Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson opens with an event in the summer of 2016: a heat wave in Siberia. Far above the Arctic Circle, wildfires raged in heat above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the “indigenous herdsmen” of the region because sick with a mysterious illness. Russian scientists eventually determined that the illness was anthrax, released when melting permafrost unearthed the dead bodies of reindeer who had succumbed to the disease decades before. Wilkerson notes, soberly, “The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died” (3).

Wilkerson then turns to the United States, noting that the election that year led so many Americans to declare “this is not who we are” (4). Wilkerson does not share this shock, stating, “Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not” (4).

To personalize the 2016 narrative, she turns to an artist helping an elderly woman with her groceries in New York City. Both are living in “a campaign season unlike any other” (4). For the first time, a woman ran on a major party ticket. Her opponent was an “impetuous billionaire” who most pundits recognized as unqualified, best known for his reality television career. As he campaigned, he became known for his mockery of disabled people, women, and anyone who disagreed with him. While both candidates were white, the woman ran for the party that traditionally represented more diverse voters, while the “male candidate represented the conservative party that in recent decades had come to be seen as protecting an old social order benefitting and appealing largely to white voters” (5). This atmosphere of division hangs above the two people with groceries, as the old woman asks the artist who he plans to vote for. She tries to win the artist over with a coded appeal to their shared racial identity as she declares, “Yes, I know he mouths off at times […] But, he will restore our sovereignty” (5).

This claim contextualizes broader demographic shifts occurring in the United States, specifically given a 2008 projection that by 2042, “whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be” (6). That same year, the country elected its first African American president, prompting both:

[…] premature declarations of a post-racial world and an entire movement whose sole purpose was to prove that he had not been born in the United States, a campaign led by the billionaire who was now in 2016 running for president himself (6).

The world watched the 2016 election, a contest decided by the Electoral College, which assigns votes to each candidate based on the popular vote outcome of particular states. This time, the Electoral College failed to line up with the popular vote, in a “collision of unusual circumstance” that emboldened white individuals who rejected inclusive politics (7). A rising tide of “white supremacist violence” occurred that year and into 2017, as white men attacked various racial minorities, hurling epithets and expressing anti-immigrant sentiments. In 2017, “a white supremacist drove into a crowd of anti-hate protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a young white woman, Heather Heyer, in a standoff over monuments to the Confederacy that drew the eyes of the world” (8). In 2018, Jews were murdered while worshiping at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

That same year, a man attempted to break into a Black church to murder its worshippers, and when this effort failed, he murdered Black people at a supermarket. As he made his escape:

An armed bystander happened to see the shooter in the parking lot, which got the shooter’s attention. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ the shooter told the onlooker, ‘and I won’t shoot you,’ according to news reports. ‘Whites don’t kill whites’ (8).

That same year, professional psychiatrists labeled the president a danger to the country because of his status as a “malignant narcissist.” Environmental protections were rolled back, and brown children were separated from their parents as they sought asylum in the United States along its southern border. The opposition party feared investigating the president’s corruption and pursuing impeachment: “Many feared a backlash, feared riling up the billionaire’s base, in part because, though it represented a minority of the electorate, his base was made up overwhelmingly of people in the dominant caste” (9). The impeachment attempt, when finally mounted, failed in early 2020.

Finally, Wilkerson describes the 2020 pandemic, a novel virus originating in China that the president dismissed as a hoax (9). In absence of a federal response, with death tolls mounting, “the unfathomable became just another part of one’s day” (10). After laying out her catalogue of all of the unrest and radical transformation in America since 2016, Wilkerson asks why so many people voted for an “untested celebrity, one who had never served in either war or public office, unlike every man before him, and one whose rhetoric seemed a homing device for extremists” (10). She considers many theories, such as sexism or lower voter turnout among racial minorities.

In answer, however, she turns to metaphor, noting that humans often do not fully account for the wide spectrum of seismic events that move the earth beneath us. The larger seismic events we recall are “often preceded by longer, slow-moving, catastrophic disruptions rumbling twenty miles or more beneath us, too deep to be felt and too quiet to be measured for most of human history” (11).

Turning back to Siberia, Wilkerson notes that Russian authorities found themselves reviving a previously dormant anthrax vaccination program and burning all of the reindeer corpses, followed by intense use of bleach, to ensure the pathogen’s death. Wilkerson hopes that humanity looked at this event and saw that lurking diseases could “only [be] managed and anticipated, as with any virus, and that foresight and vigilance, the wisdom of never taking them for granted, never underestimating their persistence, was perhaps the most effective antidote” (12). 

In another metaphor, Wilkerson notes that when individuals visit a doctor, their current symptoms are not the only matter under discussion. Instead, doctors take comprehensive medical histories. She argues that the same should be true of countries, as there should be no shame in any discoveries of the national past. She says of medical discoveries, “You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact, you do the opposite. You educate yourself” (13). This education protects the individual and also future generations.

