In a year that has forced another reckoning with America’s legacy of racism, Isabel Wilkerson’s newest non-fiction examination of history, “Caste,” shines a new light. Drawing on extensive research, the book compares and examines caste systems in three societies – India, Germany and the United States – and how those systems still shape lives at the hierarchies’ bottoms today.
Like Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, “The Warmth Of Other Suns,” “Caste” has already won near-universal adoration from literary circles. “This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” Oprah Winfrey said when naming the book to her bestseller-making list, and Wilkerson’s powerful nonfiction narrative lives up to the acclaim.
Americans often tend to assume that the horrors of Germany’s Third Reich could never happen here, despite the fact that they already have, again and again, during the more than quarter millennium of slavery and Jim Crow. In fact, as Wilkerson shows, Nazi Germany explicitly drew upon racist American laws in order to develop the foundation for their exclusion of Jews from every facet of daily German life.
Wilkerson intentionally uses language, like ‘caste,’ more commonly associated with other cultures to break the thinking around race in America and explore similarities to other societies around the world, even as she grounds the book in the unique horrors each caste system created.
The book is an excellent companion to “Stamped From The Beginning,” Ibram X. Kendi’s finely woven history on the rise of race and racism in America. Wilkerson, however, draws a compelling case that America is fighting a war for justice on two fronts: caste and race. “Caste is the bones, race is the skin,” she writes.
“The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race,” Wilkerson states elsewhere in the book, “and thus is farther reaching, deeper and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.”
Wilkerson outlines the mechanisms behind the creation of caste, and what it needs to succeed, but the most frightening part of its continued existence in the world is the banality of its evil.
It is fully human to create hierarchies among groups. It can (and does) happen anywhere, and that is the full horror of the insidiousness of caste. As Wilkerson states: “Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.”
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