I must say that I've not yet read the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. I have it, but I haven't read it.
Apparently, if I lived in Llano County, Texas, I'd consider myself pretty lucky. I wouldn't be able to find a copy of Caste there in any library anymore.
Such is the effect of a recent Supreme Court decision, issued just a few days ago. The Court decided not to intervene in a local dispute about that and other books in county libraries, which had made itself up through the federal appellate court in that circuit.
Caste is, apparently, a powerful testament to the racial divide which still plagues us. Wilkerson is also the author of an important work entitled The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the experiences of those caught up in The Great Migration, as it is called, from the South to mostly large Northern cities in the years between the world wars--a movement that changed the political and cultural landscape of the United States forever.
Wilkerson calls our divide a caste culture. Many, including me, have never heard it put that way. We think of that as belonging almost exclusively to India, which has declared their class divisions as such, while turning our backs on our own obviousness. It's how so many of us learned about the word and its horrible unfairness, dooming millions (out of a country which now boasts a population of over one billion) to lives without hope of upward mobility.
But a caste culture we are. We know of the stories. We know of the ceilings. Such was also established, for a time, in Nazi Germany. But the Nazis had an excellent example to draw from: Us. Our abuse of blacks and Natives was, and still is, a blueprint for systematically excluding people from significance just on the basis of their race.
The following is from the preface to Caste. It alone is plenty food for thought: Enough for it to be one of Time magazine's ten best nonfiction books of 2020, and receiving a 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others (source: Wikipedia). But this book may be banned now in many other libraries, for reasons you'd quite frankly have to ask the banners, because it's (purportedly) incredibly well done about a topic necessarily turned on its ear for examination. But since book banners are gathering nationwide, one community at a time, it may lead to an epidemic of banning without the kind of challenge it deserves. So enjoy: You have a place where you can at least read a few pages. It's called "The Man in the Crowd":
There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Fuhrer.
If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide.
Looking back from the vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fateful, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it.
His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.
He had joined the Nazi Party himself years before. By now though, he knew firsthand that the Nazis were feeding Germans lies about Jews, the outcastes of his era, that, even this early in the Reich, the Nazis had caused terror, heartache, and disruption. He knew that Jews were anything but Untermenschen, that they were German citizens, human as anyone else. He was an Aryan in love with a Jewish woman, but the recently enacted Nuremberg Laws had made their relationship illegal. They were forbidden to marry or to have sexual relations, either of which amounted to what the Nazis called "racial infamy."
His personal experience and close connection to the scapegoated caste allowed him to see past the lies and stereotypes so readily embraced by susceptible members--the majority, sadly--of the dominant caste. Though Aryan himself, his openness to the humanity of the people who had been deemed beneath him gave him a stake in their well-being, their fates tied to his. He could see what his countrymen chose not to see.
In a totalitarian regime such as that of the Third Reich, it was an act of bravery to stand firm against an ocean. We would all want to believe that we would have been him. We might feel certain that, were we Aryan citizens under the Third Reich, we surely would have seen through it, would have risen above it like him, been that person resisting authoritarianism and brutality in the face of mass hysteria.
We would like to believe that we would have taken the more difficult path of standing up against injustice in defense of the outcaste. But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion or even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?
What indeed? For the pestilence that threatens to now engulf us will not end with its creator. Count on that. There are too many--you can already see them, too, in the headlines--who believe, or have made themselves believe, that they can turn the USA into a cesspool of cheap obedience and white supremacy. We dangle on the edge. Those who would ban a book like Caste will now ban other books just as important and just as revealing, as it has a book about the Ku Klux Klan, about a transgender teen, and about the sexual changes we all go through.
The original case was heard in federal court with the advocates of reading, of libraries, of freedom having won. The county briefly considered closing all its libraries, but it won a reversal in federal circuit court. And now the Supreme Court will not review it, letting the reversal stand and potentially engulfing many other local communities in the same ongoing battle for the public's minds.
That battle is proving to be protracted. In order to maintain some decency about the right to think, people of my age, or so, will have to practice resistance for the rest of our lives. That need to resist may be coming, soon, to a town either near you or to the one to which you belong. This ugly era of authoritarianism assures us of that.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment