Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

“Many people may rightly say, ‘I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves.’ And, yes, not one of us was here when this house was built. But here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joints, but they are ours to deal with now.”

Wilkerson dispenses early with any notion that distance from the mistakes of the past absolves her readers of personal responsibility. Protestations of innocence may be factually accurate, but she considers them unhelpful. Using the metaphor of America as a building, she stresses ownership and occupancy over intention. To deny responsibility for America’s defining faults is impossible as long as one lives in it. Cultivating moral responsibility in her readers is one of her fundamental aims. 

“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.” 

Like an architect drawing the floorplan to a house, Wilkerson defines her terms with care, and her word choice is particularly instructive. Caste is “embedded”—it is fixed and foundational. It rests on “presumptions” of inferiority and superiority—not facts or scientific observation. The traits to which it attaches value only have meaning because of human choices. Caste is a design, and it is about domination for some at the expense of others. It is imaginary, but the stakes are high—privileging the survival of some over others. Wilkerson establishes that constructed systems are no less consequential for their artificiality—a point she will prove over and over again with historical evidence and personal anecdotes. 

“Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to identify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception—whoever fit the legal definition at that moment in history was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.” 

Here, Wilkerson explains that caste and race are related but can be treated as distinct phenomena. The meaning of Whiteness and who can belong to it is flexible. Perhaps most important for her later arguments, elites have always depended on the legal system to make these determinations. The outward signifier of caste status should not be mistaken for the system itself. It is this system, Wilkerson argues, that has the most lasting power, as it clarifies for all people how much power they have and who exactly is beneath them. To extend her house metaphor, in a caste system, there must always be a floor and a ceiling; who belongs on the other floors has been historically contested.

“It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, as law and custom stated that ‘submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons.’ It was not merely a torn thread in ‘an otherwise perfect cloth,’ wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. ‘It would be closer to say that slavery provided the fabric out of which the cloth was made.’” 

Here, Wilkerson undercuts the idea that any White person is or could have been exempt from the consequences of slavery. Instead, all White people were elevated precisely because Black people were forcibly and cruelly enslaved. Ownership may have only been the privilege of some, but deference was owed to anyone who carried the outer signifiers of caste. Slavery is not some kind of aberration from an ideal or an isolated stain on American practice. It was, instead, fundamental and inextricable from every aspect of society. 

“I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won’t step inside that retailer. I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company’s reputation, but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.” 

In the conclusion to her anecdote about the racist store owner, Wilkerson makes explicit that naming an individual is distinct from naming a problem. The man who did not believe she was a reporter or that she was merely out of business cards does not need to be named, nor does his workplace. Wilkerson employs a similar strategy in her discussion of the 2016 election, naming neither Trump nor Clinton. Her concern, even when addressing a deeply personal insult, is the structural and systemic nature of its occurrence. 

“For the dominant caste, the word is radioactive—resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it. Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning. Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women, Whites over people of color, and the dominant over the subordinate. But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to.” 

In discussing White discomfort with racism, Wilkerson makes it clear how much emotions can serve as a hindrance to justice and comprehension of deeper problems. White people concentrate so hard on avoiding a single word that they miss power dynamics all around them. Wilkerson frequently rejects the idea that personal animus is significant or a substitute for analysis of historical problems, and here she explains that to focus on racism as hatred is to avoid accepting White preferences about what injustice means and who is responsible. No one can admit to racism as most White people prefer to define it—which obscures how many Americans benefit from and perpetuate a caste system that depends on race.

“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and humiliations that accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death. By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States ‘was not just a country with racism,’ Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. ‘It was the leading racist jurisdiction—so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.’ The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.” 

Wilkerson uses historical evidence to show that Nazi race theory and American ideals of White supremacy were linked in the minds of their perpetrators. On one level, this discussion establishes how horrifying Nazism was, that Hitler could look at lynching and see something to celebrate. However, Wilkerson is also careful to note the more uncomfortable aspects of these truths—Hitler appreciated the American capacity to retain ideals of innocence even after participation in torture and murder. Furthermore, Nazis did not have to invent their own system from scratch: They took the United States as their model. Wilkerson thus undercuts the mythology that America was in any way morally superior to the nation it eventually vanquished. 

