Ibram X. Kendi Quotes & Sayings

ON JUNE 25, 1890, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke at his Harvard graduation ceremony. He had now excelled, and had graduated from the most prestigious historically Black college and the most prestigious historically White college in the United States. He felt he was showing off the capability of his race. Du Bois's "brilliant and eloquent address," as judged by the reporters, was on "Jefferson Davis as Representative of Civilization." In Du Bois's rendering, Jefferson Davis, who had died the year before, represented the rugged individualism and domineering European civilization, in contrast to the rugged "submission" and selflessness of African civilization. The European "met civilization and crushed it," Du Bois concluded. "The Negro met civilization and was crushed by it." According to Du Bois's biographer, the Harvard graduate contrasted the civilized European "Strong Man" to the civilized African "Submissive Man."5 — Ibram X. Kendi

some British settlers of colonial America carried across the sea Puritan, biblical, scientific, and Aristotelian rationalizations of slavery and human hierarchy. — Ibram X. Kendi

Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era's racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people. — Ibram X. Kendi

Ligon's distinction between making "a Christian a slave" and "a slave a Christian" turned this idea on its head. — Ibram X. Kendi

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse. This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness - curse or climate, nature or nurture - would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate. — Ibram X. Kendi

Nearly every English speaker interested in Africa read Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878), and nearly everyone who read Stanley came away viewing African people as savages, including novelist Joseph Conrad, who authored the classic Heart of Darkness in 1899. The White character's journey up the Congo River "was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world" - not back in chronological time, but back in evolutionary time.2 — Ibram X. Kendi