Caste the Origins of Our Discontents Book Review

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Random Business firm hide caption

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Random House

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Random Business firm

To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading — to relax into the virtuosic functioning of thought and course i is most to run into, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse below you.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist'due south first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to arts and crafts deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched bear witness — both historical and contemporary — in harmonious structures of language and form.

Now, in her sophomore try, the former New York Times Chicago bureau main does not disappoint. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing — a profound achievement of scholarship and inquiry that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis.

What is caste? According to Wilkerson, "caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, award, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the incertitude, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the bureaucracy." Racism and casteism practise overlap, she writes, noting that "what some people call racism could exist seen as just one manifestation of the degree to which we take internalized the larger American caste system."

Wilkerson's central thesis is that caste, while a global occurrence, achieves its nearly violent manifestation in the treatment of American Blacks, set at the lowest level in society through historical and contemporary oppression, marginalization and violence — all legally maintained through systems of police and lodge. "The English in North America developed the near rigid and exclusionist from of race ideology," Wilkerson writes, quoting the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley.

Wilkerson establishes a correlation between American Blacks, whom she names the "American untouchables" and the Indian "untouchables," or Dalits, as the everyman caste; while whites in America are the dominant, highest caste equivalent to the Indian Brahmins. Describing the treatment of Blacks in America, Wilkerson writes:

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the turn a profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as nuptials presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to convene an possessor's debts or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would take banned as war crimes had the conventions practical to people of African descent on this soil."

Wilkerson'due south argument is based on an exploration of what she names the 3 resonant caste systems in history: the Indian degree system, the Nazi caste organization and the American caste organization — which the Nazis researched when creating their own. "There were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world," Wilkerson writes, citing Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman equally evidence: "'Their overwhelming interest was in the 'classic instance,' the United States of America."

Wilkerson supports her assay with an immense compendium of documented enquiry that spans centuries. Through her detailed historical research, she unearths evidence that the violence toward Blacks that the American caste system consort was too much even for the Nazis; they balked at replicating some of the more horrific acts of American racism toward Blacks. "[Herbert] Kier was just i of several Nazi researchers who thought American law went overboard," Wilkerson writes, while others, like Hans F. K. Günter, thought the American laws so outrageous as to be untrue.

Caste, Wilkerson posits, is dependent upon the dehumanization of the other, most powerfully seen in the use of Jews and Blacks equally the discipline of horrific experiments by the corresponding dominant caste systems of Deutschland and America. "German scientists and SS doctors conducted more than two dozen types of experiments on Jews and others they held captive," while "in the Usa, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia," Wilkerson writes.

One of the virtually poignant examples Wilkerson describes is the violence done by Dr. J. Marion Sims, lauded as the founder of American gynecology, on the bodies of Blackness women:

"He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that frequently ended in disfigurement or expiry. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was not painful enough to justify the problem. ..."

Wilkerson says Sims would "invite leading men in boondocks and apprentices in to see for themselves. He later wrote, 'I saw everything as no man had seen earlier.' "

Medical experiments were likewise carried out on Blackness men and Black children: Wilkerson notes Harriet Washington's research in Medical Apartheid in which a plantation doctor "fabricated incisions into a blackness babe'due south caput to test a theory for curing seizures" with "cobbler's tools" and "the point of a crooked awl." The horror is legion.

Wilkerson documents the pogroms of violence against the caste of American untouchables every bit waves throughout history — whether the violence of slavery or the waves of vigilante violence that that rose during Reconstruction and accept connected since; incidents such the Ocoee, Fla., massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., are set in a continuum that meets with the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Ala., 40 years afterwards in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, S.C., past Dylann Roof on a Black church building v years ago. This violent terror is a marker of the caste organization, Wilkerson writes. The descriptions are vivid in their horror; the connections travel beyond history and fourth dimension to resonate in the listen.

This structural move is a classic trademark of Wilkerson's way, and one of the attributes of her unique voice that imbues her writing with such textured depth. Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows u.s.a. an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste.

Degree is divided into six sections exploring the various aspects of caste: its origins, its sustainment and far-reaching "tentacles," and its effects — whether detrimental wellness for the givers and receivers of racism or the expected white supremacist backfire to the ballot of the first president of recognizable Black heritage: "The ability of a black person to replace the racial caste system," Wilkerson writes, quoting the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was "the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted."

