Recommended Reading.

         While I wish every American adult would read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson, be forewarned that it's not easy reading. Wilkerson generously supplies the text with powerful illustrations and examples of mind numbing cruelty to the subordinate castes. This is painful to read.

        Framing the discrimination and persecution of minorities as victims of subjugation based on their caste is a helpful perspective in dealing with race relations. White persons on the lower economic rungs of the caste system often buy the dominant narrative about other races: i.e., that they are inferior. So, if these minorities, think Black Americans, do well and better than white people the only logical explanation is that they have gamed the system to their advantage. Thus comes white resentment and assumptions that they have been victimized. Trump's appeal to white supremacists fit in with their feelings of victimhood. 

      Wilkerson compares the caste systems of Nazi Germany and India with that in America. As the Nazis were coming to power in Germany they travelled to America to study Jim Crow laws in the South. They then used what they learned to oppress Jews, Gypsies, gays and others. However, there were some facets of Jim Crow they thought to extreme to use in Germany! When Martin Luther King, Jr., travelled to India he was welcomed by the Untouchables (Dalits) as one of them.

      Of the eight pillars of the American caste system that Wilkerson identifies, the second pillar was the most disturbing to me: heritability. In 1662 the Virginia General Assembly decreed "'be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children borne in this country shall  be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother."' P. 105 So if a slave owner has a child by a slave not only is that child a slave but the owner has increased his property value! This was a break from English legal precedent which gave children the status of the father. "Tied conveniently as it was to what one looked like, membership in either the upper or lower caste was deemed immutable. primordial, fixed from birth to death, and thus regarded as inescapable." P. 106

      It is my opinion that Caste is one of the most important books of the decade. Oprah says it's the most important book she's read in her book club. She sent 500 copies to various leaders because she thinks it's that good. Some of you have already read it and I hope the rest of you soon will.

Takk for alt,

Al