Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
…know the enemy and know yourself…. – Sun Tsu
While Isabel Wilkerson references several historical events and personal stories throughout the book, one in particular resonates with me. She patronizes a restaurant with a white friend. They suffer poor service while other patrons enjoy lavish care. Like Wilkerson’s white friend, I fly into rages during these experiences with my wife while she tempers it with a veteran calm forged by use. “I wouldn’t survive if I got angry every time this happens. I don’t want to live my life angry.”
I have the privilege of witnessing caste injustice while she and so many others must experience it. And yet I still get angry. So much of it rises from the rotten stench of hypocrisy, the confusing rhetoric of re-evaluating color and race, the frustration in defining the problem.
Yet after reading this book, the anger slowly drains away. I still witness the injustice and hypocrisy but find my rage abated. One realizes that our public discourse engages in the wrong conversation. We strive to combat a phantom, an invented division, a distraction from our true enemy – a system constructed to safe-guard a dominant position of certain people. Those invested in that dominance must define themselves in contrast to others who might threaten that dominance, afraid of losing their wealth and power, insecure in their own ability to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. Why berate them with illustrations of hypocrisy and injustice? They know. The construct is predicated on those hypocrisies and sustained by stoking an illogical, self-abasing hatred which justifies injustice.
Wilkerson’s presentation identifies America’s singular disease with its innumerable symptoms and encapsulates it within the context of a more universal human story; shattering our sense of exceptionalism, peeling away the propagandic film blurring our true identity.
However, as a nation, we fight this battle while only beginning to acknowledge our true self. America espouses new beginnings, the freedom to unshackle oneself from the past. In a single branding scheme, the dominant caste can blame the lower for their plight while enjoying the fruits of the past themselves. In one breath, we glorify this self-made individual but suppress efforts to rectify old national systems that restrict them. No nation or individual grows without confronting past mistakes, cures a disease without knowing its origin, heals a wound without knowing its cause.
We do not only show mercy and compassion when we own the fault. We ought to help others even when we do not directly cause their pain. So we must do this work. And the opposition will only grow in fearful ferocity with every step closer to the realization of the promised American identity. Yet if we listen with ears of humanity, rather than those of caste, this book can help us know our enemy as a diabolical social-construct and know ourselves as our fellow citizens.
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