Eli Kunisch

Throughout this book, Isabel Wilkerson tells the truely horrific tale of American slavery and attempts to explain how this institution continues to affect social dynamics within the United States to this very day. Her style is highly emotional and argues primarily through anecdotal stories which will effectively tug on the reader's conscience. If that reader is white, we are forced in the least to confront the atrocities of our fathers, while perhaps reconsidering our own prejudices. If the reader is black, they are asked to see the same, but to use this knowledge to upend the state of mind which Wilkerson might call "caste mentality". According to Wilkerson, this state of mind acts to coerce every black American into accepting a categorically lowered station, in which they will be no great threat to the status of those in higher "castes" (white people). Other races are seldom mentioned, although Wilkerson claims Hispanics and Asian-Americans to be in a sort of "middle caste". By what metrics she uses to place Asians there is anyones' guess. The stories in this book are highly selective and presented as generalizing examples by which the reader is encouraged to form an idea of the whole of American society. Little attention is given to statistics, but show up only to bolster a given story being retold. I generally try to reserve one-star reviews for books which are essentially incoherent. I chose to give this book two stars because it is clear that Wilkerson committed a great amount of time in collecting stories and discussing the issue with other activists at conventions and during news assignments for the New York Times. With this valuable information and perhaps a bit of honest analysis, she had the opportunity to show the echoes of "caste" in our own day and the ways which we might come together to fight those echoes. Instead she unashamedly equivocates the experiences of Dalits in India and Jews during the Holocaust to those of people like herself. The ability for this book to be placed on the best-sellers list and for Wilkerson to amass for herself a fortune of $15,000,000 is clear evidence of the ridiculousness of the claim.