Isabel Wilkerson

In this provocative work, Wilkerson makes a compelling case for the existence of caste in the U.S., despite little consideration having been given to that term for historical societal or racial divides up until now. The parallels to other nations in which caste has played a significant role in creating and perpetuating inequalities and inhumane behaviors are staggering.

So many concepts presented in this book are revelatory. To list a few that were especially thought-provoking:
• Nazi show more Germany was impressed with and inspired by American treatment of Black people — a chilling thought.

• The concept of Dominant Group Status Threat is eye-opening in that it pretty much explains the Republican Party's stance on just about everything.

• This excerpt: "By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like rivers of fire. Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before."

• This excerpt: "This [the sale of lynching postcards] was singularly American. "Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz," wrote Time magazine many years later."

• This excerpt: "If the lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste's inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. "If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?" The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?"

• I became conscious only as an adult that, despite feeling ethically superior in the aftermath of the Civil War, "The North" doesn't have a lot to brag about in terms of racism. It was never the welcoming utopia commonly depicted, and in fact northern racism was in many ways more insidious than the overt racism of the South because its equally discriminatory behaviors (e.g., redlining, redistricting) were shrouded in obfuscation.

It's difficult to put into words what I took from this book. It has both made me feel both more aware and more hopeless about the state of my country, as so much seems irrevocably broken, and I feel at a loss for what to do with what I've learned. show less

One of my good friends told me that this was “the best book she ever read”. I now see why. It gave me a whole new perspective on humankind and how and why we behave with cruelty to some others. I found it especially important because it was research into a global phenomenon as acted out by three different cultures (the American South, Nazi Germany, Asian Indians). As part of explaining the narrative, specific stories were used of situations that actually happened. Some of these episodes show more were disheartening, but others were truly appalling. Yet this is the world we live in. I doubt if we can change it, but it helps me to understand it. In this way, I think I can do my part to do right by other human beings.

This is one of the most disturbing books I have read. The castes of Nazi Germany evoke great emotion in me as I lost my maternal grandparents in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. I now was rereading about this experience from the view of caste systems and realizing this is no different than the caste systems of India and the caste systems of the American South. The idea of castes is examined by the author from many viewpoints. This work is well researched with amazing detail and clear, beautiful writing. This book should be a “must read” for everyone. show less

A bright light from a dark time. Rarely has a book forced me to sit and think about so many of its ideas, which along with the pandemic might help to explain why it's taken me so long to finish it. Wilkerson weaves together whole fields of research and thought and somehow made me see things that were there all along for me to see, but I hadn't. Especially impressive to me was her ability to inject narratives, sometimes very personal ones, to illustrate some of the book's ideas. I am just shy show more of the dominant caste described in this book. Being gay may be the only significant thing that prevents me from laying claim to all its privileges. So I have much more in common with the white woman who is "radicalized" in a story near the end of the book than I do with Wilkerson. But through Wilkerson's work I find there is more than enough there for me to recognize those moments in my own life when I was slighted, ignored, or even punished for being who I am. And to feel the same righteous indignation Wilkerson saw in her white friend, "on my behalf, on her own behalf, and on behalf of all the people who endure these indignities every day." I suspect I will be thinking of this book for a long time to come. show less

25. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
reader: Robin Miles
published: 2010
format: digital audiobook (22:42)
acquired: from audible, on March 30, because of an essay by Jill Lepore
read: Mar 31 - May 8
rating: 5 stars

I was really carried away by this history of US black migration from south to north. The migration itself is interesting, six million African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south over a period of 60 years, from WWI through the show more 1960's. And the elements around and about it are interesting. But what made this book special to me is what how Wilkerson presented it. The book is mainly the history of three individuals she started interviewing in the 1990's, each representing a different migration route. The history becomes, or is derived from, oral history and the migration becomes a human story—one of hopes and disappointment.

Her three main subjects were Bob Foster, George Swanson Starling and Ida Mae Brandon Gladney. Bob Foster was a success, eventually. Raised in Monroe, Louisiana, he became a leading doctor in Los Angeles, and Ray Charles' personal physician (and the Doctor Foster in the song Hide nor Hair). He lived a high life, and mostly estranged his family along the way. Wilkerson found George Swanson Starling living alone in a Harlem basement apartment. Unable to finish college because he lacked the funds needed to attend a school that allowed blacks, he later fled his central Florida community, where he had literally been targeted to be lynched after trying to organize orange grove pickers. He spent his life as the rough equivalent of a train conductor. Wilkerson's main apparent hero was Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who she found in a Chicago inner city slum rife with crime and drug deals and violence. Ida Mae grew up in a share cropper community in rural Mississippi. She and her husband left when a relative was beat with chains for stealing turkeys, except that the missing turkeys had merely wandered off and would return the next day.

Wilkerson builds a picture of the African American world in south in the 1930's, 40's and 50's, and then of the world they transported themselves to. Wilkerson calls them immigrants, even as she says they each balked at that characterization. But the comparison works in several ways. The migrants were largely southern rural naive transplants with limited productive connections, full of false hope and ripe for disappointment. And they left Jim Crow just to land in other heavily racist, and restrictive communities. As Wilkerson puts it, they didn't really benefit from leaving the south, but they did benefit in the act itself as an effort to control their own lives.

But it's the personal stories that I really liked, the biographies, life stories, and the way Wilkerson tells them. She covers the same events several times, not from the perspectives of different people, but from the perspective of different contexts. We hear a story in some detail. Then it comes up again as someone's past, but she summarizes it as if the reader had never encountered the story before. The summaries add a few details, even as they leave most things out. And later she returns to the same story yet again from yet another context. And it works, actually it was a very effect technique as she used it, forcing the reader to rethink what we thought was familiar.

I could write a great deal more about this book. There are numerous really important, fascinating and sometime horrifying details. I found the history fascinating, and the book humanizing, really opening up this world—these worlds—to us in full color. We only really get three stories, but the implications go so much farther.

Not all reviews are fully positive. But I can only recommend this.

2016:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/220674#5581320 show less