Friends,
We are continuing our journey in how to become anti-racists. This is an on-going, daily effort of self-examination, of study, and engagement in our community as we stand in solidarity with the marginalized and work together for policy change. Our previous book study and ensuing conversations have helped me and fellow conversation partners to deepen our historical understanding of racist systems in this country. We’ve grappled with various aspects of racism as they relate to power, class, body (image) or gender, to name only a few, and how we as individuals participate and are complicit in racist systems.
Our next book is Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020). Wilkerson argues that America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. As she puts it, race and caste “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning… As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.”
Wilkerson makes unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African Americans. Each country “relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.” As one reviewer of Caste observed, Wilkerson wants to “neatly lift the mind out of old ruts” by “exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and exploding how we understand American power and supremacy.”
Hope you join our study to find out more!
Bring your curiosity and your thoughts. Bring your experience. Remember, there are no wrong questions!
Peace,
Pastor Enikő
