Hello dear Readers,
Below my book review of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.
Title:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Rating: 5/5 Stars
Genre: History
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: August 04 2020
Publication Date: August 04 2020
Language: English
Book Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
"If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was."
They always say at some point in your life, you will read that book that will change you. Well, I think that time came for me.
Caste is such an eye-opening book. It's inevitable not to see many things differently, or I should say, things that you have never really seen or pay attention to. There is so much to absorb, to take, to learn, to understand, however, I am glad I took the time, it is worth the time.
In this brilliant book, the author describes and explains the three different castes systems, which have defined a lot of the human history. The Indian Caste, the Third Reich or Nazi Germany Caste, and, of course, the American Caste, systemic racism, towards African Americans, enslavement.
I was aware of the term caste, however, only as a way of differentiate people, based on the color of their skin, and country of origin. I never saw that as a "bad" indicator, or something that could really put people at the top or bottom of society, in ways not necessarily good. The Nazi Caste System for example, one of the most horrible and dark periods in human history. And most shockingly for me, to learn that Germany based most of their caste system practices and decisions on what had been already placed and going on in America for so much longer.
The amount of research put into this book is incredible. The author did an amazing job on that end. Sure appreciate that because books like this, pieces of work like Caste, are the words that can ultimately get you out of your ignorance, and show you how things really are.
In school, at least in my experience, we never really learned much about this part of history. I learned about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis when I first read The Anne Frank Diary, or when I started watching documentaries on the World War II and such. However, I did not know there was an Indian Caste System, and it was not only when I moved to the United States that I started really learning about the enslavery period, which again, never saw as a Caste system. All the protests, the Black Lives Matters movement. Terms such as White Privilege, systemic racism.
In general, what I loved the most about Caste is that I was able to learn and really understand what Caste means, what it has done to our society, and that change definitely is not an option anymore but the moral, right thing to do.
So many patterns, ways of interpreting, what should or shouldn't be, so many things imposed to specific groups, through history, that change needs to happen. When you understand the what, the how, the why, the reasoning behind these events, you cannot help but think there is more I can do, there is more we as an individuals can do for our already damaged society.
That is what Caste has done for me. We can do better, we need to.
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