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Freud's oft-quoted comment, possibly apocryphal, that everything he wrote was said better by the Bard, contains the implicit understanding that a psychoanalytic way of thinking does not belong to any particular age, school, or person. Isabel Wilkerson's book about caste, race,
and social injustice has been called an “American classic” and “the keynote nonfiction book of the American century” (Garner, 2020). It also has been criticized for, among other things, failing to recognize the importance of previous texts (e.g., Cox, 1948) and underestimating the effects of capitalist exploitation (Burden-Stelly, 2020). Its literary and historical merits have been discussed widely, from The New York Times, to The New Yorker, to Oprah's Book Club. None of that will be repeated here. Whether intentionally or not, Wilkerson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, introduces a psychoanalytic way of thinking into American households that may never have had a taste of Freud before.
Five times in his writings, Freud (1918, 1921, 1927, 1930, 1939) highlighted humanity's foolish infatuation with the narcissism of minor differences. Most of our species, rather than consolidating its energy on turning back the cruel indifference of nature—fire, flood, earthquakes, and tornadoes—instead remains preoccupied with trivial differences, such as national boundaries and religious disputes. Freud's examples of minor differences did not mention race, an omission most likely because, even as the 1930s were coming to a close in Nazi Germany, he remained oblivious to the plight of Austrian Jews—until Anna was summoned to the Hotel Metropole for interrogation by the Gestapo, from which most Jews never returned (Roudinesco, 2016).
Wilkerson's thesis is that, from 1619 onward, when the first Africans were enslaved and transported to the New World, America created a caste system based on darkness of skin. “Everything that you could and could not do was based upon w