'Great Replacement Theory' isn't about voting. It's about whiteness.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/24/great-replacement-theory-polling-whiteness/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/BLziP

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One organization that does try to gauge that belief is the Public Religion Research Institute. Its polls ask whether respondents agree with this statement: “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”

This measures whether people believe both that immigrants are “invaders” and that this is a threat to the country’s current cultural and ethnic makeup, which is to say, a threat to the country’s majority white status, with all the cultural implications that has.

“This is designed to get at the threat to White people,” Natalie Jackson, director of research at PRRI, told us. “The core of replacement theory is about whiteness.”

As Jackson noted, great replacement theory is centered on the idea that “White people, and very specifically White Christians, have always held the power in the United States.” Central to the theory, she said, is “fear of losing power to people of color coming in from other countries.”
There’s a reason why polling should capture how widespread public adherence truly is to that particular set of sentiments. If it’s growing increasingly widespread, this will illustrate with more clarity how grotesquely irresponsible it is that media figures and Republican politicians are playing footsie with various versions of great replacement theory.

Republicans and right wing media figures who push versions of this theory sanitize it by casting the threat posed by invading immigrants as primarily a political threat, not a racial one.
You can see this trick at play when Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) says that Democrats “want to change the makeup of the electorate." You can see it when Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance claims that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”

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