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Hi friends, thanks again for joining this summer book club! It's going to be super chill :)

As a reminder, the first book we'll read this summer is "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson. Just to make sure we're all on the same page (pun intended), I'm setting June 14 as a loose deadline for when to have the first two parts of the book read. If you get ahead or behind, that is OK.

I do ask, though, if you feel so inclined, to drop your thoughts on Part I: Toxins in the Permafrost and Heat Rising All Around and Part II: The Arbitrary Constructions of Human Divisions in this thread so we can discuss! By the looks of it, this book has a lot to unpack so discourse is encouraged. Feel free to drop your thoughts as you go. It doesn't have to be on June 14 and it can be a bit after. Again, that date is a loose deadline. I will make another discussion thread for the next section of the book in the coming weeks. Happy reading!

So I just finished part 1 of the novel and it was really interesting. I like when Wilkerson compares America to a very old house, one that we didn’t necessarily build but that we inherited and are required to look after. With her old bones, chipped paint, leaky pipes, and all. People that move into an old house don’t just say they didn’t cause the damage and so ignore it. They don’t do that because it’s their home and they have to live in it. Why don’t we think of our country in that way? We have a role to fix the damage because it’s our home, and if we ignore it it’ll decay and fall apart. I also really liked how she talked about when people find out they have a history of a disease in their family, they don’t feel guilty about it. They just do everything they can to learn about the disease and prevent it from causing damage to themselves and their future family. People can’t control whether their ancestors were slaves or slave owners. We can’t control the past, and we shouldn’t feel guilty about things we didn’t partake in. However, there is a responsibility to become educated, acknowledge systemic privilege, and do better for the future.

I also enjoyed that section, Shalom! Wilkerson's analogies in Part I of the book make hard, complex ideas easily digestible.

Her musings about guilt really hit home for me, too. I often encounter individuals who apologize on behalf of *insert group* even when they are not personally responsible for the existence of oppressive systems or what those in the past have done. What we are responsible for is what we do or whether we perpetuate the systems. Thank you for sharing!

This book has already made me think so much! I particularly enjoyed Wilkerson's discussion of race as a social construct in Part II. I had never thought of it in those terms before. It's not as if she's saying people don't have different features and skin tones, but more so that America has created two boxes for grouping people: Black and white. Anyone not of European or African descent falls somewhere in-between, which explains concepts such as 'proximity to whiteness.'

As Wilkerson points out, it's all very arbitrary. My brother, who is a lighter-complected Black person, might share the same or similar skin tone to an individual in the Latinx community, but only my brother would be considered 'Black' due to his ancestry or the texture of his hair. Similarly a person from India with much darker skin than my brother's would not be considered 'Black.' If race, as it was created socially, is about skin tone, then it's pretty inconsistent.

Wilkerson's discussion about European immigrants becoming 'white' once they arrived in America was equally interesting. It explains why Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish people and other cultural/ ethnic groups are politically lumped in with 'white' while simultaneously feeling some distance from WASP whiteness.

So far, I have been blown away by this book and Wilkerson’s ability to craft words in such a beautiful way. One sentence that literally had me saying “Woah�� out loud was on page 17. She describes the caste system as “the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.�� Before this, I had never heard American society described as a caste system. But it really is. And like Wilkerson notes, it had been building up underneath the surface for hundreds of years. It directs our every move without us even realizing it. It’s kind of scary to think that we have each been playing these roles with “assigned seats�� that we have virtually no control over. The color of one’s skin dictates the course of their life. That’s unfair. Why does it have to be this way? Why are people killed because of their race? Why are schools in certain neighborhoods lacking resources? Why do social hierarchies exist? I don’t have the answers but I hope to learn from this book ways to dismantle the structures that prevent freedom.

Hello everyone!

Myah, I also really enjoyed the discussion about race as a social construct and how it is perceived differently in different countries.

Another thing that stood out to me was Wilkerson's story about the upper-caste woman in India. Even though the woman wanted to heal the caste divide, she still had traits and mannerisms of someone from an upper-caste. This reminded me of discussions I've had before about bias and how subconscious our actions to be. It takes effort to "counteract the programming of caste."

One topic that disturbed me was the discussion about how Nazi Germany used the American example of racial caste systems to model their own version of racial hierarchy and purity. (And they even thought that some American thinkings were too harsh.) The Nazis were villains and committed atrocities, but they learned from America. That's something you would never be taught in a US history classroom, so I'm glad this book is talking about these things.

