White Racists Are Scared of Being on the Receiving End of Their Own History

By Dr. Stacey Patton

As the country gets ready for another Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this coming Monday, be ready to hear the same ritual incantations and corporate platitudes. The famous “I Have a Dream” speech and quotes about love and unity will be dusted off, and a beloved radical prophet will be trimmed down to a feel-good slogan about “unity.”

And Donald Trump, who has already claimed that the Civil Rights Movement “hurt white people,” will almost certainly say something else equally ahistorical and unhinged to remind us that for a large segment of white America, Black freedom itself still registers as an injury.

Trump’s claim that civil rights harmed white folks comes from an old lie that when Black people gain rights, white people are in danger. In the racist imagination, equality and justice means payback. It’s the core fantasy of white grievance, and it has never died.

This is the same emotional logic that animates today’s panic about “white replacement,” “demographic collapse,” and “extinction.” It is the same logic that recently made a white billionaire like Elon Musk see a tweet predicting the future “slaughter” of white people and decide that this is a message worth amplifying to millions.

And to understand why that fantasy has such staying power, you have to go back to the first moment when it was invented as political theology in the United States. Come go back with me to the 1860s and 1870s.

Right after the Emancipation of four million enslaved Black people, white America started telling itself a story to survive its own conscience.

The story went like this . . .

Now that Black people are free, now that they can vote, now that they can sit in state legislatures and own land and walk without chains, they’re gonna get revenge against white folks. White politicians and newspapers across the South began warning of so-called “Negro domination.” The claim explicitly said that if formerly enslaved people had political power, they would rape white women, seize and burn property, murder former masters, and turn the South into a Black-run hellscape.

 

This fantasy was used to justify the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, mass terror, and the overthrow of Reconstruction governments. Mississippi’s 1875 “Redemption” campaign openly argued that white rule had to be violently restored to prevent Black “vengeance.” The slogan was essentially: we must rule, or they will destroy us.

A few decades later, that same paranoia was popularized for mass audiences by Thomas Dixon’s novels and D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed Black political power as a revenge plot against whites and depicted the Klan as heroic protectors preventing racial annihilation. This nightmarish fantasy was the emotional engine of Jim Crow and white supremacy’s way of laundering old guilt into fear and turning terror into self-defense.

Fast-forward to 2026.

The old post-slavery delusional horror story is being broadcast at scale. A white panic tweet circulates warning that when white people lose demographic and political dominance they will be “slaughtered” by the rest of the world. And when a fantasy that old and that violent finds its way onto the timeline of the richest algorithmic town crier on earth, it is no longer just fringe paranoia.

It’s the same script, Y’all. The global majority is coming! The barbarians are at the gate! White men must hold the line against the darker races or face extinction!

But Black folks don’t have a historical record of that kind of vengeance. Not because we lacked the power to imagine it, but because we chose something harder and more life-giving than becoming what had brutalized us.

In post-slavery America, Black folks organized our freedom around staying alive. Around finding each other. Around stitching families back together after they had been ripped apart by auction blocks and whipping posts. We organized our freedom around land, schools, churches, and whatever snatches of joy we would find. We organized our freedom around the fragile, audacious work of building a future in this racist capitalist system still trying to extract from our lives every which way it could.

The first acts of freedom were not to form lynch mobs in reverse. They were to make marriages legal that slavery had rendered illegal. To walk hundreds of miles looking for children sold South, for mothers stolen East, for husbands vanished into cotton states. We planted crops on exhausted land, pooled what little coins we had in mutual aid jars, raised schoolhouses out of ashes and scraps so we could teach one another, young and old, to read the very laws that had once declared us property and non-citizens of this country. We ran for office, voted, testified, organized, and believed against all evidence, that life in this American hellscape could be more than just survival.

The overwhelming historical record of Reconstruction is not one of vengeful bloodlust. It is a story of a people who had every legitimate reason to burn this fucking country to the ground, choosing instead to try to build a more egalitarian and just one. Those ancestors surrounded by former masters, by armed militias, by night riders and terror campaigns, still decided that their children deserved classrooms, not killing fields.

We were not sitting around dreaming of brutalizing white folks. We were trying to breathe. We were trying to love in a country that had taught itself to profit from our pain. We were trying to claim our names, our kin, our dignity, our right to exist without chains or terror. And that choice, to build rather than butcher, to live rather than mirror, stands as the most devastating rebuke to the lie that Black freedom has ever been about revenge.

So why the revenge fantasy? Why is it still circulating in 2026?

Because white Americans knew then as they do know, deep in the marrow of their bones, what they had done. They had raped, stole breast milk, tortured, sold children, hunted runaways, burned bodies, and turned punishment into public spectacle. They had built a whole moral universe in which power meant the right to violate and kill without consequence. When that power wobbled, they could not imagine that those who had endured it would choose anything but payback because payback is what they would have chosen.

And projection did the work of conscience because it was easier to fear the enslaved than to face the sadistic enslaver. The white belief in revenge was never about what Black people would do. It was about what whiteness had already done, and what it knew, on some level, it deserved to answer for.

White supremacy had taught that Black people were inherently violent, hypersexual, and incapable of self-restraint. And so if you truly believe a people are brutes by nature, then giving them rights looks like handing weapons to animals. The “Negro revenge” myth was the logical extension of racist pseudoscience and theology which argued that if Black people are dangerous when bound, then they must be monstrous when free.

