Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Ideas often dance a capella.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

171. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

173. “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

174. “Every single person actually has the power to protest racist and antiracist policies, to advance them, or, in some small way, to stall them.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

176. “I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

180. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

182. “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

183. “After taking this grueling journey to the dirt road of antiracism, humanity can come upon the clearing of a potential future: an antiracist world in all its imperfect beauty. It can become real if we focus on power instead of people, if we focus on changing policy instead of groups of people. It’s possible if we overcome our cynicism about the permanence of racism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

184. “But crime bills have never correlated to crime any more than fear has correlated to actual violence.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

186. “Asking antiracists to change their perspective on racism can be as destabilizing as asking racists to change their perspective on the races. Antiracists can be as doctrinaire in their view of racism as racists can be in their view of not-racism. How can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are closed-minded and unwilling to change?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

187. “The face of ethnic racism bares itself in the form of a persistent question: “Where are you from?”

— Ibram X. Kendi

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

196. “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

197. “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

198. “The racializing serves the core mandate of race: to create hierarchies of value.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

199. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi