For months, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, lay parked on the far end of my dining room table. I’d borrowed it from a friend late last summer, and been neglectful about returning it, thinking I’d pick Caste up any day and begin to read what I knew was such an important book for the times in which we live.
But I kept putting it off, even though I felt guilty about keeping my friend’s book for so long.
Now that I’ve finally started it, I understand why. Yes, I knew it would be dense, heavy reading, powerful, painful subject matter about such an important issue, but I’ve never shied away from such material—in fact, I’m usually drawn to it.
I procrastinated because I’m sure my unconscious knew what bombshells would be lurking within its chapters. It’s hard to get through even a few pages without being overcome by shock and pure fury. And loaded up as I already was with outrage at our current political situation, the pandemic and its escalating deaths and despair, and my own angst at feeling trapped in an optionless COVID cage, I suppose I didn’t want to add more fuel to that emotional tinderbox.
But now I have; it’s burning hot and high.
Wilkerson tells us early on that the Christian philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing about the Holocaust, says “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” Yes. I’ve long believed that bearing witness to society’s inhumane treatment of those less fortunate than myself was of great importance. Sometimes we are able to make actual, practical efforts to sow seeds of caring and compassion amidst the injustice we see close to home; in both my therapy practice and work with delinquent girls I tried to do that. Sometimes we can only read about it, try to empathically experience histories of monumental intolerance. But I believe we must speak. That’s why I’ve become a writer.
I can’t be silent.
I can feel the escalation of my wild fury as I turn the pages, slowly, so I can take in Wilkerson’s words, try to comprehend that the horrors done to people of color have been done in my lifetime—in my country--lynching as entertainment, burning black human beings alive, hideous other formerly unimaginable travesties, relegating blacks to a caste system they can never escape.
I want to scream.
I realize, as I piece together the then and now, that Josh Hawley, Mo Brooks, Louie Gohmert, Rudy Guiliani, Sidney Powell, the QAnon crazies—almost all the Republicans in Senate and House, and yes, most of all, Trump, are continuing this astounding disenfranchisement. With their lunatic claims of election fraud, it’s the black vote they want to subtract, that they think is embezzling white people from their place in the hierarchy of human beings.
With their disregard of the escalating deaths in the pandemic, the largest portion of whom are black Americans, they are saying great, let them die, less votes for democracy and equality of all races and genders.
And I further realize, as I reflect on the raucous and syncophantic Trump rallies, that they exactly mirror the mobs at lynchings and burnings of the past. Lock her up! Stop the steal!
I want to do something, but I don’t know what, except to give money to the causes that I know are working towards changing the race dynamic in our country. But that doesn’t seem like nearly enough. I wish I were younger and could go to law school, engage somehow with Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy) in his incredible work.
Exhausted, my energy further hijacked by these fresh insights, this book, the daily news, I feel so totally powerless, so broken. In my “therapist hat” I would say, “Sharon, you’re allowing this to happen. You can reshape your thinking.” I would say, “Remember impermanence, things will change.”
But the deluge never stops. You say, tomorrow is a new year, there is hope on the horizon with a vaccine, Biden is to be inaugurated on the 20th despite what these monsters do.
Yes. Maybe.
Awareness precedes wisdom, the Buddhist dharma says.
The same friend from whom I borrowed Caste gave me an amaryllis bulb some weeks ago.
On a sunny table in my living room, its crimson petals are slowly unfolding.
*****
I’ll be giving another talk on Thursday January 7 for The Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield. Click on the link below and there will be a zoom link to the talk and discussion on my book, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent, How Poetry Changed A Group of At-Risk Young Women at 7:00 PM. I so hope some of you can show up in the “zoom room!”
https://www.owlibrary.org/adult-events.aspx#anchor_sharon
And this Sunday, I’ll be taping an interview for a Boston TV station, very exciting! I’ll send the link in a future post.
