In Banned Book Writing Prompts, a series in Teachers & Writers Magazine, we aim to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here, and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here.

A group of young Black men in swimsuits stand poolside in the hot sun. They are nervous, tentative. Groups of white people—most of them around my parents age—cluster around the edges. They are watching, still. Something is about to happen. I’ve never seen so many grownups at the pool. I’ve never seen people wearing street clothes on the deck. No one moves. I’m in the water with very few other kids, and we’re watching, too. Suddenly, one of the young men leaps up and into the water. I duck under to see him touch the bottom, push off, and shoot to the surface. He’s gasping for air, clearly not used to the water. He holds onto the side of the pool. One by one, the other young men jump in, staying together, some taking a few strokes towards the center and back.

I know why the young men are there. Our parents have told us, my siblings and me. They are representing the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and they are desegregating our segregated city pool. Our parents explained that this is fair. They want us to be in the water to show we approve. The young men help pull each other out of the pool, towel off, and leave. Our pool is now desegregated. It’s 1964 in southern Ohio.

We never, except for the day the pool was desegregated, talked about the racial divisions we all witnessed, even during the explosive reckoning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. 

I grew up in a large white family in a racially segregated, primarily working-class, mid-size town in the 1950s and 60s. My parents were transplants from Philadelphia and from small-town east Tennessee, and while they were aware of the profound racial divide in the U.S., they considered themselves to be liberal, open-minded, and prejudice-free. As faith-filled Catholics in a predominantly non-Catholic region, steeped in Catholic social teaching, they taught us by word and example to treat all people with respect and kindness. Our liberalism and faith, however, didn’t extend to reaching out to Black people, questioning segregation, working for racial justice, or even learning the history of race and racism in our country. We never, except for the day the pool was desegregated, talked about the racial divisions we all witnessed, even during the explosive reckoning of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. 

In grade school and high school, I did not learn of our country’s history of Black exclusion. I did learn that the U.S. had allowed slavery until the Civil War, but for all we were told and in what we read, there were no aftereffects of these 250 years of enslavement. It was a thing of the past, and we were the land of the free. There was an implicit understanding, not only in my family, but also in the social circles we occupied, that we did not mix with Black people, we did not talk about or even think about the divide between us, and we did not disturb the status quo. I learned much later that one-third of our town’s population was Black. To live with this level of broad societal acquiescence to Black exclusion, we needed the support of a 400-year-old American insistence on Black inferiority. And we had it.

I would like to say that as soon as I reached college age in the 1970s, moved to Chicago, and began to study and to work with Black people, I learned of this American tradition and worked to change it. I did not. It’s painful to admit that I left that to others. I chose not to see that my access to our institutions and our economic and social life was summarily denied to non-whites, and especially to Black people. As the Civil Rights Movement continued to drive changes in laws and practices that slowly began to desegregate some of our institutions, it forced me to open my eyes, too. I read, and I listened, and I saw. And I understood, as William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

It wasn’t until I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, though, that I learned, in closely researched and footnoted detail, of the roots of Black exclusion in this country and exactly how and why it was practiced and continues to be practiced. Wilkerson’s premise is that racism is an inadequate term for the oppression of Black people in America and that is it more accurate to view this oppression as the result of a caste system. Caste, as Wilkerson defines it, encompasses and goes beyond race. “Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings,” she says, “whereas race is the metric that’s used to determine one’s place in that.”

Wilkerson gives her readers a vision of what a world without the caste structure might look like and the freedom it would give us.

I learned, as I read, of the broad similarities between the U.S. caste structure and the many-thousand-year-old Indian caste system that establishes multi-layered and unbendable divisions, high and low, among peoples. I learned how Nazi Germany’s caste structure, which assigned inferiority to Jews and superiority to descendants of a mythical race of “Aryans,” was based, by design, on the U.S. caste structure. I learned, through Wilkerson’s detailed account, how human beings were treated under slavery in the U.S. These sections of the book were extremely painful to read, and it was equally painful to learn exactly how the caste structure underlying slavery is upheld to this day in our laws and institutions.

Chapter by chapter, Wilkerson describes how the centuries have hardened and deepened this caste system and its pernicious effects on all of us, whatever our place in the structure. In the last section of the book, Wilkerson gives her readers a vision of what a world without the caste structure might look like and the freedom it would give us. Her last words struck me to the core. “We are responsible for our own ignorance, or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. . . . A world without caste would set everyone free.” 

Now that I know about how and why caste operates in our country, I can no longer plead ignorance about this part of our shared American history. The question now is what am I, what are all of us, prepared to do about it? The fact that two large school districts in the U.S. banned this book several years ago, without explanation, makes it clear that our long American tradition of deliberate amnesia and outright denial of our past continues to haunt us. Blocking access to this history only perpetuates it. It denies our children an understanding of why and how the caste system operates to this day in our country. This enforced ignorance is the plowed field where the caste system flourishes. For me, the book has made clear the antidote to this ignorance: to keep my heart and mind open for the ways to engage in pushing back against it that I now see are all around me.

Writing Prompt 1

Think about a time you were judged by the way you looked. What image comes to mind? Or write about a time when you saw others judged by the way they looked. Take time to let an image come to you. If you start with a feeling, what you write may not allow others to see into the moment as well as you feel it. See the moment as if it’s happening now. Take a piece of lined paper and write the numbers 1-10 along the left edge of the page. Then write the answers to these questions, each beside a number: 

• Where are you as this happens? Look around and describe the place. 
• Who else is present? 
• What are you wearing and holding? 
• What are others wearing and holding? 
• What time of day is it? 
• What time of year is it? 
• What colors are you seeing? 
• What sounds do you hear? 
• Why are you there in that place? 
• How old are you when this is happening?

You can write as many descriptors as you want to write. After you have your image and the details around your image, follow the image with your pen and don’t stop moving the pen. Don’t use a keyboard. A keyboard won’t let you keep moving your hand the way a pen will.  Stay physically connected to your pen as it leads you forward into the story the image is showing you.

Writing Prompt 2

Have you seen for yourself how the caste system operates in the United States? In other countries? What image comes to mind as you remember this? Use the numbered list method in Prompt 1 to remember the details surrounding the image, and let the image lead you into writing a story about what you saw.

Writing Prompt 3

Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a “sad, dark chapter” in the country’s history. It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces. 

But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.

— Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (p. 43, Penguin Random House, 2023)

In this brief excerpt from Caste, Wilkerson makes the point that it is not possible to move on from past trauma—to “become whole”— without first acknowledging it. This is true, she says, both on a personal level and on a societal level.

In his poem, “Tired,” Langston Hughes uses a metaphor to describe the feeling of carrying such a burden. He compares it to being offered a piece of fruit—a shiny apple, say—that he knows is rotten on the inside. Let’s stop pretending, he says, and acknowledge this rottenness, opening it up for everyone to see.

Tired
By Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind? 
Let us take a knife 
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating 
At the rind.

Think about what it feels like to carry a burden from the past, whether it is a trauma that occurred in your own life or the life of someone you know, a trauma that happened in your community, or a traumatic event in the history of our country. How does it feel to carry this burden? Can you think of a metaphor that describes this feeling? Is it like carrying a heavy stone? Is it like hearing bees buzzing inside your head? 

Write a paragraph using the metaphor you have chosen to describe what it feels like to carry your burden. You don’t have to name this burden or trauma if you don’t want to, only say what it feels like to hold it. 

Then, using this same metaphor, write another paragraph describing how it would feel if you were able to acknowledge this burden, to share this burden with others. Would it feel different? If so, how?