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The Great Replacement: New York City

This is the third in a series about the continuing disappearance of whites from American cities (see our earlier entries for Birmingham and Washington, D.C.). Many people still pretend that The Great Replacement is a myth or a conspiracy theory, but the graphs that accompany each article in this series prove them wrong. Every city has a different story but all have seen a dramatic replacement of whites by minorities.

It’s hard to believe that until 1980, New York City was overwhelmingly white — and it was traditionally conservative. Even during the Ellis Island period, it was a white city except for black Harlem. After the 1965 Immigration Act, the city turned multiracial and declined. Though it recovered in the 1990s and early 21st century, the white population is still declining, and the city is now a bastion of the far left.

New York started as New Amsterdam, a Dutch settlement seized by the English and renamed in 1664. The British controlled it for the entire period of the Revolutionary War; it was a loyalist stronghold. New York abstained in the critical independence vote on July 2, 1776. After the war, it was the headquarters for Andrew Hamilton and High Federalism. During the Civil War, many New Yorkers, especially working-class whites, sympathized with the Confederacy. Many blacks fled the city after the 1863 Draft Riots, and by 1865, there were fewer than 10,000 blacks left.

More than 12 million immigrants came through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954. Almost all were white, though many were Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, or otherwise different from the Northern Europeans who founded the United States. This stopped after the 1924 Immigration Act, championed by Representative Albert Johnson. “It has become necessary that the United States cease to become an asylum,” he said. Today, the official House of Representatives website calls the bill a “legislative expression of the xenophobia, particularly towards eastern and southern European immigrants, that swept America in the decade of the 1920s.”

Of course, it wasn’t just migration from white nations that worried Americans. In 1910, central Harlem was about 10 percent black. By 1930, it was 70 percent black. By 1950, it was about 98 percent black, and Harlem was the center of American black cultural and intellectual life. It was also heavily leftist, with figures such as poet Langston Hughes and singer Paul Robeson supporting the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. In 1964, the Harlem race riot, which began after an off-duty police officer shot a black teenager, was the first major race riot of the decade.

However, Harlem was the exception, and the city stayed overwhelmingly white until after the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the country to non-white countries. President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill on (Statue of) Liberty Island, with Ellis Island visible across the water. He claimed the bill would “strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.” It didn’t.

After 1965, the Hispanic population grew and became more diverse. In the 1970s, Puerto Ricans were about 70 percent of Hispanics in the city, but now they are now less than a third. NYC’s Asian population has increased by 30 percent between 2000 and 2010.

When New York first started becoming heavily non-white, it entered a time of troubles, immortalized in films like 1976’s Taxi Driver. Many Americans remember the “Bronx is burning” incident, when a fire blazed just a few blocks away from Yankee Stadium during the World Series. Looting and violence during the 1977 power blackout showed that the city had almost no social capital. The filth and danger of 1970s became almost legendary. The 1992 AmRen article “The Late Great City of New York” paints a harrowing picture of the city at its worst.

But New York came back. Under mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michel Bloomberg, strict policing greatly reduced crime. Times Square, once a haven for peep shows and porn theatres, proudly hosts some of the most prestigious stores in the world. Scholar Heather MacDonald claimed in 2000 that the New York City Police Department was the “best urban police force” in the country. The city still has relatively low crime rates. Gentrification is transforming many neighborhoods, even Harlem.

Sadly, there’s trouble coming. Staten Island is the city’s one conservative and mostly white borough. Every other borough is majority non-white. Under far-left mayor Bill de Blasio, crime is increasing. Nonwhites have humiliated police by dumping water on them and vandalizing patrol cars. The coronavirus epidemic has hit New York state and city harder than any other region. When businesses shut down, burglars went to work.

New York city did not collapse when it lost its white majority. However, its revitalization was dependent on cutting the crime rate and stopping graffiti and public degeneracy. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has famously turned his back on the police. The city DA decided in 2018 to stop prosecuting subway turnstile hoppers, and in late 2019, there were unruly demonstrations calling for “No more cops” in the subway. Some of the old signs of collapse are back. Even the feared and hated squeegee men, whose elimination under Mayor Giuliani was widely seen as a crucial step back from the brink, have returned under the new mayor. Eliminating cash bail for many crimes means there are more criminals on the street.

