Lightly edited copy of a blast email Debi and I sent out to members of our congregation, Peace Lutheran Church of Springfield, in advance of the fourth meeting an adult faith formation discussion of the book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson. We call the group Sundays@6, and it meets over Zoom Sunday evenings at 6 p.m. I archive these emails here so I can find them later if I need them. Link HERE for an explanation of why I use the blog as an electronic filing cabinet.
A handout is attached for our next session of Sundays@6, Sunday, Oct. 15, at 6 p.m. (We’ll be online from 5:45 p.m. to chat and work out technical glitches.) We’ll be going over Chapters 10-13 in Section 4 of Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” which is titled “The Tentacles of Caste” and outlines how pervasive race-based caste is in American life. (We’ll read and discuss the rest of Section 4 next week.)
As always, we’ll meet over Zoom. A link will be available tomorrow (Friday) in Peace Lutheran’s online newsletter, News You Can Use. You can also join the session by using this link, meeting ID and passcode:
- [deleted]
If for some reason you can’t get this link or the one in the newsletter to work, you can reach Pete and Debi at [deleted].
In Chapter 13, “The Insecure Alpha and the Purpose of an Underdog,” Wilkerson has a fascinating aside about wolves and dogs. As usual, when she goes off on an apparent tangent, she’s very much on message.
Wolves, and dogs, like Wilkerson’s terrier, have leadership hierarchies like we do. But alpha wolves “establish their rank early in life and communicate through ancient signals their inner strength and stewardship, asserting their authority only when necessary” while betas, gammas on down to “the omega, the underdog, the lowest-ranking wolf, sort themselves out by instinct.” She adds:
Humans could learn a lot from canines. The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or been seen as qualified for alpha positions — as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries – not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically, on the basis of having been born into the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste, the assumption being that only those from a certain caste or gender or religion or national origin have the innate capacity or deservedness to be leaders. (p. 206)
Two things stood out to Pete when he was reading this:
- On the whole, she says, wolves and dogs do a better job of it than we do. “After all, these roles are not artificially assigned based upon what an individual wolf looks like, as with a certain other species, but emerge as a consequence of internal personality traits that surface naturally in the forming of a pack.” (p. 206)
- Caste, as Wilkerson explains it, seems to be a very complex intersection of traits that have little, if anything, to do with the content of a person’s character. In the United States it has been racialized for 400 years, but it intersects with gender, class, educational level, family income and other demographic markers.
Wilkerson doesn’t use the word “intersectionality” (at least she doesn’t mention it in the index). But it fits. It’s an academic term, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA who also developed critical race theory, and it’s been twisted beyond recognition in political debate, but Merriam-Webster defines it simply as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.” In other words, the very things Wilkerson documents in “Caste.”
Wilkerson is a journalist, not an academic, starting out as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in the New York Times’ Chicago bureau. Does she take the political spin out of the subject and give us factual language for talking about race, caste, class and other intersecting cultural markers?
The handout for Week 4 is attached as a Microsoft Word Document.
Our discussions have been just great, and last week’s was especially thought-provoking! We’re looking forward to seeing you all again Sunday at 6!
— Debi and Pete
[Published Oct. 19, 2023]
Ordinary Time 