I saw a clip about this on Alternet this morning, seriously concerned folks talking about the disappearance of the French(!!!) and Latvians and other “traditional” European stocks, all because white folks (we may hate the French, but they’re white, right?) aren’t reproducing enough. You can use other verbs, too. So I googled Demographic Winter, and, sure enough, there they are, serious white folks all gloomy eyed about the disappearance of their kind.

Full disclosure: I come out of Irish/Scotch/English/French/German stock, and am considered by most of the folks to be pretty darn white. Now my father insists he has a grandmother or great-grandmother who is not only “full Cherokee” but a “Cherokee princess,” but I have read this is a common mythic holding of many descendants of the Irish who passed through Appalachia. Nevertheless, my grandfather did have a certain cut to his nose and cheekbones that suggested that there may have been some truth to this particular mythic holding.

Fuller disclosure: This does have it’s advantages, but there are problems as well. For one thing, on occasion, even one who came to consciousness in the 1960’s with the construction of “current events” notebook on the civil rights movement which fully described the monstrous effects of a racist police state and, hence, forswore judgment of anything on a racial basis, even one such as that can find oneself in a group of just white folks, particularly white men, and the racial epithets come out and, if one objects to their use, one is likely to find that it is not just a joke to some of those present — they are serious in their racism. I have ended up disassociating myself with several folks, including some very talented musical connections, for precisely that reason–they were more committed to their racism than to music.

I’d heard there were groups of religious /pseudo-religious white folks who were bent on repopulating America with European folks by the simple act of reproducing a lot. And I did recently knock on the door of a family with a list of members by the door that numbered fourteen, counting the parents. When I mentioned this, the patriarch of the group, to whom I was speaking, said, yes, there were a lot of children in their and that “every one was a blessing” in such a way that told me, yup, I’d met one of them.

Isn’t the world a large and interesting place? Will it cease to be so if we run out of pure white folks?

–stan