Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns

Censoring books because they make some people feel bad; this week’s book ban news

Hello Friends!

I just realized that I skipped right over celebrating a one-year anniversary of Be a Cactus and of having more than 52 posts! That’s a lot of essays, and it’s fun to look back and see what I’ve written about (what’s important to me). However! I want to do one more essay for the closing of Banned Books Week, so the one-year celebration will have to wait. (I hope to take a little celebratory break to start my new novel.)

Today I want to discuss two Isabel Wilkerson nonfiction books: The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste. I was still working in the school library when Warmth was published. When Caste was published (2020), I had retired from the school library, so I didn’t write a review for teens, but it struck me with its power. More recently the censors have come after it. 

Backstory

On her Instagram page, Wilkerson posted a quote from her interview for the Oprah Book Club. Part of what she says is: 

I would never have imagined that this book would be in the middle of a federal case involving a rural county in Texas where conservatives, some of whom didn’t even have library cards, would take over the library board, remove books, including Caste, be ordered by a federal judge to reinstate the books, appeal that ruling rather than restore them and consider shutting down the entire library system.

So today, I am looking at books that the censors want to remove because they say those books make White people feel bad about their country’s history and bad about themselves for things they have no control over because they weren’t yet born when they happened. 

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns is the story of the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South in the decades after World War I. For this book, Wilkerson conducted over 1200 interviews about the 6 million Black Americans who fled the Jim Crow South. Ordinary people as well as anthropologists were using the term caste and her growing understanding of it moved her toward her next book. 

Some students at my high school were required to read nonfiction for their history and government classes, so The Warmth of Other Suns was one of the books I bought and booktalked. Here’s what I wrote down in 2016:

While I found The Warmth of Other Suns enlightening in many ways, I was truly astonished by the revelation that African Americans¹ leaving the South during the early years of the Great Migration (a period from about 1914-1970), had to escape in the same manner as slaves did earlier. Plantation owners, housewives, owners of citrus groves and industrialists all depended on cheap African American labor to maintain their lifestyles. When African Americans wanted to go north to seek social freedoms, some regions enacted laws to prevent their leaving. Others used intimidation and violence. People left in the dead of night, abandoning their goods for fear that if they had been seen packing, they’d be arrested. Some even tried tricks out of the pre-Civil War days such as hiding in coffins and having those shipped north.

The Warmth of Other Suns largely follows three migrants who left the South in three decades–the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney and her husband picked cotton and raised turkeys in Mississippi to scrape out a living. They were sharecroppers, and thus had to give the plantation owner half of all they raised. While their balance sheet at the end of each year wasn’t in the negative as many sharecroppers’ were (most sharecroppers were consistently cheated and had no means of redress), they decided to leave after a cousin was falsely accused of stealing turkeys and severely beaten for it. When the vigilantes discovered that they were wrong, they showed no remorse. Ida Mae herself was nearly slashed with a chain during the incident. And so the couple left to Milwaukee and then Chicago in 1937.

George Swanson Starling (not Ida May’s husband, whose name was also George) was a good student and had completed his sophomore year of college. But his father said he wouldn’t continue to pay for George’s schooling. In a fit of anger and hoping to get back at his father, George married a young girl who was a bad match for him. He had to work picking oranges in Florida groves. Tired of the work and of being taken advantage of, George tried to organize for better wages during World War II. At the time, many men were away at war, and there was a shortage of workers, giving African Americans some hope for leeway in their working conditions and wages. But George became known as a troublemaker, and, fearing for his life (he’d heard grove owners were planning a ‘necktie party’ for him), he fled to New York in 1945, later bringing his wife.

Pershing Robert Foster was the bright son of educated parents. His father was a high school principal and his mother a teacher at a segregated Black school. Though Pershing’s parents only made 43% of the salary of white teachers, they managed to save and send their kids to college. Pershing’s older brother was a doctor, but he could attend only to Black patients, who had little money to pay. Pershing had dreams of financial and social success. He married a girl from the Atlanta African American upper crust, one whose father was a university president. He enrolled in the Army as a surgeon. After his tour of duty, he decided that California is the land of dreams and moved there in 1953, hoping to bring his wife and children out after he established a practice.

All three families had a very rough go, even after they left the South. Prejudice still existed, even if it wasn’t written into the law. (A good example is the way all motels were always ‘full’ when Foster was looking for a place to sleep as he drove to California. Another is how African American neighborhoods in the North had very steep rents while apartments were substandard.) Life in the big cities was rough in ways new to country people who knew nothing of the drug abuse and crime that could (and did) swallow their children. Nevertheless, looking back, they were glad for their decision to flee. They had more control over their lives once out of the South. They could vote and had better jobs.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

Caste is a New York Times bestseller, and Oprah Book Club pick, a TIME nonfiction book of the year, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, and a finalist for many other important awards.

Wilkerson defines caste as the assignment of individuals to expectations, the policing of boundaries. It tells us who belongs in what neighborhood. She compares it to being cast members in a play who know their lines. When some steps out of caste boundaries, the price is heavy. (In her interview with Amy Schumer, she mentions Trayvon Martin being killed as an example.)  

Wilkerson compares institutionalized inequity in America, India and Nazi Germany, pointing out that Nazi Germany took some of its ideas on race from eugenicists writing in the US at the time. She shows how a race-based caste system divides America; how it leaves the poor without a safety net. She uses both data (she’s got the receipts) and stories of individuals, both famous and ordinary, to show how caste is experienced in the US daily; how it affects physical and mental health and life expectancy; how it affects our culture and our politics.

