Isabel Wilkerson, CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS

 

I read Isabel Wilkerson’s THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS years ago and was impressed by both its scholarship and accessibility—and surprised and appalled that I knew virtually nothing about the migration of six million blacks within our country. In CASTE, she brings together three caste systems—India, Nazi Germany, and the US—to illuminate the similarities in their underpinnings (eight “pillars of caste”), justifications, and effects. This isn’t an arbitrary yoking together—she makes the telling points that these caste systems are linked historically: both India and the US, fertile and coveted, were at one point both protected by oceans and ruled for a time by the British; and the Nazis based their Final Solution on two books about race and miscegenation written by white, Ivy-League-educated American men—The Menace of the Under-man (1922) by Lothrop Stoddard and The Passing of the Great Race (1916) by Madison Grant. Drawing upon primary sources including slave narratives and secondary scholarly sources, she presents the nuanced idea that in the US, race is a "frontman" for caste. Wilkerson’s 400-page book is well-researched and compelling, and I read it in 3 days, scribbling in the margins as I went. (The theoretical underpinning is solid and accessible; it seems to me Wilkerson leans on theories of discourse and repeated performative acts, such as are described by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, although she does not credit them.) My one gripe with the book that she employs a wide range of metaphors for caste and its effects: the anthrax released during a heat wave in Siberia, earthquakes, an old house and its mudsill, grammar, the usher in a movie theater, the cast of play (characters, roles, stage), DNA, mineral springs, a ladder, and the sci-fi movie The Matrix. But this is in an effort to bring her points home, and while I found it somewhat distracting, I applaud any strategy that helps convey her important message. I was more affected by her personal stories, as a black woman experiencing caste, which I found appalling and (admittedly) somewhat discouraging. Highly recommend.

Steph Cha, YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY

 

This book takes place in Los Angeles, shifting between 1991 and 2019. Though it is told in third person, the story is presented through alternating subjectivities -- primarily through Grace, the daughter of a Korean woman who committed a crime; and Shawn, whose sister, who is Black, died as a result. Although the action unfolds in a forward arc, this book is not so much a thriller as a nuanced, closely woven tale about how racism, resentment, and violence can be both intoxicating and devastating for a community; how the press and social media can both bring about and undermine justice; and how actions taken by groups can have profound effects upon individuals, who in turn form assumptions about groups. This is a novel in which most of the characters are complex, flawed, struggling, and devoted--either to an ideal or to family or to going straight or to old assumptions. Highly recommend.

Brit Bennett, THE VANISHING HALF

A compelling novel about twins, young black women who are "light enough" to "pass." In the 1950s,  at age 16 and faced with having to quit school to clean houses, they flee their small Deep South town of Mallard (where all the blacks are "light") for New Orleans. There, Stella passes for white, takes a job as a secretary, and marries her white boss. Desiree marries a dark-skinned man and has a dark-skinned daughter named Jude. When the marriage turns abusive, Desiree returns to Mallard with Jude, who is scorned by the light-skinned blacks and who eventually escapes to UCLA by being a track star. If this sounds like a set of double and even triple standards (who's scorning whom), it is. What elevated this to 5 stars for me was that Jude's lover Reese is transsexual, in transition from woman to man. I loved the way this subplot worked delicately to both echo and complicate the theme that identity--whether based in race or gender or any category that is ostensibly "fixed" and (usually) binary--is fluid. These categories are not "natural" in the sense that they have no meaning except for what we've given them; they're cultural constructs put in position to assuage some of the more primitive parts of our psychology--including our fear of the other. Definitely worth the read.