“Many of them are not only dog-eared, but often double-cornered-dog-eared, the margins marked up with my own commentary,” says the author, whose new book is “Caste.”
What books are on your nightstand?
I have years of catching up to do. I am especially looking forward to reading “The Sympathizer,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Washington Black,” by Esi Edugyan, and “The Vanishing Half,” by Brit Bennett.
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
I am working my way through Proust because it seems that there is the notion that every writer ought to and because I have been a Francophile since my first French class in third grade.
What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
Back in the 1930s, a Harvard-trained African-American anthropologist, Allison Davis, and his equally refined wife, Elizabeth, risked their lives to study life under Jim Crow in a remote section of Mississippi. They had to sublimate their educated demeanor and act as subordinates even to the Northern white couple, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, whom they were teamed with as fellow anthropologists for the project, lest they disrupt the caste system they were studying and invite danger to themselves. After years of dedicated fieldwork, Allison Davis and the Gardners produced a book in 1941 called “Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class,” perhaps the earliest study of caste in America from both sides of the divide. It’s a book that got overshadowed upon publication and still warrants more recognition for its groundbreaking view into life as it was in the feudal South.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
We are in the midst of a golden age of Black intellectual abundance at the precise moment we most need these voices, and it stresses me out to even attempt to name the many whom I admire. I would include Suzan-Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage, Adam Serwer, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Saeed Jones, Tracy K. Smith, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Brent Staples, Karen Attiah and Yamiche Alcindor. And I must add the historians: Ibram X. Kendi, Daina Ramey Berry, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Blair L. M. Kelley, Carol Anderson and Stephanie Jones-Rogers.
Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
I wish we could see more books about the inner lives of everyday people from marginalized groups in our country — not the extremes of either celebrity or pathology, but just regular working folks who make up, for instance, the great bulk of African-Americans. People just going about their days and getting through the challenges of ordinary life do not get anywhere near the attention they deserve in the popular imagination. And their invisibility leads to distortions in how an entire group is seen, gives the impression that people from across the racial divide are more fundamentally different than we actually are. Two of the most gorgeous examples that come to mind for me are Toni Morrison’s “Jazz” and Rita Dove’s “Thomas and Beulah,” both of which elevate the ordinary to the sublime.
What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to learn more about America’s caste system?
W. E. B. DuBois’s “Black Reconstruction” is vital to understanding the reinvigoration of caste after the end of the Civil War, as is Eric Foner’s “Reconstruction.” The late anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in his 1942 book, “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth,” was among the earliest to make the case that race was a social construct and that caste was an underlying driver of our disparities. For understanding how caste operates in specific segments of our society, I would recommend the following: “Medical Apartheid,” by Harriet A. Washington, for stunning insights into how caste has played out in the history of health care in our country. “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander, and “Just Mercy,” by Bryan Stevenson, for overwhelming evidence of caste in our criminal justice system. “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein for an analysis of how caste has undergirded our country’s housing policies. And for the effect of caste in economics, the work of William A. Darity, specifically, “Persistent Disparity” and “From Here to Equality.” Decades ago, in the seminal work “The Annihilation of Caste,” the late Bhimrao Ambedkar, the revered leader of the Dalit liberation movement, wrote of the divisive nature of caste in India, but close observers of racial dynamics in the United States will recognize parallels with our own country in his impassioned treatise. Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” remains perhaps the most comprehensive single work on what Myrdal himself came to see as a caste system in America. And finally, “The Negro in Chicago,” the 1922 report from the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which convened in the aftermath of the 1919 race riots, is as chillingly prophetic and relevant to us today as it was when it was written nearly a century ago.
Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which genres do you avoid?
I find myself drawn to classic, often underappreciated, novels of the 1930s and 1940s, to works like “The Street,” by Ann Petry, who is deservedly experiencing a renaissance, “If He Hollers, Let Him Go,” by Chester Himes, who deserves his own renaissance, and “Black No More,” by George S. Schuyler. The latter is a clever and biting satire in which Schuyler imagines the social disruption of an invention that can make Black people look like white people in a matter of days. Black people who swear they would never do it, line up to be converted, while paranoia spreads among white people who fear being infiltrated by Black people who only look white. Thousands of Black people disappear into the white world, but have trouble truly passing because they have neither the back story nor the dominant caste perspective to pull it off, and thus live in fear of being outed.
I am always struck by how fresh and unflinching the writing of that era is, that, in the midst of depression and Jim Crow and war, they wrote with a fearless straightforwardness and emotional truthtelling that could have been written today.
How do you organize your books?
My books are not only dear to me, they are central to my research and to the act of writing. Many of them are not only dog-eared, but often double-cornered-dog-eared, the margins marked up with my own commentary. So being able to locate a book is crucial, but my books are only organized loosely by subject area. I have so many books on a range of overlapping subjects, too many books for any one room, too many books for the overflowing shelves, that, especially in the thick of writing, hardly any room in my house is without a pile of books on whatever flat surface happens to be available. This means that I am frequently on the hunt through multiple rooms for a book I need, and am grateful for the internal compass that seems always to save me. There have been times where I have had to read a book a day for research, and this internal compass seems to somehow remember the general vicinity of whatever book I’m looking for and wherever it has last been seen.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
“Blindness,” by José Saramago, one of my favorites in the world. From the moment I first read it years ago while on a trip to Portugal, I have loved it for its unsentimentally pure and raw comprehension of human nature. It’s a prophecy and a parable about the range of human reactions when an unnamed city in an unnamed country is suddenly afflicted with a mysterious contagion of blindness. He chooses to leave the characters unnamed as well and thus hurls us into the isolating anonymity of the social disorder that ensues. With the turn of each alarming or endearing page, I thought to myself, this is exactly what humans would do. He holds a light to the bleak underside of human frailties that get people into trouble as they relate to one another, and he writes with a seeming wish to believe that, despite evidence at times to the contrary, while humans will do whatever it takes to survive, they are, in the end, essentially good.
What book would you recommend for America’s current political moment?
If forced to name a single one, it would have to be Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” He captured our present before it had even happened.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
Years ago, I was in the earliest stages of what would become “The Warmth of Other Suns,” still putting my thoughts into language, and teaching at Princeton for a semester. One day, I was chatting with a group of faculty members about the unnamed, embryonic book I was working on. Soon afterward, one of them handed me a copy of “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” by John Dollard, and said it might be of some help to me. It was the first I had heard of Dollard or seen the word “caste” applied to America. It felt both dissonant and intriguingly appropriate. I realized then that what I was hearing in the interviews I was conducting with people who had fled the Jim Crow South was, in fact, the testimony of survivors of a caste system here in our own country. It set me on a course of researching everything I could about caste, and I have been using the word ever since.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, to sit between them and to referee, over her favorite oysters and cornmeal dumplings and sweet potato pone.
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Isabel Wilkerson Loves Books. That Doesn’t Mean She Treats Them Gently. - The New York Times
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