Caste (Adapted for Young Adults) | Wilkerson, Isabel

Lange Beschreibung
In this young adult adaptation of the Oprah Book Club selection and New York Times bestselling nonfiction work, Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson explores the unspoken hierarchies that divide us across lines of race and class. Revealing and timely, this work will speak to young people who are engaged more than ever with the world around them, or to anyone who believes in a more just existence for all.

Readers will be fascinated by this young adult adaptation of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction work as they follow masterful narratives about real people that reveal an insidious phenomenon in the United States: a hidden caste system. Caste is not only about race or class; it is about power which groups have it and which do not. Isabel Wilkerson explores historical social hierarchies, including those in India and Nazi Germany, and explains how perpetuating these rankings dehumanizes vast sections of society. Once we learn the reasons behind caste and see the often heartbreaking effects, Wilkerson says, we can bridge the divides and make way for an inclusive future where we are all equal.

Rezensierung
 'A thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis for readers ready to change the world. Booklist, starred review

'With easy-to-digest storytelling and elaborate metaphors embedded in extensive research, Wilkerson challenges readers to resist validating any semblance of hierarchy and to refer to history as a pathway for eradicating its stronghold. Compelling and accessible for a younger generation energized to build a better world.'  Kirkus Reviews

'This in-depth exploration pulls ugly secrets out of the shadows and gives name and shape to the 'caste pyramid.' Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's groundbreaking work is enlighteningly and accessibly adapted for young adult readers.'  Shelf Awareness

Buchausschnitt
Part One

A Structure Built Long Ago

chapter one

The Afterlife of Pathogens

In the haunted summer of 2016, an unaccustomed heat wave struck the Siberian tundra on the edge of what the ancients once called the End of the Land. Above the Arctic Circle, the heat rose beneath the earth s surface and bore down from the sky, the air reaching an inconceivable 95 degrees on the Russian peninsula of Yamal. Wildfires flared, and pockets of methane gurgled beneath the normally frozen soil in the polar region.

Soon, the children of the indigenous herdsmen fell sick from a mysterious illness that many people alive had never seen and did not recognize. A twelve-­year-­old boy developed a high fever and acute stomach pangs, and passed away. Russian authorities declared a state of emergency and began airlifting hundreds of the sickened herding people, the Nenets, to the nearest hospital in Salekhard.

Scientists then identified what had afflicted the Siberian settlements. The aberrant heat had chiseled far deeper into the Russian permafrost than was normal and had exposed a toxin that had been encased since 1941, when the world was last at war. It was the pathogen anthrax, which had killed herds of reindeer all those decades ago and lain hidden in the animal carcasses long since buried in the permafrost. A thawed and tainted carcass rose to the surface that summer, the pathogen awakened, intact and as powerful as it had ever been. The pathogen spores seeped into the grazing land and infected the reindeer and spread to the herders who raised and relied upon them. The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.

On the other side of the planet, the US, the world s oldest and most powerful democracy was in spasms over an election that would transfix the Western world and become a psychic break in American history, one that will likely be studied and dissected for generations.

For the first time in history, a woman was running as a major party candidate for president of the United States. A household name, the candidate was a no-­nonsense national figure overqualified by some estimates, conventional and measured if uninspiring to her detractors, with a firm grasp of any policy or crisis that she might be called upon to address. Her opponent was a blunt-­spoken billionaire, a reality television star prone to assailing most anyone unlike himself, who had never held public office and who pundits believed had no chance of winning his party s primaries much less the presidency.

On the face of it, what is commonly termed race in America was not at issue. Both candidates were white, born to the country s historic dominant majority. But the woman candidate represented the more liberal party made up of a patchwork of coalitions of, roughly speaking, the humanitarian-­minded and the marginalized. The male candidate represented the conservative party that in recent decades had come to be seen as protecting an old social order benefitting and appealing largely to white voters.

Observers the world over recognized the significance of the election. Onlookers in Berlin and Johannesburg, Delhi and Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo, stayed up late into the night or the next morning to watch the returns that second Tuesday in November 2016. Inexplicably to many outside the United States, the outcome would turn not on the popular vote, but on the Electoral College, an American invention from the founding era of slavery by which each state has a say in declaring the winner based on the electoral votes assigned them and the outcome of the popular ballot in their jurisdiction.

By then, there had been only five elections in the country s history in which the Electoral College or a