The Paragraph In Isabel Wilkerson’s Book “Caste” That Blew My Mind
Wilkerson in chronicling Martin Luther King”s 1959 Trip To India With His Wife Coretta notes:……..
One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been Untouchables.
The principal made the introduction. “Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them.
“For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.” Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.