Plus, Baldwin insisted that it was outside of the United States that he came to understand the country more fully.


“Caste in the South,â€� wrote the anthropologists W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “is a system for arbitrarily defining the status of all Negroes and of all whites with regard to the most fundamental privileges and opportunities of human society.â€� It would become the social, economic, and psychological template at work in one degree or another for generations.”
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“The caste system has historically rewarded snitches and sellouts among the lowest caste, as with the enforcers in the concentration camps of the Third Reich and the slave drivers on southern plantations.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Conspicuously outperforming one’s fellows is sometimes resented, as it makes people who are already feeling inferior feel even more inferior,â€� Matory wrote. “Honor is a zero-sum game, with particularly intense implications for the discredited, becauseâ€� there is so little honor to go around.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“We think we ‘seeâ€� race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color eye shape, and hair texture,â€� the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘seeâ€� â€� 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.”
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
― Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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