Eric Taub

“Smaller than Evie, overall. Much smaller than Davy. So if you collided with her there could be no injury to yourself, you felt only a small thrill of pleasure at the pliant warmth of another’s being with no recourse but to give way to you without protest.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Zero-Sum: Stories

“The liberal take was that working-class whites have been voting against their interests in supporting right-wing oligarchs, but that theory diminishes the agency and caste-oriented principles of the people. Many voters, in fact, made an assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Kiara,” Elaine Brown’s hair heir said, waving her magazine.”
― Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

“Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles—the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child indigenous peoples, and the scapegoat caste at the bottom.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents