Race still matters: the (post) racial politics of conspiracy theories

Abstract The proliferation of conspiracy theories is seemingly on the rise. Among them, are many that are explicitly racist. Examples of this include Great Replacement Theory, White Genocide, QAnon, and Eurabia, which each convey the idea white people are being covertly attacked and replaced. In this article, we examine the structure of these conspiracy theories and argue that their proliferation in liberal-democratic societies is not a coincidence. Our argument is three-fold. First, we argue the proliferation of racist conspiracy theories in liberal-democratic societies has been enabled by the racial contract that underpins them. Second, we argue that in these contexts, even conspiracy theories that are seemingly non-racial, can be underpinned by structures of race and racialisation. This is because in liberal-democratic contexts, the other (who conspires) is always-already racialised, even if racialisation is disavowed. We therefore argue that the categorisation of conspiracy theories as being either ‘racial’ or ‘non-racial’ constitutes a postracial manoeuvre that obscures the racialising function of conspiracy theorising in liberal-democratic societies. Finally, we argue that the dominant trend of attributing the rise of conspiracy theories to the notion we are living in a ‘post-truth era’ obscures the connection between liberal-democratic societies and racist conspiracy theories, effectively solidifying the postracial conceptualisation of both. We argue the ‘post-’ of ‘post-truth’ works to sever the past from the present, thereby masking historical continuities of racism and depicting conspiracy thinking as a ‘new’ problem stemming from the margins of society. By contrast, we argue the phenomenon, and its attendant racism, originates from the mainstream of liberal-democratic society.