Books |
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson
By
Published: Aug 06, 2020
Category:
History
Dwight Garner, the brilliant and trustworthy New York Times book critic, is not known to gush, and yet this is the first paragraph of a recent review: “’Caste’ is an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.”
Oprah went a little further. When she chose it for her book club, she called it “the most important book, the most essential book… the most necessary for all humanity book that I have ever chosen.” She bought 500 copies and is sending it to mayors, CEOs and college professors because, she said, “All of humanity needs to read this book.”
Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. She was the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. In 2010, she published “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” a 600-page study of the exodus of blacks from the South to Chicago. That book exploded the myth of this migration; it showed that black migrants were a modern version of the Europeans who came to America decades earlier. [To buy the paperback of “The Warmth of Other Suns” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
In “Caste,” she examines the origins of racism — a social structure that makes racism possible, seemingly invisible and seemingly inevitable. You won’t get a screed here. You will get a 500-page, addictively readable account of caste in Nazi Germany, India and, of course, the United States that conclusively makes this case: “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” [To read an excerpt of “Caste,” click here. To buy the hardcover from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Let Wilkerson explain the idea that drives the book.
The word racism seemed inadequate to capture the full effect and full total experience of being in a world in which every single thing that you could and could not do was based upon what you look like, a world in which everyone was in some ways consigned to preconceived notions as to who should be where.
And people had to be careful to stay in their place, or it could mean their very lives.
The word caste is a reminder of an infrastructure beneath something that we — something that’s larger, something that sits beneath the foundation. It is the foundation, the framework for how people interact with one another.
And so I have come to believe that caste, the infrastructure, the hierarchies that we often don’t see, the bones of a thing. I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin. And that is the way to see that race is used or has been used historically as the cue, as the signal, as the indicator of where an individual fits in a preexisting hierarchy that had been created from a time of colonial era America.
When you’re in a caste system, a hierarchy, everyone is affected by it. It’s about the investment in the hierarchy, how one moves about in a hierarchy. And the insidious thing about such a hierarchy is, it’s something that we don’t see, again, bones vs. skin. You can see the skin. You can see the outward manifestations, but you don’t often see the unseen inputs and triggers and assumptions, the unconscious biases that pervade society, that are there below the surface of consciousness that have been ways that everyone has been socialized to know and recognize who is — who is very likely to be in positions of power, who is likely to be poor, who is likely to be on the margins.
This is not a book that I wanted to write. This is a book that compelled me, that called to me that I felt I had no choice but to write it. And so I ended up working on this because it seemed that there were things going on that only Caste could really explain.
A 500-page book is never a book I want to read. I’m reading “Caste.”
