Book/movie review: Caste (Book Review Sample)

Book/movie review: Caste Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Course Instructor Date Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by Isabel Wilkerson, an American journalist. The book was published in August 2020 by a publisher known as Random House. As described by the author, caste refers to an artificial order developed to rank a specific group of people. According to Wilkerson, the order has its basis on the assumed inferiority of one group and assumed supremacy of others regarding personal characteristics, heritage, economic status, or religious preferences. Wilkerson often argues that the traits used to delineate groups are benign and arbitrary in other contexts. They only become fundamental when one group uses them to assign parameters for the appropriate behaviors of each group and segregate people. Isabel Wilkerson wrote the book better to explain the racial tension in the United States. She argues that the tension results from a four-hundred-year-old hierarchy that places the black people at the bottom and the white people at the top. She describes racism in the United States as a facet of a caste system (Avakian 2021). Wilkerson explains the system more by examining and comparing features of the experience of the Nazi Germans and the American people of color to the caste systems of India. She explores how the lives of those involved in the caste systems were subject to damage, including those on top, and the impact of caste in societies shaped by them (Stewart, 2020). She believes that to understand how to move forward, we must examine the past and the racial structures that keep progress as a nation at bay. However, it is not guaranteed that saying the United States has a caste system proves anything more than saying it's a racist country did. The central theme of Wilkerson's book caste is the American hierarchy caused by the caste systems and social segregation. Wilkerson digs beneath historic systemic racism to examine social scales that transcend classifications based on race, gender, or class within America's borders. She reveals the structure of an unspoken human ranking system and shows how our lives are still restricted by what divided us centuries ago. Isabel writes that the caste hierarchy is not about feeling but determining which groups will have power and which will not. She focuses on the infrastructure of America's ranking and the divisions, whereas the use of race is to determine an individual’s place. And in defining and creating their hierarchy, they came up with a different configuration that encompassed more people on the Aryan side than would have been considered than the equivalent would have been in the United States. It, however, is not clear if the caste system has gradation that includes multi-factorial combing class or education. She only focuses on white and black people making the book superficial and simple. Wilkerson used eight pillars or features of caste hierarchy to support her arguments. The pillars include; Divine will, which believes that humans can't control social grouping either as natural law or divinely ordained. The pillar relates to the biblical story of the curse of Ham to justify Black inferiority in the United States. The second pillar is Heritability, which believes that one acquires social status at birth and is immutable (Gota, 2022). The next pillar is Endogamy which, according to the United States anti-miscegenation laws, prohibits sex and marriage between castes. The fourth pillar is purity and pollution: The belief that the dominant caste possesses purity and must be protected against pollution by the inferior castes. The fifth pillar identifies as Occupational hierarchy. The pillar supports Jim Crows laws enshrined in the United States stating that superior castes should be reserved for the most desirable occupations while restricting Black people to domestic work and farming. Next is the pillar of dehumanization and stigma: This expresses the denial of human dignity and individuality of lower-caste persons (Lacy,2021). The free and enslaved black people were subjected to various restrictions and arbitrary in the United States and suffered racist carnival games. The seventh pillar is Terror and cruelty. Black people were harassed and whipped as enslaved people in order to control lower-caste people and enforce the caste system in the United States. However, the author does not clarify when the whites committed the atrocities. Lastly is the pillar of Inherent superiority and inferiority of castes: This is the belief that individuals of one caste are superior to those of other castes as attributed to restrictions on displays of status and clothes. The similarities between Isabel’s work and Ibrahim kendi’s are the idea of racial hierarchy and racial equality, which is its opposite. Kendi, just like Isabel, believes there is no grey area middle ground between actions being either racist or not. The racial hierarchy has disintegrated the society to the point that there is no neutral ground between justice and injustice. He, just like Isabel, believes that the history and continuation of slavery serve as a purpose of power gain for those in superior positions. Kendi says that the only specific reason people in power had to convince other influential white people that black people are inferior was their self-interest. He believes that although most white people have a self-defensive reaction to being referred to as a racist, they do not intentionally gain from inequality and prefer not to be associated with racism as it is attached to shame. The other similarity between the two is that they believe in history racist policies like caste pillars. Kendi states that racist policies by superior whites came first and then later accompanied the racist feelings that aimed to justify the policies. Kendi, just like Isabel, considers addressing the policies as most important. He refers to a racist policy as the po...