Antiracism Quotes

“Racism and bigotry are not polite, and I refuse to be polite in my fight against them.”
― Mona Eltahawy, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

“[The young communist] must always pay attention to the mass of human beings he lives among. Every Young Communist must fundamentally be hu­man, so human that he draws closer to humanity's best qualities. Through work, through study, and through ongoing solidarity with the people and all the peoples of the world, he distills the best of what man is. Developing to the utmost the sensitivity to feel an­guish when a human being is murdered in any corner of the world and to feel enthusiasm when a new banner of freedom is raised in any corner of the world. [Applause]
The Young Communist cannot be limited by national borders. The Young Communist must practice proletarian internationalism and feel it as his own.”
― Che Guevara

“Faced with an inconvenient history, the first defense is silence.”
― elliot jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America

“RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.

ANTIRACIST: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“The first step to building an antiracist America is acknowledging America's racist past. By acknowledging America's racist past, we can acknowledge America's racist present. In acknowledging America's racist present, we can work toward building an antiracist America.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“A fatal mistake in the history of the world which at the current moment still continues to be made is the confusion of the nation with its ethnicity. A nation can be made of many enthicities; tribes unite and divide all the time, and they go from one nation to another; or they just live on the territories of two or other nations, which further helps with the process of fusion of other different countries altogether. The examples are almost everywhere you look. But when a certain type of ethnicity gets confused that it is the nation, it almost certainly leads to discrimination, conflicts, racism and over all pretty bad and nasty things. The same thing happens when an ethnicity which lives in the territory of a certain nation starts to capsulate itself (to deny its belongings to any type of nation), or to seek a national identity elsewhere—then we have separatism.”
― Borislav Vakinov, Heresy & Metaphysics: A Compendium of Thoughts and Ideas about Magic, Philosophy, Art, Identity, the Occult and the Deeply Weird Side of Existence

“Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one's changing policies, ideas, and personhood.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“An antiracist movement that emphasizes the *actions* of individual 'white people' with a docus on things like 'calling out' everyday racism, or holding a company 'to account' for not catering to darker skin tones, perhaps isn't up to the task of defeating a concept that our societies have been deeply invested in for centuries, and that has assumed the 'truth' status that whiteness has. The focus on microaggressions and interpersonal slights often occurs at the expense of considering 'whiteness' or as a pervasive, insidious modus operandi, a particular way of engaging with the world. It is a system that is extractive, oppositional, and binary - a dominant system, one that asserts not just that white people should be dominant over other 'races' but that, more fundamentally, sees human life as dominant over all other life forms.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“Antiracism entails two fundamental tasks: first, diminishing racialization’s ability to facilitate domination, which involves deflating identarian (racist and antiracist) modes of analysis, and, second, displacing exploitation as the basis of political economy, which involves highlighting alternative idioms by which political economy is imagined.”
― Jonathan Tran, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism

“History is what we choose to remember.”
― Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America

“Words and terms are born out of a need to describe the world. But because the victors, who get to write the history, had little need to describe the fate of the conquered, the words did not exist soon enough to describe and ultimately prevent the wholesale destruction of black communities in America.”
― Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America

“But it's important to note, life can rarely be wrapped into single-word descriptions. It isn't neat and perfectly shaped. So sometimes, over the course of a lifetime (and even over the course of a day), people can take on and act out ideas represented by more than one of these three identities. Can be both, and. Just keep that in mind as we explore these folks.”
― Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You

“There is no such thing as nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Les feministes negres sempre han subratllat que la lluita no pot dirigir-se únicament contra el patriarcat, com diuen les feministes blanques. Tampoc poc centrar-se únicament en la lluita de classes, com diuen les socialistes. No pot abordar tan sols el racisme i l'imperialisme, com diuen les negres radicals. I tampoc pot combatre només l'ecocidi, com diuen les activistes ecologistes.”
― Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone

“It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polls, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections

“Let Black make the first Move today!

Time has come to be the change. Time has come to stop looking for good moves against blacks. Let's all join in the #blackchallenge - play chess with your friend today and let black play the first move today! Spread this movement to all chess players of this world. If you are in India or anywhere in the world play chess with an underprivileged person. You take white and let him/ her play the first move.

Are there any good moves for blacks?

1 Mar Zero Discrimination Day”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Are there any good moves for blacks?

1 Mar Zero Discrimination Day”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“I believe our greatness lives within our differences and the world wants to divide us. But we were meant to come together in every arena as one, bringing with us our different perspectives, diversity, cultures, and ideas.”
― Rose Francois , A Generational Cry: Based on A True Story of the Haitian Revolution

“White segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior, assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“this double desire, this dueling consciousness, yielded an inner strife between Black pride and a yearning to be White.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“No other major-party candidate for the US presidency had ever been put under such a searing nativity microscope. Then again, no other major-party candidate for US president had ever been anyone other than a White male. The Obama campaign released a scanned copy of his US birth certificate, but the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya or some Islamic anti-American nation did not suddenly go away. They were not started out of ignorance, so why would they go away out of knowledge?”
― Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

“There's nothing more threatening to some than the redistribution of cultural capital”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“This work is not comfortable. Nor should it be. Some of what I will share will make you want to slam the book shut and you're probably going to hate me at times, but I urge you to keep going. Any pain and discomfort you feel is temporary and pales into comparison to what Black people and People of Colour often have to experience on a daily basis. On the other side of some of the most difficult realisations and exchanges with others, is huge transformation - that is where the work and change happens.”
― Nova Reid, The Good Ally

“The novel predicted the triumphs of the post-1968 PMC: the moral rectitude of the virtuous lawyer and his high-spirited daughter renders the solution to racism attractive to the establishment—work on individual capacities for empathy and walking in another human being’s shoes; read books; have righteous feelings. To Kill a Mockingbird was an extraordinarily effective piece of Cold War anti-Communist propaganda: based on a liberal fantasy that antiracism is about good white people defending helpless black people against bad (poor) white people, it created an image of American liberalism that was a powerful tool for winning hearts and minds at home and around the world.”
― Catherine Liu, Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

“My fear is that much of the antiracist literature is an iteration of the same process of maintaining and reaffirming whiteness. Little in the mainstream antiracist narrative focuses on challenging the idea of 'white people' itself. Rather, it takes the the category as an unassailable truth, with the emphasis placed instead on making white people *nicer*, through a combination of begging, demanding, cajoling, and imploring.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“Investment in the absoluteness of racial categories is in fact a conservative, fearful choice. What would be truly radical would be to sound the death knoll for the fiction that white people constitute a *race* and that this racwe is imbued with any 'natural' abilities unavailable to others. The first step is the mainstreaming of knowledge about the invention of 'race,”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“Racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy. They are the product of Eurocentrism and colonialism. To act in ways that reinforce their fixedness rather than undermine them is to continue to operate in the terrain mapped out by white supremacy.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“As the rich get richer, the rest of us will be left in increasingly precarious situations. In the global recession that is upon us, the powerful will double down on their control of state and cultural apparatus, They will be determined to repress, or co-opt, the tremulous expressions of resistance that are gaining volume as the people rise of against death. The issue of co-option is pertinent. Our articulations of dissent too often mirror the parameters of our oppression, reproducing oppressive systems, unwittingly reinforcing them, or indeed 'diverse' them, to make them more 'inclusive' when in truth the need to dissolve.”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

“...but I'm also talking about the colonizing of truth, the redesigning of the fabric of reality. I am talking about the imposition of a way of classifying, measuring, and quantifying the world, including everything from time, to temperature, to distance, to weight. All of these things became calculated and bounded by frameworks that were not only European but often peculiarly English ways of understanding reality. Today's activism responds to the world on these terms, operating on terrain already mapped out by white supremacy, Eurocentric logic, and colonialism. This would be less worrying if it was clearly identified, would not pose so grave a danger if there was awareness that the terms of engagement operate within a framework that we need to dissolve. However, that acknowledgement appears to be entirely absent, and we congratulate ourselves on 'speaking truth to power' (often, depressingly, via what we know call 'platform capitalism').”
― Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition