Ibram X. Kendi

“tis not best that you seem too learned.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Racists confessing to their crimes is not in their self-interest.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Racist intentions—not policies—became covert after the 1960s.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“EVERY HISTORIAN WRITES IN—and is impacted by—a precise historical moment.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals. In”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas and abolitionist thought.10”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call love of freedom”—or”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Others channeled—or were led to channel—their economic and political frustrations into racist ideas, which then led to more hatred of Black people.…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“In this way, heterosexual White men freed themselves, through racist laws, to engage in sexual relations with all women.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“newspaper reports of rape constructed white defendants as individual offenders and black defendants as representative of the failings of their racial group,”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“From the beginning, it has been a three-sided battle, a battle of antiracist ideas being pitted against two kinds of racist ideas…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Society, he said, became destabilized when children, women, and servants refused to accept their station.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“If Barack Obama came to embody America’s history of racial progress, then Donald Trump should come to embody America’s history of racist…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“The vicious housing cycle had already begun. Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“If Black people make up 13.2 percent of the US population, then Black people should make up somewhere close to 13 percent…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“aggressive hypersexual African femininity. Such portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhuman rapes and to mask their human attractions…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“the shrewdest and most powerful anti-Black criminals have legalized their criminal activities, have managed to define their crimes of slave trading and…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,”…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“ON JULY 15, 1787, eight-year-old Polly Jefferson and fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings reached Jefferson’s Paris doorstep. Sally Hemings had come to Monticello as…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Young Black males were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“During America’s first century, racist theological ideas were absolutely critical to sanctioning the growth of American slavery and making it acceptable to…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“The system's acts are covert, just as the racist ideas of the people are implicit. I could not wrap my head around…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Stamped from the Beginning presents this new history. It does not use terms like overt and covert, or explicit and implicit to…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“In his home, no one around him saw anything wrong with the tyranny. Slavery was as customary as prisons are today. Few…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas.…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“The year before, Boyle had jumped into the ring of the racial debate with Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness. He…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“I thought I had it all figured out. I thought of racism as an inanimate, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable,…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“It is not hard to figure out what Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indentured White servants meant when they demanded liberty in…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing. Politicians seeking higher office have…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“English physician Charles White, the well-known author of a treatise on midwifery, entered the debate over species in 1799. Unlike Scotland’s Lord…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European…

— Ibram X. Kendi