Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

These are the micro-memorials of discreet brass squares the size of one’s palm inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed throughout the city. More

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings. They

built a range of museums to preserve the story of

the country’s descent into madness. They converted the infamous villa at Wannsee, where fifteen men worked out the details of the Final Solution to kill the Jews of Europe, into a museum examining the consequences of that fateful decision. The country converted the Gestapo headquarters into a museum called the Topography of Terror, a deep dive into the founding of the Third Reich. As for the man who oversaw these atrocities, Germany cho...

In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison....

In Germany, there is no death penalty. “We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,” a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America, all currently have the death penalty.

The Germans who may “privately mourn for family members lost at the front,” Neiman wrote, “know that their loved ones cannot be publically [sic] honored without honoring the cause for which they died.” In America,

Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror

places never to be forgotten: Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and half a dozen other concentration camps.

lives. It is not something that anyone, Jew or Gentile, resident or visitor, is expected to put behind them or to just get over. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who

It is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students, and it is never far from view for any citizen. This is not to say that everyone is in agreement

“And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”