Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

112. “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

113. “Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

114. “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

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. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

134. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

136. “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

137. “We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

138. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

140. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

146. “Ideas often dance a capella.”

— 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. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

150. “White-male interest in lynching Black-male rapists of White women was as much about controlling the sexuality of White women as it was about controlling the sexuality of Black men.”

— Ibram X. Kendi