Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – In this fraught moment where democracy is in the balance, it is both chilling and clarifying to realize that, 90 years ago exactly, the Nazis were actually studying the United States and its treatment of nonwhite and Indigenous people, and were debating what they could apply for themselves as they honed their plans against Jews in Europe.
In June 1934, they convened a pivotal meeting to start work on what would become the Nuremberg Laws that would define who would be designated as Jewish and who could marry whom on that basis.
They did not need Americans or anyone else to learn how to hate, but they sent researchers to the United States to study how the U.S. had defined by fractions of blood what race a person was designated to be and the elaborate ways the country had found to officially outlaw intermarriage.
When Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents was first released, people were stopped in their tracks when they got to Chapter 8. And people who hadn’t read it but merely caught a reference on social media resisted the very idea of our country having anything whatsoever to do with the Nazis. But this history and the Nazi admiration of American race law was gut-wrenchingly documented by the Nazis themselves. Shockingly, the record shows, the Nazis rejected some aspects of Jim Crow as too extreme.
Now, in the four years since Caste made its way out into the world, spending much of its time on the bestsellers list, current events have tragically affirmed the connections it explores between our country and Nazi Germany, and many Americans have now come to recognize this as a grievous part of our history.
The questions are, as they have always been: What are we going to learn from what happened in Germany 90 years ago? What are we going to do to keep those parallels in the past? What are we going to do to prevent the authoritarian regimes of the past — both the Nazis and the Jim Crow culture that they studied — from becoming our future?
Swipe to the last slide to see one of the most cited passages in all of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, from page 82, as it’s been reposted across the internet. | Posted on 30/Jun/2024 21:47:39