Top 200 Isabel Wilkerson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

2. “Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

3. “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

4. “Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

5. “A world without caste would set everyone free.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

6. “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.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

7. “If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years, wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the subordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

8. “Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

9. “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources – which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence – who is accorded these and who is not.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

10. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

11. “America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

12. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to stoop to conquer.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

13. “Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

14. “What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

15. “People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

16. “The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

17. “Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

18. “So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

19. “So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

20. “Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

21. “Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

22. “It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

23. “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

24. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

25. “He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, ‘What kind of god they got up inside that church?”

— Isabel Wilkerson

26. “This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

27. “A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

28. “Years before, two colored doctors had been forced out of Monroe, the author Ray Stannard Baker reported, “because they were taking the practice of white physicians.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

29. “Few problems have ever been solved by ignoring them.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

30. “For the ancients, the scapegoat served as the healing agent for the larger whole. In modern times, the concept of the scapegoat has mutated from merely the bearer of misfortune to the person or group blamed for bringing misfortune.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

31. “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

32. “Even though white Americans still comprise a clear political majority and continue to possess most of the country’s wealth,” observed the legal scholar Robert L. Tsai, “it is possible to stoke outlandish fears of a coming reckoning where racial and ethnic minorities will seek to subjugate white citizens.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

33. “In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

34. “True alphas, the behaviorist told me, are fearless protectors against outside incursions, but they rarely have to assert themselves within the pack, rarely have to act with aggression, bark orders, or use physical means of control.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

35. “It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

36. “Well, I’m a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It’s that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

37. “Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

38. “Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

39. “Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

40. “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.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

41. “But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

42. “My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked about it in those terms or gave it a name.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

43. “Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. – JAMES BALDWIN.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

44. “The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

45. “That’s why I preach today. Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

46. “Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

47. “The caste system thrives on dissension and inequality, envy and false rivalries, that build up in a world of perceived scarcity. As people elbow for position, the greatest tensions arise between those adjacent to one another, up and down the ladder.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

48. “Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn’t want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn’t want to burden their children with what they had endured.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

49. “To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one’s own species.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

50. “In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.”

— Isabel Wilkerson