“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 476
Price: $32.00 (Hardcover)
Pulitzer Prize Winner Looks at Race in America from a Different Angle
In 2010 Isabel Wilkerson published “The Warmth of Other Suns” and won the Pulitzer Prize, which she absolutely deserved. She pulled no punches, explaining WHY African Americans in Georgia, Alabama and Florida migrated to the cities of the northeast, to New York and Philadelphia, what drove Mississippians to Chicago and Gary and those from Louisiana to Los Angeles.
Wilkerson laid out the meanness and cruelty that caused people to leave their homes, their parents’ graves, their friends and neighbors and flee north.
Although it was a cavalcade of bigotry, painful to read, that book was buoyed by the stories of particular individuals and families and their journeys.
This new book, a study of race, class, and caste in America, is even more painful to read and there are few narratives to make the medicine go down. But it would be cowardly and churlish to complain about the emotional difficulty of reading this book when compared to the misery of those who underwent the actual horrors.
Wilkerson discusses the caste system in India, using it to illuminate our racially based caste system in America.
In India, traditionally and now, one is born into a caste—there are thousands of divisions—and must remain there. At the top are Brahmins, priests and warriors, and at the bottom are the untouchables, permitted only the lowliest jobs, cleaning filth, and therefore regarded as inherently dirty and smelly. The system is embedded in the Hindu religion, a kind of "divine will," and believers have a tough time arguing their way out of it.
The lowest must never touch or pollute the uppers, even by casting a shadow upon them.
Here, we use race to enforce caste, a system "shape-shifting" and "unspoken."
This is true for all levels. Behave as your caste or race, dominant or subordinate, dictates or you will be punished. That punishment can occur on a spectrum from not being invited to a desirable tea party to being lynched. Between 1900 and 1940 there was a lynching every four days in the South.
Wilkerson spends some time on the antebellum South and slavery, where the enslaved were considered by many, "for the first time in human history," not entirely human, but the Jim Crow era is more to the point.
In America, our mores and laws regarding nationality, immigration and racial segregation and purity were so complicated and detailed that Nazis looked to the U.S. for inspiration.
Laws forbidding blacks from shaking hands with whites, looking whites in the eye, eating in the same room, attending the same school, all of it. Alabama, Wilkerson reminds us, "did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000."
Hitler “marveled” at how this country had killed millions of indigenous peoples, lynched thousands—sometimes as public entertainment with photographers and lemonade—yet maintained “an air of robust innocence.”
In Germany, there was some debate over how to classify a person with one Jewish parent and one Christian parent. Here we went to the so-called “one-drop” rule, which, Wilkerson comments, was “too harsh for the Nazis.”
Many American intellectuals in the ’20s were fascinated by eugenics, a pseudoscience that rated human stock by “races,” with northern Europeans superior to southern, calling for the exclusion of Jews and “Negroes” and sometimes arguing for sterilization and quarantining. This pernicious theory found its way into our immigration laws and quotas, and was studied by the Nazis.
Their implementation of these theories, their variety of "cleansing," was of course the Holocaust.
Wilkerson spends a little time comparing the aftermath of the Nazi era in Germany with the aftermath of our Civil War.
Presumably, history is written by the victors.
The area in Berlin under which Hitler had his suicide bunker is now paved over—a street and parking lot, unmarked. Displaying the swastika is a crime. Quoting Susan Neiman, Wilkerson writes "Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them." Restitution is paid to survivors of the Holocaust.
After 1865, Jefferson Davis retired to the Mississippi coast to write his memoirs and General Robert E. Lee became the president of Washington College, which later added his name to the original, becoming "Washington and Lee." There are 230 memorials to Lee in the U.S.
As different social pressures here changed, many groups were admitted to the dominant caste in America; the Germans in the 1840s, the Irish slightly later. Italians were admitted in this system, into “whiteness,’’ but not African-Americans, no matter the lightness of their skin.
Much of this we have put behind us, of course, but, Wilkerson argues, not all of it.
The caste system in America is still with us, with everyone suffering, emotionally and physiologically, with black lives shortened by perpetual microaggressions on the one hand and blood pressure spikes felt by angry whites on the other.
Wilkerson herself, an elegant, sophisticated woman, tells of grotesque indignities on planes and in stores, and if this can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
