Read This Book…

This book absolutely blew my mind. Wilkerson examines the social hierarchies that exist in the U.S., such as race and class, through the lens of a caste system: the insidious underlying system of hierarchy that uses socially constructed identifiers like race, class, and so forth to maintain the privilege of those at the top and to keep those at the bottom, well, at the bottom. This book shows that if the caste systems of the United States, India, and nazi Germany were to be in a Venn Diagram, the diagram would practically be a circle.

I’d heard for years that the original nazis in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s had studied Jim Crow laws in America and it’s where they got some of their most disgusting and depraved ideas. I’d heard this, but I didn’t know the details. Readers: this book gives details, even details about the things done here in the U.S. that the nazis thought were “too extreme.” Yes, some facets and views of white supremacists in the U.S. were “too extreme” for the nazis. Wilkerson goes into horrifying detail about violence and lynchings and abuse so major content warnings there.

She writes about what she calls the Eight Pillars of Caste, those things that need to exist to uphold this framework. Things such as the idea of heritability, that your caste is determined by your family. Also an idea of purity versus pollution and certain groups being inherently superior versus the inherent inferiority of other groups.

While this book taught me a lot about history, this is not a history book. This is an examination of a still existing framework in which we live that affects everything from the media we consume to the healthcare we do or do not receive with the punishments and backlash that happen when someone dares to try to step out of the caste system, or do something above their perceived caste.

This book is a harrowing and necessary read to understand race in America.