Following the Civil War, false claims about threats to the “white race” influenced the rising eugenics movement, Ross explained. This racist outlook was captured in the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, by eugenicist Madison Grant, who was a personal friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s. Adolf Hitler was a fan of Grant’s and often quoted from his work.
One can trace a direct line from the early 20th-century eugenicists to the racist movements of today. As the Southern Poverty Law Center points out, the Pioneer Fund was started in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, with the express purpose of pursuing “race betterment” by promoting the genes of people “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” The SPLC notes, “The Pioneer Fund has supported many of the leading Anglo-American race scientists of the last several decades as well as anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).”
Trump’s choice for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “regularly” attends events hosted by FAIR, according to the SPLC, which has classified the organization as a hate group since 2007. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leader of Trump’s transition team, has served as counsel to FAIR’s legal arm, according to SPLC. “We can see how the Trump administration is only a stone’s throw from this kind of angsty rhetoric and the people who advance practical ‘solutions’ to these made-up problems,” said Ross.
According to Ross, fears of white genocide re-emerged “after World War II, with the decolonization process and war of liberation in Algeria, all the way through the liberation of Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, as well as during the anti-apartheid movement.”
Ross points to European intellectuals from the “European New Right” as playing a key role in “normalizing the notion of white genocide, arguing that an apartheid-style racial separation would preserve cultural integrity against ‘ethnocidal’ multi-culturalism and liberal democracy.”
Lowndes emphasized that in the U.S. context, fear-mongering over the supposed decline of the white race picked up steam after the civil rights and black freedom movements. “There was a return of language about what is going to happen to white people if black people get full rights.”
‘They are the actual racists’
Sophie Bjork-James, a researcher at Vanderbilt University with expertise in conservative social movements, told AlterNet that the meme of “white genocide” has become an “increasingly popular frame” over the past 10 years, because “it frames whites as victims in a very emotionally resonant way. It seems like it is getting a much broader audience, which is scary because that can make it seem like it’s a legitimate term. Some mainstream media outlets will use the term without referencing its white supremacist origins.”