Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents Quotes
"Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history."
"The slave is entirely subject to the will of his master."
"America is an old house. We can never declare the work over."
"The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient."
"A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value."
"Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions."
"A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, reinforced throughout the culture."
"Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place."
"No one was white before he/she came to America."
"It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black."
"You looked me in the eye when I was talking," he said of this breach in caste.
"They don’t have the corner on humanity," he told her.
"I wish you would stay," the matriarch said, looking forlorn.
"There was a time," the matriarch said, "when I could have made you stay."
"Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside."
"You don’t have anything that has The New York Times on it?"
"The word race likely derived from the Spanish word raza."
"We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people."
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil," Bonhoeffer once said.
"You know the Negro race is inferior mentally," a southern physician told researchers.
"In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated. There were two separate Bibles—one for blacks and one for whites—to swear to tell the truth on."
"The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races."
"Ambulances rushed to the man’s aid, took one look, saw that he was a Negro, and backed away."
"African-Americans were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools, both north and south, lest they pollute them."
"Seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams was stoned and drowned to death for inadvertently breaching this pillar of caste."
"Each Negro who entered the pool yesterday was immediately surrounded by whites and slugged or held beneath the water until he gave up his attempts to swim and left."
"The only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed."
"Far from her, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, whites blocked African-Americans at the stairwells and entrances the week the city first allowed black swimmers to its public pool."
"The human story is filled with pain and tragedy, but among the horrors that we have perpetrated on one another, the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people, the brutal enslavement of Africans, and the destruction of Native American civilizations in many respects are unparalleled."
"Richmond required that Negroes and mulattoes must step aside when whites passed by, and barred them from riding in carriages except in the capacity of menials."
"You know what’s best for your pack. You lead by example. You’re very comfortable with that. You have a calming effect."
"In caste terms, these are the least well off, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America."
"Caste defines everything in India. It is the Hindu religion that maintains the caste system."
"The caste system makes a captive of everyone within it."
"It’s a great lie on which their identity has been built."
"This is the frightening point. Because it’s an automatic process, and it’s an unconscious process, people who engage in this unthinking discrimination are not aware of it."
"The loss of the omega can threaten social cohesion and put the entire pack at risk."
"The minute the white engineer hung up, the black engineer’s phone rang."
"The greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, but lower-caste success."
"American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were ‘inferior beings.’"
"We cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter."
"We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of (white) Americans."
"The government refused to grant the medal to either soldier."
"These actions were in keeping with societal norms that people in the lowest caste were not to be commended even in death."
"The driver backed down for the time being, told him to 'go ahead then and hurry back.'"
"He ordered the Justice Department to investigate based on the fact that Woodard was in uniform at the time he was beaten."
"The caste system thrives on dissension and inequality, envy and false rivalries."
"It was largely black efforts to rise beyond their station that set off the backlash of lynchings and massacres after Reconstruction."
"The irony of the quest of the lowest caste is that it is the very uprightness embodied by Moss, attested to by Wells, and applauded when shown by most every other group, that incites the greatest backlash."
"Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate."
"The first moral duty is resignation and acceptance."
"It’s almost impossible to imagine the same level of compassion being extended toward a black person who was just charged with murder."
"This expectation feels fueled by a perverse need to see harmed people demonstrate nobility."
"What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution."
"I speak English better than many Americans. I speak other languages as well. Don’t ever say that again."
"If his wife needed a gallon of milk and he needed to run to the supermarket to get that gallon of milk, he would run into the house to get a jacket and tie."
"Whiteness is now a salient and central component of American politics."
"There is a black tax that we pay that hurts our health, and the gap is larger among the college-educated than it is among high school dropouts."
"We have a black president, for heaven’s sakes."
"The Confederacy would lose the war in April 1865, but in the succeeding decades would win the all-important peace."
"Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime."
"The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them."
"People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock."
"If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it."
"Robert E. Lee was a well-born graduate of West Point Academy, a pragmatic and cunning military strategist, a political moderate, for his times and his region, and a Virginia slaveholder."
"Lee ordered his overseer to strip them to the waist, tie them to posts, and whip the men fifty lashes and the woman twenty, on their bare backs."
"The slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society."
"The North’s conciliatory embrace of the former Confederates compelled Frederick Douglass to remind Americans that 'there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.'"
"The pandemic, and the country’s fitful, often self-centered lack of readiness, exposed 'a failure of character unparalleled in US history,' in the words of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University."
"The shadow of the Civil War seemed to hang over the 2008 election."
"The symbolism of Obama’s election masked an undercurrent of anxiety."
"The ability of a black person to achieve high office did not signal the end of racial prejudice."
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for Obama to be a one-term president."
"No place for it in the chambers of Congress."
"Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality."
"I went to bed last night thinking we are outnumbered."
"The majority of white Americans did not vote for Barack Obama."
"Lyndon Johnson was the last president to get a majority of the white vote."
"Police were killing unarmed African-Americans at a rate of 1 in 1,000."