Top 80 Mikki Kendall Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Being a marginalized parent is an emotional and social tightrope over a hard floor without a net.”

— Mikki Kendall

52. “Despite white feminist narratives to the contrary, there is no absence of feminism inside Islam, the Black church, or any other community. The women inside those communities are doing the hard and necessary work; they don’t need white saviors, and they don’t need to structure their feminism to look like anyone else’s. They just need to not have to constantly combat the white supremacist patriarchy from the outside while they work inside their communities.”

— Mikki Kendall

53. “Going into a white woman’s kitchen did nothing to help other women. Those jobs had always been available, always paid poorly, always been dangerous.”

— Mikki Kendall

54. “WHY IS IT that we’re more inclined to create programs to combat obesity than ones that meaningfully address hunger?”

— Mikki Kendall

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

— Mikki Kendall

56. “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

57. “When mainstream feminism fails to consider these options as viable, when it relies on the same old tropes rooted in respectability, it ignores that for many, a choice between starvation and crime isn’t a choice.”

— Mikki Kendall

58. “For many who are coming to feminism in the way that I did, through lived experience, the work that feminists do in the community is more relevant than any text.”

— Mikki Kendall

59. “If your child is killed by police, if the water in your community is poisoned, if a mockery is made of your grief, how do you feel? Do you want to be calm and quiet? Do you want to forgive in order to make everyone else comfortable? Or do you want to scream, to yell, to demand justice for the wrongs done? Anger gets the petitions out, it motivates marches, it gets people to the ballot. Anger is sometimes the only fuel left at the end of a long, horrible day, week, month, or generation.”

— Mikki Kendall

60. “Feminism can’t afford to prioritize supporting whiteness over actively combating racist and misogynistic policies that will end up hurting everyone.”

— Mikki Kendall

61. “She taught me distrust. What progressives who ignore history don’t understand is that just like racism is taught, so is distrust.”

— Mikki Kendall

62. “Suits, ties, and demure dresses didn’t protect our ancestors from violence before or during the civil rights movement, and they won’t protect residents of the inner city now, no matter how often people try to blame victims of racism for how they are dressed.”

— Mikki Kendall

63. “Instead of treating them like self-determining agents in their own lives, they treat their girls as only capable of responding to what is happening around them.”

— Mikki Kendall

64. “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. It says that it supports all white women being empowered regardless of whether they are ethical or not. For white feminism, anyone can claim to be an ally as long as they occasionally do the right thing, but the reality is that the performance of allyship is ultimately untrustworthy and useless.”

— Mikki Kendall

65. “There was a sense that when the targets of oppression weren’t white, it was fine to vote based on “economic distress” and not solidarity with other women.”

— Mikki Kendall

66. “I believe in rage, believe in aiming it when I unleash it because I know it can be so powerful. My targets tend to be up, not down or sideways, from where I sit.”

— Mikki Kendall

67. “Churches, politicians, even some educational institutions teach hate and normalize it long before it ends up in a song lyric or being parroted in an interview by a newly famous sixteen-year-old. In that way the hood is a reflection of the wider world. We don’t have bigotry by accident; it’s built and sustained by the same cultural institutions we’re taught to revere.”

— Mikki Kendall

68. “We don’t have bigotry by accident; it’s built and sustained by the same cultural institutions we’re taught to revere.”

— Mikki Kendall

69. “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. Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death.”

— Mikki Kendall

70. “Counter to that centering of hypermasculinity is Black feminism, which recognizes that fighting the white supremacist patriarchy outside the community is different than fighting the toxic masculinity inside the community. There’s a desire to see the same men who are so adversely impacted by racism succeed, but not at the expense of Black women.”

— Mikki Kendall

71. “I tell you this story because sometimes the story of your life is the story of a lot of lives.”

— Mikki Kendall

72. “If a liberation movement’s own representatives are engaging with each other oppressively, then what progress can the movement make without fixing that internal problem?”

— Mikki Kendall

73. “You can argue that conservative values are at odds with feminist ideology, but ultimately the question has to be not only what women are we empowering, but also what are we empowering them to do. White women aren’t just passive beneficiaries of racist oppression; they are active participants.”

— Mikki Kendall

74. “We love the idea of a Strong Black Woman, celebrate those who, like Anita Hill, manage to continue to have a successful career in the aftermath. But what about those who can’t do that? For those without a pass back to middle class or the ivory tower, what resources are available? The same feminism that holds them up to fight the battles turns away when the war is over and doesn’t bother to tend the wounds, emotional or otherwise.”

— Mikki Kendall

75. “Being skeptical of those who promise they care but do nothing to help those who are marginalized is a life skill that can serve you well when your identity makes you a target. 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

76. “Yes, it is important for women to work together against gender oppression. But which women? Which forms of gender oppression? After all, cis women can and do oppress trans women, white women have the institutional and social power to oppress women of color, able-bodied women can oppress people with disabilities, and so on. Oppression of women isn’t just an external force; it happens between groups of women as well.”

— Mikki Kendall

77. “What I do have is a deep desire to move the conversation about solidarity and the feminist movement in a direction that recognizes that an intersectional approach to feminism is key to improving relationships between communities of women, so that some measure of true solidarity can happen.”

— Mikki Kendall

78. “Right now, in Chicago there are clusters of murdered Black and Brown women whose bodies have been found since 2001 and their murders are largely going unsolved. Chicago police have insisted there is no evidence of a serial killer in action, though in a city with a police murder clearance rate of only 25 percent it’s difficult to assess how much work has been done to solve these crimes. Murder clearance rates are down around the country, with a national average.”

— Mikki Kendall

79. “Now mainstream feminism has to step up, has to give itself to a place where it spends more time offering resources and less time demanding validation. Being an accomplice means that white feminism will devote its platform and resources to supporting those in marginalized communities doing feminist work.”

— Mikki Kendall

80. “Case in point, the recent proliferation of white women calling the police on Black and Brown people for reasons that run the gamut from eating lunch to being in a parking lot. Feminism has told these women they have a right to occupy every space, but it has not passed on the message that they don’t have a right to force everyone else to comply with their whims.”

— Mikki Kendall

81. “Mainstream white feminists will have to confront the racism of white women and the harm it does, without passing the buck to white men.”

— Mikki Kendall

82. “White privilege knows no gender.”

— Mikki Kendall

83. “It is never the privileged outsider who gets to decide when they’re a good ally. Especially not if they want to use their status as an ally to excuse whatever they have done that has offended someone in the group they claim to be supporting.”

— Mikki Kendall