july media roundup

Covers

caste

I read Times bestseller & Oprah-recommended book Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson. To be more precise, I read a little over half of Caste. It had an interesting premise and set out to show that America's racial problems were better suited to the Indian style of caste than to the American idea of racism. Wilkerson attempts to show this by defining caste's components and pointing them out in the American social landscape. Where things went wrong were the presentation. Caste had two distinct problems heavier than the premise could carry. The first issue was an overly ornate style of writing plastered with particularly unhelpful analogies. Caste is like the mudsill of a house. Caste is like The Matrix. Caste is like a computer program. A wolf pack. A Broadway play. Marionettes. Each chapter opened with an anecdote or analogy, and almost every analogy was unhelpful. The concept of enforced social stratification isn't difficult and these references only served to water down the narrative.

My second main qualm with the book was the Liberal attitudes it conveyed. In many spots I would have agreed completely with the premise if only the word "Class" were to replace "Caste". Wilkerson does actually touch on the differences briefly:

Class is an altogether separate measure of one's standing in a society [than caste], marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from the socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If yo can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.

I don't particularly disagree with her on this, but I can only say that because the paragraph is carefully arranged to be irrefutable. Is it true that class mobility exists? Yes. Is it true that class can be lost in a calamity? Yes, though only in one direction and rarely at the top. This takes into account slim possibilities and presents them as equal to near certainties. America's upper class rarely faces real financial hardship, and class mobility is almost always limited to the lower and middle classes. Here, I believe, Wilkerson is missing the economic reality that the class divide is just too large for most to cross. In retrospect that big-L Liberalism shouldn't have been surprising as it came heartily endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a woman worth over $3 billion.

the yiddish policeman's union

Michael Chabon's novel is an easy recommendation because it's fiction, an interesting premise and just plain fun. In an alt-history autonomous Alaskan zone, loose-cannon-but-damn-fine Yiddish cop Meyer Landsman must unravel the secrets of the displaced Israeli Mafia after a role-reversed Arab-Israeli war. How's that for an elevator pitch? The novel is based on the real-life Slattery Report. This one comes highly recommended -- bake some challah, pour a glass, and turn off your brain long enough catch some action and learn a bit of Hebrew on the way. ▣