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A review by lukescalone
It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the Us by Alexander Laban Hinton
4.0
This book was received as an ARC by the publisher on NetGalley.
Alexander Laban Hinton’s It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US is an interesting text that fits in the same tradition as other warnings about authoritarianism in the United States. However, unlike the bulk of the literature that has been released on the topic during the Trump years, Hinton’s work comes at the topic from the angle of genocide against the US’s ethnic and religious minorities.
As an anthropologist who spent the bulk of his career dedicated to examining the Cambodian Genocide by the Khmer Rouge, Hinton is placed in an interesting position where he is able to talk about the theory and practice of genocide without falling back on facile comparisons to the Holocaust. Additionally, the way Hinton approaches the text is captivating—he frames his lessons through the lens of classes that he teaches at Rutgers University-Newark, especially through anthropological “teach-ins” of current events. The benefit of this approach is that he recognizes the thought processes of students, including the questions and comments they make, while developing his answers and food for further thought as direct responses to those questions.
Hinton ultimately argues that “yes,” genocide by (white) Americans against ethno-racial minorities can take place. At the same time, Hinton finds that genocide is not a foregone conclusion and can be avoided with some effort. In his view, manufacturing a genocide is much like creating a fire: it requires a specific setting, tinder, a spark, and favorable weather conditions. While the setting and tinder both exist and favorable weather may have existed during the Trump years, a spark was not particularly forthcoming. In the past year, I also believe that the weather has worsened, making the prospect of genocide much less likely. In small part, this is due to the passing of the Trump administration, but I think last year’s hot summer played an important role in this. The largest number of Americans ever now believe that Black Lives Matter is a force for good and increasing numbers of Americans are educating themselves and coming to recognize that systemic racism has deep roots in American history, culture, and society. In short, Americans are (very slowly) becoming more sympathetic to the position of black Americans, and the same is true of attitudes towards Asian Americans in the wake of this spring’s heightened hostility towards them.
While I am deeply familiar with the content at hand, I continue to find it fascinating that the language of atrocity or genocide prevention is used to justify genocide. This was as true in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when Native Americans were slaughtered and expelled in order to prevent violence against white settlers, as it is today when white power activists argue that a show of overwhelming force is necessary to prevent “white genocide,” or the demographic “replacement” of white Americans. For some reason, these numbskull white power activists cannot fathom that the rise of mixed-race children, for instance, is the product of white men and women falling in love with a partner of a different race, rather than some brainwashing conspiracy. The same is true of the State Department’s Diversity Visa Program, where European applicants receive a disproportionate number of available visas in comparison to the number of visas available (they submit around 30% of applications and receive some 40-50% of visas available). It should be obvious to anyone capable of both quantitative and qualitative analysis that “white genocide” is bullshit.
The bulk of this book’s content focuses on events of 2017 and 2018, when the United States’s white power movement was at its most recent high, although Hinton spends plenty of time discussing the history and precedents of the most recent wave. Hinton’s narrow temporal focus is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we receive a great deal of information about the propaganda campaigns and violent events perpetrated by white power activists in the years at hand. But, on the other, Hinton’s skimming of the events of 2019-20 means that his line to the present is a bit weak (although 2017 was only four years ago, it feels like a decade due to the ludicrous sequences of events and “flattening” of our perspectives of time due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Another weakness is that, although the “teach-in” angle makes the book approachable, it is easy to become overwhelmed with some of the anthropology/comparative genocide jargon that the author uses.
Nevertheless, It Can Happen Here is a welcome contribution to the literature about contemporary extreme-right and white power activism.
Alexander Laban Hinton’s It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US is an interesting text that fits in the same tradition as other warnings about authoritarianism in the United States. However, unlike the bulk of the literature that has been released on the topic during the Trump years, Hinton’s work comes at the topic from the angle of genocide against the US’s ethnic and religious minorities.
As an anthropologist who spent the bulk of his career dedicated to examining the Cambodian Genocide by the Khmer Rouge, Hinton is placed in an interesting position where he is able to talk about the theory and practice of genocide without falling back on facile comparisons to the Holocaust. Additionally, the way Hinton approaches the text is captivating—he frames his lessons through the lens of classes that he teaches at Rutgers University-Newark, especially through anthropological “teach-ins” of current events. The benefit of this approach is that he recognizes the thought processes of students, including the questions and comments they make, while developing his answers and food for further thought as direct responses to those questions.
Hinton ultimately argues that “yes,” genocide by (white) Americans against ethno-racial minorities can take place. At the same time, Hinton finds that genocide is not a foregone conclusion and can be avoided with some effort. In his view, manufacturing a genocide is much like creating a fire: it requires a specific setting, tinder, a spark, and favorable weather conditions. While the setting and tinder both exist and favorable weather may have existed during the Trump years, a spark was not particularly forthcoming. In the past year, I also believe that the weather has worsened, making the prospect of genocide much less likely. In small part, this is due to the passing of the Trump administration, but I think last year’s hot summer played an important role in this. The largest number of Americans ever now believe that Black Lives Matter is a force for good and increasing numbers of Americans are educating themselves and coming to recognize that systemic racism has deep roots in American history, culture, and society. In short, Americans are (very slowly) becoming more sympathetic to the position of black Americans, and the same is true of attitudes towards Asian Americans in the wake of this spring’s heightened hostility towards them.
While I am deeply familiar with the content at hand, I continue to find it fascinating that the language of atrocity or genocide prevention is used to justify genocide. This was as true in the eighteenth and nineteenth century when Native Americans were slaughtered and expelled in order to prevent violence against white settlers, as it is today when white power activists argue that a show of overwhelming force is necessary to prevent “white genocide,” or the demographic “replacement” of white Americans. For some reason, these numbskull white power activists cannot fathom that the rise of mixed-race children, for instance, is the product of white men and women falling in love with a partner of a different race, rather than some brainwashing conspiracy. The same is true of the State Department’s Diversity Visa Program, where European applicants receive a disproportionate number of available visas in comparison to the number of visas available (they submit around 30% of applications and receive some 40-50% of visas available). It should be obvious to anyone capable of both quantitative and qualitative analysis that “white genocide” is bullshit.
The bulk of this book’s content focuses on events of 2017 and 2018, when the United States’s white power movement was at its most recent high, although Hinton spends plenty of time discussing the history and precedents of the most recent wave. Hinton’s narrow temporal focus is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, we receive a great deal of information about the propaganda campaigns and violent events perpetrated by white power activists in the years at hand. But, on the other, Hinton’s skimming of the events of 2019-20 means that his line to the present is a bit weak (although 2017 was only four years ago, it feels like a decade due to the ludicrous sequences of events and “flattening” of our perspectives of time due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Another weakness is that, although the “teach-in” angle makes the book approachable, it is easy to become overwhelmed with some of the anthropology/comparative genocide jargon that the author uses.
Nevertheless, It Can Happen Here is a welcome contribution to the literature about contemporary extreme-right and white power activism.