“Just like in the old days before Roosevelt, segregationists were given the power to locally administer and racially discriminate the relief coming… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“They all followed Mississippi’s example, instituting race-veiled voting restrictions, from literacy tests to poll taxes, that would purge their voting rolls of… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“Tocqueville described the vicious cycle of racist ideas, a cycle that made persuading or educating racist ideas away nearly impossible. In “order… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“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 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… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can call antiracists has… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“Racists confessing to their crimes is not in their self-interest.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves… — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha… — 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 Image
“assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity.” — Ibram X. Kendi Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
