Caste

I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson because she is coming to speak at the University this fall, and I just finished the chapter, The Container We Have Built for You. Lordy, but that was a tough slog. Not because the material was too academic or hard to understand—to the contrary, Wilkerson is an experienced journalist and writes beautiful and accessible prose. No, the issue was that what she wrote was all too plain and, to me, familiar because of the study I have done. It was reminiscent of Edward Baptiste’s The Half Has Never Been Told—the stories of African Americans being treated as cattle—less than cattle, really, and how that shapes their lives still today. It’s painful, because it was done in the name of my country and religion, and for the benefit of my “race”, and it is still being done by people who look like me and are even my neighbors and coworkers. I have done similar things myself in past, even though I know better now and try mightily not to. When reading work like this, I can be swamped by guilt and grief over what my people have done and despair of ever making it right. There is rich and bitter irony in that the shining light of democracy was built on the cruelly coerced labor of humans we treated as things.