Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “CULTURAL ANTIRACIST: One who is rejecting cultural standards and equalizing cultural differences among racial groups.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

153. “But what was the difference between Ebonics and so-called “standard” English? Ebonics had grown from the roots of African languages and modern English just as modern English had grown from Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots. Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? 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

154. “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

155. “While many people are fearful of what could happen if they resist, I am fearful of what could happen if I don’t resist. I am fearful of cowardice. Cowardice is the inability to amass the strength to do what is right in the face of fear. And racist power has been terrorizing cowardice into us for decades.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

156. “Even now I wonder if it was my poor sense of self that first generated my poor sense of my people. Or was it my poor sense of my people that inflamed a poor sense of myself? Like the famous question about the chicken and the egg, the answer is less important than the cycle it describes. 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.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

157. “From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

158. “White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “Prejudice “will cease,” Kelsey wrote, “when the blacks can command the respect and sympathy of the whites.”26 In.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

166. “This is the consistent function of racist ideas – and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

167. “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.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

168. “I am responsible for my racist ideas; they are not. To be antiracist is to let me be me, be myself, be my imperfect self.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

169. “THIS BOOK IS ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

170. “Only racists shy away from the R-word – racism is steeped in denial.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

171. “Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities – not Black people – inferior.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

172. “In the job industry, in education, and in many other sectors of society, officials could justify their racial disparities by pointing to test scores and claiming they were not intending to discriminate. And to racist Americans, the racial gaps in the scores – the so-called achievement gap – said something was wrong with the Black test-takers – not the tests.13.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

173. “What if strategies and policy solutions stemmed not from ideologies but from problems?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

174. “Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similar sized White body, according to researchers. No wonder the Black body had to be lynched by the thousands, deported by the tens of thousands, incarcerated by the millions, segregated by the tens of millions.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

175. “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

176. “The root problem – from Prince Henry to President Trump – has always been the self-interest of racist power.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

177. “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

178. “The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

179. “In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people. – IN THE END, hating Black people becomes hating White people.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

180. “When we refer to a group as Black or White or another racial identity – Black Southerners as opposed to Southerners – we are racializing that group. When we racialize any group and then render that group’s culture inferior, we are articulating cultural racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

181. “But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

182. “Wisconsin’s strict voter-ID law suppressed approximately two hundred thousand votes – again primarily targeting voters of color – in the 2016 election. Donald Trump won that critical swing state by 22,748 votes.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

183. “Saying the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

184. “For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around – as the powerless are taught.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

185. “To be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

186. “What if we realized the absurdity of blaming a bored child for misbehaving in class? What if we realized the inhumanity of blaming a child for being unable to articulate her emotions? What if we realized the error of blaming a learner for not knowing?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

187. “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

188. “By the early 1980s, one study showed that for every White person killed by police officers, police killed twenty-two Black people.11.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

189. “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

190. “Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

191. “All forms of racism are overt if our antiracist eyes are open to seeing racist policy in racial inequity.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

192. “Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities – not Black people – inferior. When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

193. “When Blacks were seen as simply people – a collection of imperfect individuals, equal to the imperfect collection of individuals with white skins – then Blacks’ imperfect behavior became irrelevant. Discrimination was the social problem: the cause of the racial disparities between two equal collections of individuals.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

194. “Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

195. “Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? 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

196. “Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

197. “The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. Treating ignorance and hate and expecting racism to shrink suddenly seemed like treating a cancer patient’s symptoms and expecting the tumors to shrink.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

198. “Blacks were ten times more likely than Whites to have their ballots rejected. The racial inequity could not be explained by income or educational levels or bad ballot design, according to a New York Times statistical analysis. That left one explanation, one that at first I could not readily admit: racism. A total of 179,855 ballots were invalidated by Florida election officials in a race ultimately won by 537 votes.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

199. “Every time someone racializes behavior – describes something as “Black behavior” – they are expressing a racist idea. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

200. “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