175 Quotes by Isabel Wilkerson

Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people. He.

The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible.

Sometimes in some places they would actually stop the train – keep the train from stopping at a particular station because they saw that there were so many black people there waiting to board and so therefore those people wouldn’t get to leave.

Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you.

Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror.

What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest.

Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than that of Russia and China, with a rate of 655 per 100,000. The United States imprisons more people, 2.2 million, than any other nation.

Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. – JAMES BALDWIN.