08-16-2020, 08:30 AM
(08-15-2020, 03:34 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: One need not be reminded, as it should be quite obvious to most, that for the past four decades the poorer people of this country, regardless of skin color, have been treated as livestock at best, vermin at worst. In the city of Chicago the poor are now nearly invisible with a sanitary conforming look in areas where the less well off among us used to often congregate. Not even referring to the few areas of the city where you pretty much take your life in your hands venturing into them.
Sometimes, it takes a book. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste finally addresses what should have been obvious to everyone: we, like most of the world, live within a caste system intended to keep the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless right where they are. She puts racism inside that system: a tool of repression, but not the system itself. Like the more famous caste system of India, there always has to be a lowest caste. In America, it's Black. But just because you aren't at the bottom, the next few rungs aren't all that great either: Native American, Latinx, poor white, immigrants, Asians -- everyone trained to look down on the castes below them and accept the primacy of the casts above them.
Maybe ... just maybe ... that's finally changing.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.