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<p>Join virtual craic zoom meeting 10:30 eastern time<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://us02web.zoom.us/j/516255319?pwd=ZnpFbTdEOFI1d2ZEdnpKTWt5UnJWZz09">https://us02web.zoom.us/j/516255319?pwd=ZnpFbTdEOFI1d2ZEdnpKTWt5UnJWZz09</a><br>
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Meeting ID: 516 255 319<br>
Passcode: 0210<br>
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<p>Hi Ted and all <br>
</p>
<p>Thank you for your book review of Cast. I think that this is a
very important work for our time and place. I tried to get an
ecopy from the library but failed to pick it up in timely
fashion. I think I may have some prejudice of the work as it
comes from Oprah's book club. <br>
</p>
<p>it would be a good topic to discuss this Saturday. You have
read it. So you may be able to answer some of my suspicions. I
have read some other discussions on the topic as I am sure others
have. Maybe Remo would be willing to participate in a more
directed forum. So please let us use some discipline and correct
each other when we are off topic. <br>
</p>
<p>Regards</p>
<p>Art<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10/21/21 8:23 a.m., Ted Schmidt
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:730C0978-F28B-4FD9-8CA8-4BA51959D4F1@bell.net">
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<br class="">
<span style="font-size: 36px;" class="">Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
review – a dark study of violence and power<br class="">
A renowned writer considers the social divisions in
American society, many of them unacknowledged, using
comparisons with India and Nazi Germany<br class="">
</span><img alt="A bust of Andrew Jackson in Williamsburg,
Virginia."
src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/29b61837e671cacd5602f93da6f289077689802e/0_203_4500_2700/master/4500.jpg?width=465&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=0ddc4b1b88514d18d848387f943aaf39"
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class="">
A bust of Andrew Jackson in Williamsburg, Virginia. Photograph:
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images<br class="">
<img alt="Fatima Bhutto" class="dcr-19n4rhu" style="box-sizing:
inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family:
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204, 160); border-top-left-radius: 100%;
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apple-inline="yes" id="36365930-0E88-4A60-AD9A-3F1B18B32279"
src="cid:part2.ECD90638.4A86CE62@integralshift.ca"><br class="">
A<font class="" size="5">s US president in the 1830s, Andrew
Jackson was a feverish advocate of “Indian removal”, the
banishing of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and
relocation on desolate reservations. It was Jackson who oversaw
the infamous “Trail of Tears”, the forced migration on which
more than 20% of the Cherokee people perished. History has been
kind to Jackson; it remembers him as Old Hickory, a
nation-builder who drove America’s westward <b class="">expansion
and honours him by placing his image on the $20 bill. It
doesn’t remember him as the enslaver of 161 people </b>or as
a man who went horseback riding with reins carved from the flesh
of indigenous Americans. And this is precisely how caste works,
according to Isabel Wilkerson: it <b class="">elevates and
empowers members of a “dominant caste” at the perpetual
expense of a “subordinate caste”.<br class="">
</b><br class="">
The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, a<b
class="">n expansive interrogation of racism,
institutionalised inequality and injustice. It was while
working on her </b>sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first
book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’
great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she
was studying a <b class="">deeply ingrained caste system that
had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed,
dating back to colonial </b>Virginia. In Caste,
Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she
compares with two of the <b class="">best known caste systems
in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and
of Nazi Germany, where caste </b>as a modern experiment in
barbarism was ultimately vanquished.<br class="">
<br class="">
BR Ambedkar, the Indian social reformer who fought the scourge
of caste all his life, called it “graded inequality”. Caste is a
complex system of infinite hierarchy; in Indian society, it
divides humans according to varnas, or classes – <b class="">Brahmins,
or priests; warriors; traders; and labourers. Dalits are
considered so low that they stand outside the varnas.</b>
Caste in India is a fraught and ugly thing, degrading everything
in its path.<br class="">
<br class="">
<b class="">Wilkerson’s is essentially a two-tier caste system –
dominant or white and subordinate or non-white. Th</b>e signal
of rank in the American hierarchy is caste’s “faithful servant”,
race. Caste and race continually bleed into each other; <b
class="">Wilkerson defines a racist as someone who harms,
mocks or institutionalises inferiority on the basis of race. A
casteist is someone who upholds or benefits from an ingrained
system of hierarchy, never challenging its assumptions. </b>Wilkerson’s
choice of examining caste rather than race is a valuable one;
this book is not about biology, social history or science, but
about structural power. Caste is a “hologram”, she explains,
an “insidious” force that operates outside of hatred or
intolerance, animated by practice and reflex. It’s not just the
far right or trigger-happy cops; even the “good” can be
casteists – such as the guest at a Tina Brown book party who
asked the then state senator Barack Obama to get them a drink.<br
class="">
</font><br class="">
<img alt="A statue of the confederate general Robert E Lee in
Richmond, Virginia."
src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ded51e88f59055bf1252f59fa3ccb630e18b800b/0_18_4305_2584/master/4305.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=f230798858eb136d7514f23a8dfc245d"
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cover;" moz-do-not-send="true" width="4305" height="2584"><br
class="">
<font class="" size="5">A statue of the confederate general Robert
E Lee in Richmond, Virginia. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP<br
class="">
Since its inception, the American caste system has reinvented
itself in terrifying and hideous ways. “Before there was a
United States of America,” Wilkerson writes, “there was
enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve
generations.” Caste is a dark history of the inexhaustible scope
of human violence. Enslaved Africans were seen as incapable
of injury, worked to the bone and starved, and routinely
subjected to torture and rape. The <b class="">American caste
system, like India or Germany’s, was constructed and practised
openly; it did not hide its </b>savagery. Even
Hitler recorded his admiration for the uniquely American “knack
for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass
death”. Wilkerson reminds us that the Nazis, though inspired by
America’s race laws, ultimately thought they went too far.<br
class="">
<br class="">
Writing of the South, where the purest form of American caste is
practised, Wilkerson threads microhistories into the l<b
class="">arger, horrendous tapestry. She describes local
lynching trees, schools letting out early so children
could accompany their parents to watch murder</b>, advertised
by newspapers as though they were sporting events. Photographers
brought portable printing presses to sell photos of the hanged
men as souvenirs. Lynching postcards were a thriving industry at
the turn of the 20th century, wish-you-were-here’s of the
severed, half-burned head of Will James, lynched in Illinois
in 1909 or of burned torsos from Waco. “This is the barbeque we
had last night,” a Texan wrote to his mother on the back on one
such card.<br class="">
<br class="">
Wilkerson writes about a country trembling with indignation when
asked to simply acknowledge that black lives matter. <b
class="">Congress has steadfastly refused even to debate
reparations for the descendants of the people they enslaved, </b>refusing
for 30 years to pass HR 40, a bill that would do nothing more
than table a discussion on the matter. The author unearths
much disquieting material in Caste. We know that during the Jim
Crow era, black Americans were forced<b class=""> to drink from
separate water fountains, but before they were given
fountains, Wilkerson </b>writes, they had to drink from
horse troughs.<br class="">
<br class="">
Caste as a concept can be dizzying, but Wilkerson makes plain th<b
class="">e deeply embedded infrastructure of American </b>hierarchy.
Caste is why Robert E Lee, the Confederate general who went to
war against his own country for the <b class="">right to
enslave other humans can be honoured by 230 memorials across
the land</b>. It is why Alabama was the last state in the
union to throw out its law banning interracial marriage, which
it did in 2000, 36 years after the Civil Rights Act ended
segregation. And it is why Lyndon B Johnson, who signed that act
into law, was the last Democrat ever to win the presidency with
the majority of the white electorate.<br class="">
<br class="">
<font class="" face="inherit"><span style="box-sizing: inherit;
margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px;
font-style: inherit; font-variant-caps: inherit;
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middle; height: 359px; width: 598px; object-fit: cover;"
class=""><img alt="A march by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS). ."
src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/061083f8a76a963370c564fdfb7833a7219ff2a8/0_71_3680_2207/master/3680.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=6f0e387ac46d6adfcb568dfb533b3142"
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line-height: inherit; vertical-align: middle; height:
359px; width: 598px; object-fit: cover;"
moz-do-not-send="true" width="3680" height="2207"></span></font><br
class="">
A march by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Photograph:
Pacific Press Agency/Alamy</font>
<div class=""><font class="" size="5"><br class="">
Wilkerson ends the book by holding up Nazi Germany as a caste
system successfully dismantled. But if Germany is an example
of how caste can be ended then India is the understressed
counterpoint: the nightmare of how caste can thrive and become
more monstrous if casteists are put in charge. There is no
mention of the spate of bloody lynchings <b class="">that has
gripped India since Narendra Modi</b> came to power in 2014;
no mention of Modi himself, a disciple of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), <b class="">a
crypto-fascist casteist organisation allegedly inspired by
nazism</b>. This blind spot would not be worth mentioning if
it were not for the author’s stated intention to examine
India, and the fact that the book is based on a distinctly
Indian idea, one that has grown more visible and gruesome in
recent years.<br class="">
<br class="">
<b class="">This is an American reckoning and so it should be.
Wilkerson has a deft narrative touch and she activates the
history in her pages, bringing all its horror and
possibility to </b>light, illuminating both the bygone and
the present. Caste joins the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in
exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and exploding
how we understand American power and supremacy. It is a
painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more
urgent time.<br class="">
<br class="">
</font><br class="">
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