I started listening to "Caste" by @Isabelwilkerson on audiobook because I loved her book on the Great Migration. But I didn't expect "Caste" to add so much to my thinking about my own specific research

A of some reflections

Wilkerson bravely dives into the messy and difficult process of comparative thinking to examine how race and caste function as power hierarchies across time and space

While my diss focuses only on one country context (France), it began in my mind as a set of comparative questions about how race is socially constructed across borders

Listening to Wilkerson's analysis affirmed my sense that comparative approaches are valuable to the study of power & racism; first, they remind me that we (the US) are not exceptional in the embeddedness of social hierarchies and domination in our lives

This de-exceptionalization of my thinking about the US situation helps me to de-essentialize the positions of racial groups here - the racial hierarchy we exist in is not "natural" or "inevitable" & in the absence of our particular social history a different hierarchy might arise

Comparative investigation also helps me recognize the concrete ways our cultures & contexts are interconnected - the ways others on our Earth built on our errors and misdeeds (eg Nazis drawing on the American eugenics movement) and relate to/draw on our strengths (& vice versa)

Thinking historically and globally helps me see that our racism & our resistance is interconnected with others and is affected by and affects others

It helps to make visible the parts of systematic, structural racism that are deliberate and planned (like the eugenics movement), AND it reminds me that there is the very concrete possibility of coalitioning across space and across peoples toward justice

</>