MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWilkerson makes a strong case for adopting a term associated with traditional society and heritable hierarchy to describe American racism ... Wilkerson is clear that \'[c]aste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive.\' I appreciate the gesture. The forms of inequality signaled by the terms “\'\' and \'race\' are neither identical nor symmetrical. But why then, is the lexicon Wilkerson has chosen drawn from a social order that she believes has both predated and outlasted state-sponsored racism? Since her intervention has less to do with Indian caste than with the changing conditions of American racism, I wonder whether Wilkerson has not politicized race at the cost of essentializing caste. She grasps the power of Indian parallels, but she does not engage sufficiently with caste to understand the deep lessons it has for the American experience ... She is less interested in the history of the concept than in the power of analogy ... A consummate storyteller, Wilkerson chooses her anecdotes to illustrate caste’s enduring logic, from humiliation and prejudice to spectacular violence ... The resistance to engaging with the history of racial capitalism is indeed surprising ... Wilkerson supports the forms of reconciliation undertaken by both Germany in the wake of the Holocaust and South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid. The viability of that measure without serious engagement with dispossession, destitution, and mass poverty — the problem of redistribution, in brief — appears questionable ... Wilkerson has written an important book that reminds us that a comradeship of interwoven histories might illuminate each other analogically but that they are neither identical nor symmetrical. The conversation that she has begun forces deeper engagement with the utopian possibilities, the missed meetings, the productive misrecognition, and the silenced voices which constitute the archive of global caste.
