Preview to the Next NAD Best Practices Book Club Title: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Watch the recording of the June 1, 2021 Best Practices Book club as Michael Campbell and Dave Gemmell and a team of pastors and scholars reflect upon their reading of the book 'Caste' by Isabel Wilkerson. In the book club the panelists reflected on the implications of caste within the framework of Seventh-day Adventist pastors and congregations. Panelists included: 

·       Garrison Hayes, Associate Pastor Community Praise Center

·       Kristin Denslow, Department of English Associate Professor SWAU

·       Olive Hemmings, Professor of Religion WAU

·       Zane Yi, Associate Dean, School of Religion, LLU

·       Todd Stout, Pastor, Advent Hope

The author invites us to look more deeply into the problem and complexity of race in America. The idea of caste is the artificial creation of hierarchies, especially when it concerns race, class, or gender, and the way those categories have been used to subjugate anyone else within a given culture. The problem of caste is an insidious one, and remains powerful in its pursuit of the “natural order of things.” Racism and casteism frequently occur together, and overlap, thereby contributing to scenarios that bind people within a rigid, fixed hierarchy. The author is a celebrated Pulitzer-prize winning journalist. As she unpacks 400 years of racism—what she describes as America’s caste system—she draws comparisons with two other similar structures: the “lingering, millennia-long caste system of India” and “the tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany.” In both instances, one group sought to dehumanize the other in a quest for domination.

Especially troubling was Wilkerson’s research into the Third Reich. As they debated about how to “institutionalize racism” in Germany” they asked themselves “how the Americans did it.” They found that the United States was the “classic example” of “racist jurisdiction” beginning first with the extermination of the Native peoples. Wilkerson lays bare this process in what she terms the “eight pillars of caste” which range from divine will to strategies of terror. Yet “Caste is [just] a notion; it is a state of mind.” In other words, caste can be dismantled, and all are called to be set free.