“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the 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.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

The struggle is real, along with the striving and the cultural distortion of distraction that continually draws us down familiar pathways to the destination of the so-called natural order. This well-entrenched atmosphere leaves us quite a distance from an empathic society.

In 1967, the Kerner Commission declared, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Those differences still exist today; however, they are not as simple as black and white. Today, these differences are nuanced, clandestine, and cultural, i.e., “Two Worlds.”

One world is called Objectivism, whose latest iteration was articulated by Russian author Ayn Rand but can be traced back to the 19th-century teaching of Henry David Thoreau. (Concern for self.) The other is altruism (concern for others).

These philosophies empower catchy blanket statements such as “Pull Yourself Up by Your Own Bootstraps” to “It takes a Village,” the constant tug of war between the individual and collective worldviews explains why sometimes we in America just don’t get each other.

Add in the ecosystems, silos of tribalism and overlay them upon an American landscape of what Isabel Wilkerson describes as “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.”

Now, we find ourselves against a dilemma that’s difficult to sort through. Three-Fifths Magazine seeks to unmask these ideologies and show how they are helpful or hurtful to the cause of racial justice.