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.