Veteran black journalist Isabel Wilkerson has done an admirable job of exploring the history and recent manifestations of racism and caste in America. She opens with a fine metaphorical introduction about racism and caste being deeply embedded in the ‘old house’ that is America.
She then goes into America’s dark past about slavery in the States, and shows how the North withdrew its oversight over the South after the Emancipation Proclamation, leaving the ‘dominant caste’ to reassert their hold over blacks in the South. This was eventually followed by the Jim Crow laws that hardened the discriminatory structures in the South after WWI.
Africa and Nazi Germany also form two notable background ‘stories’ to the book. In one, Martin Luther King is surprised to discover that he is considered an ‘Untouchable’ in America and, in another, the Nazis learn lessons from America’s treatment of slaves to develop their infamous anti-semitism policies.
“The Eight Pillars of Caste” sub-section covers the basic assumptions that people have about racism and caste one chapter at a time to show what assumptions are below the social surfaces that presume white dominance.
Throughout the book, famous deaths, lynchings, and other violence from the past hundred years form a core of examples of the absurd, crazy injustices done to individual blacks including baseball pitching great Satchel Paige and, even, Barack Obama.
Along the way, the author tells of the uncredited black slave who innovated the idea of inoculation, the racial sympathies of Einstein, the amazing black forgiveness of a white woman black-killer in court, the important landmark work of the Davis anthropologists in the Deep South, the black boy Devonte offering free hugs who was publicly embraced by a white cop, and the health and economic consequences of skin color.
Her section on Barack Obama shows how much he was resented by a white majority through two terms (prefiguring the Trump claims and abuse), how much of that was based on fear and hatred, and the abuse he endured including the obvious in-the-face physical snub by a white woman governor.
It’s all quite the mixed bag and the home stretch is equally memorable with the section of white supremacist resistance to the very dangerous removal of Confederacy statues in New Orleans. Wilkerson finally leaves the reader at the end with hopeful thoughts about a caste-free world down the road.
The book’s many specific examples of racism are all memorable and often based on appearances, mistaken assumptions, and deep-seated unconscious fears and hate. Indeed, the author’s own instances of encounters with bare-faced discrimination are some of the most powerful in Caste.
In short, this 400 page opus is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the background of racism in America and the broader meaning and history of the caste system. Well-researched and engagingly-written, Caste comes highly recommended.