Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

In America, at Civil War reenactments throughout the country, more people typically sign up to fight on the side of the Confederates than for the Union, leaving the Union side sometimes struggling to find enough modern-day conscripts to stage a reenactment.

In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial. Many were hanged at the hands of the Allies for their crimes against humanity. The people who kidnapped and held hostage millions of people during slavery, condemning them to slow death, were not called to account and did not stand trial.

In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the twe...

the decades roughly between the end of Reconstruction and the start of World War II, was called the Nadir by the black historian Rayford Logan. Many black historians see the current era, starting roughly with the shooting of Trayvon Martin and other unarmed black people, combined with the rollbacks in voting rights protections, as the Second Nadir. “We’re seeing the twenty-first-century version of the backlash,” I said. “The tools will be different than before.”

“So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

“Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States,” he observed in New York magazine in 2014. “In none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.” A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.

There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country, and the United States has one of the highest rates of gun deaths in the developed world, according to the World Health Organization. Americans own more guns per capita than any other nation. Americans own nearly half of the guns in the world owned by civilians.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than that of Russia and China, with a rate of 655 per 100,000. The United States imprisons more people, 2.2 million, than any other nation. The incarceration rate in America is so high that the line representing the United States extends well off the page in graphics of the prison rates in the developed world. If the U.S. prison population were a city, it would be the fifth largest in America.

American women are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy nations. With fourteen deaths per 100,000 live births, the maternal mortality rate in America is nearly three times the rate in Sweden, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Part of this reflects the w...

“This is a civilization searching for its humanity,” Gary Michael Tartakov, an American scholar of caste, said of this country. “It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own.”

few years into his tenure, the opera singer Marian Anderson, a renowned contralto born to the subordinated caste, performed to an overflow crowd at McCarter Theatre in Princeton and to rapturous praise in the press of her “complete mastery of a magnificent voice.” But the Nassau Inn in Princeton refused to rent a room to her for the night. Einstein, learning of this, invited her to stay in his home. From then on, she would stay at the Einstein residence whenever she was in town, even after Princeton hotels began accepting African-American guests. They would remain friends until his death.

At a certain point in his life, he rarely accepted the many honors that came his way, but in 1946 he made an exception for Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. He agreed to deliver the commencement address and to accept an honorary degree there. On that visit, he taught his theory of relativity to physics students and played with the children of black faculty, among them the son of the university president, a young Julian Bond, who would go on to become a civil rights leader. “The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people,” Einstein told the graduates at commencement, “but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.” He became a passionate ally of the people consigned to the bottom. “He hates race prejudice,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “because as a Jew he knows what it is.”

The sacrifices of the subordinate caste during the civil rights era, for instance, benefited women of all ethnicities—the wives, daughters, sisters, and nieces of every American man—women who now have legal protections against job discrimination that they did not have before the 1960s.

Many of the advancements that Americans enjoy and that are under assault in our current day—birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, the right to vote, laws against discrimination on the basis of gender, race, national origin—are all the byproducts of the subordinate caste’s fight for justice in this country and ended up helping others as much as if not more than themselves.

“Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire,” the Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar wrote. “Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind.”

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is looking across at someone and feeling sorrow, often in times of loss. Empathy is not pity. Pity is looking down from above and feeling a distant sadness for another in their misfortune. Empathy is commonly viewed as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how you would feel. That could be seen as a start, but that is little more than role-playing, and it is not enough in the ruptured world we live in.

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.

Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don’t get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another perso...

We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share. We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.

A world without caste would set everyone free.