Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in the face of it,” as.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

106. “Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

107. “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

108. “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

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. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

119. “The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “If policy is our love language, as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tells us it should be, then the Swedes love their children. Do Americans?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

125. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

127. “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

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

— 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. “What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the antiracist power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their racist ideas and fears, conserving their inequitable society?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

132. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

135. “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

136. “What could happen based on my deepest fears mattered more than what did happen to me.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

137. “Ideas often dance a capella.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

138. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

140. “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

141. “The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Between 1985 and 2000, drug offenses accounted for two-thirds of the spike in the inmate population. By 2000, Blacks comprised 62.7 percent and Whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders in state prisons – and not because they were selling or using more drugs.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

145. “It was like saying that the game was rigged, but Blacks should not let that stop them from winning, and that when they lost and complained about the game being rigged, they were “using that as a crutch.”14.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

146. “To fight for mental and moral changes after policy is changed means fighting alongside growing benefits and the dissipation of fears, making it possible for antiracist power to succeed. To fight for mental and moral change as a prerequisite for policy change is to fight against growing fears and apathy, making it almost impossible for antiracist power to succeed.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

147. “Culture is a resource, not a trap.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

148. “But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

149. “What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

150. “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