These are changes that drive out the middle class, and for the first time in over a decade, the city is losing population (except for majority-white Staten Island.) Anyone who lived through New York City’s darkest days knows that civilization is fragile. Those days could come back.

The Despair of Being Mixed-Race

"It is not a virtue to have a 'multifaceted identity' — it is a burden."

I am a 27-year old mixed race man of German and Iranian heritage. My father was an all-American man from Ohio. He fell in love with my mother, who had fled Iran in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution. Iranians are often considered “white.” They assimilate very well into the United States, and value education and hard work. I never put “Asian” down for race when I’m filling out paperwork — especially since I’m half European anyway. For all my life, I’ve considered myself white.

My childhood was a happy one. We were an upper-middle class family: my mother studied accounting and became a savvy businesswoman, eventually becoming the CEO of a non-profit — a perfect example of an immigrant coming to America and becoming successful. She eventually made more money than my father, who was an electrical engineer. We lived near a tight-knit community of Iranians, and my grandmother — who played a big role in raising me — taught me bits and pieces of Farsi. At school I had two sets of friends, one white and one Iranian. Lunchtime seating arrangements were voluntarily segregated by — as is the way of things — and I would go back and forth between my two friend groups.

The problems with my split identity were clear by the time I was ten. Although I hung out with both groups, I was never really “one of them” in either case. The Iranian kids spoke fluent Farsi as I’d mumble in primitive, broken farsi mixed with English. The white kids were generally nice, but after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was always a certain distance between us. Not many ten-year olds know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims, I’m afraid.

As a teenager I spent a lot of time on the Internet, reading about politics, religion, and race. At the time, I spent a great deal of time thinking about religion. My mother wanted me to be a “good Muslim boy.” My father was rather apathetic about religion, but grew up in a Christian household. I was both torn between the two, and attracted to neither. What worried me was that both religions had one thing in common: each claimed that those who worship another God will be sent to hell. This scared me, but I eventually found the atheist community on YouTube, became a non-believer, and finally found peace and clarity on the topic of spirituality.

In the ensuing years, “identity politics” became more and more widely discussed. Initially, I scoffed at the whole thing. I was mixed and everything was fine. I took pride in my enlightened opinions. I touted my identity as multifaceted and complex. Race was irrelevant. I called myself liberal. I said I was immune to racism.

But none of that posturing does much to explain my experiences in school — or in my romantic life. Just as I switch back and forth between white and Iranian friends, I switch back and forth between white and Iranian girlfriends. I’ve had a fair number of flings and short term relationships, but never had a truly deep connection with any of them. None have had a background even similar to mine. Ideally I’d like to date a half-German half-Iranian woman, but statistically speaking, that’s not very likely. Moreover, most Iranian-American women my age want a fully white man. There are family pressures that further complicate things too. My maternal grandmother has asked me if I liked Iranian or American girls more . . . and it’s obvious what answer she is hoping for.

I was reminded of all of these issues recently, when I attended a friend’s wedding in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It was a wonderful place, but it reminded me of what I don’t have in America. Its culture is very traditional and family oriented. I stayed at the home of the groom’s parents, and they treated me like family. The sacredness undergirding the traditions and cultures was apparent and inspiring. Uzbekistan’s homogeneity makes for an extremely friendly environment: complete strangers in the street speak to each other as if they were close friends. There is a strong sense of nationalism and pride in everything, as if the whole country was one big family. I could sense a level of flow and unity that was unimaginable in the United States. I asked myself, “Why don’t I feel this in my own country?”

The answer lies in my “multifaceted and complex” identity. It is, in fact, excessively multifaceted and complex. It keeps me from having strong roots. Too much complexity only leads to despair. Where is my sense of family? Where is my sense of brotherhood? Who is my woman? Who is my God? In my case, the answers to these existential questions are so multifaceted that they end up being spread too thin, leaving me rudderless. To pretend that race does not impact identity is a falsehood. Race is real and the evidence speaks for itself. It is not a virtue to have a “multifaceted identity” — it is a burden. This makes miscegenation a crime, one that bestows the tragedy of a conflicted identity on those who follow.