“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions?”

I Kings 18:21a King James Version

Apollo 13 had but one shot hanging in the balance of space forged between two deadly outcomes, essentially two realities or two worlds.

The first reality would exhaust its limited fuel to fire toward the earth’s seemingly tranquil blue atmosphere. If the angle was too steep, they would burn up, lurching from the cold and empty lifelessness of space into the dense expanse of the volatile mixture of oxygen and hydrogen molecules that forms the air we all breathe. A fired ignition that was at too slight an angle, Apollo 13 would have skipped off the Earth’s atmosphere like a rock does a pond. This second option would have hurled the astronauts into a deep space of freezing, suffocating damnation to a biblical-like eternity of the outer darkness to never be seen again.

They had but one last obscure and culturally taboo option whose hope leaned toward the miraculous. They had to turn their attention, faith, and hope to a black woman. No, this was no TV scripted Christie Love or Movie Heroin Cleopatra Jones, or even President Danielle Sutton from the 2025 Movie, G20; this was none other than a mathematician, human-computer, and real-life heroine Katherine Johnson. Some may remember this Hidden Figure from the movie of the same name. Katherine mathematically computed how to get the astronauts back at precisely the right trajectory to get them safely to the surface.

We live in a complicated society. At its roots exists “worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” These words are spoken by a present heroine of wisdom, Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson is a “hidden figure” of discernment for today. In her award-winning book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” she thoroughly chronicles the winding pathways that have converged at the intersection of today’s America.

Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism -Wikipedia

The worn grooves are those defaults that seem comfortable for the majority population. This can easily explain the yearnings for many Americans to get back to so-called simpler times, such as the 1950s, a period that was not so good for people of color. The comforting routines were understood by all sides of the ethnic divide, in the same way that a doll experiment can reveal both white and children of color prefer white dolls over dolls of color.

Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem | Let’s Talk | NPR

In a video exercise of both white and black preschool teachers viewing the behavior of black and white boys and girls, this exercise revealed that the teachers were watching a black boy specifically expecting and qualifying his behavior as bad, while no actual bad behavior took place with him or any of the children.

“In the United States, racism and casteism can overlap or figure into the same scenario. The distinction my research has led me to make is as follows: Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. On the other hand, caste is about boundaries and ranking. Any action or structure that seeks to assign, limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, that seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of arbitrary traits—such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, immigrant status, etc.—can be seen as casteism. Ultimately, casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain one’s own ranking, advantage, privilege, or elevate oneself above others or to keep others beneath you”

Amazon Book Review article entitled, A conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste”

By Chris Schluep | December 16, 2020

Today, we are separated by many ideologies, philosophies, political theories, and the like. Laced throughout the myriads of these philosophies, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, lies the conundrum of I versus we. From the original sin of man to America’s original sin of slavery. Whether some influential and very wealthy people who blossomed into a movement and nearly toppled America in the secession of a civil war to scores of Americans today who are indifferent to the world outside of their bubbles and silos. Is today’s atmosphere ripe for slaying Abel again and shouting to the heavens, Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis 4:1-9.

Whether we are talking about Cain and Abel, the story of the Good Samaritan, or your neighbor next door, the answer was then, is now, and always will be yes: We are our brother’s keeper. As a Christian believer, I still ascribe to the words of scripture that say to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Ayn Rand, a Russian American writer.

“popularized mainly through her commercially successful novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Its principal doctrines consist of versions of metaphysical realism… Perhaps the best-known and most-controversial aspect of objectivism is its account of the moral virtues, in particular its unconventional claim that selfishness is a virtue and altruism a vice.”

Written By Brian Duignan

Fact-checked by Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica

Altruism

“Altruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good to others, but also those undertaken in order to avoid or prevent harm to them…”

“Behavior is normally described as altruistic when it is motivated by a desire to benefit someone other than oneself for that person’s sake. The term is used as the contrary of “self-interested” or “selfish” or “egoistic”—words applied to behavior that is motivated solely by the desire to benefit oneself. “

Altruism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Copyright 2025 by Richard Kraut

Simply put, Altruism is concern for others. Objectivism is Concern for Self.

In the same way Katherine Johnson offered the astronauts that third alternative which leaned toward the miraculous. Isabel Wilkerson offers what looks to be the beginnings of a way out of I vs we, caste, racism, and numerous other comprehensive misunderstandings and conundrums.  

Isabel Wilkerson’s quote begins with Caste is insidious: proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.- Oxford Dictionary.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal.”

This statement liberates us all and provides a way out of the conundrum if we are willing to invest in each other. Being insidious means it has set in gradually enough so that many have missed it and can ascribe no date as to when it started. However, it has appeared in Asian Indian, the preceding Dravidian, ancient Aryan, and Babylonian religious cultures to the more recent Nazi Germany. Caste is as old as the Cain vs Abel conundrum. Like air, though we cannot see it, it nonetheless exists and is essential. Caste derives its power because it appears innocuous, but it has such harmful effects. She states that “it is not hatred,” Though people can use hatred to accomplish their goals. But the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns are not based on hatred or personal. Long story short, every person in the majority culture can take a deep breath because no one, and certainly not Three-Fifths Magazine, is saying that you have hatred. And for any person of color or marginalized individuals, your racially biased experiences are not necessarily rooted in hatred or personal attacks.

Sparknotes.com summarized Isabel Wilkerson’s watershed work in this way: “Though Wilkerson claims that a caste system disproportionately affects members of its subordinate caste, she maintains that people at all levels of caste suffer as a result of being trapped in its restrictive structure. To maintain itself, Wilkerson asserts that everyone must be complicit in the project of dehumanization, which means sowing cruelty, rivalry, and distrust. When members of the dominant caste are coerced into committing acts of discrimination and violence, Wilkerson argues that it erodes their humanity and agency, though they may perceive themselveworldviews.lg social benefits in exchange. As Wilkerson maintains in the later chapters of Caste, the impact of caste on health and quality of life can also be disastrous across the board. For example, Wilkerson attributes the fact that the United States saw more deaths from COVID-19 than any other country to the problems caused by its caste system, which encourages an individualistic rather than collective mindset.” 

If we all take a step back, we could begin to see that Individual vs. Collective cultural perspectives play an important part in how we view our world. In so many cases, the conflict may not be black, Indigenous, and people of color vs white at all, but it is Altruism vs Objectivism, as simple as I vs we. In our comprehensive list of contentious grievances, it may once again all come down to “I versus we.” Though there is no clear statistical information available, it is commonly understood that marginalization could lead to more altruistic behavior. Experience is the best teacher. Millions of Americans fall somewhere in between these worldviews.

“Without providing for a time of healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present moment without a shattering of our common life,” is from Charles Spurgeon. 

“In the Epilogue to Caste, Wilkerson issues an explicit call to action for her readers. She particularly encourages those in the dominant caste to follow up their newfound awareness of caste with radical empathy across caste divisions, especially for people in the subordinate class.”

Sparknotes.com

To refuse to participate in the shaping our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it. 

Audre Lorde