Welcome to Litsy!

@sprainedbrain The #bestof2021swap package you curated for me is amazing! I love it all. I‘m thrilled to have the two books; both have been on my list for awhile. You understand my love of hygge (all things cozy). It was a perfect package for me! Also, I do not have a pink tea cup in my collection so I‘m jazzed for this gift. It‘s been so fun being your swap partner this season. Thanks @candority for hosting. ❤️

My absolute favorite from #May and one of my favorites this year #5thbookof2021
#12Booksof2021

Informative and thought-provoking

The best book I read in April was a buddy read with #SheSaid. I learned so much from this book and was stunned by a lot of it. Recommended it quite a bit and couldn‘t stop talking about it.
Concrete Rose was another excellent April read.

#12Booksof2021

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ This book is incredible. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, it‘s both horrifying and important. I learned so much and want to continue returning to this text to process it further. It‘s very difficult to read about the atrocities humans have inflicted on one other, but it‘s necessary in order to heal from our history, understand our present, and hopefully create a better future for us all. I would recommend this to everyone.

I read this book just over a year ago and couldn‘t help but consider who I‘d be now if I‘d been taught history with a consideration of perspective bigger than white privilege. I just reread this book for an IRL bookclub, and this time I wept. In just a year‘s time I read this differently knowing that legislatures are actively working to silence that perspective.

Like the Nazi comparison and learn something from this book. But redundancy is a problem that I could not say I love this book.
3.5 -4 stars out of 5.

#firstlinefridays

This was interesting. I was particularly drawn in by the Nazi comparisons, and I think that‘s what I will remember the most of this book. I have to admit I unlikely to remember the list of “pillars” of the system (she did a chapter on each). I‘d like to say the first half (which included those pillars) wasn‘t as interesting, but it just depended on what she was talking about at the time. Cont in comments...

4/5… important book, excellently supported, and a good read. The only reason I took a star off was because I had hoped it would go a little bit deeper… maybe I‘m expecting too much. This book was groundbreaking when it was published, but less-so now because so much other amazing work on race theory and institutionalized racism has followed it.

Also, she was incorrect about anthrax—it‘s a bacteria, not a virus 😊 otherwise, well-written!!

I finished this audiobook way back on August 12, and have been annoying those who know me ever since by pointing out the American caste system hard at work every time I see it.

Masterfully written, well-researched, infuriating book that is really just stating the obvious, but since so very many of us have been missing the obvious, this book should be required reading.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Fell short of my Summer reading goal 😔

Another outstanding book from Isabel Wilkerson. An absolute must read.

Wow! This book is a masterpiece! Beautifully written and expertly researched, it made me think, cry and mourn for so many lost souls. But it is ultimately hopeful and is a powerful and compelling call to action for us to all do our part-and then some-to make our world a more equal, inclusive and kind. Please read this book! Great in #audio too! #BookspinBingo @TheAromaofBooks

Often redundant but worthy because it helps one understand the confluence of race and class - caste. It makes it clear that this tightly joined pair are responsible for stagnation of the American Dream.

In this breathtaking work of non-fiction, Wilkerson compares racist systems in America to the caste systems in India and Naza Germany. A must read.

#currentlisten

Favourite book of the month (August) and of 2021 so far!

Top 5 Non Fiction!

Really worth reading: Wilkerson, a Black American, uses]“caste“ to describe a fixed framework, with eight elements, that racism or other oppressions, which change in time and place, can be fixed on. She mainly focuses on racism through time against Black Americans, but compares and contrasts this with the caste system in India and the genocide of Jews and other in the Holocaust.
#SheSaid April, #Bookspin July #Nonfiction2021 #AboutHistory

Once awakened, we have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate; we can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person.

Wow. I don‘t like nonfiction. This was amazing. I learned so much, don‘t even know where to begin. Page 377 (epilogue): even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the 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?

WOW!! What an eye opening read! I grew up in a blue-collar and didn‘t even realize at the time that we were borderline poor. But still I was vaguely aware that I had it better than others. Wilkerson‘s book points out the many ways in which those in the dominant caste have privilege they aren‘t even consciously aware of. This book looks at America through the lens of caste rather than race. Now I have some serious soul searching to do.

