Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared.

These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.

Pillar Number Three Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

Endogamy, by closing off legal family connection, blocks the chance for empathy or a sense of shared destiny between the castes.

forty-one of the fifty states passed laws making intermarriage a crime punishable by fines of up to $5,000 and up to ten years in prison.

The Supreme Court did not overturn these prohibitions until 1967.

Alabama, the last state to do so, did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000.

the dominant gender of the dominant caste, in addition to controlling the livelihood and life chances of everyone beneath them, eliminated the competition for its own women and in fact for all women. For much of American history, dominant-caste men controlled who had access to whom for romantic liaisons and reproduction.

Pillar Number Four Purity versus Pollution

In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated. There were two separate Bibles—one for blacks and one for whites—to swear to tell the truth on. The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races.

Pillar Number Six Dehumanization and Stigma

It is harder to dehumanize a single individual that you have gotten the chance to know. Which is why people and groups who seek power and division do not bother with dehumanizing an individual. Better to attach a stigma, a taint of pollution to an entire group.

Pillar Number Seven Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

Pillar Number Eight

Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes

Chapter Ten Central Miscasting

Chapter Eleven Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung

Unconscious Bias: A Mutation in the Software

The research suggests that about 70 to 80 percent of whites fall into this category.”

“Scapegoating, as it is currently practiced,” Perera wrote, “means finding the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrongdoing, blamed for it and cast out of the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness, atoned (at one).”

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.

“The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,” wrote the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm. “He is nothing,” Fromm wrote, “but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.”

History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave, and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy.

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,”

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.”

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 those who submit to him.”

It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself.