Humans are hardwired to tell themselves whatever is most comforting. Our capacity for seeing what we would wish to see, like self-pity, is unique to our species.
Mythmaking has always formed a substantial thread of our existence. The Mayans sacrificed babies for favorable weather. Commonplace was the celebration of such monstrous behavior.
Myths and falsehoods are dangerous. One such trope led a young man over the weekend to pump rounds into the flesh of 22 people. All because of his belief of an “invasion” which he believed threatened to deepen his own personal tumult.
On Saturday, a deranged man, barely old enough to drink, allegedly stalked a shopping center in El Paso, Texas. He ripped bullets through the bodies of 22 people—killing them. He also maimed, and mentally corrupted, another two dozen. Another episode of grotesque American bloodsport.
What pushed a young man, and citizen of history’s most prosperous society, to travel nine hours, and calculate a horrendous arithmetic amongst people he had never met?
In a manifesto widely attributed to the shooter—“manifesto” is narcissist-speak for an unhinged indulgent ramble—the author claimed lead role in a fantasy crusade against the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Of course, since the shooting both sides have bloviated and bloated pixel and paper to cajole their choir. It’s President Trump’s fault, according to Democrats. Mental illness, violent video games, claim Republicans.
Perhaps this shooter was inspired by the same trope that animates young men to scream: “Jews will not replace us!” The same nonsense which witnessed a white supremacist run his Dodge through a crowd of protestors at Charlottesville, killing one.
Perhaps, what motivated him was another trope in need of dilution long before he started launching bullets at flesh.
That myth? Whites will be the minority in America by 2049, at the latest.
According to the Census Bureau, sometime in the 2040s, white Americans (currently 62 percent) will no longer form the majority. Since that revelation in 2008, progressives have plundered that incendiary statistic as proof of their coming and irreversible dominance. Your time is up, whitey.
It is remarkable. In 1980, America was 80 percent white. It is significant. Democrats are almost wholly dependent on a burgeoning nonwhite vote.
That statistic makes many people uncomfortable, not just those who frequent the darker contours of the grievance web.
Researchers found three-quarters of Republicans expressed anger or anxiety at the prospect of a majority-minority America. Remarkably, nearly half of white Democrats felt the same way. (I should point out: there is a stark difference between the average Democratic voter and the hard-left progressive base.)
Researchers found that some feared a return through reversal of the horrors in a country once grossly tainted by its racial tumult.
Yet many progressives laud a future in which political debate ceases to be relevant. Fewer white people means fewer Republicans, frays the trope.
Some myths are dangerous. And believing only what one wants to hear is more corrosive yet. The same census also revealed that whites will make up 68.5 percent of the U.S. population even in 2060.
How? Well, many of those “nonwhites” are actually white. If we call anyone with white blood “white,” like the sizeable white Hispanic population—the white share is actually going up.
By 2060, with a more sensible definition of “white,” little changes from today. Hispanic whites would make a quarter, and non-Hispanic whites would touch 44 percent.
Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, has said such a definition would mean America remained a majority-white nation indefinitely. Which is bad news for the melanin-obsessed modern progressive.
Remember (or perhaps not) Italians were once “nonwhite.” The Irish, too. Not even Richard Spencer would argue that either group is otherwise.
Another census work befuddles itself quite miraculously.
On one hand, it states that the non-Hispanic white population is set to shrink from 199 million next year, to 179 million by 2060. Abutting the same paragraph: The white-alone population, regardless of Hispanic origin, is projected to grow from about 253 million to 275 million over the same period.
So, America is getting less white. Or less white-white. Or America is getting whiter.
It is all about definition, obviously. The current interpretation of “white” adheres to a strange and brutalist stricture, like the one-drop rule of old.
Another study showed that Balkanized thinking and anxiety reduced when applied to a more inclusive definition of “white.”
According to the census, comedian Louis C.K., who has a Mexican-Hungarian father, is nonwhite. Senator Ted Cruz’s two daughters, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, are, too.
It is this folly that motors the corrosive identity politics we endure daily. And it billows the flames of race-obsessed progressives, and their alt-right kissing-cousins. After all, there is not a cigarette paper between their lurid worldviews—just a primitive skin chart denoting who is bad and who is brethren.
Some myths are comforting. And one can see why. If a progressive, why bother trying to win the battle of ideas when, in just a few decades, Republicans will dissolve into permanent irrelevance?
Some myths are monstrous. And perhaps dispelling one of the greatest and most corrosive of them would go some way to salving a nation already at war with itself.
And, who knows, we could perhaps dispense with the tiresome discussion concerning the melanin content of an American’s skin.
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