BUZZ
Analysis: Even New York Magazine found this claim skeptical
Professor Ibram Kendi is out with his latest book, this time on the “great replacement theory,” or the idea that political elites want to flood countries with racial minorities to dilute the power of white people.
Professor Kendi, who is ostensibly creating a new think tank at Howard University, argues in his new book that “great replacement theory” explains everything from Nazi Germany to the crackdown on gangs in El Salvador by President Tayeb Bukele.
The Intelligencer, a section of New York Magazine, found some claims plausible. In the book, “Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Out Authoritarian Age,” Kendi reportedly argues that Dylann Roof, who killed dozens at a black church in South Carolina, was influenced by the ideology.
Other claims are not as strong.
Zak Cheney-Rice writes:
Other elements of his scholarship are more disputable. The effort to cast El Salvador president Nayib Bukele’s targeting of gangs as a Great Replacement strategy requires some squinting, for example. Gang violence in El Salvador is an actual problem, and the country really did have the world’s highest murder rate before Bukele was elected. But he is placed in the same broad category as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who drummed up a Great Replacement panic over migrants while crime rates in Italy were plummeting.
Cheney-Rice also critiques Kendi for accusing his critics of racism for highlighting the failures of his Boston University center. His leading critics were black, after all.
“Part of what stood out about Kendi’s responses to the research-center fallout was his tendency to claim that aspersions of his motives were rooted in racism — which might have been true but also reads like deflection,” Cheney-Rice wrote.
Others pointed out Kendi’s new book is a “relaunch” of his same shtick about racism.
Kendi pushes a “racialist gospel of irredeemable total depravity,” according to Luther Abel.
These are the same ideas “Kendi hawked all the way into presiding over a Boston University–affiliated think tank that made him a very wealthy man while producing two mediocre pieces of academic research,” Abel wrote for National Review. “Since being dismissed from his ivory tower in Boston, where he spent his working hours transmuting white guilt into green, Kendi has been in exile at Howard University along with Nikole Hannah-Jones.”
Kendi’s new Institute for Advanced Study will be “dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African Diaspora” with inquiry into topics including “racism, climate change, and disparities,” according to the original announcement from Howard University.
A spokesman said in late 2025 that the Institute’s website and its accompanying news site The Emancipator would be launched “at the beginning of next year.”
As of today, however, the Institute for Advanced Study’s only public-facing site is a fundraising link. Kendi began his job in August.
The Emancipator, originally set to relaunch in November 2025, is “more or less theoretical at this point,” Kendi told the Poynter Institute in February.
