Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

This was a life-changing book for me.

If you grew up in the United States (Kentucky for me) and have always struggled to try to understand why things are the way they are, buckle up because this book will provide you a very long and detailed answer but also hit you with a sudden clarity and simplicity like shining a spotlight right into your soul and the deep recesses of your brain.

I have read many other books on race relations before, including the works of Montagu, Bryan Stevenson, and Michelle Alexander, and none of them has laid it out so clearly to me. If you are turned off by the tone of other books about race and don't understand white privilege or why you should feel guilty or worry about things that happened in your grandparents' generation or even before that, this is the book for you.

You see we are all CAST in a very specific role, playing the part assigned to us in a very deliberate society created hundreds of years ago in the colonies, based solely on a CASTE system of our skin color, a physical characteristic arbitrarily chosen because nobody can change it. You are playing a role, and your ancestors played a role, and your descendants will play a role, and you cannot help but play the role assigned to you. Wilkerson compares the United States to other caste systems in the world, perhaps ironically better known to us because we do study them in school and see them portrayed in movies - the Nazi Holocaust and the caste system of India. But then she clearly outlines how the same caste system takes place in the United States, and how it is never talked about. How we never learn the truth.

The thing is, these roles are harmful to all of us. And this is where I feel Wilkerson really hit me hard. She explains by all of us striving so desperately to be in the dominant caste (white male Anglo Saxon Protestants were the originals), we change ourselves, we are stressed out, we compete against our neighbors with the paranoid distorted belief that resources are somehow limited and only deserving to those at the top. I turn off my southern accent in certain situations; friends and family members search genealogies to try and find our Scottish/Irish ancestors in order to claim closeness to the original caste members when we were most likely indentured servants, fleeing persecution ourselves; I wear blazers to look more masculine in professional settings or when I have to give a speech; the list goes on and on. These roles cause us to subconsciously believe the lies passed on about the other caste members, and it negatively impacts our actual health and well-being to act this way. Why am I striving so hard to prove that I deserve to be at the table with rich white males? By acting this way I uphold the idea of the opposite, that at least I am not poor or black, which is the entire foundation of this caste system and all the unconscious beliefs associated with it.

I hope if you are American and you have ever harbored any spiritual or intellectual doubts about our history or the state of our current society, please read this with an open heart and mind. I realize I have a lot of soul searching to do to try to deprogram myself from this role and help to open the stage up to others.

This book, along with “a Man’s Search for Meaning,” should be required reading for all human beings. This book was an awakening for me.

“Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.”

“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”

“In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.”