“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
―
Isabel Wilkerson,
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“So the real question would be,' he said finally, 'if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?'- Taylor Branch, as quoted by Isabel Wilkerson in Caste” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“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.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“So the real question would be,' he said finally, 'if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?'- Taylor Branch, as quoted by Isabel Wilkerson in Caste” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“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.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance.... Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential.... There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem--a magnanimous understanding by both races--is the first step toward its solution.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
“The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.” ― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
