Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

52. “When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

53. “We were unarmed, but we knew that blackness armed us, even though we had no guns.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

54. “A Christian is one who is striving for liberation.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

55. “Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilations typically position White people as the superior standard.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

56. “Christianity,” Jones wrote, “encourages and orders” African people “to become more humble and better servants.” They should not learn to read and write, though. They were “by Nature cut out for hard Labour and Fatigue.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

57. “White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

58. “Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

59. “Civilization” is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

60. “Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to racially profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

61. “If Blacks did not violently resist, then they were cast as naturally servile. And yet, whenever they did fight, reactionary commentators, in both North and South, classified them as barbaric animals who needed to be caged in slavery.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

62. “The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

63. “Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

64. “Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre. I read endlessly its poetic text. But parents and grandparents did not see us listening to and memorizing gripping works of oral poetry and urban reporting and short stories and autobiographies and sexual boasting and adventure fantasies. They saw – and still see – words that would lead my mind into deviance.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

65. “POWERLESS DEFENSE: The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

66. “Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

67. “Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

68. “Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

69. “From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

70. “Racists confessing to their crimes is not in their self-interest.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

71. “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

72. “There may be no more consequential White privilege than life itself. White lives matter to the tune of 3.5 additional years over Black lives in the United States, which is just the most glaring of a host of health disparities, starting from infancy, where Black infants die at twice the rate of White infants.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

73. “Jefferson and like-minded planters of the Upper South started deliberately “breeding” captives to supply the Deep South’s demand. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man on the farm,” Jefferson once explained to a friend.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

74. “The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

75. “For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

76. “No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers. Their.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

77. “And I’ve come to see that the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing – it requires understanding and snubbing racism based on biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class. And beyond that, it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

78. “That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one’s position below that of other ethnic groups. It is angrily trashing the racist ideas about one’s own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups. It is failing to recognize that racist ideas we consume about others came from the same restaurant and the same cook who used the same ingredients to make different degrading dishes for us all.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

79. “No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

80. “White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

81. “Racist” is not – as Richard Spencer argues – a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

82. “Racist power at once made biological racial distinction and biological racial hierarchy the components of biological racism. This curse theory lived prominently on the justifying lips of slaveholders until Black chattel slavery died in Christian countries in the nineteenth century. Proof did not matter when biological racial difference could be created by misreading the Bible.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

83. “Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful – not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

84. “Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

85. “My parents – even from within their racial consciousness – were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

86. “Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas. I.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

87. “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

88. “But asking every nonathletic Black person to become an Olympic hurdler, and blaming them when they can’t keep up, is racist.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

89. “Their mission: uplift the inferior free Blacks to “an equality with whites.” And yet, AASS agents and supporters were cautioned not to adopt Black children, encourage interracial marriages, or excite “the people of color to assume airs.” Blacks were to assume “the true dignity of meekness” in order to win over their critics.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

90. “The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

91. “Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

92. “An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences – that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

93. “American enslavers were still afraid to baptize Africans, because Christian slaves, like Elizabeth Key, could sue for their freedom.2.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

94. “New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

95. “Racist intentions – not policies – became covert after the 1960s.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

96. “Afterward, White abolitionists would say to him, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

97. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

98. “They fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all Black people. My parents – even from within their racial consciousness – were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

99. “All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as nonracist has left Americans thoroughly divided over, and ignorant of, what racist ideas truly are. It has all allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are not racists. But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is inferior about that group.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

100. “Poor Blacks in metropolitan Chicago are ten times more likely than poor Whites to live in high-poverty areas. With Black poverty dense and White poverty scattered, Black poverty is visible and surrounds its victims; White poverty blends in.”

— Ibram X. Kendi