Although a claim can exist made that the opening chapter or 2 on the fallout of the 2016 election appear dated, this to be fair, is simply because of what has happened to America in the interim since Wilkerson penned those words.

What is problematic is the glaring absence of Africa in a book that aims to position itself as a seminal text on the concept of a global degree system and the positioning of Blackness inside that global caste organisation. Wilkerson glances at this briefly with a scant mention of South Africa in a couple of paragraphs and past quoting a woman identified only equally a Nigerian playwright saying that "there are no Black people in Africa" — and so keeps it moving. Both are moments that practice need to be unpacked. Information technology is understandable why Wilkerson does not walk through this door to explore degree in Africa — Caste is 400 pages before calculation the impressive list of research sources. But if Wilkerson is not opening that door, there does need to exist an acknowledgement of why not, an acknowledgement of that absenteeism.

Simply put: With colonization, European colonizers brought their caste system to Africa and implemented it over the already existing caste systems amongst many African indigenous groups.

Perhaps the absence of Africa is because of the caste system Wilkerson speaks of itself — to become people in the ascendant caste to care about a narrative near Blackness and Brownness, virtually the lower castes, there must be a stiff presence of whiteness in the conversation considering information technology is the dominant caste organization within the narrative.

And thus the caste system rears its head to touch a work about the degree organization in real time.

This points, ultimately, to the function of personal accountability within a caste arrangement. What does one do with this knowledge of the violence of caste? Does 1 perpetuate information technology? Eradicate information technology?

Interestingly, Wilkerson at times seems to contend not for an eradication of caste, but to create infinite for her, and others she meets, who have been miscast in their "caste" — regulated to the lowest caste when by intelligence or other attribute they should exist in the higher caste, or vice versa. "Nosotros had defied our degree assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author," Wilkerson writes. Even the catastrophe "Awakening" section, couched as a look forrard, is depicted less of an articulation of the possibilities of a globe without caste, and more than of her desire only to be seen every bit equal to those of the dominant caste.

In this, Wilkerson leans to biological science. She offers the example of wolves equally her back up for the necessity of this hierarchal construction — the necessity not just of the alpha, but of the omega, or the underdog, beaten and driveling by the others, the "untouchable." When the underdog dies, she writes, the whole pack is destabilized. No 1 wants to be the everyman of the low, "the scapegoat," just the pack needs one to survive.

Without the untouchable, Wilkerson argues here, society collapses. The untouchable is needed. Wilkerson only does not want to be one.

Writes Wilkerson:

"The great tragedy among humans is that people accept ofttimes been assigned to or seen equally qualified for alpha positions — as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries — not necessarily on the footing of innate leadership traits but, historically on the basis of having been born to the dominant degree or the dominant gender or to the right family unit inside the dominant caste."

I would argue that the tragedy, rather, is the need for these positions such as "omega" to still exist, which then justifies the need for this degree construction and its continued existence — even if it exists with Wilkerson'south proffered edit that would allow an individual, no matter "background or caste," to hop into their desired caste and turn a profit from the connected oppression of others the caste arrangement welds.

If nosotros are to look at biological science as testify, permit u.s. consider the research of Eli D. Strauss and Kay E. Holekamp on hyenas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which offers another model for social positioning. Within the hyena community, every bit with wolves, there is a strict bureaucracy of ascendant caste and lower castes. But, if a female person understands the hierarchy as unjust and challenges a more dominant fellow member of the college caste and her female peer group agrees with her, they will rise up beyond caste and claiming the dominant caste; if this female cross-caste coalition wins, the bureaucracy is destabilized, and this radical feminist hyena and her cross-caste pack become the new dominant caste.

It is not enough, only information technology is a start.

Let united states call up not merely nearly our own private desires to exist seen every bit a member of the dominant caste and benefit accordingly, only about the necessity to challenge this entire organization of oppression radically. Let us call up non just virtually replicating oppressive patriarchal systems simply about alternative models such as matrilineal cross-cultural advice and connexion.

Allow the states wait not to the wolves, but to the hyenas.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, author and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900274938/caste-argues-its-most-violent-manifestation-is-in-treatment-of-black-americans

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