I’ve read many books over my lifetime. However, I can count on one hand the number of books that have changed the way I see the world.
CASTE: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson, is one of those books.
Ms. Wilkerson is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns. Her latest work is bound to become a classic. It’s a lens that snaps the world into focus. I believe this focus is where healing begins.
We can’t fix a problem, until we understand the problem.
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In her meticulously researched book (that is at times difficult to read for the brutality she documents), Ms. Wilkerson details a rigid caste system, entirely based on skin color, that became the organizing principle of American society.
Originally, that caste system was necessary to justify slavery in the American colonies dating back to 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to these shores. Dark skinned people were deemed to be less than human (a permanent subordinate caste that included Native Americans and has grown to include all non-whites) inferior to all white skinned people (the permanent dominant, ruling caste) which allowed them to be enslaved.
The reality of this caste system was enshrined in our laws and it took a Civil War to begin to change that. But the caste system did not end when slavery ended. In fact it roared back with a vengeance.
The caste system adapted and it continues to this day, running in the background like malware on our societal hard drive. Draining societal resources. Infecting assumptions we make about each other. Perpetuating division and injustice.
Ms. Wilkerson illustrates how that process works in accessible, plain language that is riveting in its clarity and heartbreaking in its detail.
As racial tensions continue to flair, as they have again this week around the shooting death of Breonna Taylor by police while she slept in her own bed, Ms. Wilkerson offers a way of coming together to address a problem that none of us is responsible for creating. But a problem we all live with, nonetheless.
It’s like living in a 400-year-old house, Wilkerson says. We weren’t alive when it was built. But we live in it now, and the roof is leaking like a sieve. Sure, someone else is responsible for the deficient joinery that caused the roof to leak, but that doesn’t exempt us from the responsibility of fixing it. Because this is our house now. We live in it. And the roof will cave in and none of us will have a place to live, if we don’t fix it.
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Now, this may seem far from the concerns of faith, but this is what struck me in reading the book. The invisible presumptions of a caste system strike at the heart of faith. It denies everything that the Bible teaches.
Caste creates differences and distinctions where God sees none.
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The entire book of Exodus is the history of God leading God’s people out of bondage and into the freedom of the Promised Land. This is who God is, the Bible tells us.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr would draw on those powerful images in leading the Civil Rights Movement.
God is a God of liberation, who actively works in history to end oppression and injustice. As King famously said, “The arc of history is long, and it bends toward justice.”
Jesus continued and furthered God’s work of liberation, upending the world’s hierarchies of domination (the last shall be first and the first last, Matthew 20:16), preaching Good News to the poor (Matthew 11:4-6), blessing the meek (Matthew 5:5), welcoming tax collectors and sinners, and proclaiming God’s love as a Father’s love that crossed all boundaries and nationalities and made of us a single family.
Jesus revealed a reality where we are all united in Love of the God and Father of us all (Matthew 6:9).
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What the Bible, Jesus, and our faith teaches is diametrically opposed to the reality of a caste system like the one Ms. Wilkerson reveals at work among us.
This caste system stands in stark opposition to the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached and would undo the redeeming work of Christ. And that makes it imperative for us, as people of God, to understand the world this caste system would have us live in today, so we can change it and live in the world God desires for us instead.
As God continues to implore, “Choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
If you read one book this year, I hope that Caste: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson is the one. I don’t think you will be disappointed.
If you would like to be part of a reading group and have some company reading through it, let me know. I’d be delighted to set something up. Let me know in the comments.
Charles Oberkehr 