Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Beyond all of this, the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target’s own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting. Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste. During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live.

James Marion Sims, would later be heralded as the founding father of gynecology. He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was “not painful enough to justify the trouble.” Instead, he administered morphine only after surgery, noting that it “relieves the scalding of the urine,” and, as Washington writes, “weakened the will to resist repeated procedures.”

A certain kind of violence was part of an unspoken curriculum for generations of children in the dominant caste. “White culture desensitized children to racial violence,” wrote the historian Kristina DuRocher, “so they could perpetuate it themselves one day.”

African-Americans were mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and burned at the courthouse square, a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century. A slaveholder in North Carolina seemed to speak for the enforcers of caste throughout the world. “Make them stand in fear,” she said.

“The human meaning of caste for those who live it is power and vulnerability, privilege and oppression, honor and denigration, plenty and want, reward and deprivation, security and anxiety,” wrote the preeminent American scholar of caste, Gerald Berreman. “A description of caste which fails to convey this is a travesty.”

In a psychic way, the people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion, an awakening to the holes in an article of faith that an inherited, unspoken superiority, a natural deservedness over subordinated castes, would assure their place in the hierarchy. They had relied on this illusion, perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group in a forbiddingly competitive society “in which downward social mobility was a constant fear,” the historian David Roediger wrote. “One might lose everything, but not whiteness.”

“His whole life is one anxious effort to preserve his caste,” wrote the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar of the dominant caste. “Caste is his precious possession which he must save at any cost.”

Once labor, housing, and schools finally began to open up to the subordinate caste, many working- and middle-class whites began to perceive themselves to be worse off, by comparison, and to report that they experienced more racism than African-Americans, unable to see the inequities that persist, often in their favor.

By adulthood, researchers have found, most Americans have been exposed to a culture with enough negative messages about African-Americans and other marginalized groups that as much as 80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it, according to the Harvard sociologist David R. Williams. The messaging is so pervasive in American society that a third of black Americans hold anti-black bias against themselves.

The crack cocaine epidemic of that era was dismissed as an urban crime problem rather than addressed as a social and health crisis, considered a black problem rather than a human one. The response was to criminalize addiction when the abusers were subordinate caste, which swelled the rate of mass incarceration, broke up families, and left the country ill-equipped for the incoming tragedy of opioid addiction. Caste assumptions created devastation on both sides of the caste divide and have made for a less generous society overall.

In his book Dying of Whiteness, Metzl told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver that threatened the man’s life. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would.

As scapegoats, they are seen as the reason for societal ills. The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses. Thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.

Back in 2014, Tamir Rice was twelve when officers shot him within seconds of their arrival as he stood in a Cleveland park playing with a pellet gun, despite the fact that Ohio was an open carry state, and it is a common occurrence for boys to have toy guns, an all-American thing to do. Tamir Rice happened to be the same age as the fictional Jem when the beloved fictional father Atticus Finch gave him an air rifle in To Kill a Mockingbird, the very scene from which the title comes. Lots of American boys play with guns, are given guns, and aren’t killed for it. Tamir Rice died before he could ask why.

The NAACP brought the case to the attention of President Harry S. Truman, a midwestern moderate who was incensed to learn that authorities in South Carolina had taken no action in the maiming of an American soldier. He ordered the Justice Department to investigate based on the fact that Woodard was in uniform at the time he was beaten and that the initial assault occurred at a bus stop on federal property. But the federal trial ran into caste obstructions in South Carolina. The local prosecutor relied solely on the testimony of the bus driver who had called the police, the defense attorney hurled racial epithets in open court at the blinded sergeant, and, when the all-white jury returned a not-guilty verdict for the police chief, the courtroom broke out in cheers.

A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, burning black homes and businesses to the ground, lynching and castrating black men, and driving the remaining black population out of town, after a black man tried to vote. The historian Paul Ortiz has called the Ocoee riot the “single bloodiest election day in modern American history.”

In the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mob leveled the section of town that was called black Wall Street, owing to the black banking, insurance, and other businesses clustered together and surrounded by well-kept brick homes that signaled prosperity. These were burned to the ground and never recovered.

One of Moss’s dear friends was the journalist Ida B. Wells, and this lynching is what set her on her lifelong mission to awaken the country to the terror of lynching. “A finer, cleaner man than he never walked the streets of Memphis,” Wells wrote. “He was murdered with no more consideration than a dog….The colored people feel that every white man in Memphis who consented in his death is as guilty as those who fired the guns which took his life.”

In a caste system, there can be little allowance for the disfavored caste to appear equal, much less superior at some human endeavor.

Little more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor, and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in America, at 27 percent. But a 2017 study by Travis Dixon at the University of Illinois found that African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two-thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news.

black students into classrooms with white students. The county had no public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, forcing parents of both races to find alternatives for their children. Local whites diverted government funds to private academies for white students, while black parents, whose tax dollars were now going to the white students, had to make do on their own.

