(by Isabel Wilkerson)<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13624"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13636,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13624\/revisions\/13636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}