Wilkerson draws on her personal experience living in an old house and notes the necessity to use tools like infrared light to detect deeper structural flaws. She calls America an “old house” and notes that the same maintenance lessons apply: “The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. […] Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction” (15). This also means that arguments about not being directly morally culpable for past wrongs like slavery ignore the deeper problem: “foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now” (16). She warns against complacency, stating, “Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal” (16).

Wilkerson argues that the American house has an “unseen skeleton” that she calls a caste system. She defines this as:

[…] 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 (17).

Three main caste systems have existed in history: Nazi Germany’s racial caste system, India’s millennia-old caste system, and the enduring “race-based caste pyramid in the United States” (17). Caste is not about animosity or emotion but access to power, resources, respect, and public confidence.

These assumptions, and the power relationships that go along with them, are the “grammar” behind the ways Americans discuss race (18). Appearance is the “visible cue,” and with it are assumptions about virtually every aspect of an individual’s life, including their education, employment, and type of residence. Caste tells Americans:

[…] whether their neighborhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or to have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity (18).

While the definition of Whiteness and who could claim it has shifted over the centuries, the rules of access, power, and dominance ascribed to it have remained fixed. Wilkerson quotes one political scientist who calls race-based differentiation a classification system that “surpasses all others—even gender—in its intensity and subordination” (20). 

Wilkerson narrates a specific incident from the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.: his 1959 visit to India. Dr. King had been personally inspired by India’s independence struggle, and he also wanted to meet with India’s lowest caste, often called “untouchables.” Dr. King discovered that his fame preceded him and was discomfited when a school official introduced him as an “American untouchable.” After more thought, however, King realized that the label did apply to him.

Wilkerson argues that subordination of beings deemed lesser was key to the colonization process in North America, as White men decided, “If they were to convert this wilderness and civilize it to their liking […] they would need to conquer, enslave, or remove the people already on it and transport those they deemed lesser beings to tame and work the land to extract the wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines” (23). They constructed a hierarchy with White Europeans at the top, with many levels until “one arrived at the very bottom—African captives transported to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for twelve generations” (23).

Though scholars and ordinary Americans have not consistently used caste to discuss race in the US, the term has always been in some degree of use, including among antebellum abolitionists discussing slavery. In another medical metaphor, Wilkerson declares that “just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation” (24). While Wilkerson notes that scholars of race have been well aware of this, she also takes pains to point out that American eugenicists, those who promoted White superiority through their vision of White people’s ostensibly superior genes, also saw overlaps. In 1916, American eugenicist Madison Grant compared India’s caste system to the American South under its Jim Crow legal framework, which banned intermarriage and socialization between Americans of different races.

That same year, Bhimrao Ambedkar, born an untouchable, came to New York City from Bombay “to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste, and class” (25). Upon his return to India, Ambedkar also his caste a new name: “He rejected the term Harijans applied to them by Gandhi, patronizingly so to their minds. He spoke of his people as Dalits, meaning ‘broken people,’ which, due to the caste system, they were” (25). Ambedkar also corresponded with Black leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois, who affirmed his belief that the two systems were similar.

Wilkerson lays out her own intellectual journey, first begun in her study of Black Americans migrating out of the Jim Crow South, The Warmth of Other Suns. This journey is both intellectual and deeply personal for her, as she states:

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 […] 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 (27).

Her study of Nazi Germany, India, and US proved fruitful, as she unearthed “the essential shared characteristics of these hierarchies, what I call the eight pillars of caste, traits disturbingly present in all of them” (28). The work draws heavily on personal experiences with caste, including her own, and focuses more attention on the United States. Much of her discussion will feature the American South, as this is where the caste system was most explicitly codified and enacted.

Her other major intervention is linguistic: She will most often use the language of caste, rather than “African-American,” or gendered terms, or the umbrella term “marginalized people,” because this will help “open our eyes to the hidden work of a caste system that has gone unnamed but prevails among us to our collective detriment” (29). Her work in progress finds a warm reception with Indian scholars of caste, and, over time, Wilkerson discovers that she can determine most Indian people’s caste background through observation. When she tells this to an Indian scholar, the woman is disappointed, as she makes profound efforts in her personal life not to reinforce these hierarchies. 

In India, Wilkerson is gifted a bust of Ambedkar and brings it back to the United States. The Transportation Security administration, in the person of a young African American, inspects Wilkerson’s belongings upon her return, including the bust. When she tells the young man the bust depicts the “Martin Luther King of India” (32), he seems more interested and “a little proud.”

Wilkerson introduces the concept of a world so deeply governed by hidden computerized programming that those who live in it assume it is real. This is, of course, a film plot, as she acknowledges as she says, “the great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment” (33). Like the hidden programs the character Neo only sees with time, caste is “an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming” (34).