Isabel Wilkerson, through one story after another, woven together with historically sound reflections helps us reframe what the USA did. In order to make it work. We’ve always known our ancestors had to dehumanize the Black people they kidnapped and enslaved, worked to the bone and tortured. But what happened because of that dehumanization was to also create our version of India’s untouchables (as I heard of them in my youth) or the Dalits as I now know to name them. Most interesting and chilling to me was that Nazi high ups, when figuring out how to determine whether someone was Jewish looked to the USA’s miscegenation laws and the more moderate Nazis rejected the concept that one drop of “Negro” blood made a person black for purposes of these laws.
I knew from reputation that this was viewed as an exceptional book and I noticed I added it to a to be read book the year it came out. But I often avoid picking nonfiction books as my next read. I like vegetables, but I love the candy and fat of fiction, even good literary fiction often jumps ahead of my nonfiction reading. This book reads like a horrifying novel of how ordinary people — in this case us– can lose our humanity. Or act like very very flawed and evil people. We used to say in the 1960s, “Not to decide, is to decide” And many of us quote Martin Niemoller, “And then they came for me….” Wilkerson uses that quote. It’s the point of Caste. If we do not stand to disassemble the caste structure in the United States, to find how to be anti-racists, anti-caste structure, then we are not doing enough. But as direct as this message may be, it is supported with story after story after story of the frogs that were brought to a boil. Yes: It can happen here. It HAS happened here. And we have not learned how not to take part in the inhumanity against whole groups of people who are our “others.” It is not enough to not be racist or classist if we do not act to erase the differences made up by our forbears and enshrined by us.
I definitely found the narrator, Robin Miles, engaging for this audible book.
They Called me Bookworm 