CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS - ISABEL WILKERSON

The library is now back open, sort of. You can’t go inside but you can “order” books online and pick them up. I was availing myself of this service when I noticed they had a bunch of “Peak Picks,” CASTE among them. I’m a big WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS booster and I heard Wilerson on Fresh Air talking about this book so I figured I’d knock it out real quick. The premise is simple, think about racial hierarchy as a version of a caste system, but Wilkerson manages to spin it off into some really interesting areas. When discussing or considering race it can be really hard to see the problems and contours of a system one was born into and which pervades every aspect of modern life, the classic fish/water problem. Wilkerson is able to see this system in a new light by re-framing it using a “foreign” set of concepts. She’ll tell anecdotes about racism she’s experienced in Amerika and use “upper-caste” instead of YT to get our attention and get us thinking about this in a new way. I found it pretty powerful and useful. I wouldn’t say I needed convincing that Amerika is racist to the bone, but seeing this as a caste issue helped. Especially in terms of the psychology of those involved and the quasi-religious feelings folks have towards their caste. When I lived in India I would occasionally be drinking and hanging out with large groups of Indians and, due to the insane heat, most of us would have our shirts off. I didn’t live in India long enough, nor was/am I smart enough, to have gotten a good handle of the caste system as exists in modern India. I could never tell what caste someone was by their name or the way they looked/spoke, like South Asians seemed to be able too. However, when me and my Indian friends would hang out shirtless, I could tell who was a Brahim because they’d be wearing a Janeu, a thread that upper-caste men wear around their torso. This was always interesting to me since these men were not devout Hindus in other ways. Most obviously since we were drinking alcohol most of these hang-out sessions.But it was a part of their culture that they kept, even if they’d tell you they didn’t harbor prejudice against lower-caste people. I found it fruitful to consider what the YT equivalent was to this. Additionally, Wikerson is so smart and erudite, she’s able to toss out intriguing ideas left and right. To take one example of many, she noted how Black immigrants to Amerika, Afrikans, Caribbeans and whatnot, cling onto ethnic markers like an accent to differentiate themselves from American Blacks. This is the opposite of what happens to YT immigrants, who rush to shed their “Polishness” or “Irishness” and integrate into a higher caste. The opposite dynamic is at play with Black immigrants. She’s also got a great anecdote about a black man in Alabama in the 20s who married a YT woman and was almost lynched until the town discovered that his wife was Sicilian and thus hardly YT at all. It’s also interesting to read about Supreme Court cases in 22-23 wherein a Japanese man sued claiming that he was white, in terms of skin color, and an upper-caste South Asian man sued saying that he was literally Aryan and thus should count as YT. It should come as no surprise that the court ruled against both of these men. If I was allowed to ask for more, I would’ve liked more about the history of Caste in India, its origins, how strong a hold it had in certain areas and certain epochs, what colonialism did to the caste system, how the other Indian religions reacted to it, etc. The stuff about the Dalit-rights movement was very interesting to me. Likewise, I would have liked an exploration of a Latin America caste system, ideally Brazil, since they were so focused on these tiny mini-castes (Octoroon, Mulato, etc.), a feature in the Indian Caste system. Amerika, of course, has the opposite approach, the famous one drop rule. I would have liked to see this systems compared at length, Wilkerson touches on them but briefly. Elsewhere, the Nazi stuff was best when it highlighted how much the Germans took from Amerika when they were building their caste system. The stuff about them studying Jim Crow was pretty remarkable. However, without the space to do a deep dive into Jewish history in Europe, it wasn’t as interesting to me since their system didn’t last that long. Irregardless, this book was really helpful in thinking about race. 5 Castes.