Caste awry

Adam Shatz talks with Hazel Carby, January 12th 2021

This podcast is an accompanying conversation to Hazel Carby’s essay in the current London Review of Books (Vol. 43 No. 2 · 21 January 2021) on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; published to acclaim last year. Carby’s argument, like all those that go against the grain, is provocative. Interesting, is that the critique comes from a wider, global perspective of race and the historical complexities of the greater Black diaspora; and ironic, in that it is precisely with this broader brush that Wilkerson claims to make her case in her comparisons with the Indian caste system and Nazi Germany. But, Carby argues, Wilkerson is in fact bound by, and limited by, national constraints (be they inherited or learned), and constructs her “origin” story accordingly; one that depends on a (United States of) American exceptionalism.
Carby does make at least one very persuasive argument; in that I am persuaded to add Wilkerson’s book to my reading list! Beyond that, only a reading will tell.
(I often wonder about the considerations that lead to a book title change; why and to what end – aesthetic, linguistic, marketing. In the LRB review above, “Caste: …” is (mistakenly?) subtitled as in the US, but in the UK it seems to actually have been published as Caste: The Lies that Divide Us.)

January 17 2021: As I intimated above, prior to hearing this podcast, only positive takes on Wilkerson’s book had come my way, but a newsletter that I receive regularly from Jamelle Bouie (which always has something interesting to read, think about – and sometimes to eat!) has just suggested this review by Charisse Burden-Stelly in the Boston Review, in which, similarly to Hazel Carby, she considers “caste” to be an inadequate, even misleading, terminology under which to talk about race in the United States. Their critiques may differ in emphasis, but both reviewers dismiss this (imported) system as too rigid in structure and too dependent upon popular acceptance to lend itself to the complex interplay of politics, class and resistance in a volatile, changing social construct such as that which has evolved – continues to evolve – in the U.S.

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