Now that the Supreme Court is on the verge of moving our Republic closer to Gilead and performing a D&C on abortion rights, the push for more white babies cannot be far behind. TV evangelists, conservative commentators, and white nationalists cannot help but see the anticipated SCOTUS decision as a signal to start a movement to try and stop the inevitable browning of America. Before you think I am paranoid or gone off the deep end, there is historical primacy for white fear of losing purity and their majority. The “one-drop rule” was made legal in the United States in the 20th-century buttressing previous years of violence to separate the races. The whole idea of the Southern Belle was to elevate southern white women to a stature of perceived perfection afforded them on the backs of the enslaved. This elevation to the pedestal was protection from marauding black sexuality with the KKK as saviors as depicted in the racist film Birth of a Nation.
There is a dichotomy between the push to use all childbearing-aged women as mindless incubators and the proliferation of guns killing young black and brown boys and girls in cities. The question that needs to be asked is; is the anti-abortion crowd (with no exceptions) pro fetus or pro-life? The strategy of more white babies is not unique. Former Fox News host John Gibson started the fear campaign over 20 years ago in recent history. Gibson made a plea to the mainly white, mainly conservative viewers of Fox News, “[d]o your duty. Make more babies,” after talking about a recently released report that nearly half of all children under the age of five in the United States are minorities. Gibson then added: “You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic.” Gibson later repeated: “To put it bluntly, we need more babies,” he said.
Gibson was essentially pushing for a white baby war to ward off the inevitable future. As America gets browner and blacker, things like Muslim bans, southern border hysteria, and Afro/Latino countries disparaged as “sh*thole countries” will only be enough for the remaining frightened bigots and racists; how then, do they stop the “other?” Republicans in Congress and statehouses are willing to toss out democracy for fascism to save the status quo. They think taking away women’s rights and restricting voting for people of color coupled with xenophobic immigration laws will make America whiter again.
As an aside, it occurs to me that this also explains the sudden preoccupation with Critical Race Theory and the purposeful misinformation being used as political propaganda. Republicans accuse Democrats of taking away freedom(s) while telling the rest of us; masks traumatize our kids, not gun violence. They are finding ways to exacerbate racial animus. At the same time, the rights of their wives, daughters, and sisters are thrown into the proposed book-burning bonfires. The animus of ignorance is evidenced by those that want to engulf books in those flames about the racial strife in America. Is the fear that America will look less like the utopia of Friends and more like A Million Little Things?
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