Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson's Caste was powerful and challenging. She weaves the history and present day stories of India, Nazi Germany and the United States. Our country is horrifyingly deficient both statistically and spiritually when it comes to both time periods. Germany addresses its Nazi past--a period of 12 years--in ways that promote remembrance and repentance. I know not all Germans buy into the collective shame and grief but large parts of our population seem to celebrate hundreds of years of show more enslaving and dehumanizing millions of people.

I pass the huge Confederate flag Wilkerson describes every time I venture up 95. Only recently did they rename the house where Stonewall Jackson died...it had always been the shrine. It sits in Caroline County, part of a hotbed of that mix of Tea Party/Confederates that has arisen in parts of Virginia. Hanover County, just south of Caroline, has an active KKK group that shows up now and then to protest at the courthouse. I pass through on my way to points north and its roadsides sprout with yellow bulletin boards espousing radical right wing values. They are particularly incensed with the renaming of schools that has been taking place in their county. Wilkerson hits it on the head as she describes the anger. One new bulletin board describes the effort to erase their heritage. One statement from late in the book sticks with me. Rommel was a great general. There are no statues to Rommel in Germany.

Virginia, of course, also has the claim to fame of closing its public schools for five years rather than be forced to integrate. I wrote about this history here.

I cannot recommend this book enough. The frame of caste instead of race gives a wider perspective because it helps shows the stratas of our society that go beyond black and white. Those are the extremes but where you fall on the continuum can make a huge difference. show less

A stunning work, beautifully written, about the state of the African-Americans in America, drawing parallels with the dehumanization of Jews and others in Nazi Germany, and the centuries-old caste system in India. By weaving together the socio-historical account with individuals' life stories and the author's own experience of humiliation by the dominant upper 'caste', the author has fashioned a book that you can't put down. The importnt point she makes is that we can't rationalize away show more things like the Nazi holocaust by pinning it on some individual leaders, because the same thing may happen in any society if we are not vigilant and self-critical as a society. This has obviously grave portents for us in India, too, as the tendency to scapegoat communities and to impose caste controls seems to be increasing. show less

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 show more laws and our institutionalized racism as a model, but also 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. show less

“Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.”

Isabel Wilkerson's book should be required reading, not just in schools, but as a part of being a well-informed citizenry. An inoculation against the inability to 'see the bars' (or the refusal to see) at a time when there is so much resistance and backlash against those who want an honest look at our history.