Graded Inequality Quotes

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

If you look at this development from the perspective of a university president, it’s actually quite sad. Most of these people no doubt cherished their own college experience—that’s part of what motivated them to climb the academic ladder. Yet here they were at the summit of their careers dedicating enormous energy toward boosting performance in fifteen areas defined by a group of journalists at a second-tier newsmagazine. They were almost like students again, angling for good grades from a taskmaster. In fact, they were trapped by a rigid model, a WMD.

Therefore, as the divine wisdom is the cause of the distinction of things for the sake of the perfection of the universe, so it is the cause of inequality. For the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things.

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on.

Inequality in education starts early, and it starts at home. A study by the University of Kansas found that by the time she is three years old, a child who grows up in a home on welfare will hear thirty million fewer words than a child who grows up in the home of a professional family.* Words like “portfolio” and “equestrian.” We know that kids who have had a quality early childhood education are less likely to be placed in special education, less likely to be left back a grade,

Geoffrey Cohen and colleagues harnessed the power of values to combat the achievement gap between black and white students. They created an intervention consisting of several short writing exercises that were administered during the course of a school year. In the experimental group, each writing assignment involved writing about a personally important value. Students in the control group also completed the writing exercises but wrote about values that were important to other people. When researchers examined the students’ grade point averages at the end of the year, there was a substantial gap between the GPAs of the black and white students in the control group, but that gap was reduced by 40 percent in the important-values group.

Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

Dr. King’s treatment as an “infallible oracle” is not laziness; his perceived infallibility is related to the message he has been chosen to deliver. Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness.

A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump “in groups.” Basketball courts, however, “are in abundance” in these schools, the visitor says, because the game involves little expense. Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey’s poorest districts claimed that differences like these, far from being offensive, should be honored as the consequence of “local choice”—the inference being that local choice in urban schools elects to let black children gravitate to basketball. But this “choice”—which feeds one of the most intransigent myths about black teen-age boys—is determined by the lack of other choices. Children in East Orange cannot choose to play lacrosse or soccer, or to practice modern dance, on fields or in dance studios they do not have; nor can they keep their bodies clean in showers that their schools cannot afford. Little children in East Orange do not choose to wait for 15 minutes for a chance to hold a jump rope.

What’s different here is the focus on the proxy when far more relevant data is available. I cannot imagine a more meaningful piece of data for auto insurers than a drunk driving record. It is evidence of risk in precisely the domain they’re attempting to predict. It’s far better than other proxies they consider, such as a high school student’s grade point average. Yet it can count far less in their formula than a score drawn from financial data thrown together on a credit report (which, as we’ve seen, is sometimes erroneous).

In the late nineteenth century, training for work was decentralized and loosely regulated. Few stayed in school beyond the primary grades and even professionals such as lawyers did not typically attend specialized schools. Most accessed jobs through informal family and ethnic ties and learned occupational skills on the job. Between 1880 and 1930, conflict and coalitions between a variety of interest groups—employers, unions, government officials, professional associations, educators, parents, and students—reshaped the training pathways leading into occupations.

All these factors have made the ability to influence the deliberations within the admissions office infinitely more valuable. An annual donation to the college fund or attendance at cocktails with alumni and prominent professors is not enough. For the very, very rich, a pledge big enough to put their name on a building will do the trick, as will a seven- or eight-figure gift. Jared Kushner’s father famously donated $2.5 million to Harvard in the 1990s, and lo and behold, his son was admitted, despite middling grades in high school.

American society places tremendous importance upon egocentric behavior. Americans are encouraged to set ourselves apart from the group. Whereas in some societies it is an aberration to go against the whole, Americans celebrate the individual over the group. Public schools teach American grade school children that they are the captains of their destiny. American schools and society inculcate schoolchildren to measure their level of success in terms of individual accomplishments. A winner versus loser mentality prevails in American culture. Winners are the recipients of life’s economic awards. We are taught that possessing financial wherewithal will assist us attain exalted social status. Social status in turn allows select people to wield the power of influence. The silent audience consists of the economically deprived, the societal castaways whom we are taught to shun for lacking the temperament to succeed. A strong sense of self not only helps a person survive, but American society keeps score of a person’s economic victories and defeats. Americans measure the intrinsic value of our lives and recognize other people’s status principally in terms of each person’s relative economic resources.

wasn’t an awakening. Like many a middle-class kid before me, I found radicalism through books. My local library had heaps of socialist literature, most of them donated by red diaper babies and Jewish cultural associations. By chance, I picked up Leon Trotsky’s My Life the summer after seventh grade, didn’t particularly like it (still don’t), but was sufficiently intrigued to read the Isaac Deutscher biographies of Trotsky, the works of democratic socialist thinkers including Michael Harrington and Ralph Miliband, and eventually the mysterious Karl

