The immeasurable cost of the tyranny of caste
Some will not share her politics, but all can agree that in writing her book Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, Isabel Wilkerson has devoted every fiber of her being and soul, marshaling her formidable intelligence and skills of research, organization, and verbal acumen to a premise that, failing inscription on tablets carried from a mountaintop with care, she supplies incomparably in her text:
“We look to the night sky and see the planet and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded how small we are, how insignificant our worry of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust we are. Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in a span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with? The species has suffered incomprehensible loss over the false divisions of caste, the 11 million people killed by the Nazis, the three quarter million Americans killed in the a Civil War over the right to enslave human beings, the slow living deaths and unfulfilled gifts of millions more on the plantations of India and in the American South. Whatever creativity or brilliance they had have been lost for all time. Where would we be as a species had the millions of targets of these caste systems been allowed to live out their dreams or live at all? Where would the planet be had the putative beneficiaries been freed of the illusions that imprisoned them too, had they directed their energies toward solutions for all of humanity, cures for cancer and hunger, and the existential threat of climate change rather than division?”
“Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean...We are not what we look like, but what we do with what we have, what we make with what we have been given, how we treat others and our planet. Human beings across time and continents are more alike than they are different...None of us chose the circumstance of our birth, we had nothing to do with being born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward. We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today...A world without caste would set everyone free.”
“We look to the night sky and see the planet and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded how small we are, how insignificant our worry of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust we are. Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in a span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with? The species has suffered incomprehensible loss over the false divisions of caste, the 11 million people killed by the Nazis, the three quarter million Americans killed in the a Civil War over the right to enslave human beings, the slow living deaths and unfulfilled gifts of millions more on the plantations of India and in the American South. Whatever creativity or brilliance they had have been lost for all time. Where would we be as a species had the millions of targets of these caste systems been allowed to live out their dreams or live at all? Where would the planet be had the putative beneficiaries been freed of the illusions that imprisoned them too, had they directed their energies toward solutions for all of humanity, cures for cancer and hunger, and the existential threat of climate change rather than division?”
“Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean...We are not what we look like, but what we do with what we have, what we make with what we have been given, how we treat others and our planet. Human beings across time and continents are more alike than they are different...None of us chose the circumstance of our birth, we had nothing to do with being born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward. We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today...A world without caste would set everyone free.”
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