Top 80 Mikki Kendall Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational.”

— Mikki Kendall

2. “It’s time to treat domestic violence and hate speech as the neon red flags they are and take the necessary steps to reduce the risks instead of hoping that they’ll go away.”

— Mikki Kendall

3. “We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding what opportunities they deserve.”

— Mikki Kendall

4. “An intersectional approach to feminism requires understanding that too often mainstream feminism ignores that Black women and other women of color are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine of hate.”

— Mikki Kendall

5. “No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.”

— Mikki Kendall

6. “The tone policing of respectability ensures that the fight for equality becomes the responsibility of the oppressed.”

— Mikki Kendall

7. “Politeness as filtered through fragility and supremacy isn’t about manners; it’s about a methodology of controlling the conversation.”

— Mikki Kendall

8. “Colorism is a cultural institution that has skewed access to opportunity by consistently placing those with lighter skin in positions of privilege. This is why things like paper bag tests and comb tests proliferated in some parts of higher-income Black communities. For the paper bag test, a paper bag would be held against your skin and if you were darker than the bag, you weren’t admitted to a nightclub, a fraternity, or sometimes even a church.”

— Mikki Kendall

9. “Respectability politics are really about controlling group behavior with designations of appropriate or inappropriate behavior rooted in structural inequality. Gatekeepers of respectability push dominant narratives but don’t necessarily understand where their ideas of what is respectable come from, or how much of it is about mimicry and not innate value.”

— Mikki Kendall

10. “There’s nothing feminist about having so many resources at your fingertips and choosing to be ignorant. Nothing empowering or enlightening in deciding that intent trumps impact. Especially when the consequences aren’t going to be experienced by you, but will instead be experienced by someone from a marginalized community.”

— Mikki Kendall

11. “Feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it’s hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you’re working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy.”

— Mikki Kendall

12. “Hunger has a lifelong impact, shaping not only someone’s relationship with food but also their health and the health of their community. Hunger, real hunger, provokes desperation and leads to choices that might otherwise be unfathomable.”

— Mikki Kendall

13. “Mainstream, white-centered feminism hasn’t just failed women of color, it has failed white women.”

— Mikki Kendall

14. “For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves many of us feeling isolated.”

— Mikki Kendall

15. “Sometimes being a good ally is about opening the door for someone instead of insisting that your voice is the only one that matters.”

— Mikki Kendall

16. “We need to let go of respectability politics and understand that whiteness as a construct will never approve of us, and that the approval of white supremacy is not something that we or any community should be seeking. We have to be willing to embrace the full autonomy of people who are less privileged and understand that equity means making access to opportunity easier, not deciding which opportunities they deserve.”

— Mikki Kendall

17. “We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.”

— Mikki Kendall

18. “America loves the myth of a meritocracy more than anything else, because it lets us ignore the reality of the impact of bigotry.”

— Mikki Kendall

19. “We expect marginalized voices to ring out no matter what obstacles they face, and then we penalize them for not saying the right thing in the right way.”

— Mikki Kendall

20. “But niceness is more than helping; it is stopping to listen, to connect, to be gentle with your words.”

— Mikki Kendall

21. “Women of color declaring to white women, I’m not here to clean up your mess, carry your spear, hold your hand, or cheer you on while I suffer in silence. I’m not here to raise your children, assuage your guilt, build your platforms, or fight your battles. I’m here for my community because no one else will stand up for us but us.”

— Mikki Kendall

22. “Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn’t set a standard that can protect any woman.”

— Mikki Kendall

23. “Respectability has not saved women of color from racism; it won’t save any woman from sexism or outright misogyny.”

— Mikki Kendall

24. “Any system that makes basic human rights contingent on a narrow standard of behavior pits potential victims against each other and only benefits those who would prey on them.”

— Mikki Kendall

25. “The fundamental problem with white feminism has always been that it refuses to admit that the primary goal is shifting power to white women, and no one else.”

