David Player

“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

“Conspicuously outperforming one’s fellows is sometimes resented, as it makes people who are already feeling inferior feel even more inferior,” Matory wrote. “Honor is a zero-sum game, with particularly intense implications for the discredited, because… there is so little honor to go around.”
― 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

“The enforcers of caste come in every color, creed, and gender. One does not have to be in the dominant caste to do its bidding.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents