Caste Book Club – Section 1 Questions

Meeting #1 on Sunday Feb 21 at 5:00 PM – Origins & Evolution of Caste (Parts 1-3, pp. 1-164).

•  At the beginning of Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson compares American racial hierarchy to a dormant Siberian virus. What are the strengths of this metaphor? How does this comparison help combat the pervasive myth that racism has been eradicated in America?
• Wilkerson begins the book with an image of one lone dissenter amidst a crowd of Germans giving the Nazi salute. What would it mean—and what would it take—to be this man today?
• “Before there was a United States of America,” Wilkerson writes, “there was a caste system, born in colonial Virginia.” How can Americans reckon with this fact? What does it mean to you to live in a country whose system of discrimination was cemented before the country itself?
• Wilkerson writes about the “construction of whiteness,” describing the way immigrants went from being Czech or Hungarian or Polish to “white”—a political designation that only has meaning when set against something “not white.” Irish and Italian people weren’t “white” until they came to America. What does this “construction of whiteness” tell us about the validity of racial designations and the structure of caste?
• Wilkerson uses many different metaphors to explain and help us visualize the concept of the American caste system: the bones inside a body, the beams inside a house, even the computer program in the 1999 film The Matrix. Which of these metaphors helped the concept click for you? Why was it successful?
• Caste and race are not the same thing. What is the difference between the two? How do casteism and racism support each other?
• Did learning about the lens and language of caste change how you look at U.S. history and society? How?
• Did any of the historical and personal accounts that Wilkerson included in the first section of the book change the way you look at U.S. history and society?
  • Some of these stories include:
  • Harold Hale who named his daughter Miss to force white people to treat her with respect
  • The owner of a NYC boutique who wouldn’t believe that Isabel Wilkerson was a reporter for the NY Times
  • The drowning of Wiilie James Howard in 1943 for sending a Christmas card to a white girl,
  • The burning of Wylie McNeely in 1921
  • The lynching of Rubin Stacy in 1935 and the popularity of lynching postcards
  • The black man who died as a result of injuries because the ambulance wouldn’t take a black man
  • The stoning of a black boy who swam near the white side of the beach in Lake Michigan,
  • The treatment of the little league baseball player who wasn’t allowed to swim with his team in a pool
  • The lynching of Italian immigrants
  • The rescinding of citizenship of people of Asian descent who had lived here for over 20 years
  • The suicide of Vaishno Das Bagai after he was stripped of his citizenship and business,
  • The slave owner who whipped his slave to death for refusing to renounce Jesus
  • The medical experimentation on slave women by the “father of gynecology”