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""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today"--… (mais)
This survey of the attitudes to race in America manages to be comprehensive, thought provoking and thoroughly depressing. Her surmise is that America's segregation is not simply a matter of race, but that it has become embedded as a caste system. She compares this to other caste systems, that of India & the Third Reich. The comparison is, at times, startling and to this reader appears valid in its conclusions. I felt that chapter it was missing was how you end a caste system, the Third Reich had a very efficient caste system, but you'd be hard pressed to think that it does now - I accept that violent overthrow of the ruling party involved will have helped with ending it, but that can;t be the whole story. An excellent read, potentially an effective call to action, but it's not a hopeful book. ( )
n this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. - from the publisher
This is required reading. Who could imagine that the caste system exists in The United States and that conversation is more important than racism? Takeaways: 1)Stigmatize a group as a whole because once you know someone in a lower caste system it is more difficult. 2)Dehumanization through medical experimentation. 3)When poor white America began having a shorter lifespan, they would think to themselves, well I may be poor and hungry and an addict but no one can take away my whiteness. 4)Those at the top of the caste system need to always prove that they are better than the lower caste population. 5)It makes the overall population less safe because the dominant class can blame the lower caste for evil or wrong doing that they commit. By blaming African Americans or Jews, it deflects from their own culpability. 6)Staying in the caste system is like playing a role. 7)Expecting the subdominant class to forgive the dominant class for their wrong doing-racism, slavery, and murder. 8)The caste system makes the subdominant class feel inferiority—that they have to be on their best behavior. ( )
Extraordinary book teaching about caste and its insinuation into life in this country; it's way beyond racism but impacts the entire structure of our culture. Beautifully written, deeply researched, this is a very worthwhile book. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me, And they would not believe me precisely because they wuld know that that I said was ture. --------James Baldwin
If the majority knew of the root of this evil,
then the road to its cure would not be long.
-------------------Albert Einstein
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
To the memory of my parents
who survived the caste system
and to the memory of Brett
who defied it
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
In the haunted summer of 2016, an unaccustomed heat wave struck the Siberian tundra on the edge of what the ancients once called the End of the Land.
There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reasson the had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was "to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy." (p 82)
Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.
Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.
The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners, whose crime was that they were born with dark skin. Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally, inflicted, gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.
“No matter how grand you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do,” NBA star LeBron James told reporters just the year before, “if you are an African-American man, or African-American woman, you will always be that.”
Louisiana culture went to great specificity, not so unlike the Indian laws of Manu, and delineating the various subcastes, based on the estimated percentage of African “blood.” There was griffe (three-fourths black), marabon (five-eighths black), mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-fourth), octaroon (one-eighth), sextaroon (one-sixteenth), demineamelouc (one thirty-second), and sangmelee (one-sixty-fourth). The latter categories, as twenty-first-century genetic testing has now shown, wood encompass millions of Americans now classified as Caucasian. All of these categories bear witness to a historic American, dominant-caste preoccupation with race and caste purity.
But Ebola, and potentially planet-wide catastrophes like it, as the world would discover beyond imagining six years later, have a way of reminding human beings that we were all indeed, one species, all interwoven, more alike than different, more interdependent on one another then we might otherwise want to believe. Ebola has been merely a whispered for warning of what was to come.
Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people that we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal.
Though they may not recognize it on a conscious level, dominant-caste Americans often show nearly as much curiosity about the ethnic, and thus caste, origins of their fellow Americans as do people in India…They will question a person whose race is ambiguous until they are satisfied of an origin.
…white support has intensified for Republicans, now seen as the party of an anxious but powerful dominant-caste electorate.
But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today"--
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Google Books — Carregando...
(4.44)
7
An excellent read, potentially an effective call to action, but it's not a hopeful book. (