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Lädt ... Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents (2020. Auflage)4,289 | 166 | 2,764 |
(4.44) | 238 | ""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today"--… (mehr) |
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Gebräuchlichster Titel |
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Originaltitel |
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Alternative Titel |
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Ursprüngliches Erscheinungsdatum |
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Figuren/Charaktere |
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Wichtige Schauplätze |
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Wichtige Ereignisse |
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Zugehörige Filme |
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Epigraph (Motto/Zitat) |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me, And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that that I said was true. --------James Baldwin If the majority knew of the root of this evil,
then the road to its cure would not be long.
-------------------Albert Einstein | |
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Widmung |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. To the memory of my parents who survived the caste system and to the memory of Brett who defied it | |
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Erste Worte |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. In the haunted summer of 2016, an unaccustomed heat wave struck the Siberian tundra on the edge of what the ancients once called the End of the Land. There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. (The Man in the Crowd) We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are. (Epilogue) In the spring and into the summer of 2022, an unholy heat arose on the surface of the planet and in the hearts of men. (Afterword) | |
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Zitate |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reasson the had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was "to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy." (p 82) Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color. Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not. The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners, whose crime was that they were born with dark skin. Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally, inflicted, gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings. “No matter how grand you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do,” NBA star LeBron James told reporters just the year before, “if you are an African-American man, or African-American woman, you will always be that.” Louisiana culture went to great specificity, not so unlike the Indian laws of Manu, and delineating the various subcastes, based on the estimated percentage of African “blood.” There was griffe (three-fourths black), marabon (five-eighths black), mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-fourth), octaroon (one-eighth), sextaroon (one-sixteenth), demineamelouc (one thirty-second), and sangmelee (one-sixty-fourth). The latter categories, as twenty-first-century genetic testing has now shown, wood encompass millions of Americans now classified as Caucasian. All of these categories bear witness to a historic American, dominant-caste preoccupation with race and caste purity. But Ebola, and potentially planet-wide catastrophes like it, as the world would discover beyond imagining six years later, have a way of reminding human beings that we were all indeed, one species, all interwoven, more alike than different, more interdependent on one another then we might otherwise want to believe. Ebola has been merely a whispered for warning of what was to come. Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people that we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. Though they may not recognize it on a conscious level, dominant-caste Americans often show nearly as much curiosity about the ethnic, and thus caste, origins of their fellow Americans as do people in India…They will question a person whose race is ambiguous until they are satisfied of an origin. …white support has intensified for Republicans, now seen as the party of an anxious but powerful dominant-caste electorate. But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society. | |
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Letzte Worte |
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen. We in this country have the opportunity to set a standard for how to work together to create a truly egalitarian, multiethnic democracy, a stronger, all-encompassing, reconstituted version of ourselves as a society, and to prove to ourselves and to the world that the divisions we have inherited do not have to be our destiny. (Afterword) (Zum Anzeigen anklicken. Warnung: Enthält möglicherweise Spoiler.) | |
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Hinweis zur Identitätsklärung |
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Verlagslektoren |
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Werbezitate von |
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Originalsprache |
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Anerkannter DDC/MDS |
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▾Literaturhinweise Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen. Wikipedia auf EnglischKeine ▾Buchbeschreibungen ""As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of America life today"-- ▾Bibliotheksbeschreibungen Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. ▾Beschreibung von LibraryThing-Mitgliedern
Buchbeschreibung |
Rassismus, Sexismus, Klassismus sind Sprachen der Unterdrückung. Die Grammatik, die ihnen unsichtbar zugrunde liegt, ist das System der Kaste. In ihrer augenöffnenden Analyse legt die Historikerin und Journalistin Isabel Wilkerson den Blick frei auf eben dieses Regelwerk, nach dem wir entscheiden, wem in einer Gesellschaft Ressourcen und Respekt zugestanden werden – und wem nicht. Wilkerson betrachtet neben den USA die Kastensysteme Indiens und des Dritten Reichs. Sie zeigt, inwiefern selbst die privilegiertesten Menschen der westlichen Welt irgendwann einer benachteiligten Kaste angehören werden: der Kaste der Alten. Und sie erzählt eindrücklich aus dem eigenen Leben. Profund recherchiert, brillant geschrieben. | |
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Zusammenfassung in Haiku-Form |
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Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineGoogle Books — Lädt ...
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A caste system creates divisions and hierarchy. Caste ranks human values. Pits the presumed supremacy of one group, against the presumed inferiority of another. Caste systems are socially constructed. They are a social infrastructure that maintains itself by giving people subconscious instructions. Members keep to arbitrary boundaries, and keep to their assigned roles. Unlike class which is a malleable social standing depending on socioeconomic status. Caste is usually immutable and based on ancestry. Caste assigns meaning to people, and the roles they are permitted or required to perform. Caste systems determine power, resource allocation, and many psychological attributes.
The social problems of caste cannot be resolved by avoiding them. Ignoring the past does not reduce its impact on the present. Social problems have historic precedents, which need to be understood to consider how to resolve them. Even though the inheritors of the caste system might not have created the problem or participated in persecution, they are still responsible for the problems, to prevent further deterioration, and find resolutions.