Many recent African immigrants are better educated, better traveled than many Americans, may be fluent in multiple languages, and do not wish to be demoted to the lowest caste in their adopted homeland. The caste system encourages black immigrants to do everything they can to build distance between themselves and the subordinated caste they might be taken for. Like everyone else, they are exposed to the corrosive stereotypes of African-Americans and may work to make sure that people know that they are not of that group but are Jamaican or Grenadian or Ghanaian.

Up and down the hierarchy, Ambedkar noted, “each caste takes its pride and its consolation in the fact that in the scale of castes it is above some other caste.”

The enforcers of caste come in every color, creed, and gender. One does not have to be in the dominant caste to do its bidding. In fact, the most potent instrument of the caste system is a sentinel at every rung, whose identity forswears any accusation of discrimination and helps keep the caste system humming.

Davis would go on to get a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and join the faculty there, thus becoming the first black tenured professor at a major white American university. But he would suffer additional indignities. Faculty colleagues openly debated whether he should be allowed to teach white students, and he was prohibited from eating in the faculty dining room for a time.

Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles—the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child indigenous peoples, and the scapegoat caste at the bottom.

Freud was among the earliest psychoanalysts to connect a psychiatric diagnosis to Narcissus of Greek mythology, the son of the river god who fell in love with his own image in a pool of water and, not realizing that it was he who was “spurning” his affection, died in despair. “Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection,” wrote the psychologist Elsa Ronningstam. “He was caught in an illusion.”

“If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews,” Fromm wrote, “one can easily recognize the distorted character of their respective judgments. Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and fabrications. If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.” In both instances, Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an “inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior,” he wrote. A person in this group “feels: ‘even though I am poor and uncultured I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—I am white’; or ‘I am Aryan.’ ” A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.” The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own. “The greater the leader,” Fromm wrote, “the greater the follower….The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of th...

In India, it was Dalits who gravitated toward me like long-lost relatives, surrounding me and propping themselves on a sofa near me for an impromptu subordinate-caste tête-à-tête. I discovered that they wanted to hear from me, or, I should say, commune with someone they recognized as a kindred spirit who shared a common condition. “We read James Baldwin and Toni Morrison because they speak to our experiences,” a Dalit scholar said to me. “They help us in our plight.”

was standing during a lunch break at a conference in Delhi. A Dalit scholar and I were communing about our kindred perspectives when an upper-caste woman walked up and broke into the conversation to tell the Dalit woman what she should have included in her presentation, a point that she missed and which she would do well to include the next time. The upper-caste woman interrupted us with a sense of entitlement, without excusing herself for breaking in, disregarding the conversation in progress, disregarding me, the person with whom the Dalit woman was talking, as if whatever we were saying could wait. She chided the Dalit scholar with an air of condescension and superiority and proceeded to instruct the Dalit scholar on the Dalit behavior that the Dalit scholar had researched and written about. She castigated her in front of me, a complete stranger to both of them. I was there on a mission of my own, and an upper-caste woman was making herself the center of someone else’s conversation and was keeping me from my task.

Nordic was the kind of label that in earlier decades preceded the word stock, as with Alpine stock or Iberic stock, on a now-debunked scale of European “races.” Nordics and Anglo-Saxons were the two groups that had always been welcome in America. Nordic was what the drafters of the 1924 immigration law coveted. Nordic had inspired an entire ideology, Nordicism, which declared Nordics the most superior of all the Aryans. Nordic was the region of Europe on which the forty-fifth president of the United States seemed fixated nearly a century after the eugenics movement and whose people he wished would immigrate to America instead of Mexicans, Muslims, or Haitians.

“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.”

are among the most accomplished and well-to-do from their mother country, and thus few Dalits have the resources to get to America. By some estimates, Dalits are less than 2 percent of people of Indian descent in America. For those who manage to make it across the ocean, caste often migrates with them.

Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.

“I just went to the doctor, and he tells me I have high blood pressure and early signs of diabetes,” he said. “And I am just fifty-four. The effects of spending my entire adult life as a black man in this country are making me sick forty years ahead of my own father back in Nigeria.”

The pattern applies to another marginalized group, Mexicans in America. It turns out that poorer Mexican immigrants have longer telomeres, meaning healthier, younger cells, than better-off Mexican-Americans. Poorer Mexicans are likely to be newer to this country and to cluster together in closer support networks. Their isolation from the mainstream and the language barrier could inadvertently insulate them from the discrimination that more affluent Mexicans may face as they navigate the caste system on a daily basis. Those who were born in the United States or have lived in the country for many years would have greater exposure to the damaging effects of stereotyping and stigma. All of these groups appear to be paying a price when they step outside of the roles assigned them in the hierarchy. “High levels of everyday discrimination contribute to narrowing the arteries over time,” said the Harvard social scientist David R. Williams. “High levels of discrimination lead to higher levels of inflammation, a marker of heart disease.”

