Ibram X. Kendi on Great Replacement Theory

And many of these affinity groups are connected to cultural practices, or you have affinity groups that are oriented uh towards challenging a particular form of bigotry or let's say anti-black racism, and you have black people who are reinforcing anti-black racism. So I don't think they should be mandated. to to join the anti-racist black group, they probably would feel more at home in the white supremacist group, that black person, you know, at that college. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. Well, my guest today is none other than Ibram X Kendi.

Kendi is the author of bestselling books like How to Be an Anti-racist and Anti-racist Baby. He is now the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Howard University in Washington, DC. We had, let's call it, a lively conversation, in which we started off talking about his latest book, in which he argues that the way to understand that a huge number of disparate political movements around the world is through the lens of great replacement theory that what really unites everybody from Javier Millet in Argentina to Narendra Modi in India to Donald Trump in the United States is the way in which they are advocating for a version of this quote unquote political theory.

We then uh got into talking more broadly about how to conceive of the anti-racist enterprise and of anti-racist education, talking at length, for example, about the question of whether affinity groups, uh, particularly for younger students in schools, are productive or whether they might in important ways backfire. In the rest of this conversation, which is quite substantial, we talked about the difference between equity and equality, about whether there is something really conceptually new in the concept of equity, about whether the critique of equality is fair to the history of that movement, and whether it is true to hold, as Ibrah Kandy has written, that where there are racial disparities, they must be downstream from racist policies.

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