Top 200 Isabel Wilkerson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary?”

— Isabel Wilkerson

53. “Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

54. “This would suggest that the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the most determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North, not unlike immigrant groups from other parts of the world who made a way for themselves in the big cities of the North and West.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

55. “The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

56. “The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

57. “It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

58. “They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

59. “At one point, ten thousand were arriving every month in Chicago alone. It.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

60. “Caste is not a physical object, like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire. Caste is a notion, it is a state of mind. No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to its message, that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

61. “A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

62. “Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people. He.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

63. “The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

64. “Black passengers getting off in Washington had nothing to worry about. But for those continuing south, the crews who ran the train, the porters who helped passengers on and off, and the black passengers themselves knew to gather their things and move to the Jim Crow car up front to make sure the races were separated when the train crossed into the state of Virginia. The.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

65. “Contrary to modern-day assumptions, for much of the history of the United States – from the Draft Riots of the 1860s to the violence over desegregation a century later – riots were often carried out by disaffected whites against groups perceived as threats to their survival.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

66. “From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

67. “Sometimes in some places they would actually stop the train – keep the train from stopping at a particular station because they saw that there were so many black people there waiting to board and so therefore those people wouldn’t get to leave.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

68. “Anyplace but Here.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

69. “Endogamy ensures the very difference that a caste system relies on to justify inequality.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

70. “Alabama, the last state to do so, did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000. Even then, 40 percent of the electorate in that referendum voted in favor of keeping the marriage ban on the books.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

71. “Trump was ushered into office by whites concerned about their status,” Jardina writes, “and his political priorities are plainly aimed at both protecting the racial hierarchy and at strengthening its boundaries.” These are people who feel “that the rug is being pulled out from under them – that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their group’s advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

72. “Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

73. “In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south, fluttering along highways in Georgia and the other former Confederate states. A Confederate flag the size of a bedsheet flapped in the wind off an interstate in Virginia around the time of the Charlottesville rally.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

74. “Something about too many people packed together and nothing to guide them makes the children worse than they used to be, to her mind.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

75. “In that one exchange, Robert experienced a by-product of integration that would affect nearly every black business and institution when the doors of segregation flung open – rejection by a black customer base for the wide-open new world. It didn’t take Robert long to realize that he would have to work doubly hard to win over his own people and get any patients at all. But at the moment, he was so hurt and rattled by the woman’s rejection that he couldn’t think straight.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

76. “I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either. I came back to my native country, and I could not ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn’t live where I wanted. Now, what’s the difference?” It.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

77. “An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” 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

78. “By the second term of the administration, in 2015, police were killing unarmed African-Americans at five times the rate of white Americans. It was a trend that would make police killings a leading cause of death for young African-American men and boys, these deaths occurring at a rate of 1 in 1,000 young black men and boys.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

79. “Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and White waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor’s offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

80. “Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

81. “The use of inherited physical characteristics to differentiate inner abilities and group value may be the cleverest way that a culture has ever devised to manage and maintain a caste system.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

82. “He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

83. “Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

84. “And as they had been riding for as many as twenty-four hours and were nervous about missing their stop, some got off prematurely, and, it is said, that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those arriving in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

85. “Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

86. “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.” LOS.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

87. “What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,” Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

88. “We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author. He had defied his caste from on high and I, from below, and we had met at this moment in London at our own Maginot Line of equality, standing on different sides of the same quest to understand the forces that had sought to define us but had failed.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

89. “Let no one say that African-Americans as a group have not worked for our country. For.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

90. “Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

91. “What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

92. “White people embrace narratives about forgiveness,” wrote the essayist and author Roxane Gay after the massacre, “so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

93. “Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

94. “People as diverse as James Baldwin and Michelle Obama, Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington, and anonymous teachers, store clerks, steelworkers, and physicians, were all products of the Great Migration. They were all children whose life chances were altered because a parent or grandparent had made the hard decision to leave.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

95. “Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

96. “The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

97. “You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

98. “She trusted God and nature more than any man and learned to be a better person watching the lower creatures of the earth.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

99. “The story played out in virtually every northern city – migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters – the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

100. “Years before, in 2015, nine black parishioners were massacred in a Charleston church, and the families of the victims almost immediately extended forgiveness to the unrepentant white killer of their loved ones. It was an act of abiding faith that captivated the world but was also in line with society’s expectation that the subordinate caste bear its suffering and absolve its transgressors.”

— Isabel Wilkerson