JAC'S BOOK CLUB discussion

I realize I'm breaking our only rule. CASTE is not yet in paperback, which means it's out of reach for most of the guys (gals?) inside. Given last night's JAC discussion, it's not too soon to get started on the significance of caste in our society. Does it play a part, and how might it frame JAC'S mission?
Race. Gender. Class, and now Caste -- What makes a society unequal and self-destructive? In our meeting last night, we discussed what some call Intersectionality. How race, caste, gender, and class intersect is a worldwide problem leading up to the mass incarceration crisis we face here in this country.
I can certainly appreciate the heads up WK gave us about the pushback against CASTE, though I found it enlightening. Rather than feeling distanced from questions of RACE by this caste concept. I came away feeling LESS distanced. Caste is a system that uses race, religion, and culture to ensure hierarchies and privileges. The subtext is no one readily gives up those privileges. Just take the storming of the Capitol by angry Whites.
Despite new laws, millions of DALITS (or Untouchables) in India aren't even allowed to cast a shadow on a Brahmin walking on the same side of the street. A Dalit observed Wilkerson may achieve an elevation in class, but he will always be of the lower caste. He may not be relegated to his traditional job of digging ditches and graves. Still, he will defer almost instinctually to a higher-caste Brahmin.
She notes how, sadly, President Obama is likely to get followed in a department store as a member of a lower caste in this country. This even though he is of a very high class. When starting out as a young, middle-class reporter for the New York Times, she set up an interview with a gallery owner in Chicago. Just looking at her, the owner couldn't believe that she was the one he had an appointment with and shooed her out of his place.
In the early days of the Third Reich, writes Wilkerson, Hitler sent a commission to the American South to find out how Jim Crow laws could be applied to the Jews in Germany. The head of the commission returned with some recommendations. However, he cautioned that some of the Jim Crow laws were too draconian and too hard for Germans to accept!
CASTE doesn't pay a lot of attention to the Intersectionality of gender, as I recall. But there is another book by bell hooks (sic) on Patriarchy in the Black community that addressed the issue. I'm not sure how and whether Patriarchy and unbridled capitalism interrelate, but that's what JAC'S BOOK CLUB is for—right—getting to the bottom of things?

bell hooks – understanding patriarchy (2004) “The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. bell hooks697]Aug 29, 2016