favorite book – Reviewing Shelf

by Isabel Wilkerson

My View: Caste is one of the most amazing books I have read in a long while now and I do read a lot (atleast a book a week if not more). I started sharing quotes from this book early on in my reading on my social media pages. It is everything I think, and try to tell people but littered with real-life examples and good writing. It was all I needed.

Caste is not just a book. It’s a reality of people all around the world; from the castes in India, to Nazism in Germany, to Casteism in America. It’s the same thing, over and over again, people and places might differ. It’s the innate need to find oneself superior to another, to have someone beneath us to feel better about it all.

It’s a topic I struggle with on a day to day basis, whether it is being discriminated against in another countries for having “brown” skin, or trying to get my country’s citizens to move beyond last names and castes. It’s not easy, most of the time people don’t get it. Every time someone asks me my last name, I resist. Why do you want to know, I ask? Even as a young teen, I knew I wanted to just sign my first name and never my second. I did not want what I was born into, to define me. I did not want my last name to put me above others. I do not want a special treatment. I want to be known as who I am, for what I do, and not what I was born into, that I had no control over. Like each and every one of us on this planet, we can’t choose the color of our skin, what family and caste we are born into. Why then do we choose to discriminate and wage wars based on these baseless things?

Caste is a book that talks about history, and present, and the future. If you have been thinking about caste (like me), you would find a warm hug between its pages because here is someone who not only feels the same but also went ahead and researched and talked to people and wrote a well-researched thought-provoking book about it. Of course, there’s also this constant frustration as I read because I really wanted to find a way out of this rigmarole. But I realized the only way out is in. Unless everyone feels this way, we cannot move on or put this in the past. I feel alienated from my country when we wage wars in the name of religion and caste and what not. I wonder when will we move on?

If you have not thought about caste, you probably fit into the category of ‘dominating caste’ who has not had a reason to think about it because you are not discriminated against and it doesn’t bother you. In which case, this book is even more for you. To help you see what goes on in the world, to make yourself aware and to rise up to call out and take action against this senseless arbitrary activity that tends to continue in varied societies around the world.

While I was reading this book, I felt strongly that it should be a part of student curriculum all around the world. As the last unit narrates how Germany has not just wrapped up with the Nazism but made sure to remember what happened so that it would not repeat again. While we in US and India, continue to discriminate, ignoring what the so-called ‘subordinate’ castes have been put through and continue to be put through. Unless we rise up and shift things, we will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

What an absolutely brilliant book, Isabel! Great on facts, engaging, and riveting writing, this would be on my to-gift-to-everyone list for a long time to come.

Have you read the book? What did you think of it?

5/5 stars – I loved it.

Genre: Non-Fiction

Date Published: August 4, 2020

Synopsis:

In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a 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.

About the Author

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.