Hierarchy, and its Maintenance:
Caste can take on many forms. Assigning power based on where the individual is from, the individual’s religion, or even race. The focus of this book is on race. Human hierarchies are older than race divisions. Race hierarchies are relatively new. Race was proven a fiction by DNA. Race is a social construct, that is held as a sacred truth.
The meaning of racism has been eroded. Racism is seen as an overt expression of hatred against another group based on race. The problem caused by having this narrow view of racism, prevents considering the toxic behaviors that form racism. Racism are the experienced toxic behaviors and social instruction gathered over life. Exposing individual racist acts or people distracts from considering the system that created the individual.
Within a racial caste, purity determines status. Depending on the classification of how pure the ancestry should be, determines admittance to the dominant caste. With the Unites States, even a little bit of impurity would disqualify someone from the dominant caste.
Rather than give negative characteristics to individuals, it is much easer to stigmatize a group. Group stigmatization results in loss of individuality. To continue stigmatization, all it takes is silence by those who disagree. Rewarding those who participate in providing terror.
A stigma used against lower caste members is to make them appear polluted. That contact with the lower caste can pollute the upper caste. Much of the pollution or dirtiness came from the type of work that ancestors did.
When the lower caste starts to succeed, it creates a violent backlash. Success is not an assigned role of the lower caste. Myths of superiority are given to upper caste members. Who will do not permit lower caste member achievements, to prevent appearance of equality.
To survive, the lower caste members need to become experts in understanding the behavior and thoughts of the upper caste members. They must learn to adjust themselves to the upper caste expectations.
Even without physical violence, the caste system can still hurt lower caste members. Psychological attacks, such as prejudice, can cause many physical reactions that increases the risk of premature death.
Comparisons:
India, Nazi Germany, and United States are three caste systems that are provided and compared with. Focusing mainly on United States caste systems.
Race is how American caste system assigns power. Before race, religion defined power. Christianity defined status, privileging those coming from Europeans. The native population formed the lower caste and forced to work, while the Europeans were exempt. As the native population proved difficult to enslave, the colonists imported Africans. When slavery was ending, laws were created to keep the lower caste members in their status. Breaching the caste system meant danger, and even death. An American paradox of proclaiming liberty for all, while holding subsets of citizens in subjugation.
India’s caste system is based on surnames. Bound to a belief in reincarnation that the one’s circumstance is based on prior life’s deeds.
Nazis looked to the United States for guidance on racial separation and purity.
Difficulty of Resolutions:
Within caste systems, there are consequences to belonging to different groups. Understanding the humanity of the lower caste, means not being able to avoid recognizing the harm done to them. This recognition is seen as a defect by the upper caste members. Upper caste members can persecute their member who shows sympathy with the lower caste members.
It is very difficult to stand against the group that is persecuting others. Standing against injustice has consequences, such as scorn from society.
Identifying offenders will not actually stop the underlying problem. Need to address the causes of the underlying behavior.
Forgiveness can be seen as absolution for problems. Even though the problems keep continuing, forgiveness is being asked of.
Caveats?
The book is polarizing. Historic events and institutions are simplified. The details left out would have provided a more complex understanding of the situation. The details that are kept, are those that make the argument against the upper caste appear stronger. Making nearly all upper caste members appear to be persecuting others with hatred, while the lower caste members appear mostly innocent.
The focus on negative reinforcement of caste, perpetuates negative values. The author makes the case that creating an understanding that lower caste members have value is a resolution to the caste system, but there are not many positive values provided. The showcased experiences of lower caste individuals, are all negative. But, lower caste individuals have a lot of diverse experiences, not all of which are negative.
To end the caste system, the main solution appears to be enlightenment. For the upper caste people to become enlightened, they need an understanding that difference caste individuals have value. This is problematic because it appears that only the upper caste individuals need enlightenment. Every individual, no matter the caste, can become enlightened and understand that others have value. Each individual can do a lot to improve social situations.
Communication is needed for the different caste members to understand each other’s values. And the author asks to listen to other caste members. The problem is that this is not simple. As the author points out, that given the sensitivity of the topic, many will pretend that there is no need to discuss the topic because they are not part of the problem. But there is more to the reason why it is difficult to talk about topic, as often it is neither side which wants to allow the other side to speak. In many contexts, the discussions stop when complexity is introduced. When the other side expresses experiences or history that the other side denies. Ending discussions with more prejudice. Discussion and communication are needed to resolve the divisions and conflicts that exist, but that require a willingness of each side to listen and engage with the other side, rather than just dismiss their views.
Within the book, everything is seen through a racial perspective. There are other reasons than just race. Which the author recognizes, but does not provide the other reasons. From politics, to individual behaviors, everything appears to be just about race. Alternative explanations are not really considered.
There are many groups that faced racial discrimination in the United States, but the focus is mainly on Black experiences. There is a lack of information about how other groups handled the discrimination. Considering how other groups overcame or did not overcome racial discrimination, can provide guidance as to how Black individuals can overcome racial discrimination.
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