This weekend saw two bloody mass shooting rampages in America. The first was in El Paso, Texas, and the second was in Dayton, Ohio. Nearly 30 people were killed, with scores more injured.
In both cases, the shooters were young white males in their early 20’s.
What’s particularly shocking and terrifying is that Patrick Crusius, age 21, the El Paso shooter, posted a manifesto online just minutes prior to the shooting warning of a “Hispanic Takeover of Texas.” He also decried immigrants and dark-skinned people.
When I first saw this story on Saturday, I thought to myself, how absolutely freaking horrible this is. A 21-year old white kid from a middle class background felt the need to give up his life by going on a shooting rampage at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that was frequented by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
Crusius was so terrified that these Mexicans and Mexican-Americans posed an existential threat to he and the white American way of life that had to literally kill them. Boom. Bang. You’re dead.
It’s a terrifying thought, particularly when you try to get deep into his mind. I mean, you’re 21 dude, you should be going to keggers, chasing hot chicks, and throwing the football around. Or at least playing video games man. Just do something more productive than shooting up a bunch of hard-working Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.
But you know what? When I thought about it even more, and I moved to the next level of analysis. The United States is currently approximately 61% white, 18% Hispanic, 14% black, 6% Asian, and less than 1% native American.
However, by 2050, the US is projected to be nearly ⅓ Hispanic. That’s right, America will be over 30 % Hispanic. So in coming decades Hispanics will play a larger and larger role in the politics, economics, and civic life of America. That’s just a fact. It’s demographics. And no amount of wall-building, or anti-Hispanic hate spewing by President Trump, or just plain demagoguery, can alter this fact.
This has a lot of white people scared. And not just conservative white people.
Because in their most private moments, when white husbands and wives confide in each other late at night across their 400 thread-count Bed Bath and Beyond pillows, they talk about their innermost fear of the browning of America.
What will it mean for their white privilege? What will it mean for the 1950’s and 1960’s they grew up in? For Coca Cola, the 1969 Moon Launch, the Kennedy’s, and Marilyn Monroe? For the Yankees, Joe DiMaggio, James Dean, and all-American good times?
In short, what will it mean for White America?
These white families wonder, Is it an epitaph, this mass Hispanic migration? Or is it the start of something new, of a bolder, broader, more diverse, more inclusive America that represents all the peoples of the world, but particularly the marginalized, the colonized, and the walled off?
I, for one, hope it is the latter, and I truly believe in my heart that I’m right.
Screw Trump.
