2021 ANTIRACISM BOOK STUDY
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
April 21st through August 11th, Wednesdays from 2:30 – 4:00pm
Please read or listen to Part One (through page 38) prior to our first meeting.
About the Book
From Amazon reviewer Chris Schluep:
“(Caste) points to our entire social structure as an unrecognized caste system. Most people see America as racist, and Wilkerson agrees that it is indeed racist. She points out that we tend to refer to slavery as a “sad, dark chapter” in America when in fact it lasted for hundreds of years—but in order to maintain a social order and an “economy whose bottom gear was torture” (as Wilkerson quotes the historian Edward Baptist), it was necessary to give blacks the lowest possible status. Whites in turn got top status. In between came the middle castes of “Asians, Latinos, indigenous people, and immigrants of African descent” to fill out the originally bipolar hierarchy. Such a caste system allowed generations of whites to live under the same assumptions of inequality—these “distorted rules of engagement”—whether their ancestors were slave owners or abolitionists. And the unspoken caste system encouraged all to accept their roles..”
You may want to read the New Yorker Magazine review, Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste by Sunil Kilnani, 8/17/20. (PDF: New Yorker – Race and Caste)