Caste

This was a Common Read book I had to slog through, and boy, do I hate it with a fiery passion.

This Boston Review take down by Charisse Burden-Stelly is way better than anything I can write. Nonetheless, a few assorted thoughts and observations:

1. Wilkerson seems to be taking the Ibram X. Kendi route of generating buzz through what amounts to semantics, in her case trying to disentangle caste from racism. As Stelly writes, she fails, and frequently undermines her own argument. In the Epilogue, she writes “Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough. They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age...”. Besides the inaccuracy (take one look at the current US president, Congress, or economic fortunes by generation), this understanding of caste is entirely at odds with her own definition and everything that comes before it. She does this a lot.

2. There's an entire chapter dedicated to comparing human caste to the pack structure of dogs told through stories about her purebred terriers.

3. Having taken a number of incredible classes on race as an undergrad, on top of my time as an organizer/activist, I know there are many, many, MANY brilliant, modern theorists of race Wilkerson could draw from. Instead, she has a strange predilection for mostly white mid-century social scientists, referencing and quoting guys like Gunnar Myrdal, Erich Fromm, and Andrew Hacker instead.

4. She takes some extremely obvious and notable liberties here, stuff that would never pass muster if she was writing history. She talks about purity as a central pillar of caste, and does through references to Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse. Yet a quick Google shows that Wiltse himself writes that Northern pools were segregated by class and not race for a significant chunk of history.

5. This a pattern. Sunil Khilnani's review in The New Yorker isn't as ruthless as the other review I shared, but is similarly dubious of how Wilkerson collapses the history American slavery, Indian caste, and the Nazi extermination of the Jews into neat packages in order to make what turns out to be a point of rather dubious usefulness. (Knowing that she has decided that all three should be called caste systems helps our understanding of any of them how, exactly? Especially when their respective histories and societal functions are not nearly as clear cut and similar as Wilkerson tries to prove?)

6. And, of course, Wilkerson is really writing all of this because she is itching to vent about the election of Trump, extol the virtues of Obama and “advocates for justice” like Eric Holder and Colin Powell, and to tell us that the solution to caste is....for everyone to have empathy. That's what the Civil Rights Movement did, right? Just ask everyone to be nicer to everyone?