2021 #5: Caste - The Origins of our Discontents (Wilkerson)

 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is a lot to unpack here. And I think we need to understand who this book is for. If you are someone who wants a hyper-intellectual, full of statistics, comprehensive study of caste, this is not the book you are looking for. If, on the other hand, you want to read a book that ties lived experience in with an expansive, but not comprehensive, look at the power of caste, then this is an essential read.

I learned a lot--mostly about the ways that the Nazis used US segregation, miscegenation laws and our institutionalized racism as a model, but how the "one-drop rule" was too much even for them: "While the Nazis praised "the American commitment to legislating racial purity, "they could not abide"the unforgiving hardness" under which "; an American or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins' counted as blacks," Whitman wrote." (88). If you aren't aware of the one-drop rule and its history (in play much more recently than you might think), check out the revised anniversary edition of Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum.

Wilkerson tells us that caste, "like grammar, became an invisible guide" (18), and that complacency is casteist (79). It is an uncomfortable walk through history and an uncomfortable leaning into the present day. That's why it is so important. Wilkerson employs her skills as a journalist to utilize personal stories to amplify and illuminate well-researched truths. If you are in the dominant caste, you will find moments that may make you examine yourself and how you uphold the caste system in the way you wield your privilege, assume your superiority (see the eighth pillar of Caste, Part III of the book), and how "fear" is sometimes a privilege of the dominant caste and really about protecting status.

What is perhaps most important to the understanding of caste is to see how it self-perpetuates and invests in a continual and multi-tentacled process of de-humanization. Purity is constantly defined by the dominant caste, and even supposed "freedoms" can be disguised attempts to uphold the system, inasmuch as they should be things that are "granted" at all.

I did a four-week long book group read and I'm hoping to do a second one this summer because this book needs to be read and talked about. There is value, of course, to reading in isolation, but I'd encourage those of us who are in the dominant caste to gather others together and dig into this book. You are sure to find sentences that punch you in the gut, because Wilkerson is an extraordinarily skilled writer, yes, but also because this book asks us not to see ourselves as different than offending "outliers", but to understand how we uphold the system in myriad ways.

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