Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

“Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.”

was not merely a torn thread in “an otherwise perfect cloth,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “It would be closer to say that slavery provided the fabric out of which the cloth was made.”

only the “surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint.”

Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within

“I watched my students become what I told them they were,”

“There is never caste,” the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. “Only castes.”

“What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,” Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.”