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“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception—whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,â€� he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“A caste system has a way of filtering down to every inhabitant, its codes absorbed like mineral springs, setting the expectations of where one fits on the ladder. “The mill worker with nobody else to ‘look down on,â€� regards himself as eminently superior to the Negro,â€� observed the Yale scholar Liston Pope in 1942. “The colored man represents his last outpost against social oblivion.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“South. It amounted to the central tenets of the caste system. One of the tenets was “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jotiba Phule found inspiration in the abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“I had been writing about a stigmatized people, six million of them, who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the South, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste, I would soon discover, follows Indians in their own global diaspora.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The South is where the majority of the subordinate caste was consigned to live for most of the country’s history and for that reason is where the caste system was formalized and most brutally enforced. It was there that the tenets of intercaste relations first took hold before spreading to the rest of the country, leading the writer Alexis de Tocqueville to observe in 1831: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The Europeans could and did escape from their masters and blend into the general white population that was hardening into a single caste.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The colonists had been unable to enslave the native population on its own turf and believed themselves to have solved the labor problem with the Africans they imported.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, as law and custom stated that “submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“What the colonists created was “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world,â€� wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross. “For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the ‘human raceâ€� and into a separate subgroup that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“in 1740, South Carolina, like other slaveholding states, finally decided to limit the workday of enslaved African-Americans to fifteen hours from March to September and to fourteen hours from September to March, double the normal workday for humans who actually get paid for their labor. In that same era, prisoners found guilty of actual crimes were kept to a maximum of ten hours per workday. Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Your slaves, I believe, work as hard, if not harder, than the horses whereon you ride,â€� Whitefield wrote in an open letter to the colonies of the Chesapeake in 1739. “These, after their work is done, are fed and taken proper care of.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“No one was willing,â€� Baptist wrote, “to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“No one was white before he/she came to America,â€� James Baldwin once said. Their geographic origin was their passport to the dominant caste. “The European immigrantsâ€� experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where Europeanness—that is to say, whiteness—was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to,”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Hostility toward the lowest caste became part of the initiation rite into citizenship in America.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The people who told themselves these things were telling lies to themselves. Their lives were to some degree a lie and in dehumanizing these people whom they regarded as beasts of the field, they dehumanized themselves.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“You know that there are no black people in Africa,â€� she said.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Africans are not black,â€� she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“For white southerners, it was a “cardinal sin,â€� it was “harrowing,â€� wrote the historian Jason Sokol, “to call a black man ‘Misterâ€� or to shake hands with him.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“. They had thought of, and measured themselves as, the standard for human existence. But the indigenous people they saw were at the outer limits of a particular human trait: their height. Even the women averaged over six feet, some of the men approached seven. The well-armed explorers were the opposite. Their weapons were deadly, and their bodies were closer to the ground.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Were height the measure for determining race, as arbitrary a measure as any and less arbitrary than some, the Dutch people of the Netherlands would be the same “raceâ€� as the Nilote people of South Sudan or the Tutsis of Rwanda, as they are all among the tallest in our species, even the women averaging well over six feet. On the other end, the Pygmies and Sardinians would be their own separate “race,â€� as they have historically been among the shortest humans.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The idea of race is a recent phenomenon in human history. It dates to the start of the transatlantic slave trade and thus to the subsequent caste system that arose from slavery.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“That is how people now identified as white got the scientific-sounding yet random name Caucasian. More than a century later, in 1914, a citizenship trial was under way in America over whether a Syrian could be a Caucasian (and thus white), which led an expert witness in the case to say of Blumenbach’s confusing and fateful discovery: “Never has a single head done more harm to science.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,â€� said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The idea of race,â€� Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Color is a fact. Race is a social construct. “We think we ‘seeâ€� race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture,â€� the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’…are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.â€� And yet, observed the historian Nell Irvin Painter, “Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for “raceâ€� or “breed.â€� The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women, whites over people of color, and the dominant over the subordinate.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Rather than deploying racism as an either/or accusation against an individual, it may be more constructive to focus on derogatory actions that harm a less powerful group rather than on what is commonly seen as an easily deniable, impossible-to-measure attribute.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism. Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,â€� Bonhoeffer once said of bystanders. “God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“But they followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis having seized the advantage of this new technology, the chance to reach Germans live and direct in their homes anytime they chose, an intravenous drip to the mind.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,â€� wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures. In both countries, the subordinate castes were consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement, owing to the sins of the past.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“the first pillar of caste, Divine Will and the Laws of Nature, the first of the organizing principles inherent in any caste system.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Thus, heritability became the second pillar of caste. In India, it was generally the father who passed his rank to his children. In America, dating back to colonial Virginia, children inherited the caste of their mother both by law and by custom. And in disputes beyond these parameters, a child was generally to take the status of the lower-ranking parent.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“the Assembly decreed in 1662, “be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.â€� With this decree, the colonists were breaking from English legal precedent, the only precepts they had ever known, the ancient order that gave children the status of the father. This new law allowed enslavers to claim the children of black women, the vast majority of whom were enslaved, as their property for life and for ensuing generations. It invited them to impregnate the women themselves if so inclined, the richer it would make them.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents