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Quote by Ibram X. Kendi

“Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.”

Quote by Ibram X. Kendi

Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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How to Be an Antiracist

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Ibram X. Kendi

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“The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. They are not one and the same, as the resistance within White nations shows, resistance admittedly often tempered by racist ideas.”

RacismWhitesWhite PeopleRacistsRacesRacist PoliciesRacist Ideas
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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“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.”

RaceRacismDenialAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesRacists
Book:How to Be an Antiracist
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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?”

RacismMark TwainRacistsHuck FinnAdventures Of Huckleberry FinnSamuel Clemens
Book:The Braindead Megaphone
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“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.”

AmericaRacismWhite SupremacyAmericansRacistsWhite SupremacistsOffensiveness
Book:Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American
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