The average white American at age twenty-five is likely to live five years longer than the average African-American. While white high school dropouts have a lower life expectancy than their more educated white counterparts, they live three years longer than African-American high school dropouts. And white college graduates live four years longer than African-American college graduates.

Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country’s first black president. An estimated 43 percent went for him in 2008. Thus, a solid majority of white Americans— nearly three out of every five white voters—did not back him in his first election, and fewer still—39 percent—voted for him in 2012. In the former Confederate state of Mississippi, only one in ten white voters pulled the lever for Obama. For much of his presidency, he was trying to win over people who did not want him in the Oval Office and some who resented his very existence.

Only three Democrats have made it to the Oval Office since the Johnson and the civil rights era—Carter, Obama, and Bill Clinton, who won with 39 percent of the white vote in 1992 and 44 percent in 1996.

“The symbolism of Obama’s election was a profound loss to whites’ status,” Jardina wrote.

That same day, a troubled sixty-four-year-old man in South Florida took the most extreme action imaginable. In the time leading up to the election, according to police, Henry Hamilton, owner of a tanning salon in Key West, told friends, “If Barack gets reelected, I’m not going to be around.” He kept his word. His body was found in his condominium a day and a half after the returns came in. Two prescription bottles sat empty in his dining room. Beside him was a handwritten note demanding that he not be revived and cursing the newly reelected president.

the voting booth, many people make an autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station, their needs and wishes, and the multiple identities they carry (working class, middle class, rich, poor, white, black, male, female, Asian, Latino). They often align themselves not with those whose plight they may share, but with those whose power and privilege intersect with a trait of their own. 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.

Trump fared well against Clinton with all categories of white voters, at every age and education level, though his percentages were higher for whites who had no college degree (66 percent for Trump, 29 percent for Clinton) than for those who had a college degree (48 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Clinton). Contrary to popular assumptions that economic insecurity was a driver of the 2016 outcome, Trump beat Clinton in most every income level except those who were least economically secure—those making less than $50,000 per year. This could be seen as a reflection of the fact that marginalized voters in general, and black voters in particular—those more likely to support the Democrat—make up a disproportionate share of voters with lower incomes.

The Confederacy would lose the war in April 1865, but in the succeeding decades would win the all-important peace. The Confederates would manage to take hold of the public imagination with gauzy portrayals of the Lost Cause. Two of the most influential and popular films of the early twentieth century—Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—fed the country and the world the Confederate version of the war and portrayed the people of the degraded lowest caste as capable only of brute villainy or childlike buffoonery.

Like other slaveholders, he made full use of the “painful discipline” of which he spoke. In 1859, three of the people he enslaved on his Virginia plantation—a man named Wesley Norris and his sister and cousin—fled north and were captured near the Pennsylvania border. They were forced back to Lee’s plantation. Upon their arrival, Lee told them that “he would teach us a lesson we would never forget,” Wesley Norris later recounted. Lee ordered his overseer to strip them to the waist, tie them to posts, and whip the men fifty lashes and the woman twenty, on their bare backs. When the overseer resisted, Lee got the county constable and told him to “lay it on well,” which the constable did. “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh,” Norris recalled, “Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

Lee was never called to account for what he did to the Norrises nor to the many families he broke apart as an enslaver, the children he separated from parents, the husbands from wives. Even after leading the war of southern secession that ended with more casualties than any other on this soil, Lee faced few penalties associated with treason. President Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat and onetime slaveowner who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln’s assassination, granted amnesty to most of the Confederates in a bid to move on from sectional tensions and to put the matter to rest. Lee did no jail time and suffered little censure, though he was no longer permitted to vote, and he was forced to relinquish his plantation, which the government coveted and converted into Arlington National Cemetery.

The city had trouble finding a contractor to remove the statues. Every contractor who considered the city’s request got threatening attacks at home, at work, and on social media. It turned out that not one construction company in New Orleans wanted to touch it. Finally a contractor in Baton Rouge agreed to do it, but he pulled out, too, after his car was firebombed. The Confederate sympathizers made it clear that “any company that dared step forward,” Landrieu wrote, “would pay a price.”

An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” 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. They built a range of museums to preserve the story of the country’s descent into madness. They converted the infamous villa at Wannsee, where fifteen men worked out the details of the Final Solution to kill the Jews of Europe, into a museum examining the consequences of that fateful decision. The country converted the Gestapo headquarters into a museum called the Topography of Terror, a deep dive into the founding of the Third Reich. As for the man who oversaw these atrocities, Germany chose quite literally to pave over the Führer’s gravesite. There could be no more pedestrian resolution than that.

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.

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.”