Isabel Wilkerson's ambitious new book seeks to reframe American racism — and place it among a pantheon of other brutal caste systems.
In her new book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recalls once seeing a small, barely noticeable welt in the corner of a room in her home and deciding it was nothing. But over the years, the welt “became a wave that widened and bulged,” until the ceiling was bowed. The tiny flaw in the home’s structure could only be ignored for so long before it threatened the integrity of the whole.
As enslaved Africans began to convert to Christianity, however, the rationale evolved and hardened into one of racial difference. Wilkerson turns again and again to metaphors to pin down what caste means exactly, arguing that it’s not exactly race , nor is it class. It is, she says, “the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.” Or it is the play itself, in which “the actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them.
“After the 2016 election,” she writes, “the surveillance of black citizens by white strangers became so common a feature of American life that these episodes have inspired memes of their own.” White people calling the cops on Black people entering their own homes or waiting at a Starbucks, she argues, is “a distant echo of an earlier time when anyone in the dominant caste was deputized, obligated even, to apprehend any black person during the era of slavery.
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