The Interpreter

‘Overrun,’ ‘Outbred,’ ‘Replaced’: Why Ethnic Majorities Lash Out Over False Fears

CreditCreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

Ask a member of Sri Lanka’s dominant ethnic group why the country seems plagued by racial and religious strife, which is resurging in the wake of terrifying Islamist terrorist attacks, and you will often get the same answer.

We are fighting for our very survival, they’ll say. Though the Sinhalese, who are mostly Buddhist, make up three-quarters of the population and dominate politics, many see themselves as an embattled minority.

“They’re trying to destroy us — please tell someone in the government to take action,” Nelligala Dhammaratne, an influential young monk, recalled his Buddhist followers telling him just before riots broke out against the country’s Muslim minority last year.

Such fears are not unique to Sri Lanka. Around the world, dominant majorities increasingly see themselves as imperiled minorities.

That dynamic, sometimes known as a majority with a minority complex, is thought to be a major factor in the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, religious nationalism in Asia, and white nationalist terrorism in the United States and New Zealand.

The drivers of this trend are often subtler than Sri Lanka’s history of civil war, but can be just as consequential. Demographic change, global interconnectedness and even the rise of democracy can make majorities feel as if their dominance is endangered, leading to fear of — and sometimes attacks on — minorities whose very existence is perceived as an existential threat.

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There is a classic, cautionary case: Northern Ireland.

When communal tensions broke out into the outright fighting known as the Troubles in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland’s Protestants were numerically, politically and economically dominant. But they were a minority on the island as a whole, feeding a sense of demographic peril.

“The basic fear of Protestants in Northern Ireland is that they will be outbred by Roman Catholics,” Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s prime minister, said at the conflict’s outbreak. “It is as simple as that.”

Others said the Catholics were part of an international plot orchestrated from the Vatican.

Sri Lanka’s dynamics bear striking similarities. During its civil war, fought against separatists from the Tamil minority, Sinhalese felt outnumbered because of the large Tamil community in nearby India. This gave many Sinhalese a sense of siege, deepening us-versus-them divides that have outlasted the fighting.

More recently, Sinhalese Buddhists have seen Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority as vanguards of a global Muslim horde. Last year, Sinhalese fears that Muslims were seeking to outbreed and replace them culminated in riots.

Conspiracies about foreign influence or minority birthrates are often driven by fears of a much more real change: a loss of status. Modern democracy demands that minorities be granted equal rights and opportunities, which can feel like a threat to majorities’ traditional hold on power.

Fears of existential, sectarian conflict can be self-realizing.

In 1960s Northern Ireland, Catholic civil rights marches, modeled on those of the United States, felt to some Protestants like part of a wider Catholic plot to overrun them.

Hard-line Protestants, acting in what they saw as self-defense, whipped up violent counter-protests, culminating in riots on both sides. In response, more Catholics joined violent republican factions, seemingly validating Protestants’ worst fears. The tit-for-tat cycle continued for decades.

Long after the peace process, and with Catholics and Protestants now near evenly numbered, a shared perception of being the aggrieved, vulnerable minority persists. So does the cycle of violence.

Earlier this month, the journalist Lyra McKee was killed when a member of the New Irish Republican Army fired on the police. The group issued an apology, calling it a mistake.

CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

These dynamics are rising globally, and not only when one group is a majority nationally and a minority regionally.

Asked in 2013 about Buddhist violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority that would later culminate in genocide, Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, responded by warning darkly of “global Muslim power.”

“The fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, it’s on the side of the Buddhists as well,” she said.

Technological change may also play a role in these fears, which are driving a rise in religious nationalism across Asia. The world is more interconnected than it once was, and so feels a lot smaller. Word of any sectarian violence, no matter how far away, spreads rapidly on social media, feeding into perceptions of being threatened and outnumbered.

And the rise of democracy, long considered a force for ethnic harmony, may be provoking majority backlashes instead, according to research by Jack Snyder, a Columbia University political scientist.

As democracy became the global norm, dominant ethnic groups found themselves under growing pressure to share power with minorities. They even lost the occasional election.

Anxiety around losing status can manifest as fears, however unfounded, of becoming outnumbered. In countries with weak institutions, that can lead to violence, possibly contributing to the stall in democracy’s once-rapid spread.

“We often see this phenomenon at moments of increasing democratization and increasing enfranchisement,” said Kate Cronin-Furman, a University College London political scientist, citing “horrible violence against the Rohingya breaking out at a time of increased democratization in Burma.”

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Among supporters of Europe’s right-wing populist parties, it is common to hear fears uncannily similar to those expressed by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese.

Muslims, we hear at rallies for the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Front, will soon outnumber non-Muslims in Europe and impose Shariah law.

A leader of Vox, the Spanish far-right party that just won its first Parliamentary seats, warned at a September rally of an “Islamist invasion.” The party supports policies to increase Spanish birthrates.

Many whites welcome pluralism and multiculturalism. But for those who see the decline of white dominance as destabilizing, any increase in the minority population is perceived as an attack.

A growing body of research suggests that this sentiment may be driving significant political change in the United States, which is projected to become “majority minority” — with whites less than half of the population — by 2050.

A study by Maureen Craig of New York University and Jennifer Richeson of Yale University found that white Americans who so much as read a news article on these demographic changes will express “more negative attitudes toward Latinos, blacks, and Asian-Americans” and “more automatic pro-white/anti-minority bias.”

The effect disappeared when the authors told participants that whites were expected to remain politically and culturally dominant.

Other studies find that when white Americans learn about these demographic trends they become less supportive of immigration, affirmative action, welfare spending and health care spending, and more supportive of military spending and of President Trump.

In a 2016 poll, 57 percent of whites said “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

CreditEdu Bayer for The New York Times

Whites are subject to the same forces as any other demographic group. Fears of being outnumbered can lead to violence.

A rising wave of white-nationalist terrorists repeatedly cite “replacement theory,” in which Jews are said to be orchestrating mass immigration in order to destroy the white race.

At the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, white power activists chanted “Jews will not replace us” during their torchlit march on the University of Virginia campus.

Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 people in two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques, described immigration and low white birthrates as “an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

Last week, a gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, Calif. A document attributed to the shooter echoed the same fear: demographic replacement.


A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Ethnic Majorities Lash Out Over False Fears. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe