When Albert Einstein, a Jew, escaped persecution in Germany –– just a month before Adolf Hitler became chancellor –– he arrived on America’s shore and was shocked to see institutionalized prejudice, discrimination, and often outright abuse of African Americans.
After establishing himself as a professor at Princeton University, New Jersey, Einstein took a personal stance against bigotry: For example, when black opera singer Marian Anderson performed in his new hometown she was shunned at Princeton’s Nassau Inn because of the color of her skin, Einstein invited her to stay in his home. He frequently used his growing fame and prestige to speak out on behalf of equality, justice, and humanity.Albert Einstein
Referring to the racism he witnessed, he said, “The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.
“Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived,” Isabel Wilkerson writes, “refusing to see himself as superior to people he was being told were beneath him.”
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| Alexander Wilkerson |
Isabel Wilkerson is the proud daughter of a Tuskegee Airman in World War II. After the war her father worked as an engineer building bridges.
She sees patriotism as defending the ideals in the Constitution and standing up to authoritarianism in whatever shade or color.
Last year Wilkerson spoke at the University of Richmond and received a standing ovation.
“My father would be so proud to see this moment,” Wilkerson said, responding to the ovation.
Her father was born in nearby Petersburg, Virginia. “In everything that I do, I think about my ancestors. It was against the law for my ancestors to read and write, and here I stand with a Pulitzer Prize.”
In 'Caste,' she recounts Einstein’s gentle but powerful heroism: first to escape Fascism and Nazism in Germany and then to stand up to racism and casteism in his adopted new country.
Wilkerson writes:
“To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system –– the twelve-year reign of the Nazis –– can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’
‘It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,’ wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. ‘It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.’
It is also temping to vilify a single despot at the sight of injustice when, in fact, it is the actions, or more commonly inactions, of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running, the people who shrug their shoulders at the latest police killing, the people who laugh off the coded put-downs of marginalized people shared at the dinner table and say nothing for fear of alienating an otherwise beloved uncle. The people who are willing to pay higher property taxes for their own children’s schools but who balk at taxes to educate the children society devalues. Or the people who sit in silence as a marginalized person, whether of color or a woman, is interrupted in a meeting, her ideas dismissed (though perhaps later adopted), for fear of losing caste, each of these keeping intact the whole system that holds everyone in its grip.
‘Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire,’ the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote. ‘Case is a notion; it is a state of mind.’
No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to its message that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And, high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.
And yet, somehow, there are the rare people, like Einstein, who seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe, who manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to. From the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery to the white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, these all-too-rare people are a testament to the human spirit, that humans can break free of the hierarchy’s hold on them.
These are people of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, secure within themselves, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and compassion. They are what many of us might wish to be but not nearly enough of us are. Perhaps, once awakened, more of us will be.”
Key word: “Awakened” –– not the misappropriated, misunderstood and maligned “woke.”
Her book is a warning to us in 2023 and 2024..
To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, who also warned of dictatorships, it can happen here.
“Caste” is a must-read book for anyone interested in bridging the great divide caused by the Big Lie, Lost Cause, and forces of fear, hate, grievance, and resentment. The book is indispensable when considering the fate of military monuments and namesakes that honor the insurrectionist leaders of the Confederacy. (In the weeks ahead many military bases and sites will be renamed to stop honoring insurrectionist Confederates.)
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| Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth speaks with soldiers of 25th Infantry Division at U.S. Army Garrison Hawaii, Jan. 24, 2023. (Sgt. Rachel Christensen) |
We had the privilege of reviewing Wilkerson’s compelling book last year, and a new paperback version was published last month.
The version of Wilkerson’s book in this particular review is written for young people, at least at a high school reading level. It’s accessible without watering down any of the message, vocabulary, or concepts. Not surprisingly, “Caste” has reportedly been banned at some libraries, including in Texas.
“Like Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, ‘The Warmth Of Other Suns,’ ‘Caste’ has already won near-universal adoration from literary circles. ‘This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,' Oprah Winfrey said when naming the book to her bestseller-making list, and Wilkerson’s powerful nonfiction narrative lives up to the acclaim.”
In fact, echoing Oprah, “Caste” is one of the most important books we’ve featured over fourteen years on our Navy Reads blog. And this version for young people is absolutely excellent.
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