Top 200 Isabel Wilkerson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “What scientists have only recently discovered is that the more familiar earthquakes, those that are easily measured while in progress and instantaneous in their destruction, are often preceded by longer, slow-moving, catastrophic disruptions rumbling twenty miles or more beneath us, too deep to be felt and too quiet to be measured for most of human history.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

152. “It is to say that one of the more disturbing aspects of a caste system, and of the unequal justice it produces, is that it makes for a less safe society, allowing the guilty to shift blame and often to go free. A caste system gives us false comfort, makes us feel that the world is in order, that we automatically know the good guys from the bad guys.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

153. “A win is not legitimate if whole sections of humanity are not in the game.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

154. “More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

155. “People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

156. “What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

157. “By the time that the first woman major party candidate ran for president in 2016, some 60 other countries had already had a woman head of state, including India, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

158. “Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jotiba Phule found inspiration in the abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

159. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

160. “Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances of medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in the corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t if your wise, forbit any mention of them. In fact you do the opposite. You educate yourself.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

161. “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.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

162. “It is a danger to the species and to the planet to have this depth of unexamined grievance and discontent in the most powerful nation in the world.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

163. “And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”

— Isabel Wilkerson

164. “When Africans began converting to Christianity, they posed a challenge to a religion-based hierarchy.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

165. “Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

166. “With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mindset for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

167. “None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

168. “Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

169. “If you really love a person, you won’t get him involved in something which might hurt him.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

170. “To a watching world,” wrote The Guardian, “the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

171. “But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion and even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?”

— Isabel Wilkerson

172. “Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

173. “Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

174. “Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

175. “It is harder to dehumanize a single person standing in front of you, wiping away tears at the loss of a loved one, just as you would, or wincing in pain from a fall as you would, laughing at an unexpected double entendre as you might. It is harder to dehumanize a single individual that you have gotten the chance to know. Which is why people and groups who seek power and division do not bother with dehumanizing an individual. Better to attach a stigma, a taint of pollution to an entire group.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

176. “I had been writing about a stigmatized people, six million of them, who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the South, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste, I would soon discover, follows Indians in their own global diaspora.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

177. “Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

178. “Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

179. “No laws could make frightened white northerners care about blacks enough to permit them full access to the system they dominated.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

180. “The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses. Thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

181. “Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

182. “Not unlike European Jews who watched the world close in on them slowly, perhaps barely perceptibly, at the start of Nazism, colored people in the South would first react in denial and disbelief to the rising hysteria, then, helpless to stop it, attempt a belated resistance, not knowing and not able to imagine how far the supremacists would go.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

183. “The idea conjured up the deepest pains of centuries of rejection by their own country. They had been forced to become immigrants in their own land just to secure their freedom. But they were not immigrants and had never been actual immigrants. The South may have acted like a different country and been proud of it, but it was a part of the United States, and anyone born there was born an American.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

184. “America can be a harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations. It is the price we pay for our caste system. In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one’s own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

185. “The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change – the whites-only signs came down, the all-white schools opened up, and everyone could vote. By then nearly half of all black Americans – some forty-seven percent – would be living outside the South, compared to ten percent when the Migration began.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

186. “It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

187. “The Migration helped other people of color – the later arrivals from Asia, South and Central America, and the Middle East – whose worlds opened up further as the country liberalized its views of diversity. The Migration exposed white Americans outside the South to black culture and created an opportunity – much of it missed – to bridge the races in the New World.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

188. “Up and down the hierarchy, Ambedkar noted, “each caste takes its pride and its consolation in the fact that in the scale of castes it is above some other caste.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

189. “The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

190. “They are called silent earthquakes. And only recently have circumstances forced us, in this current era of human rupture, to search for the unseen stirrings of the human heart, to discover the origins of our discontents.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

191. “In the same way black and white were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the cast system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to extremes, and to the gradations in between...”

— Isabel Wilkerson

192. “Above her was an entire economy she could not see but which ruled her days and determined the contours of her life.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

193. “The full embrace of all humanity lifts the standards of any human endeavor.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

194. “Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

195. “By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States “was not just a country with racism,” Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. “It was the leading racist jurisdiction – so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.” The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

196. “On Wall Street, there were futures and commodities traders wagering on what cotton she had yet to pick might go for next October. There were businessmen in Chicago needing oxford shirts, socialites in New York and Philadelphia wanting lace curtains and organdy evening gowns. Closer to home, closer than one dared to contemplate, there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

197. “But expanded research is finding that this kind of cell damage results from one’s exposure to social inequity and difficult life conditions, rather than merely one’s race and ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites, whose resources might better help them weather life’s challenges.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

198. “We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

199. “Prejudice itself can be deadly. These physical reactions can put the person at greater risk for stroke or diabetes or heart attacks and premature death.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

200. “To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.”

— Isabel Wilkerson