Borrowed from Kemi (Otero Graduate Fellow)
Chapter 6 assigned reading for PUBLPOL 103C: Justice
Quotes that stood out to me and my thoughts, Parts I and II:
- “A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.” (17)
- Three caste systems that have stood out: Nazi Germany, India, and the US
- my jaw dropped when I read about the part where MLK went to India and was introduced as a “fellow untouchable from the US” — not sure why I was surprised
- “Slavery built the man-made chasm between blacks and whites that forces the middle castes of Asians, Latinos, indigenous people, and new immigrants of African descent to navigate within what began as a bipolar hierarchy.” Wilkerson’s depiction of the hierarchy — white people as the dominant/upper caste, Asian and Latino peoples as the middle castes, and African-American/Black people as the subordinate/lowest caste— is fundamental to her thesis and framework. While I wholeheartedly agree with the factual reality of white people being at the ‘top’ of the caste system and Black people being ‘subordinate’ in relation to them, I also think that this three-tiered description risks oversimplifying the actual racial landscape of the United States. At the same time, though, the following quote reminded me of the ‘model minority myth’: “Newcomers learn to vie for the good favor of the dominant caste and to distance themselves from the bottom-dwellers, as if everyone were in the grip of an invisible playwright.” (52)
- “…there are no black people in Africa” because they are “Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele […] They don’t become black until they go to America or come to the U.K. […] It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown, It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.” (53)
- “Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death”” (81)
- “Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism.” (95)
Part III: The Eight Pillars of Caste
- I: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
- II: Heritability
- III: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating
- IV: Purity versus Pollution
- V: Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill
- VI: Dehumanization and Stigma
- VII: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control
- VIII: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
…
Read Parts IV and V without taking notes — great anecdotes (some that were very heartbreaking) and historical insight
…
Quotes/Passages that stood out in the rest of the book
On the 2016 election:
- “Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy. Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe that a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics. The liberal take was that working-class whites have been voting against their interests in supporting right-wing oligarchs, but that theory diminishes the agency and caste-oriented principles of the people. Many voters, in fact, made an assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from far-away lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most — the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.” (324–325)
On people who, like Einstein, the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery, white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, “seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe” and “manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to”:
- “These are people of courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and compassion.” (384)
The last chapter is called ‘The Heart Is the Last Frontier’ and seems to offer the ‘solution’ to the caste problem by describing an interaction between the author and a plumber in which they bond by talking about losing their mothers. While it was a kind-of heartwarming story, it felt somewhat dissonant with the rest of the book/her thesis which focuses on the systemic nature of caste and racism.
My goodreads review:
Reading Wilkerson’s work was my first time being introduced to the description of race/racism in the US as a ‘caste system,’ and I found this framing/comparison to be very novel and insightful. I was surprised to learn that numerous past scholars and everyday citizens had already written about and spoken up about the parallels between the caste system in India and the US, but upon reading this book, I’d say that it is not a surprising parallel at all. While I think that Caste is a must-read — it has a convincing and illuminating blend of both historical and modern analysis, research, anecdotal evidence — I hesitate to give it five stars for two main reasons. First, for a book that rightfully describes the issue of race and racism as a systemic problem, the way in which the last chapter/conclusion, “The Heart is the Last Frontier,” seems to offer interpersonal connection as the ‘solution’ struck me as a complete dissonance and underwhelming conclusion. It’s (kind of?) heartwarming but felt inadequate. Second, while I acknowledge that: (1) it is probably incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to comprehensively describe race and racism in the US in a little less than 400 pages, and (2) her thesis is based upon the US caste system as a bipolar racial hierarchy, I felt that Wilkerson’s framework/depiction of the racial hierarchy in the US was sometimes oversimplified, especially in its discussion of indigenous peoples and other minorities like Asian-Americans and Latinos, etc.
Nevertheless, I’m very glad I read this book and think that it is a must-read for everyone.
