Caste

 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

Here's another book that I arrived at through an author's previous work. That one was The Warmth of Other

Sons, which was one of the first nonfiction books I had read in quite some time. It told the story of the wave of black migration from the south to northern and western cities, and its brilliance was the way Wilkerson grounded the tale of this group in the stories of four individuals. They became characters that, by the time the book was over, had become something akin to friends. 

This is a different sort of book. It is very clearly an argument that we Americans need to begin thinking of the divide between groups of people not as a function of race and racism but of caste and casteism. Wilkerson compares segregation and racial stratification in the US to similar systems in India and, more horrifyingly, Nazi Germany. In making these comparisons, she identifies eight "pillars" of caste, including divine will, control of marriage, an emphasis on purity, inheritability, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and inherent superiority/inferiority. It is hard, after reading this section, to disagree that what we have in the US is, in fact, a caste system.

What Wilkerson makes less clear, however, is why it matters. Even the review in The Week seems to miss this point, saying instead that it replaces the "tenuous language of racial animus with a sturdier lexicon" and that it "wrenches out established way of thinking about race out of its rut and encourages us to see it anew". But it is more than these vagaries. I think Wilkerson is arguing that we need these new words because of how misunderstood the old ones are (and always have been). Wilkerson points out that racism is often conflated with prejudice. We think of racism as mean statements or overt acts of hatred. It is therefore easy for people to absolve themselves of racism. They don't hate. They don't use slurs. So they aren't racist, right? Well, no. Because in its true sense, racism is, by definition, a structural phenomenon. Racism isn't perpetrated by individuals so much as it is imposed upon individuals as they bump up against a system designed to denigrate. The point is not whether we as individuals have prejudices against people with different skin colors. The point is that these prejudices are baked into almost every aspect of our lives. We are racist because we live in a racist system that very few of us do much to change. By removing the very charged, and very misunderstood, "r word" from the equation, Wilkerson argues that we can better see systematic discrimination for what it is. In a sense, it absolves the individual while indicting the group, both past and present. 

At least that is what I think she is arguing. I could be wrong. Because at the end of the book when she finally gets around to discussing what should be done to rectify the system, Wilkerson seems to imply that the best we can do is act individually when we can. "Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste," she writes. "Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean." This is a lovely thought, and maybe it is right, but it feels disheartening to learn that all I can do with the knowledge she has imparted is to do my best to treat the people I come into contact with as equals. Wilkerson's ideas aren't all that original; in fact, rather than breaking new scholarly ground, her book is really a synthesis of others' thinking about the relationship between racism and caste. So what I was really hoping for was a new way of looking at ways forward and on that front Wilkerson does not seem to deliver. (Not that she claims to: she compares herself to a house inspector, who, obviously, only investigates the integrity of a home rather than making any necessary repairs.) At the end of the book, Wilkerson reminds us that we are responsible "with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom." I continue to find that elusive.      

Transcendent Kingdom

 Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

I came to this book by way of Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, which I loved. For some reason, it's not in my blog -- perhaps I read it before I started keeping it? -- but it was great. It traced slavery's horrors from a village in Africa to modern-day America and back again. The power of the novel was both in its subject and its telling, which subtly tied a thread between seemingly disconnected places and people.

This is a different book. It tells the story of Gifty, whose parents moved from Ghana to Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before her birth. The tragedy that propels this story is not slavery but addiction. Gifty's brother, we learn early in the book, succumbed to an opiate addiction when she was young, destroying her world. His death pushed Gifty toward science, the experimental world of which allowed her to establish order and control over an otherwise unwieldy world and to seek a cure for addiction. Also woven through her life is an internal conflict over faith. Gifty was raised in a deeply religious household, and, though Gifty herself has given up on her mother's religion, she struggles to reconcile the role it continues to play in her life with the ostensibly godless -- or maybe it is god-like? -- impulse of science. And finally there is Gifty's relationship with her mother, which seems to lack affection. Early on, it is dismissed as a cultural difference, but later we learn of the depression that had wracked Gifty's mother since her brother Nana's death. All of these factors come to a head when Gifty's mother moves in with her during the final stages of doctoral research at Stanford.

Transcendent Kingdom just appeared at the top of the best novels of the year in The Week, where it was praised as "'a book of blazing brilliance' that, with its penetrating reflections on science and spirituality..." I didn't find it to be that, exactly. Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but those "penetrating reflections" to me actually seemed rather superficial. They weren't embedded in the story for the reader to find for themselves; they were, rather, stated explicitly by the narrator. To me, this is another case of telling rather than showing. The effect was that much of the book read more like an essay than a novel. It felt plotless. Though conflict abounded, it seemed to be ALL conflict, until the book's final pages, when everything seemed to miraculously resolve. The ending felt supremely unsatisfying and unrealistic. I'm not sure what Gifty, or the reader, learns. That addiction blows up more than the life of the addicted? That time heals all wounds? That faith and science can exist simultaneously? Perhaps I need to read it again.

First Light

 First Light

By Rebecca Stead

I first encountered Rebecca Stead when our entire school read one of her books, Goodbye Stranger, a few years ago. The whole-school read idea ended up being misguided for a number of reasons, but the book was quite good, and we followed it up with an author visit. Since then I've sought out anything and everything she's written. 

Like many of Stead's books, this story combines some science-fiction elements with modern-day realism. In this case, the realism part comes in the form of Peter, a 14-year-old New York City kid whose dad, a glaciologist, brings the family on a research trip to Greenland. The sci-fi part comes in the form of Thea, the youngest direct descendant of Grace, who led a group from England to Greenland to escape persecution from witchcraft. In Greenland, the group found refuge inside a glacier. Relying on scientific ingenuity -- they found a way to preserve ice so that it could retain its ice-like properties whilst remaining impervious to temperature -- they built a thriving community below the ice, safe from their pursuers.

The conflict in the story revolves around Thea's attempt to revive her late mother's push to explore the outside world. She finds the long forgotten -- and sealed -- tunnel the original settlers used to travel into the glacier. Her Grandmother, the matriarch of the community, Gracehope, however, is set against this idea. When Thea travels to the surface anyway, an accident nearly kills her cousin and brings her into contact with Peter, who, it turns out, has a lot more in common with Thea than he initially knows. And I'll leave it at that in case someone out there is reading this before picking up the book.

Stead is a great storyteller, there's no doubt about that. So I really enjoyed this book, and, in fact, had a hard time putting it down. But it's not quite up there with some of her others, particularly When You Reach Me. The sci-fi part of the book didn't really work as well. It was kind of strange that she tried to link this strange community with real-world events without exploring those events in much detail. And her explanations for the technologies developed to survive in Gracehope serve to undermine the world she's created. The lanterns they have, for instance, run on "oxygen". Right. Better not to have explained it at all. And so it is the characters that bring this book alive, and keep you coming back to it. Though we met only briefly, I will miss them.