Caste (Oprah's Book Club) Summary

Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontent - A Comprehensive Summary



Caste is the foundation of our divisions," Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Origins of Our Discontents. Standing resembles the bones of an old house, "the studs and joists that we can't find in the physical structures we call home." It is additionally similar to "our bones, the auxiliary honesty of our innards generally kept imperceptible without an X-ray.


Caste/Position/rank in this narrative resembles a nitty-gritty clinical history. "Station is a sickness." It is a languid toxic substance, "an intravenous trickle to the psyche," supporting a "safe framework" that is likewise powerless against its "poisons." It is a cell, "atomic," "neurological," "cardiovascular." Like a subduction-zone action underneath the Earth's surface, rank is "the inconspicuous stirrings of the human heart."

Caste isn't, in any case, about "emotions or profound quality" (however it does live on .In the hearts and propensities). Standing is a show, "a phase of incredible scale" with irremovable outfits and unforeseeable content. Rank is in front of an audience, "an exhibition," and standing is, likewise, by one way or another, "the silent attendant in an obscured theater." It is an enchantment "spell." An enterprise. A Sith Lord. A tall structure with an overwhelmed cellar. Like in The Matrix, "an inconspicuous power of man-made reasoning has overwhelmed the human species." It is a stepping stool; we exist on its rungs.

"Position is structure," whatever that implies correctly.  

What station isn't is "the R-word" — that is, race or prejudice. It isn't reducible to race — nor sexual orientation, nor class. This Wilkerson acknowledged during research for her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a seriously explored, close account of complex relocation in twentieth-century America. The Warmth of Other Suns, generally lauded and a New York Times smash hit, proceeded to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, among other honors. Chipping away at that book and finding out about the Jim Crow underpinnings of what's frequently straight called "the Great Migration," Wilkerson "found her perspectives searched for shelter from something considerably more "treacherous" than the well established Negro inquiry ("How can it feel to be an issue?" W.E.B. Du Bois writes in the very much trodden first part of The Souls of Black Folk).

Dark Southerners — tenant farmers, domestics, or more all ex-slaves and their youngsters — were getting away from a "lawful rank framework" borne of oppression, changed into Jim Crow during the disastrous progress from subjugation to opportunity conceded. "For this book," the Pulitzer Prize victor states, "I needed to comprehend the starting points and advancement of arranging and raising one gathering of individuals over another." For that reason, "bigotry," she finished up, "was deficient." And as she's adjusted her language, assuming the terms of position — "the most exact term to portray the functions of American culture" — she entices readers to do as such, as well. In that sense, Caste is a ride-along, similar to all convincing narratives. Unfamiliar isn't exactly the word for it or not the one I would utilize. Maybe muddled is, however.


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