“You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” Charleston terrorist Dylann Roof allegedly said to his victims during his shooting spree. Roof’s nonsensical rape remark (particularly since six of his nine victims were women themselves) has rightly drawn a good deal of attention, and has been effectively contextualized as part of the long history of white fears of African American rapists. But I would argue that “you’re taking over our country” represents an even more telling phrase, one that echoes longstanding national narratives and has become prominent once again in conservative discourse over the last decade.
Writers and leaders working to imagine a unifying American identity have consistently felt the need to define “America” against others seeking to “take it over.” Such definitions based on fearful contrasts pre-date the nation’s political origins, as illustrated by Ben Franklin’s 1751 fears that the colony of Pennsylvania, “founded by the English, [might] become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them.” While Franklin’s personal opinions changed over subsequent decades, such nativist fears of immigrants taking over and remaking the nation drove a number of prominent Early Republic political and social debates: the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which created a new legal category of “Alien Enemies”; the 1840s rise of the Know Nothing Party, with its conspiracy theories about Irish immigrants and “Papists”; and the evolving 19th century narrative of a “Yellow Peril” composed of Chinese arrivals and communities, which culminated in the passage of the nation’s first immigration laws, the 1875 Page Act and 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.