Top 200 Ibram X. Kendi Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

156. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

183. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

185. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

188. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi