Book Review - Caste - The Origins of our Discontents

March 1, 2021

Is this OUR America? I first heard a reading from Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste at a retreat of clergy friends. Someone read from the start of the book where the author recounts her first story, all of them true, tells about an area in Russia where rising temperatures created a deadly epidemic. People were dying by the hundreds from an unknown cause unknown until a scientist discovered a disease long ago frozen in the artic. It had now been released with the earth's warming, unleashing death and destruction.

What does that have to do with our America?

In one chapter this masterful story-teller powerfully recounted the ways Nazi planners came to their vision of picking a people to blame for all the troubles in their country. They started in Our America where these Nazi strategists had attended college and were fascinated by our system for targeting Black people. As they planned their process to identify, dehumanize, and eventually to kill their Jewish targets by the millions, the author recounts how they turned to our race system in America for inspiration and often believed our racism was too radical for them. My hair stood on end. Is this OUR America?

The author carried out a detailed analysis of the caste system in India, the practices of Nazi Germany, and the tenacious systems in America that have drawn a wall between White and Black. She describes eight "pillars", fundamental beliefs and practices that created and sustained the caste systems in each of these corners of the world. Is this OUR America?

Eloquently written and exquisitely researched, Caste provides a fresh exploration of the sweep of our country's history since the arrival of European ancestors. Perhaps a third of the book offers footnotes for all of the hundreds of stories that are told. And tucked amidst this the reader will find short stories that vividly etch our hearts and minds. They repeatedly make me ask, "Is this OUR America?"

Dear God, grant us the courage as Rotarians to dare to look afresh and ask ourselves openly, "Is the history we learned... the truth?"

Author: Marshall Hudson-Knapp
Windmill