overdue review: five snouts up for caste: the origins of our discontents by isabel wilkerson

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first, an acknowledgment that when i recently re-started posting regularly i completely forgot to use my snout-based rating system. i have been doing this since our children were little (which was a pretty long time ago). i remember when after seeing a movie (in a movie theater!) our son would say “mom, how many snouts are you giving that?” and it made me so happy. 

so i give the netflix documentary 13th three and a half snouts up out of a possible five. even though i’m recommending watching it, it’s really not a good enough production or documentary to go higher than that last ½ snout.

i give the end of overeating 4 snouts.  it’s a very good and important book but not great. i save 5 snouts for like the best book of all time. 

isabel wilkerson’s caste: the origins of our discontents, is, however, such a book. i give it a full 5 snouts up.

i found caste, given to me as a birthday present by one of my brothers last year, to be a revelation. while race and racism has clearly been a through line in american history, the concept of racism itself has never explained enough for me of what is truly happening, especially now. i remember a survey (that i cannot now locate, sorry) about why people voted for dt for president in 2016. folks that had supported dt selected reasons in the survey that clearly demonstrated that they were motivated by what i would call racism over and over again, only to go on to insist later in the survey that they were not motivated by racism.

robin diangelo’s book white fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism helped me explain some of this phenomenon of being racist while hating racism (particularly with white people in my own cohort) but not as much for others, white or otherwise.

caste helped me see racism as a huge national character defect that has been embodied and believed to be absolutely necessary to protect all levels of caste structure. caste unsparingly and rightly gives us detailed factual and hard to read accounts of the continued destruction of self, family, economic security, and physical security, including systematic torture, that the “untouchable” black caste has received in america. yet the book also unpacks the harm that the promise of “whiteness” the caste system continues to cause to non black non whites in the middle and to whites whose lives do not match that promise. 

in caste, wilkerson compares the caste system in america with the caste system in india and the caste system in nazi germany, all of which she studied extensively. it looks like part of what motivated this former new york times journalist to take a deep dive into the history and reality of caste was an attempt to explain the backlash against obama becoming president. 

my top ahas from caste are these:

seeing american history through the lens of caste brings a new understanding, compassion and the possibility of redemption and reconciliation for all of us within it. caste, not racism, is the water we’re swimming in. and like water for the fish we cannot see that we are living in a caste system. we do not know that we have been in it our whole lives and throughout history. the radical act of this book is to name the water, make us jump above and outside it to see it from an international perspective. we need to see how it operates in india and operated in nazi germany to be able to grok how it continues to operate here.

some key gleanings for me from the book:

• affluent white protestant males (the top caste in america) have been the strongest beneficiaries of the system.
• the bottom caste african americans have been the “untouchable” victims of legalized torture, rape, violence and poverty all of which is designed to keep them at the bottom.
• everyone at all levels has been taught a goal of being “white,” thereby reaching the top caste.
  • jews and people of irish and italian extraction were once legally not “white.”
  • wilkerson reviews supreme court cases that decided who is white and who is not.
• scrupulously recorded conversations amongst the top hierarchy in nazi germany reveal that they used american segregation laws as their template to create their own legal structure to hold down and murder jews, gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people and political dissidents. amazingly, they repeatedly rejected elements of american segregation law as “going too far.”
• many laws we think of as being only in the “segregated south” were in place in virtually every state in america. 
  • especially the laws against miscegenation (breeding or marriage between people of different races)
  • the laws against miscegenation were at the heart of the caste system. most of the case law about who is “white” arose in legal challenges where people wanted to have themselves declared “white” so that they could marry a “white” person.

• the promise of being “white” has also injured white americans. 
  • if you are “white” you are also supposed to be educated and rich
  • so if you are “white” and you are not educated and rich then you are
    • angry that your birthright has been violated
    • literally sick, have poor health measures that are not predictable by other factors

