Ben | The Immersion Library

“Do you as Germans feel any guilt for what the Germans did?’ he will ask them.
They will go off into groups and have heated discussions among themselves, and then come back to him with their thoughts.
‘Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,’ some students once told him, echoing what others have said. ‘And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste. You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“To put the point in a different way, the only truly original text is one that has never been read.”
― Dennis Washburn, The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki, dennis washburn