‘I think I’ve had at least seven books that have been banned in the United States,” says Ibram X Kendi, in a tone that carries no bitterness but stops just short of pride. It’s proof, he says, that his works on racism, which extend from deep, scholarly histories to a biography of Malcolm X for children, are getting through to the right people – and annoying the right people. According to the writers’ advocacy group PEN America, his books have been banned at least 50 times by multiple US school districts during the tumultuous “anti-woke” backlash of the past five years. He’s not happy about that, but nor was he discouraged. “I understood that the major reason why people were singling me out and demonising me was because they did not want people reading my books,” he says. “And when the character assassinations did not work to the scale that they wanted them to, then they started banning my books, and the books of many others.”
Kendi’s work is divisive almost by design. He has a way of framing his ideas in radically stark terms. In his 2016 breakthrough book Stamped from the Beginning, a history of racist ideas in the US, he argued that racist policies lead to racist ideas, not the other way round. His bestselling follow-up, 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist, introduced an equally contentious proposition: there was no such thing as “not racist”; you were either racist or anti-racist. There was no in-between: inaction or neutrality about racist issues was effectively complicity. By extension, he argued that all racial disparities in outcome for Black people were the result of racist policies – not just some, all.
Discussing his latest book, Chain of Ideas, 43-year-old Kendi presents another uncompromising binary. “We, as human beings, have two choices in the 21st century: antiracist democracy or racist dictatorship,” he tells me over a video call from his book-lined study at Howard University in Washington DC. In person he is mild-mannered, neatly styled and softly spoken, but in terms of rhetoric, Kendi punches hard.
“There is almost certainly a likelihood that in 20 years, the better part of Europe, and frankly the world, could be led by racist dictatorships,” he continues. “We’ve gone from monarchy to democracy to dictatorship. We’re literally going backwards. Why? Because we fear people we don’t know.”
The central subject of Chain of Ideas is the great replacement theory – the once-fringe, now-mainstream conspiracy theory that powerful elites are enabling people of colour to “replace” white populations – primarily through immigration. In Kendi’s view, the real agenda of great replacement theory has been to pave the way for authoritarian governments around the world, from Trump’s America (“You will not replace us!” the far-right marchers chanted in Charlottesville in 2017) to Orbán’s Hungary to Modi’s India. Or, looking into the near future, Reform UK in Britain, the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, and dozens more.
“As a scholar of the history of racist ideas, I’m constantly trying to make sure I’m aware of what I call in my work the progression of racism: the ways in which racism is changing and evolving and taking on new forms,” he says.
Kendi didn’t initially see the connections between racism and authoritarianism. He started out seeking answers to questions like, “Why was it that, particularly in the United States, there were increasing numbers of people, particularly white Americans, who were empowering people whose policies were clearly harming them?”
As the title suggests, Chain of Ideas maps out the sequence of ideological and historical links that got us to where so many of us are now. And although many far-right figures would be outraged at the association, the starting point is Nazi Germany. After the second world war, Kendi writes, “the house of Hitler became uninhabitable for the rest of the 20th century. It became difficult for politicians to attract voters with Nazi ideas and win.” But certain far-right elements did not abandon this structure, he says. “They gutted it. They renovated it. New walls and fixtures and furniture.”
Overt mentions of “race” or “genetics” or “biology” are too unpalatable these days, for example. So instead: “They’ve essentially said that these people from Africa and the Middle East are changing the cultural makeup of Europe,” says Kendi. “Multiculturalism, they’re arguing, is destroying ‘indigenous’ white, European cultures. And then they’re arguing that those indigenous European cultures are ‘Christian’, certainly not Muslim. Even though, for about 44,000 years in Europe, people didn’t practise Christianity.”
In the US, the scapegoats are slightly different: migrants from Latin America and non-white immigrants from Africa and Asia – but the language is similar, and hardening all the time.
During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Trump claimed that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” – echoing Hitler’s words: “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood”. Discussing shooting attacks by immigrants in the US last week, Trump told Fox News: “Their genetics are not exactly your genetic.”
The far right’s proposed solutions are not so distant from those of the Nazis, either, Kendi argues. Instead of concentration camps, we have mega-prisons, such as those run by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – crowded, unsanitary, inhumane, free of public scrutiny and increasing in scale all the time. And in place of the Nazis’ genocidal Final Solution, we hear about “remigration”. Once an extreme proposition, the concept is now openly discussed by far-right parties across the world – including in the UK, where Reform has suggested it could deport up to 600,000 people in its first term.
Great replacement theory often hinges on another racist binary, Kendi points out – between “eternal natives” and “eternal immigrants”. Through this lens, white people are cast as inherently belonging to whatever place they are in – eternal natives. People of colour, by contrast, don’t really belong or “properly” assimilate – eternal immigrants. “Apparently, white immigrants do not signify that the country is changing,” Kendi writes, only Black and brown ones. Trump expressed this directly in 2019, when he told four congresswomen of colour (all US citizens) to go back to the “corrupt” and “crime-infested” countries they came from. Trump’s own family are also immigrants, hailing from Germany and Scotland, but this is never considered problematic. Nor is the fact that, for centuries, the most extreme “replacing” has been done by white people – across the Americas, Africa and Australia, for example.
A similar “eternal immigrants/eternal natives” mindset inspired the French writer Renaud Camus to write his 2011 book The Great Replacement, which gave the conspiracy theory its name. Visiting the southern French region of Hérault in 1996, Camus was under the impression that parts of it – and by extension the entire country – had been overrun by African immigrants. “During our lifetime, and even less, France was in the process of changing its population,” he later wrote. Never mind that those Africans made up no more than 4% of Hérault’s population, Kendi points out. Or that Hérault was also a popular destination for white immigrants from Spain, Portugal, the UK, Italy and other European countries.
Many people have legitimate concerns about the extent of immigration, Kendi agrees, but “great replacement politicians are typically not supporting policies that would reduce immigration”, he says. People are likely to be immigrating because of lack of economic opportunity, war, political instability, poverty, violence, climate breakdown. “The very people who claim to be so firmly against immigrants of colour coming to their nations are simultaneously launching wars and humanitarian crises in those regions, which are only going to propel immigration … They need these immigrants to keep coming in order for their political business to expand.”
There’s a zero-sum logic to the theory, Kendi points out: people are led to believe that immigrants are taking from them, depriving them of wealth, jobs, security, taxpayer-funded amenities. These beliefs are rarely borne out by the facts. Immigrants pay more in taxes and take less in benefits than the average US citizen, and are significantly less likely to commit crimes, for example. But “once you can convince a population that they are under attack, that their lives, their livelihoods are being lost, and you have convinced them that you are their saviour and their protector, you can then present yourself as a strongman, an authoritarian, and do away with democratic traditions.”
Those democratic traditions invariably include mechanisms for dissent – the media, academia, culture, protest. All of which helps to explain why Kendi found himself in the firing line back in 2020. As Black Lives Matter protests welled up after the murder of George Floyd, How to Be an Antiracist, published a year earlier, became something of a key text. “It was a book in which I largely looked in the mirror,” he says. “Unlike other books that would talk down to people, if anything, I was talking down to myself, and really thinking through: how I have been able to unlearn these internalised, anti-Black, racist ideas?” Much of the world was asking the same questions. The book became a bestseller, which made Kendi a minor celebrity, frequently appearing on television and in the media (including the Guardian).
But Kendi’s diagnoses, and his distinction between “racist” and “antiracist”, rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way. And, he now realises, they had a coordinated attack plan. In early 2021, the far right homed in on the term “critical race theory” – an academic field studying structural racism. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo brazenly laid out the plan in a tweet: “We have successfully frozen their brand – ‘critical race theory’ – into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” Rufo labelled Kendi “critical race theory’s chief marketing officer”.
