Lex

“Should a parent clip them a little at a time, spread it out to spare them the pain of a single blow? Should a parent sit them down and get it over with? You could argue that the sooner a child knows, the safer, more prepared he will be. Maybe a parent should hold off as long as he can, give his child the longest possible chance to... a child. He'll have the rest of his life, decades, to live with the reality, adjust himself to the truth.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. "Its foundations are laid," "its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye by nature, or by curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Human history is rife with examples of inconceivable violence, and as Americans, we like to think of our country as being far beyond the guillotines of medieval Europe or the reign of the Huns. And yet it was here that "Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins," wrote the scholar Charles Mills. Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who oversaw the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands during the Trails of Tears, used bridle reins of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding. And it was here that, into the 20th century, African-Americans were burned alive at the stake, as 17 year old Jesse Washington was in Waco, Texas, in 1916 before a crowd of thousands.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“An order from the justices went out in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in the search of a runaway named London, granting that "any person may KILL and DESTROY the said slave by such means as he or they may think fit." This casual disregard for black life and the deputizing of any citizen to take that life would become a harbinger of the low value accorded African-Americans in the police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black citizens that continued into the early decades of the 21st century.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents