Implicating America
By Mary Ellen Talley
Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Random House, 2020
White Trash, The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Viking, 2016
My book club at Phinney Neighborhood Association in Seattle met this fall to discuss and rave about Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. Her well-researched book makes a persuasive case that caste, not just racism, is the original ripped and frayed thread that runs through America’s social, political, and economic fabric. Another book club member said if you want to delve more thoroughly into these topics, read White Trash, The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America, by historian Nancy Isenberg. I proceeded to read the books back-to-back.
Wilkerson compares treatment of Blacks in America to treatment of the Dalit caste in India. When Martin Luther King, Jr. journeyed to a city in Kerala, India, he was shocked to be introduced by a high school principal, “Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” Wilkerson reports that when the shock wore off, MLK recognized the truth of the introduction.
Caste is rife with fascinating and despicable political intrigue as well as gruesome racial violence of American history. By reading recent history through the lens of caste, I came to understand the backlash to Obama’s two presidential election victories. Wilkerson’s commentary explained the predictability of Trump’s victory in 2016. To give credence to her reports, the author added personal examples where she has been discriminated against because she is a member of two lower castes, female and African-American.
Isenberg writes in White Trash that “As the ‘waste firm of America’ was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.” Her history elaborates on the background of terms such as “crackers,” “squatters,” “refuse,” “rubbish,” “stragglers,” “vagabonds,” “waste.” Isenberg describes how the persistence of such terms allowed limited social mobility along the frontier more than the American myth inculcates.
Chapter titles are quite telling in both books. Wilkerson presents her eight pillars of caste in separate chapters. In addition, she points out that poor Whites have been trained to feel that at least they are superior to Black people. One chapter title announces what has been often set in motion in America, “The Euphoria of Hate.”
Isenberg’s titles are equally enticing and descriptive as they move through history. She exposes President Jackson’s cruelty toward indigenous people and unjust laws against mixing bloodlines. The chapter on “Pedigree and Poor White Trash” notes that “Increasingly, Mexicans were thrown together with blacks and Indians and contemptuously dismissed by Americans in general as a ‘mongrel race.’”
Wilkerson elaborates on the history of Eugenics in America. Her comparisons between Nazi Germany and the American South have been told before, but the juxtapositions conveyed herein were shocking to me. According to Wilkerson, Hitler studied America’s system and was impressed with Aryan supremacy, racial purification, ritual tortures, and the near genocide and exile of Native Americans he found there.
Wilkerson writes about the massacre of “nine black parishioners” in a Charleston church in 2015, pointing out the family members’ forgiveness afforded to the “unrepentant white killer of their loved ones.” Wilkerson clarifies the phenomena, noting “society’s expectation that the subordinate caste bears its suffering and absolves its transgressors.” It seems uncomfortably accurate she notes, that “Black forgiveness of dominant-caste sin has become a spiritual form of having to be twice as good, in trauma, as in other aspects of life, to be seen as half as worthy.”
As I thought about current events, I looked at the news through the prism of caste and Wilkerson’s statements resonated. Think of Supreme Court nominees, Presidential fallout for transgressions, and public opinion when victims were women (lower caste.) Think of the trope of the uneducated lower class/working class White adult voting against their own best interest just to be sure someone in a lower caste doesn’t rise above them.
Interpreting our social fabric gets hazy because strands of caste and race overlap. Whether we agree with Wilkerson’s argument about caste, she may be right that it is more productive to speak in terms of caste than it is to loudly castigate systemic and individual racism. No one wants to be accused of, or admit to being a racist, because many view racism as a binary concept, that we’re racist or we’re not because racism and racists are “bad.” However, by virtue of being born a White in America, I myself participate in a racist system. We escape that heritage only in degrees.
Wilkerson suggests that instead of focusing on racism, Americans might be able to discuss caste issues more civilly. My own thinking is that we need to acknowledge the facts of revisionist history. This may be wishful thinking as it seems unpatriotic in some circles to admit that American exceptionalism is a misnomer.
As civilization encroached upon the frontier, notes Isenberg, backwoodsmen were expected to purchase land and adjust their savage ways to society’s standards or move. Sometimes these men were enlisted for Indian Wars and later conscripted into the military. Their votes were sought when universal male suffrage arrived. In other words, the down and out were expected to do the grunt work for the elite.
This tendency has kept reoccurring throughout our nation’s history. America may have resisted a monarchy, but the landed ruling class remained in charge. Initially those without property couldn’t vote, which means the poor couldn’t vote.
Fast forward: think attitudes towards “welfare mothers” during the Reagan years and I think of my own reactions when I see the scattered tents of homeless people at Green Lake Park in Seattle.
Isenberg reports that during America’s Civil War, planters with twenty or more slaves were exempt from military service in the Confederate Army which protected the plantation economy. Later, the South’s tenant farmer system kept poor farmers from purchasing land, which had been a key to upward mobility in America.
Later, as WWII ended and the GI Bill offered a leg up to veterans, caste and race intersected. The New Deal and the GI Bill were designed to help as few African-Americans as possible and reinforced existing Jim Crow laws. Such information certainly wasn’t part of my high school curriculum in the 1960’s.
I do recall LIFE magazine photos of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s blatant interference with school integration in 1957. A news photo of a White teenager in Isenberg’s book exemplifies “the ugly face of white trash.” The teen had complained that “whites should have rights, too.” We still hear traces of that rhetoric.
Class distinction observations become clear in many of Isenberg’s chapters. She asserts that these distinctions placed/place poor Whites just a notch above that of Black people. This dovetails with themes in Wilkerson’s Caste. Isenberg writes of poor White and “redneck” votes being solicited by politicians.
The current pandemic has outed the blatant discrepancies in America’s economic, social, and health care fabric. Wilkerson cites how the Covid-19 pandemic fallout makes connections between caste and poor health. “It was the caste-like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy – grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact – that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place.” People of color were significantly affected.
Both authors conclude with cogent epilogues. Wilkerson asserts in Caste that “Americans pay a steep price for an unjust system that runs counter to the country’s stated ideals.” Wilkerson advocates that we engage in “radical empathy.” “Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations.”
Isenberg completes White Trash proposing that “If this book accomplishes anything it will be to have exposed a number of myths about the American dream, to have disabused readers of the notion that upward mobility is a function of the founders’ ingenious plan, or that Jacksonian democracy was liberating, or that the Confederacy was about states’ rights rather than preserving class and racial distinctions.”
These ambitious and accomplished books by Isabel Wilkerson and Nancy Isenberg enlarge our views and dispel common tropes about American history. Caste and White Trash make valuable contributions to our social, economic, and political justice literature. Both books are well worth reading.