It (picking cotton) was like picking a hundred pounds of feathers, a hundred pounds of lint dust. It was one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop … - Isabel Wilkerson

You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said. Most Americans, we 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.

Sometimes,” he said, “you have to stoop to conquer.

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