The Classic Question: The Paradox of The Majority or Bahujen. The term Bahujan refers to India’s demographic majority—Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes—constituting nearly 70% of the population. Yet this numerical strength has not translated into structural empowerment, giving rise to what scholars call the Bahujan paradox: the tension between political visibility and persistent social marginality. Historically, caste society imposed graded inequality (Ambedkar), ensuring that even among oppressed groups, internal hierarchies prevented unity. Despite the promise of democracy, land ownership, wealth, education, and cultural capital remain concentrated in upper-caste hands. This creates the first axis of the paradox: majority in numbers, minority in power. The second dimension lies in politics versus structure. From the 1980s, the rise of the BSP, SP, RJD, DMK, and others marked a political awakening. Bahujan leaders captured state power in several regions, but institutions like the bureaucracy, judiciary, and media remained dominated by elites. Electoral success has thus not dismantled systemic dominance. Third is the tension between unity and fragmentation. Kanshi Ram envisioned solidarity across SCs, STs, and OBCs, yet rivalries and caste sub-identities often splinter this bloc, weakening collective bargaining. Fourth, policy gains contrast with social realities. Reservations and welfare have created upward mobility for a small segment, but caste violence, everyday discrimination, and failed land reforms persist. Finally, there is empowerment without emancipation. Leaders once rooted in radical anti-caste thought often compromise with dominant caste and capitalist frameworks. Cultural icons like Ambedkar and Phule are celebrated, but frequently co-opted by parties unwilling to confront caste hierarchies. In essence, the Bahujan paradox reveals a striking contradiction: India’s majority commands votes but not full dignity, wielding political clout without achieving structural transformation.

The word caste finds its etymological roots in the Latin term castus, meaning "pure" or "chaste." This purity-based connotation undergirds much of how the caste system has been historically understood—especially by external observers—as a rigid hierarchy structured around notions of ritual cleanliness. The term entered the Indian lexicon via the Portuguese word casta, used by colonial seafarers and administrators in the 16th century to categorize the unfamiliar, complex social divisions they encountered on the western coast of India. This importation of the term marked a profound epistemic shift. As Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind (2001), colonial rule did not merely document Indian caste hierarchies; it reified, codified, and bureaucratized them. The colonial state transformed caste from a fluid, local, and context-specific social structure into a rigid administrative category essential to governance. Prior to this colonial intervention, Indian society spoke of varna and jati. Varna, meaning "color" in Sanskrit, refers to the idealized four-fold division of society into Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). However, the everyday lived reality of caste was mediated through jatis, localized, birth-based communities linked to specific occupations and ritual statuses. Jatis are numerous—over 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes exist across India—and form the actual basis of caste identity and exclusion. The colonial flattening of these complexities into the singular term caste was not an act of innocent taxonomy; it was, as Dirks shows, a political maneuver that essentialized caste as the defining feature of Indian civilization, thereby justifying British imperial rule as a civilizing mission. Sociologically, caste has been defined as a hereditary, endogamous, and hierarchical group characterized by common traditional occupations, social status, and restrictions on mobility. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) famously theorized caste as a system of ritual hierarchy organized around the oppositional categories of purity and pollution. In his structuralist framework, the Brahmin is the apex of purity, while the "Untouchable" (now self-identified as Dalit) is the embodiment of pollution. Although Dumont’s work remains foundational, it has been widely criticized for ignoring the material realities of caste, including land ownership, labor exploitation, and violence. B.R. Ambedkar, the foremost anti-caste intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution, directly opposed such idealist readings. For Ambedkar, caste was not a religious or ritual order but a system of graded inequality rooted in birth-based discrimination and enforced through violence and denial of rights. In his seminal work Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar rejected the metaphysical justifications of caste and called instead for its total dismantling, arguing that no reform could succeed without challenging its structural core.

The word caste finds its etymological roots in the Latin term castus, meaning "pure" or "chaste." This purity-based connotation undergirds much of how the caste system has been historically understood—especially by external observers—as a rigid hierarchy structured around notions of ritual cleanliness. The term entered the Indian lexicon via the Portuguese word casta, used by colonial seafarers and administrators in the 16th century to categorize the unfamiliar, complex social divisions they encountered on the western coast of India. This importation of the term marked a profound epistemic shift. As Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind (2001), colonial rule did not merely document Indian caste hierarchies; it reified, codified, and bureaucratized them. The colonial state transformed caste from a fluid, local, and context-specific social structure into a rigid administrative category essential to governance. Prior to this colonial intervention, Indian society spoke of varna and jati. Varna, meaning "color" in Sanskrit, refers to the idealized four-fold division of society into Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). However, the everyday lived reality of caste was mediated through jatis, localized, birth-based communities linked to specific occupations and ritual statuses. Jatis are numerous—over 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes exist across India—and form the actual basis of caste identity and exclusion. The colonial flattening of these complexities into the singular term caste was not an act of innocent taxonomy; it was, as Dirks shows, a political maneuver that essentialized caste as the defining feature of Indian civilization, thereby justifying British imperial rule as a civilizing mission. Sociologically, caste has been defined as a hereditary, endogamous, and hierarchical group characterized by common traditional occupations, social status, and restrictions on mobility. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) famously theorized caste as a system of ritual hierarchy organized around the oppositional categories of purity and pollution. In his structuralist framework, the Brahmin is the apex of purity, while the "Untouchable" (now self-identified as Dalit) is the embodiment of pollution. Although Dumont’s work remains foundational, it has been widely criticized for ignoring the material realities of caste, including land ownership, labor exploitation, and violence. B.R. Ambedkar, the foremost anti-caste intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution, directly opposed such idealist readings. For Ambedkar, caste was not a religious or ritual order but a system of graded inequality rooted in birth-based discrimination and enforced through violence and denial of rights. In his seminal work Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar rejected the metaphysical justifications of caste and called instead for its total dismantling, arguing that no reform could succeed without challenging its structural core.