“Upper-caste men, the people who wrote the laws, kept full and flagrant access to lower-caste women, whatever their age or marital status. In this way, the dominant gender of the dominant caste, in addition to controlling the livelihood and life chances of everyone beneath them, eliminated the competition for its own women and in fact for all women. For much of American history, dominant-caste men controlled who had access to whom for romantic liaisons and reproduction.” 

Here, Wilkerson makes clear that America’s race-based caste system penetrated all aspects of American life. White men could behave with impunity and violate the laws they wrote, as they were the architects of the broader system. They defended their own ability to rape at will and set themselves up as defenders of women who looked like them. Gender is thus not at all irrelevant to understanding America’s history of violence and inequality. It is inextricable from the caste system and the determination of who had legal and social power in White supremacy. 

“African-Americans would later convert the performance role they were forced to occupy—and the talent they built from it—into prominence in entertainment and in American culture disproportionate to their numbers. Since the early twentieth century, the wealthiest African-Americans—from Louis Armstrong to Mohammad Ali—have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a 2020 ranking of the richest African-Americans, seventeen of the top twenty—from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan—made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports.” 

Wilkerson frequently notes the ways Black people innovated, survived, and even thrived despite the systems dedicated to their subjugation. Here, she notes that a role born from this status—that of entertainer—saw some Black people attain wealth and status. This social role, however, is not a matter of the distant past. The wealthiest Black people today do similar work to their ancestors, though they do so with more autonomy. This evidence makes it more difficult to relegate slavery and its social codes to a matter of the distant past. Instead, it is all around us. 

“One day he was out riding with some other White men, southern White men, who were checking out some black sharecroppers. The black people were reluctant to come out of their cabins when the car with the White men pulled up. The driver had some fun with it, told the sharecroppers he was not going to hang them. Later, Dollard mentioned to the man that ‘the Negroes seem to be very polite around here.’ The man let out a laugh. ‘They have to be.’” 

Wilkerson frequently draws on research into caste to bolster her arguments and engage the reader more deeply. The White anthropologist in this anecdote may not have intended to be an object of terror, but he became one by association as he accompanied White landowners on their rounds. The driver takes terror as a means of amusement, joking about the life-and-death authority his position provides. He extends the cruel humor when he laughs at the anthropologist’s mistake: Politeness is not a matter of kindness or civility for Black people, but survival. 

“As this was England, there was a break for tea, and I gravitated to Tushar again in the crowd. He looked forlorn and impatient now. ‘They haven’t answered my questions,’ he said. ‘All my life I have lived with this. I am looking for answers about how this began. I will stay to hear more.’ He asked me why I had come all the way from America for this conference. I told him I wanted to understand caste because I lived with it, too. I told him most people don’t think of America as having a caste system, but it has all the hallmarks of one. He listened and did not judge.” 

Wilkerson suggests that academia, too, is bound by structures of privilege, as she finds herself isolated at a conference when she opts not to boast about her credentials as a writer. She gravitates toward an engineer from India on a similar mission—she cites his anguish and his desires to emphasize that caste harms individuals and leaves them without the tools to understand why their lives operate as they do. Where her comparisons between Nazi Germany and the United States are meant to undercut any sense of American superiority, her story of affinity with Indian people creates more hope. Shared experience of oppression can build friendship and solidarity between people of otherwise distinct national and social backgrounds. 

“Some people from the groups that were said to be inherently inferior managed to make it into the mainstream, a few rising to the level of people in the dominant caste, one of them, in 2008, rising to the highest station in the land. This left some white working-class Americans in particular, those with the least education and the material security that it can confer, to face the question of whether the commodity that they could take for granted—their skin and ascribed race—might be losing value.” 

Wilkerson’s project, while historical, is also always about explaining the present, putting contemporary events in a larger frame. For White Americans, caste is a commodity—an object purchased at the expense of others but valued nonetheless. She continues her rhetorical strategy of not naming key figures; President Obama is a threat not because of anything individual, but because of his race and his defiance of caste. His achievement suggests that Whiteness is less significant than it has been in the past, and this is a source of concern, especially for those whose class position is less secure. For Wilkerson, class is not unimportant—but it can never be separated from its overlaps with the caste system.

“In the United States, it is a numerical impossibility for African-Americans to wreak such havoc in employment and higher education: there are simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding. Notably, while affirmative action grew out of the civil rights movement by lowest-caste people and their white allies, analysis show that is white women and white families, who became the prime beneficiaries of a plan intended to redress centuries of injustice against the lowest-caste people.” 

