ŷ������

This may be the most important book I read this year. It’s timely, well researched, and well written. Non-fiction is not my primary reading material, but I found myself engaged and easily turning the pages. Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of another book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration posits that African Americans are on the lowest rung of a caste system in American. In a systematic revelation of facts, Wilkerson shines a searing light on the history of enslavement in the South and compares it to the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews and India’s caste system. The Jim Crow south continued to perpetuate inequality and worse. It’s a bone-chilling account and a call to personal awakenings of conscience.

Wilkerson writes of silent earthquakes rumbling deep within the earth long before the actual earthquake creates havoc and devastation. She states that “only recently have circumstances forced us, in this current era of human rupture, to search for the unseen stirrings of the human heart, to discover the origins of our discontents.�� That is what she probes within these pages.

The eight pillars of caste as outlined by Wilkerson begin with ‘Divine Will and the Laws of Nature.�� Just as some Christians point to the ‘curse of Ham�� as justification for slavery, so does the ancient Hindu text of India provide for the caste system. It pains me to remember the sermons in my own church when I was growing up...that "integration is an act of communism," a reflection of the ignorance and unjustified fears of the time. I was eight years old when my school became integrated. The other children were just like me, only a different color.

Wilkerson points to the 2016 election as a consequence of a backlash against the presidency of the first African American, Barak Obama. Many people vote against their own self-interests when they perceive that their dominance is threatened. One would think that climate change, science, and coronavirus would be at the forefront of everyone’s agenda, seeing as how all those things have to do with the survival of humanity, but that is not the case. The protection of wealth, superiority, and entitlement seem to be just as valid these days.

Wilkerson compares how Germany faced the aftermath of what happened there with how American continues to subjugate blacks and other minorities. She imagines what life would be like if all people were celebrated, if everyone was allowed to reach his/her full potential. Noam Chomsky, celebrated linguist, scholar, and political activist recognizes the Black Lives Matters movement as a reason for hope and “the biggest social movement in American history with support beyond anything that’s ever been registered in the past.�� (1)

I don’t believe I have ever read anything so thorough or revelatory about what it means to be black in America.

(1)