A couple of years ago, I sat on my porch in Oklahoma reading Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, in which he chronicles the origins and thorough inculcation of the concept of race into the heart and soul of the United States. I taught Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in a social welfare history class for many years, so I was aware of the realities of a national identity fraught with division purposefully created for the advantage of the few. Kendi’s book, however, made me understand even more deeply the persistence and determination of the white power structure to assure that racism was foundational in the identity of our young country. In the past year, I’ve read many other books about race and class and how we have gotten to our current state of ever-increasing inequality and division.
Rothstein, Richard. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America.
Rothstein chronicles how the governments of cities and states not only did not stop the blatant practices of real estate companies and banks to discriminate against black citizens in housing, but actually promoted them, denying black families the opportunity to live in places where their children would be most likely to thrive and further driving a social and economic wedge between white and black people across the country.
Metzl, Jonathan. M. (2019). Dying of whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland.
Metzl paints a searing picture of the desperation of certain groups of white people in three states that results in a consistent pattern of support of political decisions about taxes, gun ownership, and health care, that result in tragic disadvantage for the very white people who support them.
Ewing, Eve. L. (2018). Ghosts in the schoolyard: Racism and school closings on Chicago’s south side.
Closely related to housing, the availability of adequate schools is a determining factor for most families as they strive to create an environment in which their children can be safe, happy, and successful.
Murphy, Chris. (2020). The violence inside us: A brief history of an ongoing American tragedy.
Although he does not use the language of caste, Murphy reflects on the way that violence against enslaved black people, justified by their less-than-human status, set the stage in the United States for the development of the systemic violence that is evident today. “America became a nation anesthetized to physical harm because the entire country’s economic, political, and social structure was predicted on the brutal subjugation of black Americans.” (p. 61)
Isobel Wilkerson, I. Caste: The origins of our discontents
Wilkerson brings together all the messages from the previous books about race and class in a compelling argument that what we have in the United States is a caste system, similar in design and effect as the ancient one in India and the one that was created in Nazi Germany. In the United States, the system, based on skin color, has effectively excluded black people from the benefits of citizenship and placed white people in a situation of superiority that can itself be oppressive, especially for those whose life experience of economic struggle results in further distancing from groups of people with whom they share similar economic interests, desperately hanging on to whiteness as the one part of their identity that they hope will save them from landing on the bottom.