Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – It is being asked over and over again in this final week before election day: Why is this election so close? (And now with the election over, how did this happen?)
The answer:
When you look at this as only an election, then it doesn’t make sense. But when you look at this as an existential crisis over what our country will be, then it starts to make sense.
Looking at it through the lens of caste, it makes perfect sense. People are not voting against their own interests. They are voting for the interests that matter most to them.
For many people, as we saw on Jan 6, that means maintaining their position at the top of the American caste system, with all the rights and entitlements that come along with it.
Tensions are on the rise as our country faces an existential crisis unlike any we have seen before, due to the projections that, by 2042, the historic white majority would no longer be in the majority. As it is, in 2020, the census found that, for the first time in American history, the white population was the only group whose numbers fell while others remained steady or grew.
This is an existential crisis for everyone because we have never experienced this configuration as a nation. That is why we’re seeing a fixation on immigration in this country — as to which kind of immigrants are welcomed versus which would be deported, and a fixation on curtailing abortion and ensuring more births.
The task before us is to imagine what kind of nation we want to be and what we are willing to do to achieve it.
It was an honor to discuss this with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and to hear him say of the caste perspective on this fraught election: “I feel that I finally have an explanation that I get. I just haven’t had one before tonight.”
These were the reasons I wrote Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. For fuller insights, I invite you to consider chapters 25 and 26, along with the Afterword, of Caste, in which I forewarned of what we are seeing.
The interview is available to hear on the YouTube Channel for MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, starting at minute 20:46. | Posted on 01/Nov/2024 23:56:22