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Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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—now with a new Afterword by the author.
#1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize National Book Award Longlist National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist Kirkus Prize Finalist
“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, and beautifully written 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 outcasting 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.
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.
- Listening Length15 hours and 10 minutes
- Audible release dateAugust 4, 2020
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB085VXLKRJ
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 15 hours and 10 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Isabel Wilkerson |
Narrator | Robin Miles |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com Release Date | August 04, 2020 |
Publisher | Random House Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B085VXLKRJ |
Best Sellers Rank | #258 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1 in Sociology of Class #2 in Sociology (Audible Books & Originals) #2 in Sociology of Social Theory |
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Within the book, the author proceeds to make her case through an Introduction (‘A Man in the Crowd’), some 31 chapters broken into seven parts and an Epilogue (‘A World Without Caste’). The parts are as follows: (1) Toxins in the Permafrost and Heat Rising all Around; (2) The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions; (3) The Eight Pillars of Caste; (4) The Tentacles of Caste; (5) The Consequences of Caste; (6) Backlash; and (7) Awakening. There are also Dedication and Acknowledgement along with extensive Notes and Bibliography sections.
Some of the parts that stood out for me began with the author’s framing of her study of caste. For instance, Wilkerson observes (at Location 233 in the Kindle version) that “The election [in 2016] would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one’s own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even of the planet itself . . .” A little later (Location 276), she adds “Then the worst pandemic in more than a century brought humanity to a standstill.” Her attention turns to questions (Location 280-86) “What had happened to America? What could account for tens of millions . . . [to] ‘vote against their own interests’. . .” After indicating (Location 357) that “Like old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation . . .” along with its imposed racial and power dimensions, the author clarifies her quest across oceans for understanding and explanation (bringing to mind Weiner’s “Socrates Express” and Zakaria’s “Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World”---see my reviews).
Wilkerson goes back and forth in place and time between the US, India and Nazi Germany to explore the origins, character and insidious effects of such caste systems. For instance, she relates (Location 1158-59) that “Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there . . . ‘Perhaps only the Jews have as long a history of suffering from discrimination as the Dalits’. . .” In one of many examples later (Location 1213-14), the author describes that “In the early stages of the Third Reich . . . Nazi bureaucrats met to weigh the options for imposing a rigid new hierarchy, one that would isolate Jewish people from Aryans now that the Nazis had taken control. . . [They studied] how the United States had managed to turn its racial hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage.”
While the book begins and finishes strong, there is much substantiating material in-between to go through to get to the many gems hidden within the text. For instance, Wilkerson indicates (in Location 4754-59) that “The 2016 election became a remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America, from highest to lowest status in a given group’s support of the Republican: White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent . . . The Democratic vote went as follows: White men, 31 percent. White women, 43 percent. Latino men, 63 percent. Latina women, 69 percent. African-American men, 82 percent. [and] African-American women, supported the white female Democrat by 94 percent.” Even while such references and the author’s anecdotes are helpful, I find myself seeking other sources to help spell out minority women’s situation and perspective further for someone like me (e.g., see Angela Davis’s “Women, Race, and Class” and other such works).
As the author expresses the tremendous personal/societal cost and detrimental human impact of our caste system, she admits the limitations of a book such as hers and the challenges in resolving matters. However, her text is well worth reading and offers the possibility of awakening regarding these issues and pursing a vision for a better world. As she states in her conclusion (Location 5553-55), “In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. . . we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe.”
Certainly, our nation has been long divided over race, dating back to 1619, when the first slave ship made port in Point Comfort, Virginia, and unloaded about twenty chained Africans, destined for slavery. Up to this point the concept of "white" and "black" people was unknown. The colonies were comprised of Europeans (mostly Englishmen) who did not think of themselves as white. And the arriving African slaves did not think of themselves as black, but as Igbo. Yoruba, Ewe Akan, and Ndebele. White people and black people were concepts that developed over time. Writes the author: "There developed a caste system, based on what people looked like, an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed, unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about living their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously to this day."
She adds, "Caste is not a term often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the term for decades." Indeed, the idea of "race", is a recent phenomenon in human history. It dates back to the start of the transatlantic slave trade and thus to the subsequent caste system that arose from slavery.
The word "race" likely derived from the Spanish word "raza" and was originally used to refer to the "caste or quality of authentic horses, which are branded with an iron so as to be recognized," wrote the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley. As Europeans explored the world, they began using the word to refer to the new people they encountered. "Ultimately, the English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist form of race ideology," say the Smedleys. "In the American mind (race) was and is a statement about profound and unbridgeable differences (that) conveys the meaning of social distance that cannot be transcended."
Geneticists and anthropologists have long considered race as a manmade invention, with no basis in science or biology. In fact, the term "Caucasian", a label often ascribed to people of European descent, is a word invented by a German professor of medicine named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was so taken with the shape of a human skull he found in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia, that he applied it to the people he believed descended from there and settled in Europe.
About two decades ago, an analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. Concludes the geneticist J. Craig Venter: "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world." Which means the entire racial caste system--the catalyst of hatreds and civil war--was built on what anthropologists now call "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits," derived from "a few of the thousands of genes that make up a human being."
In other words, it is based on a lie.
As slavery took hold in the Southern colonies, slaveholders began looking to the Bible for justification of their "peculiar institution" and, while conveniently ignoring Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, turned their attention to the Old Testament and learned that back in the Middle Ages some interpreters had described Noah's son, Ham, as bearing dark skin, and thus translated Noah's curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham--against all humans bearing dark skin.
They took further comfort from Leviticus, which exhorted them, "Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are around you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids." They took as further license to enslave those they considered religious heathens, to build a new country out of the wilderness. Thus, a hierarchy evolved in the New World they created, one that set those with the lightest skin above those with the darkest.
"The curse of Ham is now being executed upon his descendants," wrote Thomas Cobb, a leading Confederate and defender of slavery. "The great Architect had framed them both physically and mentally to fill the sphere in which they were thrown. His wisdom and mercy combined in constituting them thus suited to the degraded position they were destined to occupy."
Writes the author: "The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures. In both countries, the subordinate castes were consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement, owing to the sins of the past."
It would take a civil war, the deaths of three-quarters of a million soldiers and citizens, the assassination of a president, Abraham Lincoln, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to bring an end to slavery in the United States. Still slavery would live on in a new form of discrimination--white supremacy.
The white supremacists devised a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly, while a popular new pseudoscience called eugenics emerged to justify the renewed debasement. People on the bottom rung could be beaten or killed with impunity for any breach of the caste system, like not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough--or in trying to vote.
When Hitler and his band of thugs took power in Germany and focused their hatred toward European Jews, who should they turn their attention to for guidance? To the discriminatory race laws of the Jim Crow south. According to Yale legal historian James Whitman, in debating "how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich, the Nazis began by asking how the Americans did it."
PUTTING AN END TO CASTE
Writes the author: "The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not the collective will to maintain them . . .
"Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the county's DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened . . .
"To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system--the twelve-year reign of the Nazis--can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the theorist Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil."
"What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon," writes philosopher David Livingston Smith, "is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It is that they were ordinary human beings."
Note: While preparing this review, I came across this quote by Nelson Mandela: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can learn to be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." Mandela, it will be remembered, was elected as South Africa's first black head of state. Under his watch, the government focused on dismantling the legacy of caste (a.k.a. apartheid) by tackling institutionalized racism and fostering racial reconciliation.