for far longer: Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years. - Isabel Wilkerson

The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.

Presaging the disparities that led to mass incarceration in our era, the abolitionist minister William Goodell observed the quandary of black people in antebellum America. “He is accounted criminal for acts which are deemed innocent in others,” Goodell wrote in 1853, “punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.

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.