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Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions, Isabel Wilkerson writes inCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Caste is like a detailed medical history.
Caste is a disease.
It is cellular, molecular, neurological, cardiovascular.
Like subduction-zone activity below the Earths surface, caste is the unseen stirrings of the human heart.
Caste is drama, a stage of epic proportions with unremovable costumes and an uncorpseable script.
It is a magic spell.
A high-rise building with a flooded basement.
Like inThe Matrix, an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species.
It is a ladder; we exist on its rungs.
Caste is structure, whatever that means precisely.
What caste is not is the R-word that is, race or racism.
It is not reducible to race nor gender, nor class.
Du Bois writes in the well-trodden first chapter ofThe Souls of Black Folk).
For that purpose, racism, she concluded, was insufficient.
In that senseCasteis a ride-along, like all persuading histories.
Public conversations about race in America could use some messiness.
We could stand to be more awkward amid too much PR.
Wilkerson asks, What does racist mean in an era when even extremists wont admit to it?
Caste takes precedence because of precedent Wilkerson prefers the wordcastebecause it is, in a word, ancient.
Castedoes not abandon racial terms.
Blackness, for one.
However, Mapping Police Violence tracks victims who are, among other races, best described as black.
And contemporary scenes tend toward autobiography.
In scenes such as these, another awkwardly unavoidable term emerges, the C-word: class.
It is thus not clear what the proximity of these narratives is meant to illuminate.
There is danger in drawing too fine a parallel.
It would seem that it cant be done, an answer fine by me.
But the book does not end on such a note, or anything like it.
The language is slightly different, but weve been here before, have we not?
