This week, I find myself thinking a lot about Zora Neale Hurston and her enduring masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. It’s a book that captured my heart in ninth grade, and I’ve found myself returning to it countless times, discovering new parallels in our stories, and sometimes, honestly, beating myself up for not reaching Janie’s milestones. But Janie reminds me that we are able to come to peace in the end, if we so choose. We just need to be brave enough to try.
One of the reasons I loved the book so much was Janie’s freedom. After everything she’d been through—true love, luxury, abuse, poverty, neglect—she achieved a profound peace, a freedom completely divorced from everyone else around her. She moved beyond color and money, right on to that “peace” so many of us claim to “protect” these days. Janie found herself, and she found a way to love herself along the way. Her strength resonates deeply with me, especially when tensions around us feel like a rapidly approaching tsunami.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is a chilling and informative exploration of hierarchical systems in America, Nazi Germany, and India. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It offers profound insights into the powerful undertows we’re experiencing in the current political climate – undertows that threaten to drag us all into a radicalized current, much like the one Janie navigated to find her calm.
Wilkerson recounts a seemingly innocuous lunch with a white family friend, a situation that quickly escalated. The friend publicly accused the waiter and restaurant manager (a Black woman, I should add) of racism, claiming they weren’t receiving the same courtesy and promptness as other tables.
This scenario is so normalized in the Black community that we often either just leave or use humor to ease the pain.
Either way, there is pain.
Unless you choose not to acknowledge it (if you know, you know).
Wilkerson observes that her friend, “outraged,” ensured everyone around them knew her fury and its source. This, of course, drew unwanted attention.
In 2025, we might call this behavior from a white ally “cringe.” We might even imagine her friend as a “Karen.” Our understanding of these dynamics has evolved even since Caste was published five years ago.
Wilkerson notes her friend “radicalized within moments” due to her “othered” experience.
That was just lunch.
Yesterday, millions of Americans were “othered” again. Millions of what Isabel Wilkerson terms “dominant caste” individuals were impacted by the House of Representatives. Millions of white Americans, across diverse groups like single parents, seniors, individuals with disabilities, and caregivers, faced changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP benefits. The goalposts moved for them. This is not something they are accustomed to.
“Where’s my 40 acres and a mule?” my dad has joked my whole life.
I didn’t truly understand until I became a working parent: the promises, the betrayal, the expected (demanded) forgiveness for the sake of promise, repeat. This pattern has echoed through all of American history, largely due to legal definitions of race and what we’ve allowed those definitions to mean to us.
But race isn’t the only factor that “others” us in a capitalist economy. Millions of white Americans are discovering this now. As white women lost their DEI hire roles, as farms lost their migrant workers, and as states most in need of FEMA lost access to aid, white Americans began to realize they too could be “othered.”
And frankly, it doesn’t feel good.
This experience, this sudden shift in the “goalposts,” has led to a different kind of radicalization. We’re seeing it in all its forms, from “red-pilled” mediocre white men to hands-off protests. Black women have largely decided to observe, because, hey, we tried, and we were still dismissed.
The goalposts have moved for white America again. I’m a little afraid of what that means for the rest of us. How does Janie’s quiet pursuit of peace look amidst this new, churning societal tide?
This pattern of “othering” isn’t new. Christina Accomando’s The Regulations of Robbers delves into how legal frameworks historically defined and dehumanized Black people, particularly Black women, to maintain a system of liberty and equality for white Americans. She highlights how anxieties about racial definitions in the 19th century led to increasingly complex laws that, despite their supposed rationality, actually obfuscated racism and sexism.
Accomando reveals how Thomas R.R. Cobb, in his book Historical Sketch of Slavery, essentially absolved white men of rape, portraying it as a “condition of slavery” rather than an act of power. He even depicted enslaved women as “cunning,” supposedly entrapping white slave owners with their lust. This kind of historical interpretation, placing blame on the oppressed, is a prime example of how narratives are constructed to justify inhumane treatment. The parallels between Cobb’s framing and Wilkerson’s friend’s “outrage” – both centering the discomfort of the dominant group – are striking. In both cases, the “othered” party is expected to accommodate the emotional landscape of those in power. It’s a cyclical radicalization of convenience, pushing aside the actual suffering for a more palatable narrative, much like those who watched Janie on her journey, judging her without understanding her internal truth.
Accomando’s analysis, drawing on critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and black feminist thought, reveals how seemingly neutral legal discourse continues to obscure systemic racism and sexism. It is the nature of conservative arguments being used today to drown the U.S. Constitution.
This historical continuity of denied agency for Black women over their bodies is glaringly evident in contemporary cases. Accomando reminds readers of Brenda Vaughn, a pregnant Black woman given additional jail time for check forgery to “keep her fetus from possible cocaine use,” a judge equating check forgery to rape. And, Darlene Johnson, ordered to have a Norplant implant.
And now, in 2025, with the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, doctors are being pursued for providing abortion access, and the heartbreaking case of Adriana Smith, a Black woman in Georgia declared brain dead, her family denied the right to take her off life support due to a “fetal heartbeat law.” In 30 states, an external entity can intervene in a woman’s advance directive because she is pregnant, yet not a single state has a single circumstance that allows the same for men.
That makes me furious.
I want to radicalize.
But who does it help?
I want to be diplomatic.
But who does it help?
Radicalization, born from the fear of the “other,” continues to manifest in policies that undermine fundamental rights and agency. We know that “othering” leads to dangerous and unintended consequences for everyone.
We must seek our own peace, like Janie, not for quietude’s sake, but as a foundation for genuine action (because we all are called to act), for truly facing the tsunami and charting a course toward a better shore.
Follow the Labor Pains project on social media to stay updated and join the conversation!
Leave a comment