White Genocide, Eurabia and Other White Supremacist Nonsense
9 Comments Posted by
Emil Karlsson on January 11, 2014
In relation to white supremacist propaganda and race trolls, this website has taken on and refuted (among other things) misuses of heritability, abuses of dated and flawed adoption studies from the 1970s, low sampling density masquerading as discrete racial categories in PCA graphs and frivolous claims about how ethnic diversity in a society is somehow a cause of psychosis and cancer. Yet, some of the core claims of white supremacists has not yet been covered. So without further ado, it is time to drive the stake into the heart of a couple of white supremacy conspiracy theories and errors: white genocide, Eurabia and the failure to understand socio-economic confounders.
Demographic change over time due to population migration is not the same as the intentional physical extermination of entire groups of people. The notion that there is a relative epidemic of black-on-white murders in the United States is based on a failure to normalized for base rates and differential encounter rates. Most of the observed over-representation of African-Americans in crime statistics can be explained by various socio-economic factors and related factors. The Eurabia conspiracy theory fails to understand basic math and also makes a number of false assumptions about fertility rates. Finally, anti-racism is not a secret code word for anti-white because anti-racists tackle many other constellations of racism, such as oppression of the Dalits in India and the Burakumin and Koreans in Japan.
Demographic change over time is not the same thing as genocide
The basic idea behind the flawed notion of “white genocide” is the notion that population demographic changes over decades (caused by e. g. different populations moving and interbreeding) constitutes an actual genocide. However, this does not actually fall under the definition of genocide.
Although there are several definitions of genocide with slight differences, here is the
genocide definition provided by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) adopted by the UN:
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (article 2) defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … “, including:
– Killing members of the group;
– Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
– Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
– Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
– Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
A similar
definition of genocide was adopted by the International Criminal Court:
Article 6
Genocide
For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Does changes in population demographics over time due to movement of people and interbreeding constitute:
- …an intention to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group? No.
- …the killing of members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group? No.
- …causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group? No.
- …inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part? No.
- …a way to prevent births within a national, ethnical, racial or religious group? No.
- …a way to forcibly transfer children? No.
Thus, based on generally accepted definitions of genocide, notions of “white genocide” based on changing population demographics over time and interbreeding are demonstrably false.
In an ironic twist, complaints that a “white genocide” is occurring represents a common denialist tactic known as playing the martyr card. People who promote other kinds of pseudoscience like alternative medicine or crank claims about physics often compare themselves with Galileo and ensure their followers that the only reason they are being criticized is because modern science feels threatened by new ideas rather than the more plausible reason that they are promoting nonsense.
White supremacists fail to control for base rates and differential encounter rates
Another component to the myth of white genocide is the notion that there is an epidemic of black-on-white homicide in the United States. This is usually advanced by raw data comparisons on statistics from the U.S Department of Justice or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, a naive raw data comparison is a notorious example of statistical illiteracy. A simplified example may help to bring this point home: imagine that a raw data comparison between right-handed and left-handed people showed that there were more right-handed murderers than left-handed ones. What conclusions could you draw about the connection between being right-handed and being a murderer? Absolutely nothing, as you have to perform the correct data normalizations. In this case, you have to control for the size of the two groups of right-handed and left-handed people. Are there more murders by right-handed people because right-handed people are more prone to murders or because there are just so many more right-handed people than left-handed people? In other words, the correct comparisons are between frequencies, not absolute figures.
The factors that white supremacists who use the “black-on-white homicide epidemic” trope fail to control for are:
- (1) differences in base rates: because of socio-economic factors (such as crowded housing, poverty density, population density, income, levels of urbanization, unemployment rates, deprivations of community resources and family disruptions), African-Americans are overrepresented in crime statistics. When comparison black-on-white homicide and white-on-black homicide, base rates is a confounder (cf. handedness above).
- (2) differential encounter rates. Whites are more likely to encounter other whites, whereas African-Americans are not more likely to encounter other African-Americans. Thus, the differential encounter rates also needs to be controlled for so that the comparison is between apples and apples.
Once you control for these two factors, the black-on-white homicide rates are more or less what you would expect if there was no relationship between ethnicity and homicide. In other words, the second pillar of the white genocide myth collapses.
Anti-Racism is not a Marxist anti-White plot
People opposing racism comes from many different political positions: leftists, libertarians, independent etc. and it is not restricted to being about discrimination against African-American. For instance, anti-racist activist Tim Wise has
talked about the discrimination against the Dalits in India or the Burakumin and Koreans in Japan.
Eurabia: a conspiracy theory based on bad math and faulty assumptions about fertility rates
The Eurabia conspiracy theory is based on the flawed notion that Arabic countries are plotting to transforming Europe into an Islamic republic by sending a deluge of Muslim immigrants with enormously high fertility rates compared with Europeans. This is typically accompanied by estimates like “in X decades, country Y will be majority Muslim” or something similar. However, the Eurabia conspiracy theory is based on: (1) bad calculations, (2) failure to understand that fertility rates in Arabic countries differ substantially (and is actually falling!) and (3) that the fertility rates in immigrant populations converge on the fertility rates of the population at large.
Here is an
informative graph from Pew Research:
A
CNN interview with Pew Researcher Brian Grim explains the problem with the Eurabia conspiracy theory:
“There has been a lot of speculation about the growth of the Muslim population around the world, and many of those who speculate don’t have good data,” said Brian Grim, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum.
For example, the report undermines the notion that Europe is heading toward having any country with a Muslim majority. The continent will be about 8 percent Muslim in 2030, it projects.
“The data that we have isn’t pointing in the direction of ‘Eurabia’ at all,” Grim said.
“The Muslim population is growing and slowing. Instead of a runaway train, it’s trending with the general global population,” he said.
Cooperman [another Pew researcher – E. K. note] hopes that information will help make for more intelligent discussions, he said: “In the midst of heated debate and speculation, we think that solid, reliable, empirical estimates are valuable.”
I think it is true that solid empirical estimates are good, but pseudoscientific propaganda is very powerful. If irrational people accepted rational arguments, there would be no irrational people.
White Genocide, Eurabia and Other White Supremacist Nonsense