• everyone at all levels has been taught, and sometimes violently shown, that it is dangerous to defy caste expectations. you must stay in your place. you must remain at your level of caste or you or someone else may die.
• in the context of all of this, what we call “racism” is simply a complex set of tools designed to keep the caste structure in place. in a sense she shows that in american racism ensures survival, often literally, at all levels of the system. it goes something like this. in order to survive, or ensure that other survive, i must:
  • know who is white and who is not white
  • know how i am allowed to behave toward them in public and in private
  • know how people at each of the 3 main levels of caste (white, not white, and black) are allowed to behave in public and in private
  • protect everyone in my caste and in other levels of caste by identifying who they are, taking whatever actions i need to take to see that they remain in their place

i see much of this through my understanding of my own mother’s life. born in 1933 in “the cradle of the confederacy” charleston, south carolina, my mother, as a white protestant woman of british descent, was born into the highest caste available to a female. through the lens of caste, one can understand that on some level because (not in spite) her parents were highly educated christian caring people they obeyed the caste laws and expectations which “protected” everyone who followed them. thus they maintained separate entrances, dishes, etc. for blacks and jews and treated everyone according to the rules of their caste. my mother was raised and cared for predominantly by her black “mammy,” lulabel. lulabel (unlike my mother’s bio mother) sang to her, hugged her, petted her and loved her up. my mother loved lulabel and she believed that lulabel loved her.

my mother’s parents would have modeled for her (and perhaps lulabel would have taught her as well) the significance of people’s skin color. they would have showed her that there is something called called “race” and there is something called “black” and that lulabel was “black” and they were “white.”  they would have shown her that if she loved lulabel and wanted to “protect” lulabel, lulabel had to remain “in her place.”  it would jeopardize my mother’s whole security for lulabel to enter through the wrong door. the ways she interacted with my mother in public were highly constrained and were high stakes. it would be enormously threatening for lulabel or my mother to lulabel to say the wrong thing in public. lulabel could lose her job, lose her livelihood, lose her life if my mother did not know who was white and who was black and what each person could do and not do.

my mother, despite this education, chose not to remain entirely in her own place by defying expectations and marrying a man from the “nawth” and moving to his native california with him. raising us in san diego in the 1960s and 1970s, without knowing she was doing so, she taught me to see the differences in “race” early on. while it was pretty easy to teach me who was black, it was more subtle to teach me who was “not white.”  she wouldn’t use this phrase, but in context of caste it appears that that was what she was trying to ferret out. framing it as curiosity and interest, she would point at people on the street and wonder aloud “where are they from?  there’s a little something in there isn’t there?  she might be part ‘oriental,’ she might be part italian, he might be arab. i wonder…”   if she thought someone was different from the kind of white we were, she basically would not let it drop. 

married to a man who was by then leading the san diego chapter of friends of the black panthers and participating heavily in the cesar chavez grape and lettuce boycott of safeways, she never said “black people are bad” or “non white people are not welcome in our home” and neither of those assumptions of racism were communicated or modeled. all people were welcome in our home. my parents had friends of all “races” (although most of them were white, not all of them were). 

nonetheless, the tool of racial discernment remained solidly in my mother’s belt. it was an absolutely bedrock habit to determine what race every person she met was and to not know was absolutely unacceptable. she appeared absolutely fascinated. it was like a hobby for her. if i had a jewish friend, she would tell me what she thought i needed to know about jews, “they are very loud. they have a lot of opinions.”  if i had a black friend, “they are very loud and very loving. they will leave you” (which is what eventually lulabel did). like that.

i tell you this story about my mother in the context of the book because caste helped me see my mother’s racism differently than i have before. it made me see it as a tool of survival. in the 12 step recovery culture, every addict takes a fearless and searching moral inventory as the 4th step and then out of that inventory uncovers “character defects” that they begin to pray to be willing to be lifted from them. i have come to see that most of my character defects arose as patterns that i developed to save my life (literally or figuratively) at some point.

an example of that would be my defect of compulsively organizing and controlling groups. as a young child i was very lonely because i was left out of groups. as i got into (what we used to call) junior high i made a decision never to be left out again. i started appointing myself in charge of every group i could and even creating and forming new groups if i needed to in order to feel okay. i have carried this pattern with me throughout my life until i began to consciously consider letting it go.

i believe this book needs to be read because these descriptions bring to the reader a compassion and understanding for the scope of the system that we are attempting to unravel in america. if we keep our focus on doing away with “racism,” we are in danger of missing the point. racism is a means to an end, not the end. in the original sense of the word, the book caste literally “dismantles” (removes the mantle or cover) off the american caste system, revealing to all of us what we have been believing in, protecting and sometimes living and dying over without even acknowledging its existence. the book has great explanatory value of the rise of the current rightwing movement and why it is fueled by white people whose real life does not match the promise of their caste position.