Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

103. “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... as such, policies from those of Calvin Coolidge to Donald Trump’s limiting immigration to the United States from China or Italy or Senegal or Haiti or Mexico have been self-destructive to the country.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

104. “In my first course with Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

105. “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

106. “The lack of resources leads directly to diminished opportunities for learning. In other words, the racial problem is the opportunity gap, as antiracist reformers call it, not the achievement gap.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

107. “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

108. “Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

109. “What if we focused our human and fiscal resources on changing power and policy to actually make society, not just our feelings, better?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

110. “From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

111. “The Black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high as the White unemployment rate for the last fifty years. The wage gap between Blacks and Whites is the largest in forty years. The median net worth of White families is about ten times that of Black families. According to one forecast, White households are expected to own eighty-six times more wealth than Black households by 2020 and sixty-eight times more than Latinx households.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

112. “My research kept pointing me to the same answer: The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

113. “To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

114. “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world – it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

115. “Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

116. “White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

117. “Pain is usually essential to healing. When it comes to healing America of racism, we want to heal America without pain, but without pain, there is no progress.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

118. “Dark African Americans receive the harshest prison sentences and more time behind bars. White male offenders with African facial features receive harsher sentences than their all-European peers. Dark female students are nearly twice as likely to be suspended as White female students, while researchers found no disparity between Light and White female students. Inequities between Light and Dark African Americans can be as wide as inequities between Black and White Americans.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

119. “The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

120. “Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

121. “When someone discriminates against a person in a racial group, they are carrying out a policy or taking advantage of the lack of a protective policy. We all have the power to discriminate. Only an exclusive few have the power to make policy. Focusing on “racial discrimination” takes our eyes off the central agents of racism: racist policy and racist policymakers, or what I call racist power.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

122. “Racist ideas often lead to this silly psychological inversion, where we blame the victimized race for their own victimization.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

123. “Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

124. “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.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

125. “A Christian is one who is striving for liberation.” James Cone’s working definition of a Christian described a Christianity of the enslaved, not the Christianity of the slaveholders. Receiving this definition was a revelatory moment in Dad’s life. Ma had her own similar revelation in her Black student union – that Christianity was about struggle and liberation.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

126. “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.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

127. “I felt the burden my whole Black life to be perfect before both White people and the Black people judging whether I am representing the race well.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

128. “Dark sons and Light daughters receive higher-quality parenting than Light sons and Dark daughters. Skin color influences perceptions of attractiveness most often for Black women. As skin tone lightens, levels of self-esteem among Black women rise, especially among low- and middle-income Black women.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

129. “Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

130. “If Barack Obama came to embody America’s history of racial progress, then Donald Trump should come to embody America’s history of racist progress. And racist progress has consistently followed racial progress.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

131. “With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

132. “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word – racism is steeped in denial.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

133. “Remember, to believe in a racial hierarchy is to believe in a racist idea. The idea of an achievement gap between the races – with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinx at the bottom – creates a racial hierarchy, with its implication that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black and Latinx test takers and not the tests.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

134. “To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape peoples’ lives.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

135. “What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

136. “When we say poor people are lazy, we are expressing an elitist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say Black poor people are lazier than poor Whites, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of elitist and racist ideas – an ideological intersection that forms class racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

137. “Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

138. “Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

139. “I felt the burden my whole Black life to be perfect before both White people and the Black people judging whether I am representing the race well. The judges never let me just be, be myself, be my imperfect self. –.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

140. “Crucially, their going after all patriarchs, no matter their gender identity, showed me that patriarchal ideas and policies and powers were their fundamental problem.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

141. “Slavery was as customary as prisons are today. Few could imagine an ordered world without them.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

142. “The interracial MFDP came to Atlantic City and requested to be seated in place of the regular Mississippi delegation, which everyone knew had been elected through fraud and violence. The MFDP’s electrifying vice chair, Fannie Lou Hamer, riveted the nation in her live televised testimony at the convention. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

143. “But it is difficult to create that environment, since racist power makes laws that illegalize most protest threats. Organizing and protesting are much harder and more impactful than mobilizing and demonstrating. Seizing power is much harder than protesting power and demonstrating its excesses.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

144. “Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

145. “Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

146. “What a powerful construction race is – powerful enough to consume us. And it comes for us early.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

147. “White assimilationist ideas challenge segregationist ideas that claim people of color are incapable of development, incapable of reaching the superior standard, incapable of becoming White and therefore fully human. Assimilationists believe that people of color can, in fact, be developed, become fully human, just like White people. Assimilationist ideas reduce people of color to the level of children needing instruction on how to act.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

148. “We’d notice that when racist Whites see Black people conducting themselves admirably in public, they see those Blacks as extraordinary, meaning not like those ordinarily inferior Black people.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

149. “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.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

150. “Every parent and teacher should think their child is gifted and beautiful.”

— Ibram X. Kendi