Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste presents evidence that it’s more helpful to think of America’s problem in terms of caste, rather than racism.
I found it overwhelmingly persuasive. The single most persuasive bit of evidence for me was a memo written during World War I on how Black soldiers were to be treated.
Some American troops were under French command. The French were treating Black American soldiers as human beings, and that was causing unrest among white Americans.
French officers were commending Black troops and were socializing with them. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the United States had a caste system that forbade that kind of thing in strongest terms.
And so Col. J.L.A. Linard, a French colonel attached to American army headquarters, was told to write a memo explaining how things stood.
W.E.B. Dubois got a got a copy of the memo and published it in The Crisis.
If you can read it without thinking we have a caste system in the United States, your mind does not like mine.
Col. Linard was clear that Black people had to be treated badly not because they needed to be treated badly, but because American society demanded it.
• Sources: ”A French Directive,” The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919), p. 16-18. The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition put it online:
https://glc.yale.edu/french-directive
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment