175 Quotes by Isabel Wilkerson

That any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions is a testament to the beauty of the human spirit.

That summer and into the fall and in the ensuing years to come, amid talk of Muslim bans, nasty women, border walls, and shithole nations, it was common to hear in certain circles the disbelieving cries, “This is not America,” or “I don’t recognize my country,” or “This is not who we are.” Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.

America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation.

You must not fail,” George told Pat, “because they’re expecting you to.

In Germany, there is no death penalty. “We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,” a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America, all currently have the death penalty.

Crimes involving a black suspect and a white victim make up 42 percent of the crimes reported on television news even though crimes with white victims and black suspects make up a minority of crimes, at 10 percent, according to the Sentencing Project, an advocate for criminal justice reform.

The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,” Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.

In Germany, the Nazis banned Jewish residents from stepping onto the beaches at the Jews’ own summer homes, as at Wannsee, a resort suburb of Berlin, and at public pools in the Reich. “They believed the entire pool would be polluted by immersion in it of a Jewish body,” Jean-Paul Sartre once observed.