Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

I have a confession to make. I have tried to read other Isabel Wilkerson books before and I have failed to complete them. There are reasons for this, but I'll get into that. The local League of Women Voters was doing a book club for Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and I went ahead and signed up for it because I'd heard such good things about the book.

I taught an introductory political science class called American Minority Politics for many years. I have read numerous books on race in the United States. I have struggled with language, message, and tone when talking to audiences about race. I am not a newbie on the topic of race relations in the United States - a topic that's incredibly important, relevant, and intractable in this country today.  It was with this understanding that I cracked open Wilkerson's book.

This Goodreads review is basically my take on it. It's an important book, full of important anecdotes and historical perspective. If you are a person who doesn't think about race much - its impact on society and the daily lives of every individual - you're probably going to get a lot out of this book. But if you're looking for a new theoretical lens with which to view racism in the United States, you're not going to get it here. To quote the review I linked to above, " Seeing the title "Caste" had me believe that this this discussion would go beyond the the binary frames that usually are associated with the discourses on racism by using the lens of caste hierarchy. As the book went on, however, I found the intricate retelling of past atrocities against individual African Americans - which most of the book is dedicated to - akin to a rehashing of past work. Instead of establishing a new frame using caste, I found that on many occasions, the phrases of "dominant caste" and "subordinate caste" were just replacements for the words "white people" and "black people.""

Wilkerson honestly doesn't address much in the way of race beyond white and black. In a country where colorism is a problem and not all people are white or black, the discussion of caste was pretty limited. The main idea of the book is that Nazi Germany, the United States, and India all have/had similar caste systems and the book is supposed to trace those parallels, but the focus is almost entirely on the United States case, which makes sense since it's the author's area of expertise, but is disappointing because I was hoping for more of an explanation of the similarities than I really got.

Okay, two more minor criticisms before I move on to lines of note. One, Wilkerson's oblique writing style is quite distracting for someone one like me. In the first forty pages, Wilkerson had extended metaphors comparing race to an old house, an illness, a play, and the movie The Matrix. Just pick ONE!! Sheesh. She also does this thing where she doesn't refer to people by name, but rather by descriptors or pronouns and I find myself incredibly turned off by this. Just use the name Hillary Clinton, not the "Democratic candidate for president in 2016."  Tell me that the court case you're talking about is Plessy v. Ferguson, not just describe it without naming it! I also thought this book was an organizational nightmare, particularly the second half, but I guess that's my common complaint about a lot of non-fiction, so there you go.  

Lines of note:

"Slavery in this land was not merely 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 poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences." (page 44)

Americans didn't invent slavery. I mean, early Mesopotamian records include references to slavery. I mean, of course the  American context is tailored to the geographic situation, but it wasn't an American invention.

"It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil." (page 47)

Wow! That's an amazing timeline.

"In debating "how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich," wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, "they began by asking how the Americans did it.""  (page 79) 

"Mindful of their appearances beyond their borders, for the time being at least, the Nazis wondered how the United States had managed to turn its hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage." (page 83)

Ouch. We ended up talking a lot about this in our book club a lot. The idea that the seeds of the Holocaust were built right here in the United States was sobering.

"An order from the justices went out in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in the search of a runaway named London, granting that "any person may KILL and DESTROY the said slave by such means as he or they may think fit." This casual disregard for black life and the deputizing of any citizen to take that life would become a harbinger of the low value accorded African-Americans in the police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black citizens that continued into the early decades of the twenty-first century." (page 153)

I thought this was a succinct explanation of how early slave patrols led to lynchings and to the mistreatment of minorities by the police in the modern context.

"Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it. Just as the assumptions of inferiority weigh on those assigned to the bottom of the caste system, the assumptions of superiority can burden those at the top with unsustainable expectations of needing to be several rungs above, in charge at all times, at the center of things, to police those might cut ahead of them, to resent the idea of underserving lower castes jumping the line and getting in front of those born to lead." (page 184)

"Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else's definition of who they are and who they should be." (page 290)

An interesting way of (maybe?) convincing someone who doesn't think that this is relevant to his or her life that he or she should care.

"Years ago, back in the 1990s, the political scientist Andrew Hacker posed a theoretical question to his white undergraduates at Queens College in New York. He asked them how much they would have to be paid to live the next fifty years as a black person. The students thought it over and came back with a figure. Most said they would need $50 million - $1 million for every year that they would have to be black." (page 308)

I had this discussion with my husband and I think we agreed that this was a challenging theoretical and I think we came to agree that if we had to be black and stay in the United States, we'd definitely need at least a million a year and boy is that a wake-up call about privilege. 

Things I looked up:

Lothrop Stoddard (page 80) - American historian and political scientist who was a terrible person with his white supremacy and eugenicist views. Coined the term Untermensch, meaning "subhuman," which greatly influenced the Nazi government.

Madison Grant (page 80) - Another American white supremacist who was an advocate of scientific racism and was influential in passage of anti-immigration and anti-miscegenation laws. (Also, he was a conservationist who is credited with saving many species of animals. People are complicated, aren't they?)

Lynching of Rubin Stacy photo (page 92) - Stacy (sometimes it's spelled Stacey if you're looking this up, but it's spelled Stacy in Caste) was lynched in 1935 in Florida. There's a photo of the lunching (it's terrible, so I won't put it here, but here's the photo if you're curious) and the thing that's so crazy about this photo is that there's a white girl in front looking up at Stacy's body with a look of glee? excitement? on her face. It's quite distrubing.

"Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes "became a burgeoning sub-department of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. postmaster general banned the cards from the mails."" (page 93-94)

I had never heard of this trend. How disturbing.

Eugene Williams (page 118) - A seventeen-year-old boy who was swimming in Lake Michigan in Chicago when he unknowingly passed into white waters and was stoned and drowned to death. This was a catalyst for the Chicago race riots of 1919.

Charles Stuart killed his wife Carol DiMaiti Stuart in a Boston suburb (page 193-196) - He falsely alleged that a black man shot and killed Carol and shot Charles, but it turns out that Stuart himself had killed his wife and unborn child. The idea that he could blame a black person and a lot of attention focused on black criminals (the mayor actually said they would "get the animals responsible" which shows how quickly we go back to dehumanization of "the other" in the U.S.).

Ocoee riot - In 1920, at least 50 African-Americans were murdered in the bloodiest election day riot in the country's history for attempting to vote. (page 288-289)

I'm really struggling with this book. I think it's jam-packed with information people should know, but I think it's theoretically weak and organizationally confusing. I also think Wilkerson's writing style is oblique and that style of writing does not do any favors to a topic that needs as clear articulation as possible as race in the United States.  

3.5/5 stars