— Mikki Kendall

26. “Just as fear of a Black man was used to justify lynching, fear of offending other white women has become the excuse for not confronting the harm white women are doing to themselves in their haste to uphold the limited protections offered by white privilege.”

— Mikki Kendall

27. “But to paraphrase James Baldwin, to be aware of what is happening in this world is to be in an almost perpetual state of rage. Everyone should be angry about injustice, not just those experiencing it.”

— Mikki Kendall

28. “We’re all on stolen land in the United States, but some communities are far less likely to be impacted by redlining or subprime lending.”

— Mikki Kendall

29. “When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn’t solve anything.”

— Mikki Kendall

30. “The myths of the Strong Black Woman from chapter one, the Wise Indian, the Submissive Asian, and the Sassy Latina do more than show up in bad TV shows. They influence the perception that women who are not white do not experience a full range of emotions, much less suffer from the same mental health issues.”

— Mikki Kendall

31. “The problem has never been the ways that victims don’t tell, so much as it has been that some victims aren’t seen as valuable enough to protect.”

— Mikki Kendall

32. “Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met.”

— Mikki Kendall

33. “Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn’t set a standard that can protect any women. Instead it sets up arbitrary respectability-centered goalposts against which all women are supposed to measure their behavior. That’s not freedom; that’s just a more elaborate series of cages that will never be comfortable or safe.”

— Mikki Kendall

34. “Feminism in the hood is for everyone, because everyone needs it.”

— Mikki Kendall

35. “Feminism is the work that you do, and the people you do it for who matter more than anything else.”

— Mikki Kendall

36. “It’s not at all helpful for some white feminists to make demands of women of color out of a one-sided idea of sisterhood and call that solidarity. Sisterhood is a mutual relationship between equals. And as anyone with sisters can tell you, it’s not uncommon for sisters to fight or to hurt each other’s feelings. Family whether biological or not is supposed to support you. But that doesn’t mean no one can ever tell you that you’re wrong.”

— Mikki Kendall

37. “But as adults, as people who are doing hard work, you cannot expect your feelings to be the center of someone else’s struggle.”

— Mikki Kendall

38. “Girls in the hood must learn to present only the fraction of themselves deemed acceptable while also working twice as hard to get half as far in life.”

— Mikki Kendall

39. “Attempts to tie access to food programs to labor, to respectability, to anything but being a human in need are ultimately less about solving the problem of hunger and more about shame.”

— Mikki Kendall

40. “Because so much of what feminists had to say of her time was laden with racist and classist assumptions about women like her, she focused on what she could control and was openly disdainful of a lot of feminist rhetoric.”

— Mikki Kendall

41. “We expect cis women to be harmed, so we focus our energy on warning them to avoid danger.”

— Mikki Kendall

42. “We are part of the society that we are fighting to change, and we cannot absolve ourselves of our role in it.”

— Mikki Kendall

43. “On average, American states spend $88,000 to incarcerate a young person, but allot an average of $10,000 to educate them.”

— Mikki Kendall

44. “Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational. Sometimes a personal apocalypse, sometimes one that ruins a whole community. It isn’t a single event of biblical proportions, but it is a series of encounters with one or more of the fabled Four Horsemen.”

— Mikki Kendall

45. “There’s nothing empowering about the idea that the road to their sexual freedom is making a fetish costume out of a culture.”

— Mikki Kendall

46. “The feminism at the University of Chicago on offer to the low-income Black women living in the neighborhood might as well have been a scene from The Help.”

— Mikki Kendall

47. “There’s no magic shield in being middle class that can completely insulate you from the consequences of being in a body that’s already been criminalized for existing.”

— Mikki Kendall

48. “Girls like me seemed to be the object of the conversations and not full participants, because we were a problem to be solved, not people in our own right.”

— Mikki Kendall

49. “A better deal for white women could not be, would not be, the road to freedom for Black women.”

— Mikki Kendall

50. “Being a marginalized parent is an emotional and social tightrope over a hard floor without a net.”

— Mikki Kendall