Caste
By Isabella Wilkerson
Published 2020
Read Jan 2023
This reader devoured Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” before this website was started. Wilkerson was a journalist working for the New York Times when she wrote it and her use of stories of three real people who participated in the Great Migration of blacks from the south to the rest of the county was remarkable and effective.
This reader began reading Caste shortly after it was published. The first section of the book was somewhat confusing to this reader and led her to put the book down for awhile. When the book was selected for this reader’s book group, this reader restarted the book and was once again awed by Wilkerson’s ability to teach with stories, many of which told of her own experiences. Wilkerson proposes that a caste system was developed in this country, starting with the earliest settlers who used white and black indentured people to serve their masters and enable their wealth. Elites, poor whites, then blacks making up the coarsest caste levels which still exist more that we’d like to believe despite the changes in laws that make all citizens with, supposedly, voting rights.
Wilkinson compares and contrasts the various caste systems—India, Nazi Germany, the US. It was difficult for this reader to learn that Nazi Germany looked to the US for guidance for their own caste system and thought that the US’s version was more draconian than they were comfortable invoking. While there have been a variety of reactions to this book—her “solution” too utopian; her analysis right on or not deep enough, ect—it is a book well worth reading. It will invoke new ways of thinking about the societal problem that still exists and is likely growing as new “non-white” immigrants continue to flock to the US and its stated ideals.
MarshaReads.com 