Depressingly, by and large, it worked. The rightwing propaganda machine cranked into gear, and the genuine victimhood of Black Lives Matter was overwritten with a hammered-home narrative of white victimhood, ostensibly at the hands of critical race theory, “DEI”, “identity politics” and “wokeness”.
It wasn’t just the book bans: the backlash affected Kendi’s work. In 2020 he had been invited to form a new Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with $55m in grants. But by 2023 the personal attacks had led to a significant decline in funds, Kendi says. Added to which, he was accused of financial mismanagement and having an “imperious leadership style”. Journalists seized on the allegations, he recalls, but far fewer of them reported the outcome of the investigation: “I was completely cleared.” The centre closed in June last year.
Meanwhile, as he revealed in How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi was recovering from stage 4 colon cancer. He was diagnosed in 2018, and needed surgery and six months of chemotherapy. The treatment appears to have worked, he says, although it’s too early to declare an all-clear. Ironically, the cancer took his mind off things: “If that wasn’t the primary worry in my life, I feel like the attacks would have been much more difficult to endure. When you’re facing a major health crisis, it puts everything else in perspective.”
All in all, it’s been a traumatic few years, Kendi admits, “which is why I’m so happy … happy isn’t the best word … fortunate to have been able to work on a book project while I was experiencing all of that. It’s therapeutic for me because when I’m researching and writing, I just become so laser-focused. It’s as if the entire world melts away.”
Kendi puts his career success down to “a combination of luck and a willingness to be self-critical”, although he also admits to having a stubborn curiosity. “My parents would say that ever since they could remember, I have been able to point out contradictions.” It also helped that he grew up steeped in African American politics and activism. He was born in Queens, New York, to deeply religious parents who both became Methodist ministers, but their religiosity was not all-encompassing. “There was also a secular, scientific part of their ideological makeup.” He argued with them, of course, but they remain close. When he married in 2013, he changed his name from Ibram Henry Rogers. The X stands for Xolani, which is Zulu for “peace”. Kendi, a new family name he chose with his wife, Sadiqa, means “loved one” in Meru. They have two daughters, aged nine and two, so now he is on the receiving end of the arguments, having the contradictions in his own rules pointed out to him. “And when they do, there’s nothing I can say. They know how to get me,” he laughs.
As he prepares to embark on a US-wide book tour, Kendi is excited but also apprehensive, he says. “Apprehensive because this is a pretty fraught, polarised, even to a certain extent dangerous, political time in the United States.” Going out and speaking about these issues, as a prominent, routinely demonised Black intellectual, carries uncomfortable levels of risk.
Then there’s the bigger problem: that the world seems to be heading inexorably towards the “racist dictatorship” end of Kendi’s binary. Laying out the process is one thing, but what can be done?
“I think it’s incredibly important for us to hold people accountable,” he says. “Germany decided to only incarcerate Hitler and ban his party for a few years after he led an insurrection. If the level of accountability had matched the harm, the face of European history may have been different.” He barely needs to complete the thought at this stage. Just as Trump and his associates are likely to evade accountability for the 6 January insurrection, so the enslavers and the Confederates of the civil war and the architects of Jim Crow segregation never really faced justice. “That is, frankly, the American tradition, which is to not hold, particularly racist, power accountable. And generations of Americans have suffered as a result of it.”
But the primary route to enabling antiracist democracy to flourish, he says, is simply improving conditions for people. “Because it is those conditions, and it is people’s own struggles, that are being capitalised on to blame those immigrants, Muslims, Black people, for why those conditions exist. By giving people more, it makes it harder for you to say: ‘You don’t have because others are taking.’” The great replacement theory is a smokescreen for the real causes of poverty and deprivation: neoliberal capitalism and the huge inequalities it has created. “As a human community, we have to move away from this idea that as other groups gain, my group loses, that other groups are fundamentally our political enemies. Because that idea is being used by oligarchs all over the world to divide and conquer us … We’re so easily manipulated into thinking that strangers are dangerous. The people who are dangerous are the people who are telling us that strangers are dangerous.”
• Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the Origins of Our Authoritarian Age is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
