Caste by Isabel Wilkerson **** (of 4)

 

In 1932, when Nazi planners were devising a plan that would lead to the marginalization, denigration, disenfranchisement, and eventual elimination of its Jewish citizens, they modeled their efforts on how America marked its black citizens in such a way that they could not be full members of American society. Nearly 70 years after slavery was outlawed, Black Americans could not attend white schools, eat in white restaurants, drink from white water fountains, swim in white pools, live in white neighborhoods, walk on a sidewalk if a white was approaching, or speak back to a white person in any way other than deferential. Failure to adhere to the rules of American white superiority could result in summary execution by mobs of self-appointed upholders of white law. More than 4,000 blacks were lynched. American segregation was the perfect model for Nazism and somehow I never learned that in school.

What Caste makes clear is that race, or more accurately, skin color was an arbitrary designation implemented by Europeans to justify the enslavement of Africans. Incidentally, in Africa, there are no black people. Sit with that for a moment. Africans recognize themselves as Bantus, Ewe, Akan, and other groups to which they belong, but they do not define themselves by skin color (humans appear in a wide range of hues) any more than they do on the size of their ears, the color of their eyes, or their height. Only Europeans called Africans black to distinguish themselves as white, which none of us really are, either. Before Europeans enslaved Africans, Europeans had no colors, either. Instead, they were French, Czech, Polish, Scottish and other groups to which they belonged. To add justification to their gathering of human property they added scriptural superiority to Christians who were white and applied a collection of personality traits upon blacks - lazy, shiftless, criminal, subhuman. In reality, skin color is an uncontrollable function of DNA and has as much to do with personality as shoe size.

Sign in the northern U.S.

It makes sense in America's caste system, then, that self-preservation for whites, the ruling-class, fight to maintain their superiority over the subordinate class. It is especially important to stay a rung above blacks for white Americans of the lowest classes. They aid and abet leaders that magnify painful stereotypes because it keeps them "above" blacks. White Americans of all classes worried about their upcoming loss of majority status must tighten their grip on the controls over the powers that support the caste system: the police, courts, legislative branch, and White House.

Wilkerson's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, taught me more about the Jim Crow south than any combination of other books or classes I've ever encountered. Caste changed the way I see the world and should be mandatory reading for all Americans.