Isabel Wilkerson's thesis on caste

 The thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste is that racism is an inadequate concept to explain Americans society. If you are baffled the by state of the country, put aside notions of race for a minute and think about the problem in terms of caste.

Caste is a bigger concept. It assumes there exist classes of people that all the rest of us have the right to exploit. Cheap labor. Uncomplaining obedience. Complete subservience. That’s what the lower castes are for.

The system is preserved by calling the lower castes into place with every tactic imaginable. If you believe in the system, you put down people you perceive as beneath you with catty little social slights and with policing policies that kill unarmed citizens. You vehemently oppose laws that improve life for all — because that would mean improving the lives of those in the lower castes.

If you think you might be interested in the book but are on the fence, consider this paragraph:

Exclusion costs lives, up and down the hierarchy. The physician Jonathan M. Metzl, who has conducted research into the health of disaffected whites in middle America, has measured the life-and-death consequences of state decisions to withhold benefits seen as helping presumably undeserving minority groups. In the state of Tennessee, for example, he found that restrictive health policies may have cost the lives of as many as 4,599 African-Americans between 2011 and 2015, but also cost the lives of as many as 12,013 white Tennesseans, more than double the loss sustained by black residents.

Wilkerson quotes Metzl’s story of a 41-year-old Tennessee cab driver who was dying of a treatable condition. Help was available just across the state line in Kentucky, which had made access to care more available through the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid. But the cab driver did not want his tax dollars being spent on “Mexicans or welfare queens.” He said he’d rather die, and he did.

All my life, I have known people like that cab driver. I have spent decades trying to understand them.

This book might not help you. It helped me.

• Source: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.