MixedThe Los Angeles Review of Books... ambitious and unwieldy ... Wilkerson skates over the inadequacy of race language perhaps too quickly ... As a history, it has too many gaps; as a memoir, it reveals no discernible structure of a life lived over time; as a polemic, it relies far too much on sentimental appeal ... I confess being unable to know what to do with a chapter that outlines canine hierarchy and concludes that \'humans could learn a lot from canines\' about \'natural alphas. Similarly confounding is an odd interlude of an upper-caste Indian man jettisoning his symbol of caste identity, the sacred thread, and feeling that he is born again. Despite such unusual choices, most powerful in Caste are the vivid anecdotes of personal harm — the cumulative evidence for the lived experience of discrimination from slavery to segregation and into the era of civil rights and beyond ... turning to caste affords Wilkerson access to an experiential, affective register through which she collates moments that capture the persistence of discrimination ... such a personal focus serves as the anchor for the entire book as Wilkerson highlights the injury caused by unexpected behaviors ... That Wilkerson presents these ordinary encounters as \'radicalization\' or \'awakening\' — rejoicing that \'the heart is the last frontier\' — indicates the limits of her political imagination where the agency of the subordinated is superseded by the appeal to the sentiments of the dominant castes. Such limits are particularly evident because her sustained insistence on the potency and pervasiveness of the entrenched caste system demands solutions other than banal realizations of privilege or of common humanity. Moreover, as Wilkerson educates herself on the persistence of caste in India, she also seems to miss the full vibrancy of Dalit politics, culture, and history, insisting instead that she has developed a kind of caste-radar ... While the specific legacy of slavery and segregation, as well as the magnitude of ongoing anti-Blackness, demands attention, any book that claims to pinpoint \'the origins of our discontents,\' and provide a road map for the future must engage with changing and internally complex racial formations ... The vocabulary afforded by caste, uninflected by differential access to power, allows Wilkerson to claim that \'caste trumps class\' but misses a true measure of the modalities in which discrimination is lived and how racial taxonomies change over time ... For those convinced that racism in the United States isn’t a big problem today, the book should be an eye-opener. For those of us who already know these histories, Caste may serve instead as an invitation to dig deeper than Wilkerson herself chooses to and to understand more fully the exact coordinates of the race-caste analogy, both difference and similarity. In challenging American exceptionalism by placing domestic racial formations within and against other times and places, Wilkerson admirably draws attention to the realities of global connectedness. But transnational comparison should ideally go a step further, in order to reframe the unexamined truisms of each site and illuminate something we would not otherwise see ... In the end, Wilkerson’s choice to define caste and race with partial precision inhibits a fuller understanding of how inequality and discrimination acquire new shape and form in the present — as historical forms of violence persist but also mutate and magnify. To misread the very nature of power makes efforts to combat it nearly hopeless but also denies agency to those who fought the battles of the past and march in the streets today. What struck me most as I read this book during the pandemic is that Wilkerson’s frame doesn’t help explain how the powerful social movements of our COVID-19 era could emerge, or what they mean — led by the young; the poor; by women; by queer, trans, and nonbinary people; by Black and Dalit leaders in both India and the United States. Wilkerson engages the failures of President Trump’s response to the pandemic, and the misery it has caused, but not the larger histories of the movements that have led us to this moment.
Toni Morrison, foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksRefusing polarized narratives, The Origin of Others takes up this more nebulous task of understanding what it means to encounter the Other, to estrange or render familiar, to discard as foreign or to bring home ... In some ways, the most striking aspect of The Origin of Others is a catalog of 20th-century lynchings Morrison includes — with names, dates, and bare facts about the accusation of a crime, and the form of the attack ... Such spare prose requires no further exegesis, just the facts ... Reminiscent of such previous efforts as Edward Said’s Orientalism, Chinua Achebe’s \'An Image of Africa,\' and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, she pulls back the flesh of the racist and the racialized alike to try to unearth some common humanity without discarding realities of power and privilege.
