Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
(Format used for this read: Print–hardback)
I started this book back in the beginning of February and am only now just finishing it.
It wasn’t because this book was super long that it took me longer than usual to get thru it….
It was because the pages were absolutely PACKED with history, research, and stories that had my brain thinking and my heart feeling BIG TIME.
This is a study of history, a dissection of social constructs, and a deep examination of our own humanity.
Here is my one word thought on this book, yall:
WOW.
So so so much to take in and process and learn.
Isabel Wilkerson is not only an extremely informative and well researched author, the way she writes is absolutely captivating.
Here is the official summary:
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.”
I have never considered that the United States has it’s own caste system. And I never considered that Nazi Germany did either.
Divided and racist and harmful systems? Absolutely.
But I had never thought about them in the terms of caste. I had only ever thought of the continent of Asia when I think of countries with castes…the only country I know any kind of small facts about their caste system is the country of India….and that is just from books I have read or a small handful of conversations I have had with Indian American friends.
Needless to say, I am pretty ignorant when it comes to factual information, history or research regarding the caste system.
This book was a HUGE education for me. Because after reading it, I can absolutely 100 percent agree that this country does have it’s own caste system.
Here is one definition provided in the book as to what a caste system is:
“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.”
“In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste……..Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”
To see how Ms Wilkerson displays the striking similarities in three different countries in how human beings are classified and placed in a hierarchy was shocking and fascinating.
Comparing India and the United States:
“Both countries have since abolished the formal laws that defined their caste systems–the United States in a series of civil rights laws in the 1960s and India decades before, in the 1940s, but both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. Both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not.”
“The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures.”
Comparing Nazi Germany and the United States:
“By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States ‘was not just a country with racism, it was THE leading racist jurisdiction–so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.”
“American laws were the main foreign precedents for {Hitler’s} legislation.”
“At the depths of their dehumanization, both Jews and African Americans were subjected to gruesome medical experimentation at the hands of dominant caste physicians.”
So often we as Americans want to separate ourselves from the rest of the world….we want to view our nation as superior, kinder, more just than every other place in the world.
But that is a false narrative we feed ourselves alongside a horrific history we refuse to face.
“Few problems have ever been solved by ignoring them.”
“The country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery WAS the country.”
“Slavery in this land was not an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poor members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.”
There were some sentences that were written so powerfully and so precisely, that they just knocked me right down:
“We prejudice complicated human beings in ways we are never told to judge inanimate objects.”
“The caste system is upheld by its own inertia and by the superior caste’s interest in upholding it.”
“Over the centuries, people at the margins have had to study those at the center of power, learn their invisible codes and boundaries, commit to memory the protocols and idiosyncrasies, because their survival depends upon knowing them as well as if not better than their own dreams and wishes.”
“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”
And there were some very traumatic true personal stories Ms Wilkerson told–both her own and shared with her by others–that the depths of my heart hurt to read. I won’t quote any of those here because I do want to say that if you are a BIPOC this book may be triggering for you at many parts, especially these…so please proceed in your reading of the book with care to yourself.
Isabel Wilkerson does end her book showing how we can CHANGE our country. She is realistic but also very hopeful.
“It turns out that everyone benefits when society meets the needs of the disadvantaged.”
“A world without caste would set everyone free.”
This is a book to be absorbed more so than read.
There is SO much more to say and discuss and process from these pages…this is really just a snippet of thoughts from a book that made my brain spin into overdrive. I definitely will do a repeat read of this book again.
HIGHLY and DEFINITELY recommend this to EVERYONE.