There is no such thing as “the white race.”
(This is not to say white privilege isn’t real. White privilege is 100% real. White privilege is the purpose for which whiteness was invented in the 1600s in Virginia.)
Right now you may be thinking: “What?” And also, “what?"
But it’s true. Whiteness was made up. People “really are” (to the extent ethnicities are “real”) Polish or Italian or Irish (or of Polish/Italian/Irish ancestry), but the idea that all of those people are “white” is invention. Social convention.
Indeed, anyone familiar with the history of whiteness knows that people of those three backgrounds were not always considered “white.” Despite sometimes having blond or red hair, blue eyes, and/or extreme predisposition to sunburn.
Whiteness isn’t real. It’s a category of privilege and exclusion, set in opposition to those considered “Black.”
Now you may be saying, “Hold on. Blackness is a real thing. Black American culture is a real thing.”
Yes, it is! Just like our dominant Euro-American culture is a real thing. But there’s no inherent racial reality underneath either category. Whenever people have tried to draw firm lines between “races” it only highlights the arbitrariness.
In the U.S., thanks to racist “one drop rule” laws, anyone with anyone discernible sub-Saharan African ancestry is considered Black. Structural racism — laws and covenants and red-lines and segregation — enforced with violence have served to solidify this definition. (ETA: and people of mixed African and European ancestry tend to identify as Black as delver points out.)
But this definition is not universal. In South Africa (Elon Musk’s home country), there was a “Coloured” racial category distinct from “African” (formerly “Bantu”) under Apartheid. Coloured people could live in places Africans could not, and vice versa. There were all sorts of criteria we can recognize as ridiculous to determine who was who: you couldn’t be white if you stuck a pencil in your hair and it stayed put. (Which would exclude plenty of curly haired Europeans.)
Since then DNA analysis of Afrikaners — descendants of Dutch settlers and privileged as “Whites” under Apartheid — has shown they almost all have significant, if small, non-European ancestry. Whoops!
If the U.S. had decided to define “races” differently, anyone with any discernible European ancestry could be considered white. It’d be just as valid.
All this to say: (racist) people getting all up in their feelings about “The Great Replacement” or “the white race going extinct”…
x
Anytime you encounter this in the wild, just reply "so?"
The only reason anyone would care if white people "went extinct" (and, Christ, get a grip) would be if they thought white people were inherently superior for some reason. Make them say that with their whole chest.
— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) 2025-12-03T00:15:23.390Z
… are not just being racist, they are playing in their own racist made-up fantasy land where being Russian is the same as being Portuguese, and being Japanese is the same as being Māori. (We already know they’d think being Igbo is the same as being Tswana if they’d ever heard of either of those things.)
(Aside: what’s with that map? They’re making it look like Sweden is majority non-white.)
Also: 8% of 8 billion people is… [scrunches face, opens calculator app]... 640 million people. Nearly twice the population of the United States. We low-on-melanin-recent-ancestry-from-Europe folks are not “on the verge of extinction” unless we’re talking about global heating putting all of humanity at risk of extinction. Plus: we’re all the same species. We’re all human beings.
This ahistorical panic about “whites” going extinct likewise ignores that within the past couple centuries there have been genocides against people of ethnicities (sometimes) considered white, such as Jews, Armenians, and Ukrainians. And it was the same bigoted, racist, hateful “logic” now being used against so-called “people of color” — the animus that deems “them” different from “us” — that fueled those genocides.
