Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
When I was a kid, I drove my mother nuts. I began each day with questions I believed critical to life and limb and needed to be answered immediately. I continued my personal inquisition throughout the day and well into the evening. My sister, Saint Lisa, shared a bedroom with me and never tired of creating or recounting stories to soothe my mind and address the reoccurring themes of my incessant inquiries. Mr. X and Nancy Drew stories eased my worries about the existence of evil. Tales of Little Rita and the consequences of restricting her diet to slightly toasted no-crusted egg salad sandwiches taught me how to cope with my compulsive behaviors. Accounts of the Swallows’ and Amazons’ sailing adventures portrayed entering the unknown as a positive adventure.
Now, years later, I’m still searching for answers. In the past few years, I have been honored to participate in Social Justice book clubs and Learning Circles hosted by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library system. As I learn the names, dates, and events left out of the curricula of my public schools and colleges; as I acquire more details about the enslavement of Africans captured and brought to Virginia in 1619, as I study and discuss books focusing on Black History, including chattel slavery, public lynching, segregation, legal slavery under Jim Crow, massacres, torture, castration, infanticide, rape, redlining, mass incarceration, underrepresentation, voter disenfranchisement, suppression, killings by police, medical mistreatment, the absence of universal health care, and constant microaggressions (the WHAT of what happened), I’ve been less and less satisfied with answers to WHY these things happened, and continue to happen in America.
Why do the police continue to shoot unarmed black men, women, and children? Why do we have a disproportionate number of black men, women, and children in prison? Why do we have a disproportionate number of black children and teens in special education classrooms? Why is it still difficult for black citizens to vote?
When I served on a jury in 2019, six of my fellow jurors who were black reported that they had been pulled over multiple times while driving within the limits of the law. Why? My local newspaper acknowledged that an analysis of traffic stop data shows evidence to support the fact that black motorists are disproportionately represented in traffic stops and nearly three times as likely to be searched than white drivers. Why? Why has no federal health policy erased the disparity in health care and services between blacks and whites in this country?
Why do we shout about the greatness of America as we deny some individuals their rights to identity, authority, life, liberty, and happiness? Why are these injustices so persistent, long after a significant number of white individuals have gained economic wealth?
Why in Letter to My Son does Ta-Nehisi Coates have to acknowledge: “The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson offers one theory illuminating the WHY of behaviors that retain and promote separation instead of inclusion, intimidation rather than encouragement, belittlement in place of praise, rejection over acceptance, and a persistent degraded status for individuals who are black. It is one view. I agree with critics that it is far from a comprehensive one, largely ignoring the link between American capitalism and racial oppression and exploitation. Yet, I believe, it is a valuable addition to answering the question of why we have been unable to ensure the basic human needs of black individuals in America.
In Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, published by Penguin in 2020, Ms. Wilkerson states that a caste system exists in America and that like other caste systems, ours 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 others. According to the author, “caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.” Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that “what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system.”
Traits that are neutral in the abstract (color, for instance) are assigned worth based on the traits of the dominant caste. “The hierarchy of class is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources–which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about authority, consideration, and assumptions of competence–who is accorded these and who is not.” Caste is a force that operates outside of hatred or intolerance, animated by practice and reflex. It’s about systematic coding and learned cultural assumptions of white superiority–along with unconscious biases. It’s not just the far right or trigger-happy cops that buy into the caste system; “even the ‘good’ can be casteists (those who uphold or benefit from an ingrained system of hierarchy, never challenging its assumptions)–such as the guest at a Tina Brown book party who asked the then state senator Barack Obama to get them a drink.”
Like the cast on a broken arm or the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place. Adherence to a caste system (casteism) includes behaviors that in any way support the denying of individuals political power, social equality, and basic dignity because of their lower placement in the system. Examples of casteism include any behavior that maintains your own ranking, advantage, and privilege at the expense of others; that seeks to curry favor with and remain in the good graces of those who dominate socially, politically, and economically.
Ms. Wilkerson states that some other caste systems use metrics so subtle that many outsiders may not be able to tell the difference between the dominant and subordinate groups. But in America, physical characteristics are used to differentiate inner abilities and group value. By using physical characteristics to determine who could be slave or free, who was assigned to the bottom or top, our country consigned a whole group of people to the bottom, based on what they looked like. One’s historic place in the hierarchy is visible on sight, at the very first glance. “In America, white superiority has been reinforced through nearly every cultural, social, economic, legal, and judicial aspect of American life. Caste is etched in Scripture and therefore justified as divinely ordained. It is inherited. Terror is used to enforce it. Endogamy, or restricting marriage within the group, preserves it. An obsession with the polluting touch of the other characterizes caste consciousness, leading to elaborate and often absurd regulations to maintain purity. Occupational hierarchy also marks caste, and it operates through the dehumanization of those deemed lowest.”
Ms. Wilkerson would be the first to say that her theory is not new. There is a scholarly tradition dating to the early nineteen-hundreds linking oppression in the United States to the Indian concept of caste. Ms. Wilkerson explains her motivation for investigating this theory in the following quote:
I discovered, while working on The Warmth of Other Suns, that I was not writing about geography and relocation, but about the American caste system, an artificial hierarchy in which most everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like and that manifested itself north and south. I had been writing about a stigmatized people, six million of them, who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the South, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the same way that the shadow of caste, I would soon discover, follows Indians in their own global diaspora.
For this book, I wanted to understand the origins and evolution of classifying and elevating one group of people over another and the consequences of doing so to the presumed beneficiaries and to those targeted as beneath them. Moving about the world as a living, breathing caste experiment myself, I wanted to understand the hierarchies that I and many millions of others have had to navigate to pursue our work and dreams. [p. 27]
Some critics have questioned Ms. Wilkerson’s theory and/or have found it to be incomplete. I encourage you to read “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” and then check the following resources that offer well-written evaluations of the book and many more answers to the “whys” I previously posed.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: A Failed Comparison and A Deeply Flawed Book
Isabel Wilkerson’s Book Caste and The Discontent of a Ruling Class in Crises
The Work of Analogy: On Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”
Is America Trapped in a Caste System?
Caste Absolves Racism: The Old Libel Against Hindus in a New Book
Caste Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation Is in Treatment of Black Americans
