One of us remembers a college political science lecture on the Civil War in which the professor claimed, \u201cThe Civil War was not about slavery. It was about economics.\u201d He didn\u2019t follow that up with the appropriate caveat, which would have been something like, \u201cThose economics were based on the enslavement of millions of Africans brought to this country against their wills.\u201d<\/p>\n
During Black History Month, we who would be well-informed \u2013 whatever our skin color \u2013 might choose to read one of the numerous bestselling books of late that address the Black American experience.<\/p>\n
A number of these books are intended to help people recognize their internalized racism and attempt to overcome it, such as Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s How to be an Antiracist, Ijeoma Oluo\u2019s So You Want to Talk About Race and Robin Diangelos\u2019 White Fragility: Why It\u2019s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.<\/p>\n
Isabel Wilkerson\u2019s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents takes a different approach, one that is especially appropriate to Black History Month. The American Prospect called the Pulitzer Prize-winning author\u2019s second book \u201cthe missing puzzle piece of our country\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Researched in meticulous detail, the readable narrative weaves together American slavery, the Nazi regime and the Indian caste system into a single fabric, so that the domination of groups of people in very different circumstances is laid bare for what it is. A master of metaphor, Wilkerson describes caste as \u201cthe wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
More directly, she notes that caste is \u201cthe investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilkerson then proceeds to explain caste in light of eight \u201cpillars\u201d that function to support it.<\/p>\n
This structure, this careful dissection of the problem, is necessary, but it is Wilkerson\u2019s storytelling about the violence committed against Black people, during slavery (1619-1865) and since, that is most shocking.<\/p>\n
We all know about lynchings, for example, but few of us have likely read the stories of specific people not just denied due process but tortured and killed in front of cheering white crowds, their deaths documented in postcard photographs of the events. (A book of these gruesome postcard images documents the horror: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen.)<\/p>\n
Wilkerson recounts these stories factually, not gratuitously. Some of the events happened long ago, but many are more recent, like that of a 15-year-old Black boy named Willie James of Live Oak, Fla. Willie naively wrote a Christmas card to a white girl he wished could be his sweetheart; white men hog-tied and dumped him into a river to drown in front of his father, who was held at gunpoint \u2013 in 1943.<\/p>\n
Wilkerson also records the systemic racism that has supported the caste system in the United States and reminds of us the many recent acts of violence that prompted the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n
She calls for \u201ca public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching thought it may be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having read Caste, it would be difficult for most reasonable people to disagree; such a commission is likely a necessary component to any collective recovery from our past.<\/p>\n
Reading Caste can be a first, if painful, step in learning the history we were never taught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
of us remembers a college political science lecture on the Civil War in which the professor claimed, \u201cThe Civil War was not about slavery. It was about economics.\u201d He didn\u2019t follow that up with the appropriate caveat, which would have been something like, \u201cThose economics were based on the enslavement of millions of Africans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-48614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48614"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=48614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}