Caste

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wilkerson does a great job of having Americans confront the historical atrocities of slavery. Having the institution of slavery rub shoulders with the Holocaust and the Indian caste system and come out as the worst definitely makes me as an American feel shame and sadness for our past collective behavior. She also does a pretty good job of illustrating how the caste system still exists in America and I won't deny that . However, she also seems to equate anyone that voted for Trump as at least a closet racist and that anyone who was ever rude or mean to her did so because she is black. While I definitely won't discount her feelings (and some definitely were racist actions against her), nor will I even try to defend That Man (although Hillary Clinton was no real choice, either), I sometimes as a white person despair as to what I can do to make the situation better. I sometimes feel like the constant listing of slights, mini-aggressions, even blatant racism is counted against any white person, so that I feel so shameful of my skin, that a gulf between me and a black person has widened instead of shrunk. I am more terrified of inadvertently offending a person of color now that I think twice about engaging them in conversation. Even now I am certain someone is misunderstanding what I am trying to say. I will keep reading about race because with each book I understand better a different point of view and I can empathize just a little bit more.

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At first, religion, not race as we now know it, defined the status of people in the colonies.  Christianity, as a proxy for Europeans, generally exempted European workers from lifetime enslavement.  This initial distinction is what condemned, first, indigenous people, and, then, Africans, most of whom were not Christian upon arrival, to the lowest rung of an emerging hierarchy before the concept of race had congealed to justify their eventual debasement.

Their lives were to some degree a lie and in dehumanizing these people whom they regarded as beasts of the field, they dehumanized themselves.

The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

seeing whatever is happening to them as, say, a black problem, rather than a human problem, unwittingly endangering everyone.