Caste by Wilkerson notes

Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

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26 Highlights | 14 Notes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 565

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy—in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

we can tell

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1155

cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1241

“Nordics” and advocated for the exclusion and elimination

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1432

the postcard

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1545

property for life and for ensuing generations. It invited

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1804

Poles, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others outside of western Europe

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1805

status contested, these groups were not always extended

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1806

“white” people, not then anyway. There was an attempt

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1811

Later, in 1922, a black man in Alabama named Jim Rollins was convicted of miscegenation for living as the husband of a white woman named Edith Labue. But when the court learned that the woman was Sicilian and saw “no competent evidence” that she was white, the judge reversed the conviction. The uncertainty surrounding whether she was “conclusively” white led the court to take the extraordinary step of freeing a black man who in other circumstances might have faced a lynching had she been seen as a white woman.

Sicilian

Highlight (Blue) | Location 1823

was griffe (three-fourths black), marabon (five-eighths black), mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-fourth), octaroon (one-eighth), sextaroon (one-sixteenth), demi-meamelouc (one-thirty-second), and sangmelee

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1895

Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.

circular

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1997

They were punished for being in the condition that they were forced to endure.

more no way out

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2006

A black man in the 1930s was on his way to pay a visit to a young woman he fancied, which occasioned him to go into the town square. There, some white men approached him and “forced him to procure overalls, saying he was ‘too dressed up for a weekday.’

change those clothes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2015

Merriment, even if extracted from a whip, was seen as essential to confirm that the caste structure was sound, that all was well, that everyone accepted, even embraced their station in the hierarchy.

See KJV Psalm 137

keep smiling

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2019

“I have often set them to dancing,” he said, “when their cheeks were wet with tears.”

it's my job

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2035

The caste system took comfort in black caricature as it upheld the mythology of a simple, court jester race whose jolly natures shielded them from any true suffering.

yeah, no suffering there

Highlight (Blue) | Location 2040

commended for her role as Mammy, a solicitous and obesely

Highlight (Blue) | Location 2042

That trope

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2075

Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy.

related to the price of being a torturer

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2592

“Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status.”

yikes, they are gaining !

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2595

In earlier times, even those who owned no slaves, wrote the white southern author W. J. Cash, clung to the “dear treasure of his superiority as a white man, which had been conferred on him by slavery; and so was determined to keep the black man in chains.”

I want somebody to be lower

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2644

Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

yeah, who?

Highlight (Pink) | Location 2661

Custom and law segregated the white working and middle classes for so long that most would not have been in a position to see firsthand the headwinds confronting disfavored Americans.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 2710

For example, a pioneering study by the sociologist Devah Pager found that white felons applying for a job were more likely to get hired than African-Americans with no criminal record.

felons or non

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 3402

Little more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor, and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in America, at 27 percent. But a 2017 study by Travis Dixon at the University of Illinois found that African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 3408

Crimes involving a black suspect and a white victim make up 42 percent of the crimes reported on television news even though crimes with white victims and black suspects make up a minority of crimes, at 10 percent, according to the Sentencing Project, an advocate for criminal justice reform.

quite wrong