Antiracism Quotes

“No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Movements are most powerful when they begin to affect the vision and perspective of those who do not necessarily associate themselves with those movements.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“When Black women stand up— as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The possessive investment in whiteness can’t be rectified by learning “how to be more antiracist.” It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism. What is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing short of that is going to make a difference.”
― Saidiya Hartman

“[Trans women] have to fight to be included within the category “woman” in a way that is not dissimilar from the earlier struggles of Black women and women of color who were assigned the gender female at birth.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Science says the races are biologically equal so if they're not in society, the only reason why can be racism.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“As many times as I’ve spoken during Black History Month, I never tire of urging people to remember that it wasn’t a single individual or two who created that movement, that, as a matter of fact, it was largely women within collective contexts, Black women, poor Black women who were maids, washerwomen, and cooks. These were the people who collectively refused to ride the bus.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Whatever grace might 'trickle down' from the higher regions of a given society to the lower is no more essential than that which rises and converges from
the opposite direction.”
― Aberjhani, Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

“The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“...published in the June 1963 issue of Liberation Magazine and written from a prison cell in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr also mused: 'First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season".
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill ismore frustrating than absolute misunderstandingfrom people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“Such are the incalculable effects of that negative passion of indifference, that hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other.

Racism, for example. Logically, it should have declined with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows. But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, an artificial construct, based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation -- as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial phase -- there is no racism properly so-called. Once that `natural' relation is lost, we enter into a phobic relationship with an artificial other, idealized by hatred. And because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other.
Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism.

All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning, a mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference -- a logical product of our marvellous planet-wide conviviality.

The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat. And it is still the same person.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime

“The civil rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not underestimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“It doesn’t matter that a Black woman heads the national police. The technology, the regimes, the targets are still the same.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“I think that we often treat these cases as if they were exceptions, as if they were aberrations. Whereas in actuality they happen all the time. And we assume that if we are only able to punish the perpetrator, then justice will have been done. But as a matter of fact, as horrendous as it was that the grand jury refused to indict two police officers for the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, had they indicted the officers, I don’t know whether anything would have changed. I’m making this point in order to emphasize that even when police are indicted, we cannot be certain that change is on the agenda.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“For most of our history the very category “human” has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“During the commentary on Ferguson, someone pointed out that the purpose of the police is supposed to be to protect and serve. At least, that’s their slogan. Soldiers are trained to shoot to kill. We saw the way in which that manifested itself in Ferguson.”
― Angela Y. Davis

“It is a mistake to assume that all we have to do is guarantee the prosecution of the cop who killed Michael Brown. The major challenge of this period is to infuse a consciousness of the structural character of state violence into the
movements that spontaneously arise.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“After Spanish and Portuguese colonizers arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth century, they took to race making all the different indigenous peoples, calling them all one people, "Indians", or negros de la terra (Blacks from the land) in sixteenth-century Brazil. Spanish Lawyer Alonso de Zuazo in 1510 contrasted the beastly race of Blacks as "strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak, who can work only in undemanding tasks." Both racist constructions normalized and rationalized the increased importing of the supposedly "strong" enslaved Africans and the ongoing genocide of the supposedly "weak" Indians in the Americas.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The other races, save Latinx and Middle Easterners, had been completely made and distinguished by the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Beginning in 1735, Carl Linnaeus locked in the racial hierarchy of humankind in Systema Naturae. He color-coded the races as White, Yellow, Red, and Black. He attached each race to one of the four regions of the world and described their characteristics. The Linnaeus taxonomy became the blueprint that nearly every enlightened race maker followed and that race makers still follow today. And, of course, these were not simply neutral categories, because races were never meant to be neutral categories. Racist power created them for a purpose.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“[The Kerner R]eport does not say that Americans are racist. If it did, the only answer would be to line everybody up, all 200 million of us, then line up 200,000 psychiatrists, and have us all lie on couches for ten years trying to understand the problem and for ten years more learning how to deal with it. All over the country people are beating their breasts crying mea culpa--"I'm so sorry that I am a racist"--which means, really, that they want to cop out because if racism is to be solved on an individual psychological basis, then there is little hope.

What the Kerner Report is really saying is that the institutions of America brutalize not only Negroes but also whites who are not racists but who in many communities have to use racist institutions. When it is put on that basis, we know we cannot solve the fundamental problem by sitting around examining our innards, but by getting out and fighting for institutional change.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“The Black Power movement—or what we referred to at the time as the Black liberation movement...was a response to what were perceived as limitations of the civil rights movement: we not only needed to
claim legal rights within the existing society but also to demand substantive rights—in jobs, housing, health care, education, et cetera.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“As Dr. King said, "Justice is indivisible." He said, "I am not going to be concerned about justice for Negroes in the United States because I know that justice is indivisible, and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
― Angela Y. Davis

“But those who demand the smoking gun of a racial slur or swastika or burning cross before they will believe that an individual encounter with the police might be about race are ignoring what we know and what the numbers are bearing out: something is going on and it is not right. We are being targeted.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“So much of feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended”
― Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

“My fortune within corporate America has always been held hostage by white solidarity.”
― Talisa Lavarry, Confessions From Your Token Black Colleague: True Stories & Candid Conversations About Equity & Inclusion In The Workplace

“Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare "transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it," U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“In the days leading up to the moments when we found ourselves choking on disbelief while watching streamed images of corpses being loaded into freezer trucks, emergency room attendants scrambling to save lives, nurses sobbing frustration over feeling overwhelmed and abandoned, and U.S. citizens on the march to take control of their own fates, Americans witnessed something foreboding. It was the formation of a dominating political culture which would prove fatally lacking when put to a test of ‘unprecedented’ severity.”
― Aberjhani, Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

“My ideas of gender and sexuality reflected those of my parents. They did not raise me not to be a homophobe. They rarely talked about gay and lesbian people. Ideas often dance a capella. Their silence erased queer existence as thoroughly as integrationists erased the reality of integrated White spaces.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to not be racist. Now let's know how to be antiracist.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. People who hate you for not being like them. Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks. Like... 'like' you. Meaning, they 'like' you because you're like them. And then there are antiracists. They love you because you're like you.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You