ILR School Tackles Replacement Theory

The School of Industrial and Labor Relations recently held a talk titled “What You Need to Know About Replacement Theory.” Professors Tristan Ivory, Risa Lieberwitz, and Ileen Devault discussed their perspectives on the phenomenon and its impacts across society. They connected the theory to the shootings in a Buffalo, New York, Tops supermarket and an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. To begin the event, the professors were asked to share the definition of the theory and its context. 

Professor Lieberwitz outlined that the Great Replacement Theory is a “conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being brought into the US and replacing the white people” and a means of stoking “fear and hatred towards unidentified threats.” She explained that it is an “anti-immigration conspiracy theory” and that an ideal solution to the Great Replacement theory’s spread would be “strengthening labor movements and building more social justice groups”.

Lieberwitz pinpointed socioeconomic inequality as the issue that creates the need for  strengthening labor movements, noting that Great Replacement theory adherents are typically young white men who are “disaffected by what they are going through in their life” and blame outsiders. She did not detail how social justice groups would prevent these individuals from believing the theory’s ethos or engaging in violent attacks against specific groups. 

Shifting from a US perspective to a more international perspective, Professor Ivory expanded on the theory as an idea that circulates across the globe. He argued that early strands of the theory came from French author Renaud Camus, who according to Ivory, claimed that “people were going to go ahead and ‘replace’ whites across Europe.” Ivory saw this phenomenon as a product of an “expansion of whiteness” and believed that the “conception of whiteness has grown over time.” Most notably he claimed that the theory is a “consolidation of panethnic depiction of whiteness” following World War 2.

Ivory briefly compared the Great Replacement theory to eugenics, before Professor Devault continued the comparison. Devault contextualized the growth of the eugenics movement growing more prominent after the 1920s, corresponding with the US having immigration quotas in the name of upholding the ideology that Devault saw as “preserving America.”

When attempting to connect the Great Replacement Theory’s ideologies to recent events outside of violent events by indiviuals, Professor Devault argued that the spread is related to the “increasing number of states that are publishing anti-abortion legislation and preventing a woman’s decision on her own body.” 

Said Devault: “I think misogyny is something that runs very deep in our society.”

Professor Lieberwitz agreed that believers of the Great Replacement Theory are attempting to “roll back the clock… in various ways,” looking back with nostalgia at the time when women stayed home and recognized the male breadwinner as the “king of the castle.” Their version of history is incorrect, according to Lieberwitz, who pivoted into how history is framed and taught in educational institutions, arguing that Americans students are given an ahistorical viewpoint of the world. She chastised laws that prevent K-12 or higher education institutions from teaching about race, racism, and racial history, most likely alluding to instances of schools banning Critical Race Theory and the 1619 project.

“Not only does it scrub the US of its racial histories by denying the opportunity to teach about its history”, but it is also “being used to rewrite history and shifts notions of harm from those who have been subjects of racism to say no to its harm to white children.” 

The discussion concluded with a question on how the Great Replacement theory enters political discourse. Lieberwitz rejected the notion that both parties were equally culpable, which she called a “false equivalence in discussion”. She maintained that the left and right are not equally responsible in the theory spreading, isolating the Republican party as the source of the problem:

 “If we’re talking about these conspiracy theories, is this strictly a right wing conflict? The answer is yes. The history of this situation is to keep people from working together to form a society that is based on equality and ensuring that people have a good life. It is an approach that has to be called out and for those of us that are on the left, need to recognize how extreme this position is. It’s become mainstream because of coded language on the right.” 

This is not the first time the ILR School has had an event on immgration related discourse. Several years earlier, Professor Veronica Martinez-Matsuda criticized “mainstream media and popular discourse” focusing on Mexican migration as evidence of an “unregulated nature of immigration” having “equally damaging social and cultural implications as it does political.”

As for the ILR School’s future programming, if this event is any indication, politics will only be an increasing focus.

Artwork created by Nial Parmanan ’23.