Confronting evil again and again

On the first few pages of Isabel Wilkerson's latest

I recently started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which is likely to win everything it can possibly win in the literary and journalistic world. Already, the New York Times’s Dwight Garner has deemed it “an instant American classic.”

The book offers a masterful portrait of American inequalities, connecting it to caste systems of Nazi Germany and India. It begins with The Man in the Crowd, a brief narrative about the famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich in which, among the heil-ing men with their right arms outstretched toward the Führer, one man keeps his arms folded to his chest. Next, we visit Siberia in 2016, where a heat wave has struck the tundra near the End of the Land and anthrax is terrorizing the living.

Readers are quickly transported to the other side of the planet, to the United States, where a “collision of unusual circumstance” gives us Trump’s America on a broken, golden platter. On page eight, Wilkerson describes the emboldenment of evils we might recall from the headlines after November 2016.

She mentions the Portland stabbing of 2017, and my eyes squeeze shut. Two white men stabbed to death for standing up to another white man who was hurling anti-Muslim epithets at a hijabi woman. I remember the first time I read of it three years ago, scrolling through my phone in someone else’s bed, barely awake yet and glued until nightfall. I remember reading it and feeling my body go into a shock, immovable, locked in place, heavy. I remember that feeling because it’s the same feeling I had upon hearing of the next hate crime, the next mass shooting in a year of mass shooting after mass shooting. It’s the same feeling I have anytime I hear of another death at the hands of police, another senseless deportation. It’s the same feeling I’ve been getting lately, the closer we get to another election.

I’m only 15 pages in, and I’ve already had to take several breaks. This will be a slower than usual read for me.

Pick up a copy, if you can.

—fiza

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