Guerrilla Readers, April 2025

CASTE and PREQUEL

Hello again, Guerrilla Readers. We’ll be opening our full discussion of Caste next Monday, but I wanted to take a few moments to remind us of the other books we’ve read in this series (in addition to Democracy Awakening and Jesus & John Wayne). Here are some of my thoughts on Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Rachel Maddow’s Prequel.

Two Hidden Histories, One Urgent Message

At first glance, Caste and Prequel don’t seem to belong on the same shelf. One is a sweeping meditation on social hierarchy; the other is a sharp investigation of American fascists in the lead-up to World War II. But if you sit with them together for a while, they start to sound like a two-part warning—one from the inside of the house, the other from the front gate.

Both books are asking us to stop focusing on the headlines and start paying attention to the foundations—what’s underneath. Wilkerson wants us to notice the structure we live inside every day—the one that ranks people by race/caste and keeps inequality running quietly in the background. Maddow, on the other hand, asks us to look at the slow-building threat outside the window: political movements driven by power, fear, and a talent for blending in that may seem fringe—even hyper-fringe—until they aren’t. Until they’re no longer outside the window. They’re in our living rooms.

These two authors come from different angles, but they’re telling us something similar: What looks like crisis is often just the system doing what it was built to do.

What They Notice

Both authors care deeply about history—not just as something to remember in a quiet moment, but as something that has never really left the room. Wilkerson shows how America’s caste system isn’t something buried in the historical past. It’s the scaffolding that still shapes who gets seen, who gets silenced, who gets the job, who gets to feel safe.

Maddow reminds us that the U.S. had its own forgotten fascist movements in the 1930s and ’40s—well-funded, well-connected, and shockingly mainstream. And here we are again. Don’t believe me? Just look at the news.

There’s a powerful throughline here: If we don’t know the history, it’ll end up in o our laps.

Denial Is Part of the Design

One of the strongest links between Caste and Prequel is the role of denial—not just as a personal blind spot, but as a structural tool. In Caste, Wilkerson shows how the dominant caste maintains control by refusing to see its own privilege. It’s not just silence—it’s strategic not-seeing. Current examples: the erasure of DEI from government records. The most chilling, IMO: the removal of Maya Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy library, while copies of Mein Kampf remains on the shelves.

In Prequel, Maddow shows us newspaper stories and takes us inside congressional hearings where people knew exactly what was happening with pro-fascist groups—but chose to look the other way. In both, the danger wasn’t always the bad actors. Sometimes it was the good people who simply didn’t want to deal with it. Want a current example? Just look at Congress. You’ll find plenty.

When Normal Gets Dangerous

And maybe the most significant connection: Both books show how dangerous “normal” and “normalizing” can be. Wilkerson describes how caste survives because it feels familiar. It’s the walls around us, the ceilings overhead, the floor we walk on. And it doesn’t feel especially oppressive until and unless you’re the one who’s stepped on. For example, you’re a high-achieving Turkish Fulbright Scholar in an American university on an F-1 student visa—until you’re snatched off the street and deported.

Maddow’s story is full of moments where fascist sympathizers use patriotic language, media platforms, and polite social circles to avoid detection. They didn’t show up in jackboots. They wore suits-and-ties and clerical collars. They hosted radio shows and built roads and universities and published newspapers and were celebrity airplane pilots. They sounded “reasonable.”

That’s what makes “normal” all so dangerous. We don’t notice. We accept. It’s always been this way, and that’s okay. Until it isn’t.

Different Lenses, Shared Urgency

Of course, the books are different in tone and shape.

Wilkerson writes with the grace of a poet and the urgent self-examination of a moral philosopher. She looks deep into herself and invites readers to reflect, to reckon, to feel. Caste is the kind of book that lingers—it asks us to ask ourselves who we are and where we belong in this moral universe.

Prequel moves fast. It’s built like a thriller, but it’s all true. Maddow follows the money, the documents, the names. As she does on her television show, she lays out the dots and then connects them, one by one, with a journalist’s precision and a prosecutor’s patience. There’s not much self-examination here. There isn’t time for it.

But what they both make clear is this:
We don’t get to say, “We didn’t know.”
We know now.
And knowing comes with responsibility.

More questions. Of course.

Yes. Books like these always make us ask questions. Here are a few that bother me. If they bother you, too, I’d love to hear about it.