Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
America is a post-racial society. There was racism in the past but most white people no longer hate African Americans and American institutions are not designed to oppress people of color.
America is a systemically racist society built on the unpaid labor of African Americans. Although laws have been changed, old attitudes constantly morph to obtain the same results in new contexts. So, we have gone from slavery to Jim Crow to segregation to mass incarceration and voter suppression.
How can both these perspectives be true? Isabel Wilkerson has an interesting explanation. In her view, a caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, influences people’s lives and behavior more than race, class, or any other factors.
In the book, the author examines the caste systems in America, India, and Nazi Germany, to compare and contrast the systems and describe the impact of the caste systems on the lives of citizens at each level of the hierarchy.
Wilkerson identifies eight pillars of caste systems:
- Divine will and the laws of nature – The hierarchy is ordained by God
- Heritability – Rank in inherited at birth
- Endogamy and the control of marriage and mating – Miscegenation is discouraged
- Purity versus pollution – Dominate caste must protect itself from pollution
- Occupational Hierarchy – Occupations are assigned to caste by law and by culture
- Dehumanization and Stigma – Locks marginalized groups outside the norms of humanity so every action against them seems reasonable
- Terror and enforcement, cruelty as a means of control – Psychological and physical violence and terror are used preemptively to stymie resistance
- Inherent superiority versus inherent inferiority
While the author’s analysis of caste systems is interesting and compelling, the most interesting part of the book is how caste systems alter the belief structure and the behaviors of the people who live under these systems. Wilkerson goes into detail describing the negative impact that caste systems have on us all. How the system colors our thoughts and actions on the unconscious level. How the system causes groups to deny the humanity of their fellow citizens.
While I have not resolved where I stand on Wilkerson’s presentation, I highly recommend this book. Primarily because it has done what all good books should do; it has given me a lot to think about.
Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” was a tour de force, and now she’s created another masterwork with “Caste.” She insightfully diagnoses our current situation: Caste is “like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened” (p. 381).
And she offers a prescription based on empathy: “If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key that opens the door to whatever we may have in common, whether cosplay or Star Trek or the loss of a parent, it could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across the ocean” (p. 386).