I spent the last week driving the north coast, and my only companion was @Isabelwilkerson and her new (audio)book #Caste. It's massive, but I worked my way through it and can confirm that, as many critics have already reported, it's a masterwork. Well done, Isabel!
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It would be impossible to adequately summarize a magnum opus like this on Twitter, so I won't try. But I will say that, while much of the ground Wilkerson covers was familiar to me (and will be familiar to many or most of the people who will self-select to tackle it), her. . .2/
tactic of setting American systems of oppression against those of Nazi Germany and the Indian caste system is effective. It makes familiar tales and lessons read as both new and poignant. It is as if she, at the outset of the book, puts new lenses in our eyeglasses and. . . 3/
then walks us once again through our history. As she tells story after story after story (there are a *lot* of stories; this is mostly a good thing) from the past and the present -- many known, some not -- each seems to be set in clearer focus than ever before, and each. . . 4/
thus sheds new light on our collective history.
That's a neat trick and it's what makes the book effective, groundbreaking, and important. 5/
That's a neat trick and it's what makes the book effective, groundbreaking, and important. 5/
That's not to say that Wilkerson doesn't also deliver new ideas and stories to learn and digest; she does. I was, for instance, surprised to learn that Nazi planners imitated American systems of oppression because they were the best-demonstrated practices of the day. Ugh. 6/
Wilkerson also convincingly makes the case that the totality of human suffering delivered by the American systems of slavery and Jim Crow comprise, perhaps, the worst crimes ever perpetrated upon its people by any nation. 7/
This argument, made in the last third of the book, calls into question the premise of American Exceptionalism. Or, perhaps more accurately, it suggests that what makes America truly exceptional is our conscious and unapologetic history of cruelty toward our own people. 8/
Not a nit, really, but along the way I found myself hoping for more real-time prescriptions from Wilkerson regarding how we might do better, how we might live better. She mostly (and smartly, I suppose) saves those lessons for the last couple of chapters, but. . .9/
even there she chooses not to deliver point-by-point instructions, instead encouraging the reader to conjure how much better the world would be today if all of those people held down through the centuries by our pernicious systems of oppression had been allowed to flourish. 10/
Which, for me at least, calls to mind the old Chinese proverb: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Let's get started.
I'm glad @Isabelwilkerson wrote this book, and I'm glad I read it.
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Let's get started.
I'm glad @Isabelwilkerson wrote this book, and I'm glad I read it.
/end