Miranda wrote: "So far, I have been blown away by this book and Wilkerson’s ability to craft words in such a beautiful way. One sentence that literally had me saying “Woah�� out loud was on page 17. She describes t..."
I also had a "woah" moment when Wilkerson described America's racial hierarchy as a caste system. It reinforced to me how much our country tends to sugarcoat things or cover up its darkest history and realities.

Katy wrote: "Hello everyone!

Myah, I also really enjoyed the discussion about race as a social construct and how it is perceived differently in different countries.

Another thing that stood out to me was Wilk..."

And what's insane is, the US government and I'd say the general public (correct me if I'm wrong) reprimanded the atrocities taking place in Germany under Nazi rule, yet disregarded issues at home.

Be forewarned! My comments for these sections won't be eloquently written and will be quite vague in nature. However, I had a few notes and external media/content that I think could add something valuable to our discussion of this book.

In part two (I don't recall which chapter) when Wilkerson is discussing the various unjust reasons Black people were lynched for at the time ("frightening" a white woman, etc), it reminded me of this art exhibition by Kerry James Marshall called "Heirlooms and Accessories" (link: ). In his art work, Marshall would take photographs of lynchings and erase all other people except one spectator, making them the focal point of the piece. I'll paste an analysis of his work below:

"Heirlooms & Accessories makes use of Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photograph of the murders of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith to interrogate the legacy of racial violence. Fading the rest of the image so that it nearly matches the white of the paper, Kerry James Marshall highlights the faces of three women in the crowd, accessories to the murders, and places each of them inside a locket, an accessory. These three women, each representing a different generation, participate in a legacy of racism. This legacy is made tangible by turning them into pieces of jewelry, heirlooms that are physically passed down from generation to generation."

Additionally, I found it repulsive when Wilkerson stated that people would send postcards of these lynchings, which were then banned, however were still sent just in an envelope instead. When I read about how people would go witness these murders with their own eyes, I always get a sense that their passive participation in these acts has a voyeuristic, almost pornographic, connotation to it. And I'd like to think that we as a society are past that, but I feel that's too naive. In a similar vain, we still participate in this voyeurism through our consumption of media whose primary focus is Black pain. We see criticisms of films and tv shows that center themselves in either times of slavery or the segregation era. Now we're in a Jordan Peele era of film where we see the combining of horror elements with that of the Black experience. And though I think it can be tastefully done, we see examples of films like "Antebellum," "Bad Hair," and the show "Them" missing the mark for many. It's interesting to see how the most commercially successful films centering Black people usually occur during one of those two periods for it to be successful across all audiences. I'm sure there are exceptions to this that I have missed, but my point is I don't think we're too far removed from these voyeuristic tendencies, we just consume it in a different manner now compared to then.

And one last! comment! I found it so interesting how those protestors ended up hurting and killing some of their own participants, as well as hurting the police chief (?I think? it's around the part where they mention Henry Fonda). It reminded me of "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" and how a central theme to the autobiography was the notion that slavery is just as detrimental to white people as it was to those who were enslaved.

I'm very open to discourse on the topics I briefly discussed, especially if you disagree with some of my points. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading everyone's comments!

Samantha wrote: "Be forewarned! My comments for these sections won't be eloquently written and will be quite vague in nature. However, I had a few notes and external media/content that I think could add something v..."

Sam, thank you so much for this insightful comment. You bring up so many good points, and I appreciate how you've connected Wilkerson's ideas to what is going on in our media landscape today.

This fixation on Black pain does seem to bode well in terms of popularity among wider audiences. While I enjoyed "Get Out," for example, and its theme of Black bodies being nothing more than a commodity, I admit that there's an element of theater to it. So yes, in a way it does come off as a sort of showcase of Black pain for the masses to enjoy.

Don't even get me started on "Bad Hair." That movie deeply disturbed me.

What frustrates me, is we rarely see depictions of Black people in media just ... existing, or even, experiencing fantastical things. We don't see Black people falling in love with vampires (shameless "Twilight" plug, I'm sorry!). We don't see Black people in thoughtful films that aren't completely centered around discussions of race. Only recently have we seen Black people as superheroes. But we often do see them, as you pointed out, as slaves and civil rights leaders, as help or people living in the inner city (Think "Friday" and "Boyz in the Hood"). There's always a fixation on struggle or race. Not to say these films aren't important, but that's all we ever see.

And as far as media coverage of Black people goes, I can't think of the last time I saw a news story about a Black person (who isn't an athlete or entertainer) just existing or doing something cool. We often see portrayals of Black suffering or Black people as criminals. This warps public perception in dangerous ways. Being Black isn't a crime. Black people aren't just good for playing sports and entertaining the masses.

Thanks again Sam for extrapolating from this book and making me think deeper!