Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

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.

The old house metaphor is the image that readers bring up more than any other. It came to me through my own love of old houses. While I was researching the book, a section of the plaster ceiling in a bedroom began to separate. We brought in inspectors to try to solve it. One inspector used an infrared light. Others went into the attic and onto the roof. The bow in the corner had come from a long ago leak that had grown beyond notice, unattended by a series of previous owners. Now a section of the ceiling was threatening to cave in on itself and perhaps take the rest of the ceiling with it. I hadn't caused this problem, and had, in fact, been the one to install the new roof. But it fell to me to fix it or suffer the consequences. Contractors offered to trim out it out and sheet-rock over it. But a plasterer said that the only way to really fix it was to tear out the plaster, down to the beams, inspect and rebuild the rotting lath and replaster the whole ceiling. And so we did. It took days to scrape and inspect, recast and reconstruct. And when it was done, I could breathe free, knowing, as we now are called upon to do in our era, in the house we all live in, that it was sound and secure, not merely patched and covered over, but maybe even better than it was, for ourselves and for the generations that come after us.