Caste

Reading Caste, and feeling my brain both expanding and exploding.  Isabel Wilkerson, thank you for spoon feeding us a breakdown of the most complicated social dilemma of this country (and the world). 

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown.  It was in the  making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another,, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.  It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.  

None of us are ourselves. 

p53

In 1994, when I stepped off that airplane, little did I know I would be cast into a caste system (the middle caste, as it were), a social construct that is singularly American.  I had spend my entire subsequent years to "fit in", but into what, I didn't know until now.  It was an innate "fight or flight" response I had to assimilate or fail.  In doing so, I had given up my unique identity and rooted more and more tightly to my assigned caste (for as it turns out, one cannot move from one caste into another).  It is not social, it is not racial, it is not cultural, it is all of these and more.  

I have not felt like myself since.  Now I know why.  And in that, there is clarity and relief.  

I have tried to explain my trips of homegoing, how nice it is to hear my native tongue, to look around and see similar complexions and features.  What accounts for that instant sense of arrival and belonging?  I have not understood it until now.  When I go "home", it is the ultimate reclaiming of self, just another human on her native land, no more and no less.  The opposite has always been an undercurrent of my life in this country.  Since the Pandemic, since the era of Trump, it has been imperative that I identify it, name it, and speak out against it.  Not to traverse castes, but fight to abolish it altogether.