Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

153. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

159. “Ideas often dance a capella.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

171. “Proslavery legislators repressed the very captives they said were docile, and restricted the education of the very people they argued could not be educated.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

172. “Whoever makes the cultural standard makes the cultural hierarchy.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

173. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

185. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi