BOOK NOOK Is a recent read occupying your thoughts? Has a book indelibly imprinted your life? We want to hear from you. Send your recommendation to marydieter@depauw.edu.
President’s Bookshelf / What We’re Reading
Book choice and conversation, plus president’s presence, pleased participants in first-ever book club More than 40 alumni and parents of alumni participated Jan. 13 in the firstever President’s Book Club, a Zoom gathering in which they discussed Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.” The participants represented a large swath of DePauw graduates – from the Class of 1964 through the Class of 2016. According to its publisher, the book “examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.” President Lori White said she chose the book because she had read Wilkerson’s previous bestseller, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” and “found Wilkerson to be an incredible storyteller who provides well-researched, historical context for issues of race.” White opened the discussion by asking the participants to summarize their impressions of the book in one word. “Overwhelmed,” said one. “Enlightening.” “Timely.” “Appalled.” “Provocative.” “Thought-provoking.” “Powerful.” “Humbling.” Melinda Haag ’81 recalled that, as a political science and English major at DePauw “who took a ton of philosophy and ethics and history” courses, she participated in many class discussions about
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“class,” but not “caste,” a distinction Wilkerson makes in the book. “Every institution we’ve created, whether it is secular or sacred, has this caste system embedded in it in some way,” Haag said, causing her to wonder “does it mean we have to blow all of it up and start over again?” María Garriga, parent of a 2016 alumnus, was dismayed that the author said Nazi Germany patterned its system after America’s caste system and also found similarities between the American and Indian caste systems. “The average American out there thinks it’s horrible – that Nazi Germany was horrible and the Indian caste system is incomprehensible – but then I had never thought to compare it to our own history,” she said. “That is the biggest gift that I got from the book –
to think of it on those terms.” Said Anne Ballentine ’86: “It makes it feel like it’s going to be hard for Black people to overcome that level that they’ve been forced into, like the caste system in India. It made me feel like the work was going to be even more difficult and challenging, but, hey, we’ve got to embrace it.” The book club met a week after the riots at the U.S. Capitol, causing participants to draw comparisons to Wilkerson’s observations. “What we have seen is the dominant gender of the dominant caste, although not the highest of the caste – more middle and low – reacting to the subordinate caste. Period,” said Kate McQueen ’71. Deep in her book, Wilkerson noted that historian Taylor Branch asked, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” “That just nails it,” said Cindy Tibbetts Frey ’84. “That’s what happened last week.” Craig Adams ’90 said that reading the book caused him to recognize that “I suffer from an incomplete history … that I have to work hard to understand so that I better understand the issues.” Black history should be taught in high school civics classes or in courses at DePauw, he said. As a