Importantly, Wilkerson, while being clear that she doesn’t have all the answers, points out how we can become a society that doesn’t label as ‘other’ people unlike us. My response to the call for censorship and banning—one of surprise—comes from Wilkerson’s positive outlook for the future. She describes the caste system as an inherited system. So, no, she doesn’t blame her contemporaries for the past nor does she tell them they should sit around feeling bad about it. The censors are wildly off track. What she does do is create a call to action: It’s on us to move forward. We ARE responsible for what we do today.

The book ends with a lovely personal story of Wilkerson making a connection. I know I have been filling these banned books essays with spoilers, but I’ll leave this one for you. If you haven’t yet read the book, you’ll enjoy it. And, it has exactly the thing that censors say they want in books: a feel good moment of coming together, a moment of showing how it’s done. This makes me think the censors haven’t actually read the book. (Note: people who want books banned often don’t actually read them. These days, Moms for Liberty has a script for complaints that can be downloaded, so many people challenging books never read one word of them and know absolutely nothing about them.)

Why Warmth and Caste belong in the high school library

• They cover important aspects of American history, show why inequity exists today, and include ideas on how to change things. 

• A high school student who reads at grade level should have no problem understanding the books—background information is included to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of history.

• The anecdotes and stories of many individuals increases the readers’ interest in their fates because we feel like we know them. (Yes, I’m back to empathy again.) 

• There are enough facts and statistics to prove that some of the bias against Black American migrants from the South–such as the sense that they had high birth rates and less education than others in the cities to which they fled–are not based in reality.

• The author’s comparison of the Great Migration of Black Americans to immigration to a new country is also an interesting parallel for students (higher order thinking).

Have a listen to Amy Schumer interviewing Wilkerson about Caste for Audible.

Crazy stuff

A few weeks ago, I defended Lois Duncan’s teen novels, saying that those crime novels and their popularity made her a sort of Agatha Christie of the teen world. Which I thought sounded pretty safe. This week I read that 

Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1937) showed up on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the first time this past year. So much for safe books! On the upside, the number of attempts to censor books fell this year compared with last year according to the ALA, which attributes this to the fight against book censorship. However, the levels are still significantly higher than pre-2020 levels.

 

Part 2

Library and book challenge/ban news

It’s Banned Books Week, and books by James Baldwin, Terry McMillan, Amy Tan and Agatha Christie made PEN America’s index of school book bans for the first time. From the 19th

A number of books, many of which are works by women of color, showed up on PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans for the first time over the past year. They include Julia Alvarez’s 1991 novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” about four immigrant sisters from the Dominican Republic — a popular pick for readers during Latinx Heritage Month. Other recent entries to the index include Amy Tan’s novel about the Chinese-American daughter of an immigrant mother, “The Kitchen God’s Wife” (1991); Terry McMillan’s romance novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996); and Ellen Oh’s novel inspired by her mother’s experiences during the Korean War, “Finding Junie Kim” (2021). 

Agatha Christie’s “Death on the Nile” (1937), Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1943), Olive Ann Burns’ “Cold Sassy Tree”(1984), Barbara Kingsolver’s “Prodigal Summer” (2000) and Julie Murphy’s “Puddin’” (2018) also debuted on the index.

The 1953 novel “Go Tell It On the Mountain” by James Baldwin, a champion of civil and gay rights, appeared on the index for the first time, as did books related to slavery such as Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of An American Family” (1976) and W.E.B. DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” (1935). Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel “Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)” debuted on the index, too.

Book Banners are Costing Tax-Payers Millions of Dollars

The book ban fight in the public library in Llano County, Texas, cost the county over $100,000 in legal fees in the first 6 months of 2023, and they recently lost their appeal in the Supreme Court in 2024, which cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Money that could have gone towards repairing potholes, providing public services, or, you know... actually governing.

Not to be outdone, the review of books at Hamilton East Public Library in Indiana has cost taxpayers over $300,00.

In Florida, book bans cost each district between $34,000 to $135,000 annually, and Florida has over 70 school districts. That means that millions of dollars are being spent to remove books. 

When Between the World and Me Faced a School Book Ban, Ta-Nehisi Coates Decided to Report It Out

In an excerpt from his new book, The Message, the author visits South Carolina to confront a raging censorship battle—and some terrible vestiges of American history.

The truth is that even as I know and teach the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it. I see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of libraries, banning them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and brought into another age, one of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires. My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

The next chapter in record U.S. book bans? 'Soft censorship' from NBC News

“I can understand some of the impetus where people are thinking they’re safeguarding kids or they’re protecting kids. But at the same time it’s very dangerous, because one person’s idea of what safeguarding means is actually depriving kids of valuable sets of information,” [David] Shelley [CEO of Hachette Publishing] said, pointing out a sizable portion of banned and restricted books are written by people of color and LGBTQ authors. “So actually in the supposed safeguarding of kids, what you’re actually doing is depriving them of representation.”

What the reports do not quantify is the collateral damage of book bans, or so-called soft censorship, when a title is excluded, removed or limited before it is explicitly banned, out of fear of backlash. This could look like the removal of books due to complaints from parents or a librarian declining to carry a title out of concern about an impending ban or challenge. According to the ALA, surveys indicate 82%-97% of book challenges go unreported and receive no media coverage.

“I do think when we talk about soft-banning, where it applies heavily is schools and libraries. Where they won’t even order the books for their library,” said George M. Johnson, whose first book, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” is one of the most banned books in the U.S. “So I think that is where the danger lies, because we can track the books that are being banned, but we can’t track books that are not being ordered.”

1. Wilkerson uses different terms to describe Black Americans, all based in the time period she is discussing. So she uses colored, African American and Black. I used African American following her lead.