I am reading Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Lies that Divide Us.” It is a well written, well constructed, amazing work of scholarship that lays bare the fundamental caste basis of America since the beginning. It becomes way easier to understand white American embrace of Trump and his horror show. And the comparisons with the India caste system are memorable and incisive.
But it is also perhaps the most painful book I have ever read. Every page seems to have a new horror inflicted on African Americans to maintain the caste/race hierarchy. Atrocities, rape, torture, forced labor, lynching, families torn apart, and the whole post Slavery Jim Crow system.
Though I suppose the idea that tens of thousands of American used to send post cards with pictures of lynchings on them every year, well I guess that shocked me perhaps most. That and the fact that the Nazis took their anti-Jewish Nuremberg Race laws almost directly from their study in the 1930s of the US race laws, though the Nazis to begin with thought the US race laws on racial inter-marriage and the practice of lynching overly harsh. Inter-racial marriages were still theoretically illegal in Alabama up to the year 2000 btw
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