By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Guest Columnist
On a Wednesday night in the heart of downtown Inglewood, people file into the Miracle Theater, a 1930s movie house remade into a space for live theater that also hosts community and cultural events. The Miracle is part of what locals hope will be this historically Black Southern California city’s revival, its name reflecting both great optimism and frank acknowledgement of the steep odds of the success of economic justice that’s decades overdue.
It’s a fitting venue for a discussion with Ibram X. Kendi, the scholar, historian and author of multiple books, including the bestselling “How to Be an Antiracist.” He is here to speak to how Black success everywhere is being steadily imperiled by the embrace of a white nationalist conspiracy theory that threatens to quash social and racial progress in America and across the globe.
On stage, Kendi discusses his new book, “Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.” In a dense but surprisingly brisk 510 pages it lays out the meteoric but little-noted rise of a conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement and its significance at a time of rising fascism and authoritarianism. Kendi defines the Great Replacement Theory as the belief that global elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives, livelihoods and electoral power of white people.
Kendi has long been accused by right wing figures such as Christopher Rufo and John McWhorter of being opportunistic, but in person he is forceful, thoughtful and measured. He speaks evenly and gives each question posed by the moderators and audience members equal consideration.
In the rare moments that he raises his voice, such as when he talks about America’s failure to truly acknowledge the racist foundations of Trumpism, he speaks with a kind of focused indignation that reflects his upbringing by parents who were both Methodist ministers.
“What if the media called what is happening ‘neo-Nazi’ instead of ‘conservative’?” he says to the audience. “Because that’s what Trump is.”
When I interviewed Kendi by phone a few hours before the Inglewood event, he explained some of the more pernicious aspects of the Great Replacement Theory.
“What has been pivotal in GRT construct is a past ‘good’ immigrant versus a ‘bad’ new immigrant,” Kendi said in our call. “In the past, immigrants who came legally assimilated and improved the country. But now they’re coming ‘illegally’ and they’re creating these separate societies and they’re destroying the nation.”
The construct of bad immigrants also includes Black Americans who have been citizens for generations, longer in a lot of cases than many white people, but who have consistently been treated, legally and otherwise, as less than American and unfit for a white, civilized nation. As Kendi said in the interview, it’s an idea that dates all the way back to our Founding Fathers.
“Thomas Jefferson argued that gradually African Americans should become free,” he said. “But when that happens he said they’re not going to be able to live next to us in peace and prosperity. They will be perpetually at war.”
What Jefferson proposed was the mass deportation of all emancipated African Americans back to Africa, a concept known as colonization.
“In the 19th century it was the most powerful racial reform movement in the country, and it was perceived by both centrists and white enslavers as the solution to the Negro problem,” Kendi said.
It’s abundantly clear to me that while the movement faded, the notion that people of color aren’t really Americans and need to live apart, or to just leave, has not. Suffice it to say that we still have a Negro problem.
There is nonetheless a hopeful cast to Kendi’s latest work, centered on his belief that “human groups are natural allies against inequities,” and that coming together is more instinctual than sowing division.
“Frankly, that’s the hope, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book,” he said. “So that we can be moved in that direction, recognize the conspiracy theories that are driving us apart and envision a new way of seeing different groups, and see the ways in which we’re linked as part of a chain of humanity. And that we can have solidarity and power we need to overcome what’s happening.”
Later that evening at the end of the event at the Miracle Theater, an audience member asked Kendi how, in the face of so much turmoil, he personally maintains that hope. He didn’t hesitate, or raise his voice.
“My ancestors who were enslaved never gave up hope,” he said. “Hope is what caused them to flee plantations. I never give up, no matter what is happening.”
Erin Aubry Kaplan examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California for Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.
