David Player

“Caste in the South,” wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “is a system for arbitrarily defining the status of all Negroes and of all whites with regard to the most fundamental privileges and opportunities of human society.” It would become the social, economic, and psychological template at work in one degree or another for generations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson

“The caste system has historically rewarded snitches and sellouts among the lowest caste, as with the enforcers in the concentration camps of the Third Reich and the slave drivers on southern plantations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“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

“Conspicuously outperforming one’s fellows is sometimes resented, as it makes people who are already feeling inferior feel even more inferior,” Matory wrote. “Honor is a zero-sum game, with particularly intense implications for the discredited, because… there is so little honor to go around.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents