Swift Reads - Insights on Isabel Wilkersons Caste

Swift Reads

Insights on Isabel Wilkersons Caste

First published by Swift Books LLC 2020

Copyright 2020 by Swift Reads

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
Find out more at reedsy.com

Chapter 1

Insights

#1

The 2016 US presidential elections shook the world. The candidates were polar opposites, equally loathed by fans of their respective adversary.

#2

White people are the ones who have been in charge all along. They felt like theyre losing that position. So they wanted to elect someone who would make sure they stay in charge, which was Donald Trump. His win was the victory of white supremacists.

#3

The sentiment of returning to an old order of things, the closed hierarchy of the ancestors, soon spread across the land in a headline-grabbing wave of hate crime and mass violence.

#4

The world was unable to comprehend how tens of millions of voters chose to veer from all sense and to put the country and thus the world in the hands of an untested celebrity. The answer is the deeply embedded, hierarchic caste system in America.

Chapter 2

Insights

#1

America is a country that was built on the backs of slaves. The people who profited from slavery still do so today, and the ones who were slaves still have no power. This is the caste system in America.

#2

Caste is a structure of human hierarchy. It is a way of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, and it has been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species.

#3

In the same way that the black and white people were not actually black or white, but were gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes.

Chapter 3

Insights

#1

Caste is not a term often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the term for decades.

#2

The caste system is a social system of stratification, where people are born into a slot in the social hierarchy. The hierarchy is based on perceived value. The perception of value is based on wealth or skin color.

#3

The white supremacists of the South saw the caste system in India as a model for the American South. They believed the white race was superior to all other races and wanted to preserve the purity of their blood. They did this by segregating blacks and whites.

#4

The original caste system was in India. It was based on the occupation of your ancestors.

#5

The caste system in the United States began with the enslavement of Africans. As the colony grew, laws were passed that granted privileges to Europeans. Over time, all Europeans were fused into a single white identity.

#6

The caste system is alive and well in America, and we are ignoring it. To truly understand America, we must open our eyes to the hidden work of a caste system that prevails amongst us.

Chapter 4

Insights

#1

Life is a play. The rich white people play the roles of the heroes and heroines of history. The costumes they wear are the costumes of their predecessors, handed down from generation to generation, and have become ingrained in their identity.

#2

When people are cast into a role, they become associated with that role. They are expected to act a certain way. Veer from the script, and they will face the consequences.

#3

The creation of a caste system was a process of testing the bounds of human categories and not the result of a single edict. The process took decades of pushing boundaries of cruelty.

#4

Slavery in America was not an accident it was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste, unlike any prior form of slavery in the world.

#5

Slavery made the enslavers some of the richest people in the world, granting them the ability to turn a person into an object, all the while unwilling to admit that they were torturing other humans.

#6

It would take wars and millions of deaths to bring the institution of enslavement in the United States of America to an end. Yet it didnt bring racism to an end, or the caste system.

#7

People in the dominant caste invented a new way to keep the subordinate caste at the bottom of the social order. They called it Jim Crow. They invented laws that made it illegal for black people or lower caste to vote, or to have equal access to jobs and housing.

#8

Thus, each new immigrant walks into a preexisting hierarchy, arising from slavery and pitting the extremes in human pigmentation at opposite ends, and becomes part of the caste, trying to distance themselves from the lowest caste, yet unaware of its existence.

Chapter 5

Insights

#1

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.

Chapter 6

Insights

#1

Races are arbitrary categories, and they have no basis in science. The term Caucasian isnt scientific because its based on a single skull.

#2

According to scientists, the human race is 99.9% the same, but we have been taught to see differences in skin color and hair texture and eye shape as race, and to think of those differences as being like the differences between cats and dogs.

#3

The word caste, which has become synonymous with India, did not originate in India. It comes from the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for race or breed. Thus, a word we now ascribe to India actually arose from Europeans interpretations of what they saw.

#4

Racism is a system of power that benefits one group over another. Its not just about prejudice. You cant have racism without power.