Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Isabel Wilkerson

Quote by Isabel Wilkerson

“Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don’t get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or 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.”

Quote by Isabel Wilkerson

Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Create image

Work

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist renowned for her profound insights into racial and social issues. Born in New York in 1961, she graduated from Columbia University with a Master's degree in journalism. Wilkerson's work, 'The Warmth of Other Suns', which meticulously documents the mass migration of African Americans from the Southern United States in the mid-20th century, won the Pulitzer Prize. more

You May Also Like

“Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as a part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies by the state and sometimes by bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in forms that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories.”

LoveWonderViolenceEmpathyOthers
Book:See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
Create image

“Grace stopped in the door, dimly silhouetted by the dull gray morning light, and looked back at me, at my eyes, my mouth, my hands, in a way that made something inside me knot and unknot unbearably. I didn't think I belonged here in her world, a boy stuck between two lives, dragging the dangers of the wolves with me, but when she said my name, waiting for me to follow, I knew I'd do anything to stay with her.”

LoveRomanceSweetCommitmentWolves
Book:Shiver
Create image