It’s Personal: On Gaining an Inclusive Consciousness and Becoming an Ally

In retirement (after I caught up on sleep) my brain was ready for some non-medical activation, so I joined my college’s online book club. The first book we read was Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020). Caste likens racism in the United States to the caste system in India, as well as Hitler’s antisemitism in Germany. I learned that Hitler’s bureaucrats were inspired by our own country’s Jim Crow laws in developing their anti-Jewish policies. The main point of Caste is that “otherism” — the act of declaring one group of people as better than or less than another group — runs through human history and can be based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identification, or other identifiers.