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Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Quotes

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Famous Isabel Wilkerson Quotes

“As it stands, the United States is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be out-numbered by people not of European descent within two decades. This is unknown territory for everyone in the hierarchy, an ethnic distribution that could potentially look closer to that of South Africa than to what Americans have grown accustomed to. Anticipatory fear seems already to have surfaced, but if history is any guide, a change in demographics might have less of a material effect on the dominant caste than imagined. A 2016 study found that, if disparities in wealth continue at the current pace, it would take black families 228 years to amass the wealth that white families have now, and Latino families another 84 years to reach parity. Thus, as in South Africa, there would be no reason to believe that economic, social, and, in America, political dominance would not still remain in the hands of those who have held it for the entirety of the country's history. This will be a test of the cherished ideal of majority rule, the moral framework for caste dominance in America since its founding.”

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Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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“He [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1795], coined the term Caucasian on the basis of a favorite skull of his that had come into his possession from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. To him, the skull was the most beautiful of all that he owned. So he gave the group to which he belonged, the Europeans, the same name as the region that had produced it. That is how people now identified as white got the scientific-sounding yet random name Caucasian.”

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Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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“The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil. Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.”

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Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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