"Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things."
Perhaps never has a book been so simultaneously difficult and important to read.
"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent" is part history book, part sociology study, and part political commentary, somehow managing to weave personal accounts with true horror stories with contemporary context and historical backdrop.
"Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world."
"In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi."
Isabel Wilkerson's staggering tome features a stark and matter-of-fact tone, yet the revelations of a largely obfuscated American past are as instructive as they are emotional.
Her ability to trace history's abuses to contemporary politics and emerging boundaries alone makes "Caste" worthwhile. Her painstaking research into what this trending could mean for a shifting American demography makes the book essential.
"Why, some people on the left kept asking, why, oh, why, were these people voting against their own interests? The questioners on the left were unseeing and yet so certain. What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it."
"What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our forefathers' era, but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system."
Wilkerson has noted that this was a book she "did not seek to write but had to write," and that compulsion should extend to everyone who may not seek to read it -- but must.
"The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be."
No comments:
Post a Comment