Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, - Isabel Wilkerson

They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.

We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said. “They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.,” she said. “It is then that they become black.