Isabel Wilkerson’s work digs into the cause of white on white hate. In essence, Americans live out their lives within their assigned place within the American caste system. While skin colour automatically places white people above others within the hierarchy, whites still navigate a caste system.
This explains, in part, white Americans resistance to “white privilege”. But, but, but cry white people, everyone has to work hard to get ahead. My grandmother cured us of that nonsense, with her oft repeated admonition: “some people travel a thousand miles to reach the place where you were started, so don’t tell me you’re working hard.”
Quotes from 12 August 2020 interview, with Isabel Wilkerson, author: “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents”
“So, caste system essentially is an arbitrary grading, an artificial graded ranking of human value in a society. And it’s one in which there’s a fixed infrastructure that, in our country, predates anyone who’s alive today. It goes all the way back to colonial times, when the country was being formed. And a caste system essentially determines one’s standing, the respect accorded a person, the benefit of the doubt, access to resources or the deprivation of access to those resources, even such things as assumptions of competence and beauty.”
“It began with the creation of a country in which the people who were the colonists, who were British, placed themselves, obviously, at the top of the hierarchy and then imported, brought people in, from Africa to be the enslaved people, who would automatically, by definition, be at the very bottom of the caste system, having no rights whatsoever, not even rights over their own bodies...”
“And so, anyone coming in from outside of what these poles that were [inaudible] random designations of human beings ended up having to find a way to navigate. And it created this stressor, these stressors and tensions between groups as they tried to figure out how to survive in an often forbidding bipolar structure.”
Read full interview here:
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/12/caste_isabel_wilkerson
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/8/12/isabel_wilkerson_on_the_us_caste
