Memorial Plaques

• Plaque of Remembrance—Honors Enslaved African Ancestor
• Epitaph of Atonement—To make amends for ancestors who perpetrated and perpetuated systemic slavery of African people in the US (i.e. Blackbirds—hunters of fugitive enslaved people, plantation owners, slave patrols, “patrollers” or “patty rollers”—organized groups of armed men who monitored and enforced discipline upon enslaved Africans in the antebellum U.S. southern states). 
• Epitaph of Achievement—To acknowledge ancestors who opposed the enslavement of African people, an enslaved ancestor who excelled in the midst of and in spite of slavery (Frederick  Douglass, Shadrach Minkins), Abolitionists (Isaac Hopper—a Quaker, John Brown, William Still), enslaved ancestors who revolted and resisted (Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman). 

From an Isabel Wilkerson Instagram post: During this time of thanksgiving, my deepest gratitude to every reader who has taken Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents into their hearts and shared what they have learned from it — like @brigittesbookshelf who, after reading Caste, railed against the differences in how our country and Germany address their fraught histories.

For one, there are the stumbling stones, known as Stolpersteine —the brass squares inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims, embedded in the cobblestones outside the last known residences of those abducted. I will never forget seeing the stones for the first time in Berlin as I researched this book, how transfixed I was by them and by so much else I saw in that haunted land.

Grateful for readers who now see the deep and disturbing connections between Nazi Germany and Jim Crow, as documented in Caste. My years-long journey felt like an underground mission, linking a disparate history to better understand our own. Because we haven’t addressed our past, as has Germany, we still live with the consequences.

From @brigittesbookshelf: “Rather than monuments to lives lost and stolen…, we cling to Confederate monuments, name our schools and streets after terrorists, and deny our complicity. [pic 9]
“Caste shook me. The book was unsettling in its effectiveness. Wilkerson argues that America is a caste system…as Nazi Germany and India. The myth of American exceptionalism tries to deny that fact, but in doing so, we are all the more culpable for its repercussions. Wilkerson makes her point through relentless analysis and data, but also through vignettes that serve as metaphors for the systems she critiques…. [S]he forces us to dwell in the similarities between eras, including our current one.

“Wilkerson’s argument is compelling throughout, but her section about the backlash against Obama was most powerful to me and helped me better understand the forces operating today. She argues that we must reckon with caste, which unlike race is the only sufficiently comprehensive explanation for the stratification and oppression built systemically into our society. This book is essential.”