Pepper's Library

“We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author. He had defied his caste from on high and I, from below, and we had met at this moment in London at our own Maginot Line of equality, standing on different sides of the same quest to understand the forces that had sought to define us but had failed.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. "There is never caste," the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. "Only castes.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“High levels of everyday discrimination contribute to narrowing the arteries over time,” said the Harvard social scientist David R. Williams. “High levels of discrimination lead to higher levels of inflammation, a marker of heart disease.” People who face discrimination, Williams said, often build up a layer of unhealthy fat, known as visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, just under the skin. It is this visceral fat that raises the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and leads to premature death. And it can be found in people of all ethnicities based on their experience of discrimination.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents