Alana Benjamin’s Reviews > Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents > Status Update

The story of Devonte Harris was shocking enough for me to put down the book after half an hour of reading.

"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." (70)

"Hostility towards the lowest caste became part of the initiation rite into citizenship in America. Thus, people who had descended from Africans became the unifying foil in solidifying the caste system, the bar against which all others could measure themselves approvingly." (51)

"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 quicksand and mythology of race." (24-25)