"Assimilationists believe in the post-racial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away. They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist power’s final solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist. Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"The history of the racialized world is a three-way fight between assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracists. Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals." — Audre Lorde "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference"
"We are surrounded by racial inequity, as visible as the law, as hidden as our private thoughts." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"What if we realized the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students? In other words, the racial problem is the opportunity gap, as antiracist reformers call it, not the achievement gap." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"'Racist policy' says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. 'Institutional racism' and 'structural racism' and 'systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic. ... Covering up the specific policies and policymakers prevents us from identifying and replacing the specific policies and policymakers. We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of 'the system.'" — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem has always been the self-interest of racist power. Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest has been behind racist policies. Powerful and brilliant intellectuals then produced racist ideas to justify the racist policies of their era, to redirect the blame for their era’s racial inequities away from those policies and onto people." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful self-interest)—all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"The common idea of claiming 'color blindness' is akin to the notion of being 'not racist'—as with the 'not racist,' the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity." — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
"What’s the problem with being 'not racist'? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: 'I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.' But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist' isn’t 'not racist.' It is ‘antiracist.'" — Ibram Kendi How to Be an Antiracist
