We have identified two distinct contextual uses of the noun “displacement” ubiquitously employed by xenophobes, viz., racial and cultural. The Nation and the World are best familiar with the noun concerning the widespread and biased ideation that a perceived inferior or odious species will invade and overrun a superior and singularly appropriate race of inhabitants. This species of xenophobia is the toxic mantra of all Nationalist White Militias and, as well, the neurotic ideation of many reductive thinking, grievance-driven individuals.
It is this irrational bias that has universally resulted in the cruel repression of those members of humanity who, haplessly, were born with a skin color other than white, or perhaps into an ethnos ascribing to spiritual beliefs other than Christianity. Man’s execrable history of the resultant acts of tragic inhumanity has evinced itself in wars, religious Inquisition, and a shameful plenitude of misery and human tragedy.
World history has, in notable part, been written by the universal pandemic of toxic prejudice, empirically metastasized by the perpetuation of vile, unscientific, and mythical delusions of racial and ethnic superiority. The best-known, egregious examples in history include the Spanish Inquisition, the Hundred Years’ War, the pillaging and rape of South America by rapacious Spain and Portugal, the American Civil War, the Native American Removal Act (“The Trail of Tears”) the American CivilWar, the inhuman tragedy of American, negro chattel slavery, and the monstrous tragedy of thde Holocaust.
The outlandish contextual delusion of the xenophobic racial bigot is that the iconic American will be tragically replaced by non-Christian (heathen) members of an empirically inferior race. It is demonstrably ironic and mentally dissonant to note that the apocryphal Jesus, as theologically portrayed in the New Testament, is empirically and undeniably a dark-skinned, Palestinian Jew,
The attenuation and ideal elimination of the un-American and dehumanizing institution of racial prejudice, through constitutional provision, and Congressional legislation ensuring the moral enforcement of equal rights, notably voting, are accepted expressions of the avowed American tradition of equality; but to date, have not been sufficiently successful in the effectuation of such aspirational justice.
Our readings inform us of a somewhat divergent. xenophobic fear of “replacement,” analogously biased, albeit less profoundly anthropological. It is the neurotic fear of what we have chosen to label “cultural” replacement. This ethnocrastic-cultural ideation finds itself viable among certain citizens of historically established ancient cultures, such as France and England to the effect that immigrants from foreign cultures would pollute the established culture of such a nation, possessing such a valuable and singular culture, and disasterously incorporate their less desirable folkways. in replacement of the invaluable cultural ethos of the country to which they immigrated. We would term such extreme national prejudice “cultural ethnocentricism,” or, dynamically,” as cultural replacement.” By significant example, Albert Camus, the internationally celebrated French novelist and thinker, was a proponent of such cultural hybris.
The first category of delusional “replacement’ is, in reality,” a paranoid excuse for plain and simple racial hatred. The second, cultural replacement,” would have no rational context in a Nation of immigrants, espousing, “E Pluribus Unum.”
-p.
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