Benjamin Franklin, 1750: “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” Good info in this book about the historical changing definition of “Whiteness” and the history of barriers against those seen as “other.”

Virginia 1662 “All children born in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” Breaking from English legal precedent, this new law allowed enslavers to claim children of Black women, the vast majority of whom were enslaved, as their property for life, and for ensuing generations. It invited them to impregnate the women themselves, if so inclined...it converted the Black womb into a profit center.

#Bookspin for August
1. Girl, Woman, Other
2. The Lion‘s Gaze
3. Lost Children Archive
4. Me & White Supremacy
5. Five Little Indians
6. Talk about Race
7. The Salt Path
8. Warlight
9. Chop Suey Nation
10. Bush Runner
11. Africville
12. Redhead by the Side of the Road
13. Death and Life of Great Cities
14. The Innocents
15. How to Pronounce Knife
16. The Mountains Sing
17. The New Jim Crow
18. Hood Feminism
19. Seven
20. H is for Hawk

Starting this one now.

I‘m only at 4% but I am already annoyed. The author has referred to America as the oldest democracy in the world twice so far, and in what universe is that even remotely true? If we think of democracy as every citizens having the right to vote, America is not even a democracy right now.

#caste #nonfiction #kindle

This is a real eye-opener of a book, which redefines the centuries old system of racism and oppression in the United States as really a caste system like that found in India or Nazi Germany. Our caste system was simply determined by skin color rather than ethnicity or family name. This makes it all the more clear that accusations of “reverse racism” by white people are nonsense. “White privilege” is also obvious when put in this caste context.

#JoysofJune #Challenge2021

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ An excellent account of racism and explanation of how the U.S. is built on a caste system like India and Nazi Germany. I thought her explanations of what led to the 2016 election outcome were extremely clear and helped me wrap my brain around how the last four years happened in my own backyard. This book gathered all my questions of “Why?” and “How?” and provided the answer of the sickness of systemic racism. Recommend.

Wonderful book, I learned a lot. Highly recommend!

review here: https://debbybrauer.org/#caste-the-origins-of-our-discontents

Wow! Anyone who reads this book will not be able to deny the existence of racism in America. Very compelling and tough to swallow — this should be required reading.

#Booked2021 #AntiRacismBook

This book, there‘s not enough words in the world to give this book justice.

Wilkerson argues that US isn‘t a racist society, but a caste society and African Americans are the lowest caste. She compares US to India and Nazi-Germany.

I couldn‘t believe what I was reading when I read that Nazi-Germany looked to the US for inspiration and thought the US took things too far (!!!).

This should be mandatory reading for everyone.

This is unbelievable

I‘m not sure I want to know the answer to that last question.

I do this all the time and never thought that not everyone feel like they have the right to do so.

Echoing what other Littens have said about this book. I‘ve been reading books about racism & bias, & all of them have taught me something. This one adds new ideas & makes so much sense. So glad I finally got around to it. @Riveted_Reader_Melissa #shesaid
“‘So the real question would be,‘ he said finally, ‘if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?‘”
A powerful quote from this morning.

This book. I have no words.

Wilkerson makes the devastating history of caste utterly clear. Combining the U.S. system with India and Nazi Germany history is brilliant. I was especially gobsmacked by some of her real-life examples, from the historical to the personal.

Just go get this and read it!

Full review http://www.TheBibliophage.com #shesaid #booked2021 #antiracistbook #nonfictionchallenge2021 #POCauthor #thebibliophage2021

After slavery ended, the former Confederates took power again, but now without the least material investment in the lives of the people they once had owned. They pressed down even harder to keep the lowest caste in its place. African-Americans were mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and burned at the courthouse square, a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century.

The Warmth of Other Suns is one of my favorite books so my expectations were high for this follow up. This is more sociology but equally well done. I think she does a great job of comparing the racism and inequality in the U.S. with that of Germany and India. I‘m glad I waited to read this with our #SheSaid group here on Litsy because that helped me absorb it more.

This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to sell souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning sub-department of the postcard industry.

Something to think about

It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they have been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.