Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Six years ago this very day, I boarded a 7 pm flight to London en route to Delhi for my first ever trip to India after two decades of studying the concept of caste. I knew not a soul, so it took months of planning and hand-wringing over visas and bureaucracies to get there.
I arrived in the night fog of Delhi 22 hours later with the sole purpose of communing with like-minded scholars, whom I had reached out to, sight unseen, to join an intimate conference on the subject that had been my life’s mission since my research on caste for The Warmth of Other Suns.
I carried with me my marked-up copy of The Annihilation of Caste, by the Dalit visionary Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. I channeled the spirit of the only caste scholar to have lived in the Jim Crow South and in India, Gerald Berreman, a lodestar for the case I was making about the parallels in both countries.
But what propelled me more than anything, beyond the urgent threats to our democracy over the ruptures of caste, was a lifetime of chafing under caste myself — the pushback and indignities I’ve faced as a living, breathing caste experiment, obstacles that would become the scenes and sinew of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
I told no one what my project was or that I was even working on a book. It is my process, as anyone who knows me knows, to never, ever talk to anyone about what I’m working on — a vow I’ve kept since The Warmth of Other Suns, where I learned the occupational hazards of sharing new ways of seeing the world before you publish them.
In that circle of scholars in Delhi, I finally found people who spoke my language. They seemed delighted to hear an African-American woman’s expertise and kindred truth, the parallels I had long identified in these systems of oppression.
On these trips, I go as a scholar not a sightseer, so the pictures I take are for research purposes, to record images to convert into the word pictures of narrative nonfiction. But here are a few: one with a Dalit schoIar who confided to me the travails she had suffered, and a meeting with an attendee’s copy of Warmth on the table.
One day, I hope I get to see the Taj Majal. Until then, the mission continues. | Posted on 19/Jan/2024 23:04:49