The fantasy of impending slaughter was also a political tool. It mobilized poor whites to defend elite interests by convincing them that their real enemy was not the planter or industrial barons class screwing them over, but the newly freed neighbor up the road who didn’t have shit. Fear and the delusion of “Negro domination” stitched together a cross-class white identity. If you can convince a population that they are about to be exterminated, you can get them to accept almost any brutality as necessary self defense.

Elon Musk knows this history and so do the rest of those racist degenerates. And the lie of Black revenge collapses even in his own family’s backyard. It didn’t happen in South Africa after apartheid either.

Black South Africans did not organize their liberation around mass slaughter of whites. They did not set up concentration camps or round up Afrikaner children and march them into oceans. After centuries of land theft, pass laws, forced labor, police torture, and racial terror, the demand was not extermination of white people.

There was rage, grief, and justified fury. Absolutely! But the political project was truth, accountability, and survival and not racial annihilation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself stands as an indictment of the white revenge fantasy. A nation brutalized chose reckoning over retribution and a future over a bloodbath.

So when Musk amplifies a tweet fantasizing about the “slaughter” of white people, he is not warning of something history makes likely. He is projecting a worldview forged in domination and a belief that when power changes hands, cruelty must follow, because cruelty is how power has always been exercised by people who look like him.

And here’s the thing, non-white people have always been the global majority. Always. For millennia, most of the planet’s population lived in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East. And so if sheer numbers produced genocidal revenge, then Europeans would have been enslaved, branded, shipped, auctioned, and worked to death by the rest of the world long before Columbus’s ass ever got lost. There is no record of that. None!

There is no global archive of white children being sold off in markets across continents by non-whites. There’s no centuries-long industry of white wombs exploited for breeding by non-whites. No scientific disciplines built to prove white inferiority. No religious cosmology declaring whiteness a curse from the Christian god. No non-white transoceanic system whose wealth was wrung from the organized torture and commodification of European bodies. None!

In Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in the Middle East, Europeans were often a tiny minority ruling over vast non-white populations. And even there, the dominant pattern was not that the majority rose up and attempted to exterminate every white person. The dominant pattern was resistance aimed at sovereignty, at land, at self-determination, and at dignity. Anti-colonial movements did not build slave ships for white folks. They fought to get the fucking boot off their necks, not to become the boot.

Even the most violent revolutions in the global South were not organized around a fantasy of racial annihilation. They were organized around the end of occupation, the end of extraction, the end of imposed poverty. The goal was freedom, not mirror-image domination. That is the historical record the “slaughter” narrative has to erase in order to function.

What there is, instead among Europeans and their American descendants, is the reverse.

A small set of European empires conquering the hell out of the world, categorizing, and brutalizing the global majority, then inventing race as a theology to make the violence feel righteous. Slavery, colonialism, apartheid, Jim Crow, residential schools, forced sterilizations, land theft, famine by policy, segregation by law, lynching by ritual, and genocide by administration. That is the record. And the fear now being broadcast is not that these things might happen. It is the unspoken knowledge that they already did, and that those who benefited from them have never fully faced what they built and benefit from.

So when a white billionaire amplifies a post warning that white men will be “slaughtered” if they lose majority status, he is essentially saying that this is how power has worked in my imagination and the minds of people who look like me, therefore this is how it must work in everybody else’s. He is revealing a worldview in which the only alternative to supremacy is annihilation, where equality is reinterpreted as extinction, and where sharing the world feels indistinguishable from being hunted in it.

It is the same logic behind Donald Trump’s claim that the Civil Rights Movement “hurt” white people. Because in this framework, the expansion of rights to the formerly excluded is not justice but injury.

This is why the language is always so apocalyptic. “Replacement.” “Erasure.” “Genocide.” “Extinction.” It is never about policy, resource distribution, or democratic pluralism. It is about bodies and blood and a terror of falling from the top of a hierarchy that has been naturalized as the order of things. And because that hierarchy was built through racial violence, its collapse is imagined only through racial violence as well. Folks like Trump and Musk can’t picture a future of peaceful coexistence, but as a reverse plantation, a reverse lynch mob, and a reverse caste system. Not because history points there, but because their conscience does.

Be clear, this ain’t just about two racist men sharing an old tired trope. It’s a warning that says white folks are in danger, only unity under strongmen can save us, empathy is weakness, and democracy is a liability when it empowers the wrong people. It is the same emotional architecture that justified slave patrols, colonial militias, border walls, mass incarceration, and “law and order” crackdowns.

And notice the sleight of hand: the post claims that non-white people already “openly hate” white men, and that this hatred will metastasize into slaughter once power shifts. This collapses legitimate critique and racial justice into hostility and threat. To name white supremacy means hating white people. Demanding equity means we’re plotting revenge. To tell the truth about colonial violence is reframed as evidence of future cruelty. It is a rhetorical move designed to turn the record of harm into a pretext for continued dominance.

It’s so damn narcissistic when you really think about it. The assumption is that white men are the central actors in every imagined future. That the world’s primary question is what will happen to them. That the rest of humanity is essentially waiting in the wings, seething, rubbing their hands and counting the days until the script flips. This ignores the fact that most people on this planet are too busy out here surviving, building, loving as best they can, trying to raise children, and navigating systems that were never designed for them. The fantasy of universal, simmering anti-white vengeance flatters its believers by making them the emotional center of global history even in their own imagined downfall.

What Musk’s retweet ultimately shows is how deeply some white folks are trapped inside a zero-sum, domination-or-death model of human relations. They can’t, won’t imagine a world organized around shared power rather than hoarded power and control.

And it also shows that whiteness, when it feels itself decentering, reaches for the language of apocalypse rather than the language of repair and cooperation. Instead of asking what justice would look like, it asks who will be slaughtered.

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