Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

The loss of the omega can threaten social cohesion and put the entire pack at risk. Depending on the composition

Either way, the pack is destabilized. After all, these roles are

but emerge as a consequence of internal personality traits that surface naturally in the forming of a pack.

not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically, on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family

them. It is a tragedy for humankind, which is deprived of the benefit of natural alphas who might lead the world with the compassion and courage that are the hallmarks of a born leader, male or female, of whatever religion or background or caste, the actual intended alphas of the

The challenge for a parent in the subordinate caste is to calculate the precise and optimal moment to break the truth to a child before the caste system does it for him, to figure out how to stretch their innocence until the last possible moment before it is too late.

Modern-day caste protocols are less often about overt attacks or conscious hostility and can be dispiritingly hard to fight.

the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit. It

but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

If there is anything that distinguishes caste, however, it is, first, the policing of roles expected of people based on what they look like, and, second, the monitoring of boundaries—the disregard for the boundaries of subordinate castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominant caste, to keep the hierarchy in place.

This was the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition. They were not, like me, frozen

is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. Achievement by those in

the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all.

puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash.

clarified for them that these men were “inferior beings,” no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that

“This indulgence and this familiarity,” read the announcement, “are matters of grievous concern to the Americans. They consider them an affront to their national policy.” In apprising their

the French command gave this directive: “We cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter. We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside of the requirements of military service.”

More pointedly, the French officers were told: “We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of (white) Americans. It is all right to recognize their good qualities and their services, but only in moderate terms.”

White officers who had witnessed their bravery broke with caste and nominated both men for the Medal of Honor. But this was the height of the eugenics era, when black inferiority was near universal convention in American culture. The government refused to grant the medal to either soldier. The award intended for Holmes was downgraded to a lesser citation, and the recommendation for Stowers was lost for half a century. These actions were in keeping with societal norms that people in the lowest caste were not to be commended even in death, lest the living begin to think themselves equal, get uppity, out of their place, and threaten the myths that the upper caste kept telling itself and the world.

as often happens, does not appear to have reaped the rewards for a role that was beyond his station.

might begin to comprehend it. In that moment, you are face-to-face with the force of willing susceptibility to evil. The Nazis

Did the German people know the carnage they were celebrating? Yes, it turns out, clips of bombing raids were shown during news reels before the feature film at the cinema. They knew that the French had been violently defeated. It was two years past Kristallnacht. They knew that

Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe, to African-Americans during the lynching terrors of Jim Crow, to Native Americans as their land was plundered and their numbers decimated, to Dalits considered so low that their very shadow polluted those deemed above them—happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded and had been open to being persuaded, centuries ago or in the recent past, that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving of their fate. Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important.

Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.

As long as the designated bottom dwellers remain in their designated place, their own identities and futures are

“White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world.”

narcissism—a complex condition of self-aggrandizing entitlement and disregard of others, growing out of a hollow insecurity—as it applies to individuals. But some scholars apply it to the behavior of nations, tribes,

Their investment in this illusion gives them as much of a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority. “The

survival of the group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great or greater than that of their own lives, and furthermore that they believe in the righteousness, or even superiority, of their group as compared to others.”

“Group narcissism leads people to fascism. An

extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism.”

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 narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him.”

began to be able to distinguish people from their bearing and demeanor, in accord with the universal script of caste.

a dominant-caste person lecturing a subordinate-caste person about something on which the subordinate-caste person may, in fact, be an authority.

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.”

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.

“What I need is to feel better inside my own skin,” he said.

term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.

call “ ‘racialized economics’: the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.”

electorate. But the foremost concerns of the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc—affordable housing, clean water, police brutality, the racial wealth gap, and reparations for state-sanctioned discrimination (as has been accorded other groups discriminated against in the United States)—have remained on the back burner, or have even been considered radioactive issues for the party that African-Americans help to sustain. To those who say that this would be impractical, it would be the duty of the party representing and dependent on the subordinate caste to open the eyes of their fellow Americans and

make the case for a more egalitarian country.

Those susceptible to “dominant group status threat,” Mutz wrote, will do whatever they can to protect the hierarchy that has benefited them, to “regain a sense of dominance and wellbeing.”

they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”

“These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” he said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”

“They were created as political weapons,” he would later write, “part of

an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of...