Review

This review was published on Goodreads.

Author’s Note (05 Jun 2024): This review was written over 2 years ago.

It feels weird to rate a nonfiction, especially when its subject is far removed from my personal life. Your struggle for freedom entertains me, 4/5. I don’t even have the required background knowledge to criticize many of the arguments this book raises. The rating is for how successful the book is in overturning my worldview, and in that department, I think it did pretty well.

This is a wake-up call, addressed to the audience, alerting them to the real monster lurking behind the facade of race: the caste system. The author draws copious examples from the Third Reich, India, the US, and her own experience as an African-American, to step-by-step peel away the layers of lies and self-delusions that caste erects, exposing its arteries and nervous system, how it feeds from envy, hatred and desire to belong of humans, how its ripples spread far and wide beyond the myopic visual horizon of Twiiter cancel games. No medium will ever be able to capture 246 years of slavery and its shadow that haunts an entire community to this day, but this book comes damn close.

For those who have an explicit purpose to read this book, I recommend you dive in. For those whose life do not cross paths with the plight of the African-Americans, the Indian Dalits, or the many scapegoats of the Nazis, I encourage you to read this book as a study in social hierarchy, how something as arbitrary as melatonin could be used as demarcation point for caste, and how none of us is immune. In the New World, skin color is the basis for caste division. In Europe, lineage. India, Hindu religion. What other lines exist in our own society? Age? Gender? Ethnicity? Eye color?

== END REVIEW ==

My favorite snippets

Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances in medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of a BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact, you do the opposite. You educate yourself. You talk to people who have been through it and to specialists who have researched it. You learn the consequences and obstacles, the options and treatment. You may pray over it and meditate over it. Then you take precautions to protect yourself and succeeding generations and work to ensure that these things, whatever they are, don’t happen again.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it.

Forced good cheer became a weapon of submission to assuage the guilt of the dominant caste and further humiliate the enslaved. If they were in chains and happy, how could anyone say that they were being mistreated? Merriment, even if extracted from a whip, was seen as essential to confirm that the caste structure was sound, that all was well, that everyone accepted, even embraced their station in the hierarchy. They were thus forced to cosign on their own degradation, to sing and dance even as they were being separated from spouses or children or parents at auction (yes that’s why i hate team building games so much thank you)

Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don’t get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.