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Quote by Isabel Wilkerson

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

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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

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“Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn’t stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine.”

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