A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the p… - Isabel Wilkerson

The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

The story played out in virtually every northern city — migrants sealed off in overcrowded colonies that would become the foundation for ghettos that would persist into the next century. These were the original colored quarters — the abandoned and identifiable no-man’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.

It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.