No easy exit

Isabel Wilkerson is not a linear writer. She offers her readers a non-linear, experiential text in Caste, exposing us to the meaning of the systemic classification of human beings in caste societies. The three such societies she focuses on and compares are our American polity, Nazi Germany, and Hindu India. This is a nearly 500 page book that immerses the reader in realities that hurt.

This is not a book for the squeamish. According to Wilkerson, in the United States a racialized caste system has rendered Black people the lowest among the low, a status so much part of the air we breathe that its accidents often pass by unmarked by both higher status people (mostly but not exclusively white) and even its Black subjects themselves. Unexamined, caste is just the way the world works. Under slavery, the caste system extracted value from the work of Black Africans through branding, whipping, torture, and rape; under Jim Crow, the freed people were subjected to dismembering and lynching; and today we practice mass incarceration and Derek Chauvin-policing.

And there's no escaping the U.S. caste system. There's hardly a professional class Black person who hasn't lived an incident such as what happened to rising political star Illinois State Senator Barack Obama who tells of being casually taken for a waiter at star-powered New York (white) media party.

She writes from her own experience of living with no refuge from Black caste status despite her journalistic acclaim and Pulitzer award.

Modern-day caste protocols are less often about overt attacks or conscious hostility and can be dispiritingly hard to fight. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. 

It's a form of hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit. It is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based in rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions, to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. 

This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

No reader of this book will come away thinking that the micro in the term micro-aggression means inconsequential. Not only the terrible history of oppression, but also a current reality of oblivious suppression is Wilkerson's "origins of our discontents."

And here we are in the era of the full-on fascist GOP and dithering Dems (on their bad days). Wilkerson shows how durable and resilient the racial caste system remains. The demographic mix in the country is changing. Will that change undermine the system?

Wilkerson is appropriately dubious, yet tries to be hopeful.

Without an enlightened recognition of the price we all pay for a caste system, the hierarchy will likely shape-shift as it has in the past to ensure that the structure remains intact. The definition of whiteness could well expand to confer honorary whiteness to those on the border -- the lightest skinned people of Asian or Latino descent or biracial people with a white parent, for instance -- to increase the ranks of the dominant caste.

... None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward. ...

(I might add also how we treat other species as well.)

This book is a long, harrowing journey. So is the struggle for a kinder society in which it is easier for all men and women to be good.