Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

15. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
reader: Robin Miles
published: 2020
format: 14:26 audible audiobook (496-pages in hardcover)
acquired: April 2
listened: Apr 5-25
rating: 4
locations: US and India (and a little of the UK)
about the author: journalist from in Washington, D. C., born 1961

I adored [The Warmth of Other Suns]. It revealed the storyteller Wilkerson is, and her ability to re-contextualize things, to make you look at the same story in different ways and find that story suddenly entirely new. It's my favorite audiobook.

I had a little trouble with this because it opens with what I felt was a manifesto, an at least four chapter introduction. And when she starts telling stories, they are overshadowed by this introduction and the context. They feel anecdotal. So early on I was uncomfortable with this. But as I listened more, what she was saying started to ring with me and I started to use her ideas in how I evaluated things. And it made a difference, a maybe profound difference. I've begun to rethink much of American culture in this context - Trump, anti-vax, covid-denial, global warming denial, immigration xenophobia, go-it-alone stuff, voting against your own interest financially, or health-wise. It works. The simple idea of seeing white entitlement as a caste system takes a little thought and experimenting, at least it did with me. But ultimately it's very meaningful. Recommended.

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/330945#7495216 ( )

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 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. ( )

This was one of the best books that I have ever read. I rate it right up there with "Sapiens" by Yuval Harari as books that give a framework and lens for you to view all things in our world. In Sapiens Harari helps explain how throughout history arbitrary decisions based on myths and non-scientific beliefs came to create the world we live in today. Wilkerson drills down from these concepts in Caste. Her contention is that in our country( she also looks at India and Nazi Germany) we have created dominant and lowest castes based on nothing more than peoples race or some other arbitrary trait that the dominant class uses to stigmatize the lower caste. Wilkerson traces the history of the blacks in America starting with 1619 and the first slaves all the way through present day. In example after example she takes her narrative and makes it real by showing how caste impacts our everyday lives and actions. She gives examples in her own life about how she, an educated black woman who was a New York times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, had to constantly justify herself as more than a member of the lowest class. This book shows the extensive research that she did and her use of data was excellent. An example that I liked was her potrrayal of blacks as being poor and living in horrible places. The realty is that 22% of blacks live in poverty which means 78% don't yet Blacks in the media etc are portrayed as poor which creates this as the first thing that comes to mined when whites think about blacks. She has many examples of pre conceived attitudes that lead to actions that have nothing to do with a persons skill or worth but reflects their low caste. Wilkerson contends that no matter what class or economic success the lowest cast achieves, the dominant white class will continue to view them as the lowest rung of the caste hierarchy. This book is a must read. Should be required reading in order to graduate high school. Once you read this and really think about what Wilkerson is reporting, hopefully you will have more empathy for blacks in America. I know that this book has helped me to have a different focus on race in America. ( )

race relations, social stratification, racism, caste, American history ( )

"Once every few years a book comes along that fundamentally reframes the conversation around race and racism in the United States. The last book I recall having had such a broad impact was Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), “a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.”" ~EUAR