Ibram X. Kendi

I guess as well as you can be, despite all we're having to negotiate these days.

How are you?

So great replacement theory is this political theory, this conspiracy theory that suggests that

there are these powerful elites typically framed as liberal who are displacing, who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and livelihoods of white people who apparently need authoritarian protection.

And so this theory has mutated

in which really almost every disadvantaged group in the United States and other country has been positioned as coming to take over society.

Authoritarian leaders have used this theory to present themselves to everyday people as their saviors and their protectors so that they can justify taking away their civil liberties and rights, and so they can encourage people to submit to their own domination.

So when you can make a group of people believe that their lives are being lost at the hands of those Muslims, that their jobs are being stolen by Black people, that their nation is being taken by those immigrants,

It causes people to feel that they need someone, something to protect, to stop all of this loss, to stop the loss of their status, to stop the loss of their jobs.

And authoritarians who are pushing this theory are then turning around and ultimately saying that I will be your protector.

And then the way they go about protecting people is literally destroying democracy and building authoritarian states.

It is.

And that's one of the reasons why in Chain of Ideas, I tried to not only document

emergence of great replacement theory but even the ideas that are causing people to believe this theory so the first link in the chain of ideas is this zero-sum story so people believe when they see black people gaining they imagine that white people are automatically losing

The second idea is to ignore racial inequity data.

So when you ignore racial inequity data where white people are on the higher and living end of nearly every racial disparity, it gives you the opportunity to claim white people are the primary victims of racism.

Yeah, so the term Great Replacement

was named by a French novelist named Renaud Camus in a book he published in 2011.

But this is an idea, this is a conspiracy theory, this is a political theory that's frankly been around since the late 19th century, when you had colonial officials believing that if African and Asian and Latin American people threw off the yoke of colonialism,

that they would then engage in the colonization of Europe and take over, engage in genocides, all the things that... And so they had all these fears that Europeans would be replaced by their former colonized subjects.