“Caste” an essential read

I applaud you for publishing Jerry Willins’ review of “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, in your Dec. 23 edition. This book is riveting and a literary pleasure, both for the ease of its narrative and for its elegant thought and language.

It is also hard to read because of what it reveals, page after page. From slavery to Jim Crow to Obama to Trump, Wilkerson illuminates how we have sustained an artificial construction of society that deems some of us to be favored and some of us to be stigmatized as less worthy based on the shade of our skin, white or black or brown. The consequences are dehumanizing, consistently brutal, and often murderous.

As she did in her previous and also extraordinary work, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Wilkerson takes the reader on a long, clear-eyed walk in the painful, worn-out shoes of American racial discrimination. It is not pretty. As the reader inevitably recoils from the details, Wilkerson patiently and clearly shows how those in the favored castes unknowingly, subliminally ration -alize and prolong this tragic system, even if we are loving souls and personally free from prejudice in word and in deed.

That is an essential moral for all of us to absorb from this beautiful, sad, and important work. Please read it. Please take a walk in these shoes.

Sincerely,

Mark Lundsten

Anacortes