Professor Ibram Kendi has put out a new book contending that "great replacement theory," the notion that political leaders aim to inundate nations with racial minorities to weaken the influence of white populations, accounts for everything from Nazi Germany to the anti gang campaign in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele, The College Fix reported.
Kendi, who is supposedly constructing a new think tank at Howard University, advances these arguments in his book "Chain of Ideas. The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age."
The Intelligencer section of New York Magazine deemed some of Kendi's assertions reasonable. The book reportedly contends that Dylann Roof, who killed worshippers at a black church in South Carolina, drew inspiration from the ideology.
Other claims proved harder to accept. Zak Cheney Rice observes that "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 additionally criticized Kendi for labeling his critics as racist when they drew attention to the problems at his Boston University center, pointing out that his most prominent critics were themselves black.
"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 depicted the new book as a recycling of Kendi's well worn arguments about racism.
Kendi advances a "racialist gospel of irredeemable total depravity," according to Luther Abel of National Review. 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. "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 indicated in late 2025 that the Institute's website and its accompanying news site The Emancipator would go live "at the beginning of next year."
As of today, however, the Institute for Advanced Study's sole public footprint is a fundraising link. Kendi commenced his position in August.
The Emancipator, initially slated to relaunch in November 2025, is "more or less theoretical at this point," Kendi acknowledged to the Poynter Institute in February.
Kendi's effort to brand reasonable immigration enforcement and gang suppression as expressions of white supremacist thinking exposes the intellectual hollowness of his entire worldview. Public safety and immigration control are not manifestations of racial hostility but fundamental policies for preserving a cohesive society. Americans should dismiss Kendi's racialized framework and acknowledge that defending borders and punishing violent criminals benefits people of every background, while preserving the country’s demographic founding core.
