Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – There is no need nor do we have the luxury of continuing to be surprised at what we are seeing unfold around us.
I wrote this back in the summer of 2022 for the new Afterword of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I wrote this before many dared to think that even the consideration of this level of intrusion into people’s private affairs could ever be possible, that a basic part of everyday life would ever be up for debate:
“A revealing example of the extremes to which the most ardent have been willing to go to assure numerical caste dominance is the proposal to deny access to birth control itself. Combined with bans on abortion, these proposed restrictions would effectively block most every avenue for protecting bodily integrity and determining one’s own destiny, or, in the words of then Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in 1972, ‘the decision whether to bear or beget a child.’
“It was the longest-serving current member of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, who wrote the concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In doing so, he singled out three landmark cases that he argued the court should take up next: Lawrence v. Texas, which protects the right to same-sex intimacy; Obergefell v. Hodges, which established the right to same-sex marriage; and the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, which grants the right of married couples to use birth control. Justice Thomas described these three bedrock rulings as ‘demonstrably erroneous decisions,’ and wrote: ‘We have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents.’”
Understanding our country’s 400-year-old caste system explains so much of what we are witnessing. I urge all of us to learn our history and to recognize the patterns as a roadmap for what could come — if we truly want to work toward a more humane and egalitarian future.
#castetheoriginsofourdiscontents #dobbsvjackson #griswoldvconnecticut | Posted on 08/Jun/2024 01:20:57
