Let's Replace White People!

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Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m white. Blue eyes. Light hair. Fair skin prone to freckles and melanoma. Under no circumstances would I ever be mistaken for anything other than a white boy. Feel free to throw in some cultural stereotypes, too. Can’t dance. Frequently gawky. No chill. Whatever—those are just cheap bonuses, accentuating what everybody already knows anyway: white guy here.

I could complicate this slightly by noting that I am also Jewish, but that’s more of a hidden talent, like juggling or double-jointedness. No one knows unless you tell them, and until you tell them you’re white, and so it doesn’t really matter. To Chinatown fruit vendors and racist gas-station attendants in Indiana (real-world examples, people!), I’m white. And as you might’ve noticed lately—like, say, for the last 400-plus years?—folks like me are the problem.

But lately, of course, the problem has gotten worse. America’s fascists have taken power, vowing to turn back the clock on any policy or program that benefits, or even acknowledges, non-whites, non-Christians, non-males, and non-citizens¹. To be sure, I realize that Asians, Latinos, and Black people voted for that guy to be president in larger numbers than ever before, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Republican Party is fundamentally a movement of the white people, by the white people, and for the white people.

One of the ways that party and its leader have risen to dominance was by stoking fears of Replacement Theory, a conspiracy that says leftists (a.k.a. the enemy within) and foreigners (the enemy without?) are attempting to import enough non-whites, and I guess “interbreed” with white people, that the white population is diluted out of power. This is a crazy theory. No one is seriously trying to do this, because if the Left could be this organized and far-sighted, they wouldn’t be in the shitter they’re in today.

But it’s also a great theory. We should totally make it a reality. Let’s get rid of white people!

Now, now, calm down. I’m not talking about mass murder here. I know you’re dreaming of it—you’re good Americans, after all—but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. So messy! Also: I would like to be around to see how things turn out, okay?

Still, we need to get rid of white people, and the best way—the most elegant and practical approach—is to get rid of whiteness.

This is no simple task. Whiteness has been entrenched in this country for centuries; you don’t need a Ph.D. to argue that whiteness is one of the foundations, if not the foundation, of our nation. We can’t just wish it away.

What we need to do is to get white people to stop identifying as white. We need to get rid of whiteness. And to do that, we need to convince white people that whiteness is bad for white people.

Here I’m taking a page from Saint Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who famously argued that laws discriminating on the basis of sex weren’t just bad for women—they were bad for men, too. It’s a brilliant argument, and if it worked in 1975, it could work today, right? Right?!?

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The fatal flaw of whiteness is the same as its initial appeal: It denies difference. Go back a few centuries and imagine yourself as an amoral European man, and it makes sense. The world is opening up, and all you want to do is make shitloads of money and dominate the world so you can make even more money. Is that so wrong? Only problem is all these… other people: Africans, Asians, indigenous Americans. At best, they’re in your way; at worst, they’re actively competing with you. But you—you’re from a backward little island emerging from religious civil war, or from the malarial floodplains on the North Sea—and if you’re going to succeed, you’re going to need allies, because there just aren’t that many of you these days. To be fair, you loathe all the other Europeans as well, and pray for their downfall, but this is a global crisis, so you suck it up and say, “Okay, bros, you’re no longer Saxons and Welsh, Castillians and Lombards, Papists and Proddies. You’re white, and you’re white because God said so, and besides look at all these other people—please allow me to present to you some hideous woodcut caricatures of them—who aren’t white and who definitely want to rape your women and devour your babies. Do you want to see the woodcut again? So please be white with me, and we’ll make a lot of money together, too. Please? Did I mention that God said it should be this way, because He totally did. What, the Jews? No, I don’t like them either, but they could fund this whole enterprise. How about we let them in for now, and we’ll figure out some kind of final solution later? Okay, good. Deal?”

As you can see, it’s a very persuasive argument.

And yet it was, in the long run, very bad for the people it enwhitened. (Not as bad as it was for everyone else, of course.) Because while you can pretend there are no differences among people for years, even for centuries, this doesn’t change the fact that people are different. They come from different backgrounds, with different forces shaping their lives, different beliefs and values, different languages and foods. You can unite them with commonalities, and that’s certainly a strength. It’s the basis for all successful social movements. In fact, it’s the key—finding the single uniting factor while acknowledging, accepting, and working through difference. It’s why New York City is the best place on earth.

But whiteness—or whiteness as it’s practiced by American fascists today—requires suppressing difference entirely. Yes, you can be Catholic or one of the lesser forms of Protestantism; you can be Buddhist or Jewish or even Muslim. You can trace your ancestry back to whichever crappy corner of Europe you like, and even occasionally proudly eat and drink the cuisine of your forebears. (Just make sure it’s not too weird.) Hell, you can be Black or Asian or Latino or whatever. You can even be gay, though it definitely helps if you’re rich. All you have to do to be white, or to become white, is demonstrate absolute loyalty to the cause, to the leader. No matter that their policies may harm you and your family, no matter that if and when shit hits the fan, the desires of evangelical Protestant men with English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian roots will dominate. All you have to do to be white, to stay white, is subsume all that makes you you and choose an identity that denies any of those things.

This sucks. No one should have to do this, and no one really wants to do this. And no one is really capable of doing this. Human beings can’t help fighting among themselves, and they fight all the more bitterly when they think they’re all the same. (Winning means getting to define what the same means.) Diversity exists whether you recognize it or not. When the uniting force denies all internal differences, it becomes oppressive—it dooms itself to self-destruct.

And that’s the good news: Whiteness, and the architecture of fascism built atop it, can’t last. It will replace itself, but only after it destroys itself. The bad news is: This may take a while, and some of us can’t wait that long.

To that end, let’s find some practical ways to replace white people in the short term. The trick here is not so much to replace them physically as conceptually—to stop white people from thinking of themselves as white people—and I have an idea about how to achieve this: with forms.

You ever fill out a form? You ever applied for a job, filled out the Census, written down your medical history for the 17th time even though the doctor definitely has records of all this shit? Then you almost certainly had to list your race: Black, Asian, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan native, and of course White. (Hispanic or Latino we put to the side for reasons.) Some forms allow or encourage you to check multiple boxes, and some even have a Biracial or Multiracial box on its own. Forms are everywhere, and this approach to categorizing Americans has become standard.

My proposal: Let’s replace “White” with “Other.”

The goal here is not to stop tracking white people. We’ve got tons of data on them anyway. No, what we want is to end the quotidian possibility of self-identification, to require them to think about themselves not as a legitimate category but as belonging to the slop bucket—or perhaps the melting pot?—of Other. Because Other has no commonalities, no unifying factor other than non-belonging. It’s all difference. It’s the remainder, what’s left over from the indivisible. When all currently white people are required to check Other, maybe they will begin to think of themselves, and their place in society, with a bit more sophistication, and a little less binary dogma. The best way to replace white people is to get them to replace themselves.

Obviously, this ain’t gonna happen at the federal level in the near future. But at the state level? At the corporate level? With small businesses? This might stand a chance. Put it on a referendum—I’ll vote for it.

Alas, we’re still left with the Jewish question: Should we start tracking that on forms, too? Many people, after all, consider it an ethnic identity as much as, or more than, a religious one. Me, I say: Nope! We all need to have our little secrets, so please, let us yids keep this one. A secret identity always makes things more interesting, doesn’t it?

Notes

1. I’d throw “non-rich” in there, too.

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