175 Quotes by Isabel Wilkerson

[Scapegoating] blames societal ills on the groups with the least power and the least say in how the country operates while allowing the larger framework and those who control and reap the dividends of these divisions to go unchecked.

I ain’t got much education, but I sho’ know folks.[Quoting Ida Mae Brandon Gladney]

We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’ … are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. t was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

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 slavery lasted on its soil.

Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing.

It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. "There is never caste," the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. "Only castes.