seek to use the immigration of people of color – including Latinos – to “steal” political and economic power from Anglo-Saxon whites.
(You may be interested in: US shootings: what is known about the attacks in Buffalo and Los Angeles?)
Although the Great Replacement has its origins in some books written by French nationalists at the beginning of the last century, its contemporary use is attributed to a book written in 2001 by the Frenchman Renaud Camus entitled precisely ‘The Great Replacement’.
Although its popularity had been limited to a very extreme sector of the right and anti-Semitism, it gained currency with the anti-immigration movements of the last decade and a voice with the arrival of Donald Trump to the US presidency.
In fact, it has become almost a recurring mention from well-known Republican and conservative voices in the country like Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and writer and commentator Ann Coulter.
Carlson, according to a recent New York Times study, has made at least 400 allusions to the theory since 2016.
“People from the third world are migrating to the US to replace the current electorate and dilute the political power of those who live here“said the presenter in April of last year after warning that people like President Joe Biden stimulated immigration because they wanted to change the racial composition of the country and usurp the power of people whose ancestors founded the country.
(Also: One dead, five injured in church shooting near Los Angeles)
What there is is fear of the idea that whites will soon cease to be the majority
Jeanine Pirro, another Fox host, argued in 2019 that liberals were pushing immigration to take over the US and replace its citizens with illegals who would vote Democratic.
None, of course, have promoted the use of violence.
But as Adolphus Belk, a political science professor at Winthrop University, says, many extremists are reading it that way.
“Behind this, what there is is fear of the idea that whites will soon cease to be the majority to be part of a plurality. But the extremists see this as a call for a ‘holy war’ where they believe they have a responsibility to defend their culture, their political power and their people at any cost. In some cases eliminating who they see as the enemy,” says Belk.
The case of New York is not the first with this worrying trend. In 2019, another white man killed 23 people, mostly Hispanics, in El Paso, Texas.
Likewise, the murder of 9 people of color in South Carolina in 2015 and another 11 people in a synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018, were classified as racially motivated hate crimes.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
Correspondent of THE TIME
Washington
@sergom68
More news
Killer who broadcast US shooting had more attacks planned
Shooting in the United States: pastor hit the aggressor with a chair
Fentanyl and firearms cause records of deaths in the United States
#Buffalo #shooting #conspiracy #theory #motivated #attacker