“One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and between darkness… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“From the beginning, it has been a three-sided battle, a battle of antiracist ideas being pitted against two kinds of racist ideas at the… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“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 Copy Share
“Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing. Politicians seeking higher office have primarily created… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“The vicious housing cycle had already begun. Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“To justify Black enslavement, Barbados planters actually “preferred” the polygenesis theory over the curse theory of Ham,” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share
“Our education has filled us with strong prejudices against them,” Hopkins professed, “and led us to consider them, not as our brethren, or in… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share