Two Special Reading Recommendations

In February of 2013, Forest Whitaker, a famous, Academy Award-winning actor, entered a delicatessen on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was crowded, so he turned around to walk out rather than wait. In New York City, where people get angry at you for walking too slowly on the sidewalk, this maneuver is not only commonplace, but normalized. I’ve walked out of such delis many, many times.

But on his way out, Mr. Whitaker, who is Black, was stopped by a store employee who accused him of stealing and who frisked him in front of the crowd of other customers.

“It’s a humiliating thing for someone to come and do that,” he said afterwards. “It’s attempted disempowerment.”

How did this happen to a famous actor at the height of his power and influence?

Was it mere racism?

For Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the episode reveals something else, the invisible force that keeps everyone in their place, even celebrities like Forest Whitaker. That invisible force is caste.

And her book is a work of monumental scholarship and insight that ought to redefine the way we think about American society. If you are working to build a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just community, then you must read this book.

The Basecamp community’s core value is pluralism. Before reading this book, I would not have had language for this, but pluralism is fundamentally “anti-caste.” Consider this early description of caste:

Caste “predates the notion of race and has survived the era of formal, state-sponsored racism [1] that had long been openly practiced in the mainstream. The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see. We cannot win against a hologram.” [2]

If Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist is the defining book about the tip of the iceberg, then Caste is the defining book about the 90% of the iceberg under water. In many places the book is a harrowing and painful. But it is also—and always—supremely insightful, elegantly written, and unrelenting in its persuasiveness that caste is the true “origin of our discontent.” Or, as Wilkerson puts it,

“Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race is the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.”

The perfect reading companion to Caste is the short-form interview series “Leading in the B-Suite” by Rhonda Morris and Adam Bryant. They have created a platform to demolish the rigid caste roles described in Wilkerson's book by highlighting the tremendous skill and wisdom of Black executives.

Consider this excerpt from their most recent conversation, with Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox:

Morris: Over the course of your career, what headwinds did you face because you are a Black woman?

Burns: “People think that the only racism that we now feel or should feel is when people overtly say or do something. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. It’s like the air that you breathe. My daughter and I were walking down a street in New York City and there was a bunch of people coming toward us, three or four across. They didn’t pay any attention to us, and my daughter said, 'They walk like they own the place.'

“There’s a structural comfort level in society, a supremacy, that White people, particularly in America, feel. The challenge is so much more about the world re-educating White people than it is about the world re-educating Black people or Brown people. What happened with the Jim Crow laws was that they taught White society to look at all Blacks as objects that were less valuable than their horse or their dog.

“And this was during non-slave times. So if you saw a Black person walking toward you, that Black person had to give way to you. The reason why I’m talking about this is that I’ve never been faced with ignorant racism at work. But it was clear that no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good I was, we’re going to be judged against this standard that we will never be able to meet, and most of us don’t want to.

“It became clearer as I moved up in the company that there was a level of discomfort because I am so different from the people my colleagues normally saw. The subtle messages were that I was in a place that I didn’t belong.”

If you read only one book this year to become a better leader, better educator, and better human being, let it be Caste.

And if you read only one interview series to achieve the same objective, let it be “Leading in the B-Suite.”

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[1] If you are skeptical of the notion of “state-sponsored racism,” worry not: she comes with a long list of receipts.

[2] In the same section, Wilkerson goes on to say:

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank of standing in the hierarchy. […]

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. […]

“What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.

“For this reason, many people—including those we might see as good and kind people—could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group.”

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