Transcript: A Racist Theory Is Poisoning Politics Across the World

Author Ibram Kendi says the rise of “great replacement theory” is driving many problems both in the United States and abroad.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined today by Ibram Kendi. He’s a professor at Howard University. He’s also the author of a few books now—How to Be an Antiracist, The History of Racist Ideas—and he has a new book out that we’re going to talk about today. Professor, welcome.

Ibram Kendi: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So let me talk about the book itself. The book is about this idea of the global replacement theory. So talk about replacement theory and what that means. The title of the book is Chain of Ideas, I should say. We’re going to talk about about the chain of ideas ... but the book is about replacement theory, so talk about what that means for people who don’t know.

Kendi: Sure. In Chain of Ideas, I’m chronicling the reemergence of what’s known as “great replacement theory” over the last two decades, but also showing its much longer history. After chronicling that history, I ended up defining great replacement theory as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and even livelihoods of white people, who apparently need authoritarian protection.

When we hear things like “immigrants are invading the nation,” we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we hear ideas like “the enemy is inside the gates,” or “they’re poisoning the blood of the nation,” or “diversity programs are discriminatory,” or “we need to engage in mass deportation,” or “anti-DEI” programs in order to save the nation—we’re hearing great replacement theory.

Bacon: Is there a place it originated, or is it a more recent phenomenon, or has it been existing a long time but proliferated in the last decade or so?

Kendi: So a French novelist named Renaud Camus named the theory with a book he entitled The Great Replacement in 2011. And ideas are different than people, and ideas can live for quite some time before anyone names them. This is an idea that really emerged in its totality in the late nineteenth century, when you had some colonial officials thinking that if decolonization ever came—if African people who were colonized, or Latin Americans, or even Asian folks were to free themselves—these colonial officials imagined that they wouldn’t stop there, that they would then try to come and colonize Europe and engage in displacement and genocides, and essentially do to Europeans what had been done to them.

What’s ironic about that origin story is even Camus, writing in 2011, and again in 2018 when he wrote a book, You Will Not Replace Us—he described the so-called great replacement as counter-colonization.

Bacon: So in the U.S., I think the obvious example is the tiki torch–holding students at the University of Virginia in 2017. That’s when I thought about this, because they actually said, “You will not replace us.” But give other examples of where you’re seeing this play out.

Kendi: We can go all the way back to 2011. That is the year in which ... the sixth link in the chain of ideas is this notion that white Christians are indigenous to the nation. And when I say the sixth link—the chain of ideas is organized around these 10 ideas that are the building blocks for great replacement theory.

This idea that white Christians are indigenous to the nation and everyone else, no matter how long they’ve been here, are eternally immigrants, and certainly not American, is one of the ideas that undergirded birtherism, [which] of course Donald Trump expressed first in 2011.

That was also the year when a group of scholars and scientists in New England found that white people had recognized Black progress, but the majority of white people that they surveyed believed that Black progress had come at white expense. They empirically found the existence of what’s known as zero-sum theory, which is also a foundational idea within great replacement theory—an idea that has been relentlessly debunked.

Bacon: How does it play out in other countries? Because ... it’s not white versus Black, or white versus people of color, [like] in the U.S.

Kendi: So what I found is that even as Renaud Camus and even maybe a Donald Trump positioned and conceived of these as a racist theory in which Black people were replacing white people—it’s mutated. And it’s mutated to not just a racist theory. It’s mutated to be an ethnocentric theory, whereby in a country like India, Modi, the prime minister, is positioning the Muslim minorities as replacing the Hindu majority.

Or similarly in nearby China, in which it’s imagined that Chinese Muslims are replacing and displacing the Han majority, so they’re being actually rounded up in concentration camps. In other countries, it may be the minoritized ethnic group that’s positioned as a replacer.

Or in a country like Russia, whereby Putin has described queer people as replacing the traditional values of Russian Christians. Or gender. In the U.S. context, like in other countries, it’s imagined that “gender ideology,” as they call it—another term for feminist ideas, or ideas that express equality between queer people and cisgender and heterosexual people—that those are destroying the nation. Or white women who decide not to have three or four children are contributing to declining birth rates, which is leading to the replacement of white people.

Bacon: Does this depend on demographic change, or is it almost distinct from that? Because in the U.S. we’ve had a growing population of people of color, so there is a numerical case for changes—not necessarily that you’re being replaced, but ... does this theory depend on change, or is it more a feeling of change that people are expressing, that they’re really opposing?

Kendi: Again, going back to Renaud Camus—in writing and conceiving of great replacement theory, he acknowledged that data and science were not necessarily on his side. He more or less told his readers to not really look to science or data to describe what is happening—that instead you should look to how you feel.

Kendi: I’m literally sort of quoting him. This is not a theory that makes logical sense. Even if you take the United States, which has the largest foreign-born population in the entire world—86 percent of people in the United........

© New Republic