Ibram X. Kendi

“When men oppress their fellowmen, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Enlightenment ideas gave legitimacy to this long-held racist “partiality,” the connection between lightness and Whiteness and reason, on the one hand, and…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas…

— 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

“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

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

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity.”

— 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

“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

“For Jefferson, power came before freedom. Indeed, power creates freedom, not the other way around—as the powerless are taught.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“To justify Black enslavement, Barbados planters actually “preferred” the polygenesis theory over the curse theory of Ham,”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to…

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Our education has filled us with strong prejudices against them,” Hopkins professed, “and led us to consider them, not as our brethren,…

— 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

“Planters responded to labor demands and laborers’ unity by purchasing more African people and luring Whiteness away from Blackness.”

— 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

“the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people.”

— 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

“South Carolina authorities reprimanded Bryan. They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.20 Hugh”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Maybe Mather was consciously attempting to redirect the public’s anger away from elites and toward invisible demons.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities.”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior. Benjamin”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“tis not best that you seem too learned.”

— Ibram X. Kendi