When the NYT tries to pass cognitive effluvia as reality-based opinion.

Oh, Good Lord. The New York Times is becoming a source of entertainment rather than news.

In @NYTmag, Isabel Wilkerson writes that while America’s founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all, the reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries https://t.co/QhW3MuQvzG

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 1, 2020

The line everyone is focusing on from the article is this claim:

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Culminating in this humdinger:

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

You wonder, How on earth did this ignorant drivel even see the light of day? Where were the editors? Well, at least part of the answer is that is a long time since they could afford editors. Or intelligent writers.

Part of the answer is that this is part of the New York Times' treasured The 1619 project. Their Soviet-like effort to rewrite history as they would want it to have been rather than as it was. Reminds me of the old Soviet joke, "The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable" reflecting the totalitarian habit of over-promising on the future and rewriting the past to meet current political needs.

Twitchy is all over this fool of a piece as is Twitter, mockery raining like ash on Pompeii.

Occam's Razor says that perhaps this isn't about missing editors or poisonous hateful racial ideologies. As their bio thumbnail indicates - "This article is adapted from her forthcoming book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”" If all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail.

Which makes the absurdity of her claims all the more puzzling. If she wrote a book on caste systems, then surely she knows that the US does not have a caste system. And class is not synonymous with caste. And caste doesn't always entail race. And . . . well the list of things you would expect her to know and which she apparently does not is pretty extensive. No need to belabor the point.

Meanwhile in the real world, it might be worth taking a gander at Thomas Sowell, a real economist and historian, a prolific writer who may have written more books than Wilkerson has read, who has written many empirical and objective books on race, caste, class, and affirmative action in a global and American context, and who turned 90 a couple of days ago.

If you want to understand the real world and not the fantasy grievance dream land of Wilkerson, you might consider these books by Thomas Sowell:

1975. Race and Economics. David McKay Co. ISBN 978-0-679-30262-9.
1980. Knowledge and Decisions. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03736-0.
1981. Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays. Hoover Press. ISBN 0-817-97532-2.
1981. Markets and Minorities. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04399-2.
1981. Ethnic America: A History. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02074-7. Chapter 1, "The American Mosaic."
1983. The Economics and Politics of Race. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-01891-2.
1984. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-03113-7.
1987. Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-07114-7.
1987. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-06912-6.
1990. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. ISBN 0-688-08599-7
1993. Inside American Education. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-5408-2.
1994. Is Reality Optional?. Hoover. ISBN 978-0-8179-9262-0.
1995. Race and Culture: A World View. ISBN 0-465-06796-4.
1995. The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-08995-X.
1996. Migrations and Cultures: A World View. ISBN 0-465-04589-8. OCLC 41748039.
1998. Conquests and Cultures: An International History. ISBN 0-465-01400-3.
1998. Late-Talking Children. ISBN 0465038352.
1999. Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays. ISBN 0-8179-9582-X.
1999. The Quest for Cosmic Justice. ISBN 0-684-86463-0.
2002. "Discrimination, Economics, and Culture." Pp. 167–80 in Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, edited by A. Thernstrom and S. Thernstrom. Hoover Institution Press.
2004. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10775-3.
2010. Intellectuals and Society. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01948-9. Lay summary.
2011. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02250-2.
2013. Intellectuals and Race. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-05872-3.
2015. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective.[80]
2019. Discrimination and Disparities (revised, enlarged ed.) ISBN 978-1-541-64563-9.

And these are only the books he has written relevant to the lies Wilkerson is telling. There are many other books on other interesting topics.

And for the racists out there who believe in the primacy of racial identity, perhaps it helps to know that beyond being a prolific author, economist, historian, and Classical Liberal (the important attributes), he is also African-American.