(by Isabel Wilkerson)
I missed this month’s nonfiction book club meeting because my husband and I had tickets to see Ethan Lipton’s “We Are Your Robots” in Brooklyn (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I read the book anyway because it seemed like something I probably should have read already. This book came out 2020 and has much to say about 21st-century American politics, but also about America’s past. The central argument is that when we talk about race in America we’re often really talking about caste; Wilkerson compares how caste works in America to how it works/worked in India and Nazi Germany, and argues that you can’t understand our country’s current “discontents” without looking at America through this lens of caste.
Near the end of the book, Wilkerson writes about a conversation she had in 2018 with Taylor Branch, who is a friend but also a historian who’s written about the 20th-century civil rights movement in the US. Wilkerson writes of Branch saying this, as they talked about where America is and where it’s heading: “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” That sentence sure hits different at this moment in 2024.
As I was reading this book I sometimes appreciated the way that it melds history and argument and personal experiences/personal stories, and I sometimes wished that it were a shorter book that were either more scholarly or more personal. Having finished it, I think I appreciate the book’s structure more than not: the personal stories add interest and invite the reader toward a place of empathy, which is part of the point.
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