South Shore was one of the last white strongholds on the South Side, the completion of a cycle that had begun when the migrants first arrived and sta… - Isabel Wilkerson

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources — which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.

Color is a fact. Race is a social construct. “We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’…are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes, that have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.” And yet, observed the historian Nell Irvin Painter, “Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.

And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channeling the bitter cry of his people in America: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?