We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to not be racist. Now let's know how to be antiracist.

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.

this double desire, this dueling consciousness, yielded an inner strife between Black pride and a yearning to be White.

I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Racist ideas clouded the discrimination , rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people.

An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.

We were unarmed, but we knew that blackness armed us, even though we had no guns.

To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. [...] We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic. [...] All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups.