Media coverage of Great Replacement Theory traces its roots through the Trump years to the Southern Strategy of the 1960s. But the legacy can be measured not in years but centuries. It’s the same lie told by every demagogue ever: Foreigners are coming and only I can save you — and your children! That angle comes straight from the Blood Libel against Jews, always a go-to for the worst among us.
It copies a pattern set in 1475, when then-new printing technology was used to mass produce the lie that Jews had tortured and murdered little Simon of Trent, which led to the actual torture, murder, and expulsion of local Jewish families. Simon would be venerated as a saint, his death made another Crucifixion, and exploited the same way.
The deliberate promotion of fear and hatred of black people goes back to a 17th-18th century shortage of slaves, who at the time might come from almost anywhere. There was an opportunity to solve the shortage by kidnapping Africans. To justify that, the concept of a racial hierarchy based on physical characteristics like skin color was invented. (Excellent sources of this history are Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told and Jill LePore’s These Truths.)
It was supported with bogus racial science and religion, promoted through print, political campaigns, and in churches — the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, was formed (in 1845) in protest over the abolition movement.
Previously, slavery had been commonplace, but by the late 18th-19th century had widely come to be seen as wrong and shameful. Slaveholders lived in ever greater terror of an uprising, or a moral reckoning. They responded with vicious self-justification, Including the casting of their own sins into black people as supposedly deserving their fate, and the enlistment of God in their unholy enterprise as its supposed designer.
Meanwhile many non-slaveholders were complicit, content to participate in the profits while trying not to think too hard about how those profits were made.
The cruelty, guilt, shame, and fear were passed down the generations, long past the Civil War, through Jim Crow, through the Southern Strategy, to today’s demagogic politicians and media profiteers: the direct moral descendants of slaveholders and pogromists.
Still exploiting, and causing, the sacrifice of innocents.
