David Player

“We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’ … are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“The caste system has historically rewarded snitches and sellouts among the lowest caste, as with the enforcers in the concentration camps of the Third Reich and the slave drivers on southern plantations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste in the South,” wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “is a system for arbitrarily defining the status of all Negroes and of all whites with regard to the most fundamental privileges and opportunities of human society.” It would become the social, economic, and psychological template at work in one degree or another for generations.”
― Isabel Wilkerson

“Both occupy the lowest positions on the status hierarchies in their societies,” wrote Harvard political scientist Sidney Verba and his colleagues in a study of Dalits and African-Americans. Both have been “particularly singled out from other groups” based on characteristics ascribed to them.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents