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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/csd.2022.0040

1543-3382

Wilson Kwamogi Okello,

Political Economy and Marxism

Reviewed by: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Wilson K. Okello Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Isabel Wilkerson New York, NY: Random House, 2020, 477 pages, $32.00 (hardcover) In 1974, Sonia Sanchez scripted a play to name the silences that conflicted with the collective Black liberatory agenda. Framed as a prescient question doubling as a title, the play Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? was a meditation on what it means to hold unflinchingly to notions of holistic human dignity. When asked about the play's public reception, Sanchez noted, "You got some silences. But the point is, you had to say it" (Wood & Sanchez, 2005, p. 129). I believe Sanchez meant the stakes were too high to remain indifferent about the systemic mistreatment of Black people. Because the stakes are always high, I center Blackness in my work as the seat of political relations, and with it, histories of violence and exclusion (i.e., enslavement, lynching, segregation), joy, waywardness, and possibility toward the principal question: What does it mean to be human? My work seeks to enlarge Black futures and possibilities for living as fully human by drawing on Black critical theories. I believe that when we fail to seriously engage racialization or consider the ways it moves in and across time and space, we foreclose analytical potentialities and the ethical capacity to engage the fullness of endarkened lives and desires for all humans. Ergo, in my analysis, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an ethical misstep that does more harm than good. Isabel Wilkerson offers a case for drawing readers away from what she believes is the conceptually limited polemic of race and racism. In its partiality, Caste is not, and cannot be, a humanizing text, though it claims to be, as it refuses the processes by which humans and nonhumans come to be. Despite reference points, it does not grapple with the complexity of history, choosing instead to enlist oversimplified anecdotes to explain the condition of endarkened lives. Finally, it is not a map to freer ways of being and cannot engender futures beyond the principles and priorities of its intended readership, namely, those invested in, or ideologically proximate to, white logics and methods. Tabling for a moment what the text is not, I offer some thoughts on what Caste is and does, along with the consequences of that work, before offering some recommendations for its use in higher education and student affairs. Caste is a work of literary nonfiction and should be contextualized as such. Wilkerson weaves narrative into her larger thematic structure, making the text accessible in and beyond higher education. Generally, there is value in sharing personal anecdotes about one's experiences at the intersection of racialized, gendered, and classed systems. Working across genres, when done well, can be a portal to interdisciplinary understandings. Without nuance, however, such efforts can be misleading and analytically compromised. In the opening pages, Wilkerson attempts to ground the text in historical patterns. For Wilkerson, a caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a [End Page 467] hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it (p. 17). Principally, Wilkerson argues that the US caste system shares similarities with those of India and Nazi Germany. The caste system in India is reinforced by the Hindu belief system, thereby establishing compliance as the commitment to spiritual practice. Wilkerson connects the lowest caste in the US (i.e., Black people) to those called the Dalits or "untouchables" in India while identifying the upper caste as the White majority, the equivalent of India's Brahmin. To ground this particular point, she curates what she calls "the eight pillars of caste" (pp. 99–159). Wilkerson's larger point that systems of oppression—caste systems—share identifiable interests is correct, as imperialism, racism, and capitalist exploitation are willfully consistent in philosophy and execution. In Part 1 of the text...