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Quote by Ibram X. Kendi

“Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess I became a criminal at seven years old.”

Quote by Ibram X. Kendi

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How to Be an Antiracist

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Ibram X. Kendi

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“Can we ever really know to what extent this man [Mark Twain] or his book [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] was, or is, racist? When we identify racism in the book, aren't we really just identifying racism in the culture out of which it came? Is it fair to expect Twain to have vaulted himself out of his own time and place and arrive, clean-booted and upright, in our own? Isn't the book still funny and deep? Aren't I actually enjoying it? How does one do the complicated math of Ultimate Racism: If we determine that, relative to our own time, Twain was a 40 percent racist, while relative to his own, he was only a 12 percent racist, or was in fact a 0 percent racist--what do we know, really?”

“In fact, I've yet to encounter anyone in America who has openly admitted to being a racist. Nothing is more offensive to an American than being called a racist. We'll forgive you sooner for punching our mother in the throat or kicking our beloved puppy in the face. Even white supremacists don't consider themselves to be racist. They're just "racial realists" or "American Identitarians" who believe in preserving the purity of the white identity.”