The walls of the Reading Room of the Obama Presidential Library contain books hand-picked by President and First Lady Obama. I could spend days in there, but I only had a few hours.

I browsed The 1619 Project, The Things They Carried, and Between the World and Me. But the book I spent the most time with was Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson.

The chapters cover the various ways the U.S. established and codified its racial caste system and how it keeps it in place. I was familiar with a lot of the chapter subjects, but the part that was new to me was the chapter titled “The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste.”

Wilkerson uses the work of scholars and historians, and draws on the transcript of a meeting that took place on 5 June 1934. It was the first meeting of Nazi bureaucrats to discuss what laws they could put in place to begin the process of separating Jews from those they called Aryans. It was the discussion that began their long effort to wipe out a major part of the population.

Wilkerson writes that to begin their discussion, they looked at a nation that had already established a caste system based on race, a caste system written into law and supported by socially accepted violence. They needed a model for legal and social miscegenation, especially one that would maintain a veneer of all-men-are-equal.

Wilkerson’s book reports that Nazi legal scholars spent months scrutinizing American laws for ways to criminalize marriage between races and socializing as equals. The U.S. was a model of how to punish people for occupying the same physical space or behaving in ways that didn’t show they understood that they were “inferior.” Americans modeled keeping groups segregated under penalty of death, and to keep certain groups from reproducing.

Wilkerson even mentions that one Nazi legal scholar spent time in a few countries the Nazis hoped to emulate, including South Africa. But they focused on the United States because we did it best. They not only liked how we had subjugated the people that white men brought over as slaves, but they admired our genocide of millions of indigenous people, and the containment of those who survived.

American eugenicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant wrote extensively on Nordic superiority, racial heirarchy and the need for sterilization. Hitler himself was so impressed by their writing that he wrote to Grant telling him that Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race was his “Bible.” (Someone saw the parallels between American eugenics and Nazi Germany because Stoddard’s views became much less popular after World War Two.)

I particularly like this: Hitler also admired the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.” Yes! We do that very well, believing strongly in how good this country is no matter how much evidence shows we treat marginalized populations like they’re not human.

Wilkerson even writes that in this meeting some Nazi bureaucrats said the Americans might have taken things a bit too far by segregating its train cars and other public spaces. They thought we were great, but wondered if they needed to oppress their people quite as extensively as we did.

They were also baffled by our lack of attention to Jews. It was the one part of our brilliant system of oppression they found incomplete.

I read maybe half of Wilkerson’s chapter before I’d had all I could take in one sitting. I felt stunned. We showed the Nazis how to destroy people. We gave them the model and inspiration for their lethal hierarchy. We showed them how to do it successfully.

I have to admit that I have the privilege of being stunned. I’m sure generations of Americans saw the hypocrisy of the U.S. crowing over its defeat of Nazi Germany. How much harder it must have been to live here when white, non-Jewish people across the country confirmed to each other that such a horror could never happen here. The Germans are the problem. Thank God we’re safe here in America.

There is nothing Americans love more than a World War II movie. We love occupying the role of the hero in a war where the good guys and bad guys were crystal clear. It’s either outrageous or wearying of us to take credit for saving Europe from Nazi destruction when we’re the ones who showed the Nazis how to do it.

I’ve given a tiny glimpse of Wilkerson’s Caste. It’s a brilliant book that I strongly recommend.

You can also read or comment on this article on Substack.

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on LinkedIn