Wilkerson’s discussion of affirmative action highlights how much debates about it are about caste. They rely on emotional investment in dominance rather than empirical reality. Dominant caste people are, in this way, cast as “dreamers”—so attached to caste that they ignore reality. The more important story is the subversion of original consequences: Despite the efforts of African Americans, affirmative action has benefited them less than White women. Though she does not say this outright, this point suggests that the American caste system is more comfortable challenging White male dominance on the axis of gender than it is in combating racism and problems of White overrepresentation.

“The caste system had given Charles Stuart cover and endangered Carol deMaiti Stuart, as it had for White women in the Jim Crow South, where husbands knew that a black man could be blamed for anything that befell a White woman if the dominant caste chose to accuse him. It is not to say that any group is more prone to criminality or subterfuge than another. It is to say that one of the more disturbing aspects of a caste system, and of the unequal justice it produces, is that it makes for a less safe society, allowing the guilty to shift blame and often to go free. A caste system gives us false comfort, makes us feel that the world is in order, that we automatically know the good guys from the bad guys.”

Wilkerson uses the Stuart case to establish that the caste system does not truly help any American flourish or guarantee safety. While it is most often used to harm those it deems less valuable, it can be weaponized against anyone. Charles Stuart used it and nearly covered up his role in the murder of his wife and death of his child, drawing on an ancient script for modern goals of success and wealth. The Stuarts of the world will remain with us as long as caste does, as they can hide behind our preconceived notions and our preference for neat scripts of heroism and villainy. 

“Beyond that, when any citizen is disrupted in the midst of everyday life and responsibilities, it is, in fact, a societal disruption, a tear in the daily workings of human interaction. These people are part of the American economy, and when they are interrupted, schools and business and institutions suffer an invisible loss in output as their workers get blindsided from their tasks.”

Wilkerson implicitly invokes another value of American society in this critique of caste: the value of economic productivity. She argues that caste runs counter to this value, as constant interruptions to defend the hierarchy prevent people from working to their full potential. Society is likened to a fabric, and caste is a threat to its cohesion. If Americans value labors and workers, she implies, they should invest less in caste and more in a commitment to shared humanity. She knows, of course, that this will not be done readily, but it is another example of her effort to present caste as irrational and antithetical to some stated goals and preferences. 

“Of the major scholars of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, he and his wife were among the only field researchers who labored under the cloud of caste subordination themselves. Their work would end up inspiring St. Claire Drake, Stokely Carmichael, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, all of whom read his work as undergraduates and saw themselves in his analysis. Allison Davis was nearly lost to history, but he has become a champion to current-day researchers who seek to understand the infrastructure of our divisions. He brought a singular depth of commitment to understanding the caste system in hopes of defeating it. He had taken on the challenge as if his life had depended upon it, because in a very real way, it did.”

Wilkerson uses Allison Davis to support her argument that personal experience is an asset to scholarship, rather than a detriment. Caste influences the reception of Davis’s work: White scholars are able to publish more quickly, and Black scholars hesitate to embrace his conclusions because of what they suggest about the present and future of the Black liberation struggle. He went on to influence that struggle’s future, Wilkerson underlines, as she names civil rights leaders who were influenced by his work and legacy. Davis labored and struggled, and Wilkerson takes pains to establish that his work was not in vain. In so doing, she casts herself as one of his successors. 

“The ancient code for the subordinate caste calls upon them to see the world not with their own eyes but as the dominant caste sees it, demands that they extend compassion even when none is forthcoming in exchange, a fusion of dominant and subordinate that brings to mind the Stockholm Syndrome. Though the syndrome has no universally accepted definition or diagnosis, it is generally seen as a phenomenon of people bonding with those who abuse or hold them hostage.” 

Wilkerson takes pains to establish that while caste has sometimes mandated physical separation, it never provides emotional or psychic separation. Instead, it demands that subordinated people be intimately familiar with those who oppress them, even to their own detriment. Their mental and emotional energy is never fully their own; there must always be some in reserve to cater to those whose needs they must know intimately. Their position is like those in a hostage situation: they act out of self-preservation. This captivity is at work in our own time and does not depend on legal enslavement or segregation—it depends on caste in whatever form it takes. 

