Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

162. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

165. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

184. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “Is making our children feel good in moments more important than raising them for a lifetime in the real world? –.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

194. “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

195. “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

196. “But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

197. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

199. “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

200. “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