Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

“What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,” Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.”

Modern medicine has long sought to attribute the higher rates of disease in African-Americans relative to white Americans to genetics. But it turns out that sub-Saharan Africans do not have high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, while African-Americans have the highest rates of those conditions of all ethnic groups in the United States.

Studies are showing that prejudice itself can be deadly. Neuroscientists have found that harboring this kind of animus can raise a person’s blood pressure and cortisol levels, “even during benign social interactions with people of different races,” wrote the neuropsychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould. Prejudice itself can be deadly. These physical reactions can put the person at greater risk for stroke or diabetes or heart attacks and premature death.

Among whites, the sight of a black person, even in faded yearbook photographs, can trigger the amygdala of the brain to perceive threat and arm itself for vigilance within 30 milliseconds of exposure, the blink of an eye, researchers have found. When whites have a bit more time for the conscious mind to override the automatic feeling of threat, the amygdala activity switches to inhibition mode. 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.

But expanded research is finding that this kind of cell damage results from one’s exposure to social inequity and difficult life conditions, rather than merely one’s race and ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites, whose resources might better help them weather life’s challenges. The opposite is true for people in the lower castes in America. Socioeconomic status and the presumed privilege that comes with it do not protect the health of well-to-do African-Americans. In fact, many suffer a health penalty for their ambitions. “Middle class African American men and women are more likely to suffer from hypertension and stress than those with lower incomes,” wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress-inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.

People who face discrimination, Williams said, often build up a layer of unhealthy fat, known as visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, just under the skin. It is this visceral fat that raises the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and leads to premature death. And it can be found in people of all ethnicities based on their experience of discrimination.

Thus, people of color with the most education, who compete in fields where they are not expected to be, continually press against the boundaries of caste and experience a lower life expectancy as a result. The more ambitious the marginalized person, the greater the risk of what evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves calls “the out-of-place principle of social dominance.” Graves found that hypertension rates of blacks and whites are roughly the same when affluent African-Americans are deleted from the equation. The caste system takes years off the lives of subordinate-caste people the more they find themselves in contention with it.

People with overlapping self-interests will often gravitate toward the personal characteristic that accords them the most status. Many make an existential, aspirational choice. They vote up, rather than across, and usually not down. They believe they know who will protect the interests of the trait that gives them the most status and that matters most to them.

“What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics,”

The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them.

This was common practice and standard procedure during much of the 246 years of slavery. Had these and even more gruesome atrocities occurred in another country, at another time, to another set of people other than the lowest caste, they would have been considered crimes against humanity in violation of international conventions. But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.

Usually, it is the victors of war who erect monuments and commemorations to themselves. Here, an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other.

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought or fell for them.” Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, after decades of silence and soul-searching, chose to erect memorials to the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings.

In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south, fluttering along highways in Georgia and the other former Confederate states. A Confederate flag the size of a bedsheet flapped in the wind off an interstate in Virginia around the time of the Charlottesville rally. 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.

He wished every dominant-caste person could awaken to this fact. “My message would be to take off the fake crown. It will cost you more to keep it than to let it go. It is not real. It is just a marker of your programming. You will be happier and freer without it. You will see all of humanity. You will find your true self.”

We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity.

It turns out that everyone benefits when society meets the needs of the disadvantaged.

Before 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act, the United States was neither a democracy nor a meritocracy, because the majority of its population was excluded from competition in most aspects of American life. People who happened to be born male and of European ancestry competed only against themselves.

Anyone who truly believes in a meritocracy would not want to be in a caste system in which certain groups of people are excluded or disqualified by long-standing deprivations. A win is not legitimate if whole sections of humanity are not in the game.

The full embrace of all humanity lifts the standards of any human endeavor.

Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.

The black maternal death rate is three times that of white women overall, and, not surprisingly from a caste perspective, the death rate is five times higher for college-educated black mothers than for college-educated white mothers. The disparities are so wide that a college-educated mother from the subordinated caste is more likely to die from childbirth than a dominant-caste mother who did not finish high school.

“Not only does the black-white disparity for infant mortality exist at all educational levels, it is greatest for those with a master’s degree or higher. Further, the IMR is highest for black women with a doctorate or professional degree.” These counterintuitive outcomes reflect both the long-standing resentments, unconscious biases, and pressures faced by those who defy their expected place at the bottom of the caste system and the toll on the bodies of those who may experience “weathering” as they, by their ambitions and achievements, find themselves in continuous contention with the boundaries of caste.

The hazards of being forced to carry pregnancies to term could lead to more tragic outcomes and deaths for black women and babies, with a 2021 study by the sociologist Amanda Jean Stevenson finding that the death rate for black mothers will rise by as much as a third under these abortion bans.