The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

Here on the last day of Black History Month, I still have not finished reading Isabel Wilkerson’s phenomenal The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). I started it in early January but have not finished, because I have been too busy resisting ICE in the Twin Cities.

Two whole months without finishing a book. That’s a dubious lifetime achievement. I do not like this.

A few years back, I read Wilkerson’s Caste, which is examines social caste systems in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. It remains one of the finest history/sociology books I’ve ever read. The Warmth of Other Suns is exceptional, too. It is about the Black migration out of the South in the twentieth century.

I’ve learned more about Jim Crow from this book than I have from any other source. I don’t know if other countries handle their own histories better, but in America, we sanitize the uglier parts, rendering Jim Crow as something unfortunate rather than deadly. We talk about how Black people had to use separate drinking fountains, which is bad but not lethal. We don’t do a good job talking about the pervasiveness of lynchings or how sharecropping was barely distinguishable from chattel slavery.

Wilkerson describes the brutality of Jim Crow by following the lives of three Black southerners who escaped to New York, Chicago, and California. She centers the stories of individuals while incorporating broader lessons of history and sociology.

I have been listening to the audiobook, with superb narration by Robin Miles, even as my government terrorizes immigrant minorities who came to America for a better life. I am reminded that one reason we study history is to avoid repeating it.