“Over the course of American history, black men have died for doing far less to white women than what he did to me that night. You might say, Why didn’t you complain to the airline? Why didn’t you tell him off? Those questions belie the situation. This was not the fault of the airline. As for the man who did this, he ignored my protests of his behavior. This happened because good people were silent and let it happen. I was too disgusted to reply as the man swaggered ahead of me. I made my way to the other side of the passenger walkway and continued until he was out of my sight.” 

Wilkerson carries the weight of history with her whenever she travels. She knows that a White man can assault her with impunity and that men of her own race have lost their lives due to accusations of assault that were false. She imagines an interlocutor who doubts her choices or questions her decisions. She declares baldly that she was unheard and makes no apology for this as the responsibility is not hers. Her suffering depended as much on tacit acceptance as it did direct action. She cannot undo what happened, but it seems significant she denies the man any reply: She does not perform forgiveness even if she may not feel free to express the full extent of her outrage. 

“When whites are prompted to think of the black person as an individual, imagine their personal characteristics, the threat level falls. This shows that it is ‘possible to override our worst impulses and reduce these prejudices,’ wrote the psychologist Susan Fiske. But to do so in a meaningful way requires forethought, an awareness of the unconscious biases passed down through the generations, and the chance for people different from one another to work together as equals, on the same team, with shared goals that ‘require cooperation to succeed,’ Fiske said. Outside of sports and the military, American society provides few such opportunities.” 

Wilkerson uses social science data to demonstrate that caste has physiological and psychological consequences. Whiteness responds to the proximity of other castes as stressful and threatening, and it is a matter of effort and conscious thought to fight this programming. American society is structured to make such efforts inherently difficult. Few institutions are interracial in design, so socialization that counters unconscious bias is rare. This is the contemporary legacy of de jure segregation: Its caste prescriptions operate within individuals even when those laws no longer exist. 

“Obama’s own personal history does not force Americans to confront slavery and Jim Crow directly: unthinkable. But from a caste perspective, and beyond his own personal gifts, his singular origin story was one that the caste system would be more willing to accept, if any. His growing up in Hawaii, the son of an immigrant from Kenya and of a White woman from Kansas, was free from the heaviness of slavery and Jim Crow and the hard histories of regular African-Americans.”

Wilkerson provides another lens on the popular perception of Barack Obama’s uniqueness. His personal history lacked ties to the more racially charged aspects of the American past. Obama’s proximity to Whiteness and distance from slavery influenced his rise. To return to one of Wilkerson’s central metaphors, he could become president without forcing Americans to examine the structure of their inherited house. 

“Many voters, in fact, made an assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.” 

Wilkerson quickly dispenses with the popular view that support for Trump cannot be explained in practical terms. Instead, she argues, his supporters voted their values and priorities with an eye to demographic change and social structure. It simply mattered less to them that Trump could cause great harm in the short term. Given this priority, it was rational of them to support a candidate who explicitly backed the caste system and its guarantees of dominance. Caste has its own logic beyond short-term gain. 

“In Germany, there is no death penalty. ‘We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,’ a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America, all currently have the death penalty. In Germany, few people will proudly admit to having been related to Nazis or will openly defend the Nazi cause. ‘Not even members of Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party,’ wrote Neiman, ‘would suggest glorifying that part of the past.’” 

As she uses India to showcase solidarity between marginalized peoples across national boundaries, Wilkerson uses modern Germany to show that recovery from the worst of the caste system is possible. Germans reject capital punishment because of their national past—Wilkerson takes care to underscore that capital punishment is more commonly practiced in states that embraced Jim Crow legal structures. German extreme conservatives use other rhetoric than Nazi ideology to advance their goals. It is possible, then, to openly glorify caste beyond the bounds of social acceptability—and this, too, is a sign of progress.

“But it was the caste-like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy—grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact—that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.” 

Wilkerson makes caste visible in ongoing events, calling essential workers’ jobs “caste-like” to underscore the ways an old system remains at work. Caste is embodied in new and stark ways in a pandemic, as it deems those at the bottom of its hierarchy acceptable losses while the privileged remain more protected. Just as slavery allowed White people greater material comforts, the caste logic of which workers are essential allows White people to have others perform their home deliveries that minimize exposure to Covid-19. No aspect of human life—or humanity’s relationship to invisible viruses—can escape the logic of caste and its life or death implications.