From the Bookshelf of ECIS Libraries Week 2021…

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson

Why we're reading this: Embedding IDEAS in the Curriculum - Librarians as connectors
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Apr 01, 2022 K rated it it was amazing

Shelves: spiritual-reads, anti-racism, african-american-reads

Firstly, why didn't this book win all the prizes? I checked the Pulitzer Prizes for 2020 and 2021 and it didn't win, it wasn't even named a finalist. I don't understand. It's a watershed book for United States culture and democracy! I'll give the committee the benefit of the doubt and read the book that won, which is about the first and only successful coup that occurred in USA history. But Caste, is about a system, ongoing to this day that impacts our daily life. Why was it overlooked?

Secondly, Firstly, why didn't this book win all the prizes? I checked the Pulitzer Prizes for 2020 and 2021 and it didn't win, it wasn't even named a finalist. I don't understand. It's a watershed book for United States culture and democracy! I'll give the committee the benefit of the doubt and read the book that won, which is about the first and only successful coup that occurred in USA history. But Caste, is about a system, ongoing to this day that impacts our daily life. Why was it overlooked?

Secondly, this book has changed my self-identity. That last time a book did that was exactly ten years ago. I had read Half A Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book that when I started it, I was an American reading a global title. By the time I was finished with the book, I was a global citizen, who happened to be American.

So how did Caste: The Origin of Our Discontent change my identity? I knew from listening to Chenjerai Kumanyika on the Seeing White podcast, that the label 'white' hadn't been created for anything good. It existed solely so there could be a label 'Black,' and Black people could be oppressed and exploited. I took in that information but didn't have a sense of what to do with that information.

Now that I have read Caste: The Origin of Our Discontent I know what to do with that information: reject the label. I refuse to answer to the label 'white,' or say that I am 'white.' This 'white' caste designation is medieval and exploitive and I want nothing to do with it. From here on out, I am a European American. Need me? I'll be over here not exploiting people and not acting out a dominant caste position.

Isabel Wilkerson is a masterful teacher and a deeply convincing researcher. She develops metaphors to help people understand their rickety inheritance (her metaphor of our democracy as a fixer-upper old house). Her comparison of Nazi, Indian and American caste systems was deeply convincing. This book helped me understand my country's culture in ways 100% new to me. May this profound understanding now help me to do my part to dismantle this evil and greedy caste system.

It almost made me cry to log in to Goodreads and see that over 100,000 people had read Caste. If you are an American, I urge you to read this immediately, especially if you are someone from the dominant caste. I'll be over here rereading the pillars of the caste system listed in the book to see which ones I can contribute to dismantling. ...more

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Oct 30, 2020 Nadine rated it really liked it

Shelves: diversity, audiobooks, adult

What a book. Having grown up in racist apartheid South Africa and then living with the guilt for all my life I always felt shocked and disappointed in my people. Reading this makes me shocked and disappointed in larger swathes of humanity and so so angry at all the indignities and hurt and unfairness that the author and all people deemed to be of a "lower caste" suffer.
She rightly points out that caste is also dependent on context and I know that feeling of anger and helplessness even as a white ...more

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