Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Rating: 5 stars / 5 stars
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Favorite Quote: “Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.” Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020, pg. 17.
Review: Disclaimer…this was my first (and so far only) 5 star read of the year. This review will just be singing its praises.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is a study in how America’s history of racism at times mirrors and at times diverges from the rigid caste system of India. It combines historical exploration with journalistic investigation with personal narrative.
Wilkerson’s storytelling is unrivaled. What unfolds in the pages of Caste is a history of America, of India, of Germany - of the sometimes rigid, sometimes fluid manifestations of oppression that span geographic bounds and centuries.
What stands out just as much as the historical narrative Wilkerson weaves is the sprinkling of personal anecdotes that Wilkerson includes, just to drive the point home. Some are her own, while others are little nuggets of history that might otherwise risk being washed away by the tides of time. There were a few that stood out in particular:
A Black little boy ostracized during a party at the local pool following his baseball team’s big win. Originally he wasn’t allowed in at all, and then was, just for a few minutes, when no one else was in the pool, with strict instructions not to touch the water.
Wilkerson’s own story of showing up to interview a local business owner for an article she was writing who summarily dismissed her because he couldn’t fathom that she worked for a national publication. Despite her many assurances that she was who he was meeting with, he never believed her.
Wilkerson’s interactions at an academic conference with scholars who all studied the caste system of India and how caste itself played out in the interactions of the various conference attendees.
In Caste’s pages, Wilkerson documents the most blatant of America’s racism - slavery, Jim Crow era violence, etc., but also the more discreet manifestations of that racism - the moments and microaggressions that categorize every day in America.
About that Quote: Occurring fairly early in the book, this quote embodies what the rest of the book seeks to achieve (and in fact, does achieve) - an exploration of the many ways “caste,” as explored by Wilkerson, manifests in different and varied systems of oppression.
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