Jayati > Jayati's Quotes

“according to immigration and legal scholar Ian Haney López, the Irish in the 1850s to 1880s, and the eastern and southern Europeans in the early twentieth century. It was in becoming American that they became white.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“not any kind of New World magnanimity that opened the Golden Door.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“In 1691, Virginia became the first colony to outlaw marriage between blacks and whites, a ban that the majority of states would take up for the next three centuries.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The Supreme Court did not overturn these prohibitions until 1967. Still, some states were slow to officially repeal their endogamy laws. Alabama, the last state to do so, did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“This inverted the natural expression of manhood—total freedom for one group and life-or-death policing of another—and served further to reinforce caste boundaries and the powerlessness of subordinated men who might dare try to protect their own daughters, wives, sisters, and mothers. At the same time, it reminded everyone in the hierarchy of the absolute power of dominant-caste men. This was a cloud that hung over the lives of everyone consigned to the lowest caste for most of the time that there has been a United States of America.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated. There were two separate Bibles—one for blacks and one for whites—to swear to tell the truth on. The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M.” A warden in Louisiana reported that he had just taken custody of a runaway and noted that “he has been lately gelded and is not yet well.” Another Louisianan reported his disgust for a neighbor who had “castrated 3 men of his.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Both the Germans in the Nazi era and the descendants of the Confederacy used ritualized torture for arbitrary infractions, some as minor as stealing shoes or pocket change or, in the case of the American South, for acting out of one’s place.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“After slavery ended, the former Confederates took power again, but now without the least material investment in the lives of the people they once had owned. They pressed down even harder to keep the lowest caste in its place. African-Americans were mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and burned at the courthouse square, a lynching every three or four days in the”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“unfit for absolute power over the life and death of another. “They were owned by a woman ‘unable to read or write,’ ” Stampp wrote, “ ‘scarcely able to count to ten,’ legally incompetent to contract marriage,” and yet had to submit to her sovereignty, depend upon her for their next breath. They were owned by “drunkards, such as Lilburne Lewis, of Livingston County, Kentucky, who once chopped a slave to bits with an ax,” Stampp wrote; “and by sadists, such as Madame Lalaurie, of New Orleans, who tortured her slaves for her own amusement.” In order to survive, “they were to give way to the most wretched white man,” observed The Farmers’ Register of 1834.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“and Mary Gardner in 1941. A planter in Mississippi said that, if his tenant “didn’t stop acting so big, the next time it would be the bullet or a rope. That is the way to manage them when they get too big.” In 1948, a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi, was severely beaten by two whites, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, “because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“rest until they have uncovered the person’s rank in the social order.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“They had relied on this illusion, perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group in a forbiddingly competitive society “in which downward social mobility was a constant fear,” the historian David Roediger wrote. “One might lose everything, but not whiteness.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“vote or cheat you out of it: they could by arousing your anxieties make you impotent, but they could not strip your white skin off of you. It became the poor white’s most precious possession, a ‘charm’ staving off utter dissolution.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“If you are not black and “if you or your parents were alive in the 1960s and got a mortgage,” wrote Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate, “you benefited directly and materially from discrimination.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“major source of current-day wealth, wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. “Yet they find themselves portrayed as privileged beneficiaries of special preferences by the very people who profit from their exploitation and oppression.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it, according to the Harvard sociologist David R. Williams.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The undertreatment of the subordinate caste leaves them to suffer needlessly, and the overtreatment of the dominant caste may have contributed to the rising mortality rate for white Americans who become addicted to opioids.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The caste system spared no one in the scapegoat caste. When pregnant women were to be whipped, “before binding them to the stakes, a hole is made in the ground to accommodate the enlarged form of the victim,” a Mr. C. Robin of Louisiana wrote in describing what he had witnessed. “The Negro becomes both a scapegoat and an object lesson for his group,” the anthropologist Allison Davis wrote. “He suffers for all the minor caste violations which have aroused the whites, and he becomes a warning against future violations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“even though African-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India are rarely in positions to decide who will get hired at corporations or admitted to universities.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“This was his only child, the most precious human in the world to him. The boy was so sweet-faced, innocent, and free. How could he tell him that the world, his country, saw him as a threat? When exactly is the best time to break a child’s heart?”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Once, when an overseer tied a woman up and whipped her in front of her children, “the frightened children pelted the overseer with stones,” Stampp wrote, “and one of them ran up and bit him in the leg,” as they cried for him to let her go. The caste system may have treated them as cattle or machinery, but the children responded instantly as the human beings the dominant caste refused to see.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The scholar W.E.B. Du Bois recognized this phenomenon in his research into what happened after the end of the Civil War: “The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, burning black homes and businesses to the ground, lynching and castrating black men, and driving the remaining black population out of town, after a black man tried to vote.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“a purposeful distortion of meritocracy.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“one another. “They even quarrelled over such petty questions as to who should salute first,” observed Bhimrao Ambedkar, “as to who should give way first, the Brahmins or the Kshatriyas, when the two met in the street.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Marginalized people across the world, including African-Americans, call this phenomenon “crabs in a barrel.” Many of the slave rebellions or the later attempts at unionizing African-American laborers in the South were thwarted because of this phenomenon, people subverting those who tried to get out, the spies paid with an extra peck of privilege for forewarning the dominant caste of unrest.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents