Caste

Well Did You Evah!

I have heard among this clan,
You are called the forgotten man
(Is that what they're saying, well did you evah!)
What a swell party this is

It isn't enough to make fun of High Society.  Something should be done about the caste system that enables High Society.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson has a new book titled Caste. While I have not yet read the book I am looking forward to doing so.  Meanwhile I have been following Ms. Wilkerson's appearances on her promotional tour.  Unlike Ms Wilkerson's comments during her appearance on Fresh Air, I do not think that caste in the United States is only bipolar; white and black. It is far more nuanced and hierarchical than that. I am: 

• the grandchild of an illegal immigrant (admittedly from Canada); 
• the child of a father who  dropped out of school to work at a low paying factory job; 
• was unable to speak to the only grandparent who was alive during my life because she only spoke Polish and I only spoke English;  
• the brother ( the best man at my wedding and the godfather of my oldest son) of an openly Gay Man; and 
• raised as a Roman Catholic. 

But I graduated from two Ivy League schools and, and earned a higher income as a professional engineer, and I know that I have often been assumed to be a member of a "higher caste". 

I may not have claimed that my ancestry was Swedish, did not attended a military high school but dodged the draft, and while my grandfather did not die of the 1918 Spanish Flu, I know that my father's bother and sister did and I get the year correct, but I too was also never accepted by the upper caste in Manhattan.  I know that the caste system has affected me, and I assume that it also has affected the mental health of those who practice and believe in it.