Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage.

Color is a fact. Race is a social construct.

In a caste system, conflating compliance with approval can be dehumanizing in itself.

It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether separate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status.

wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the subordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position.

The emerging caste system permitted the exploitation of the lowest caste but not equality, or the appearance of equality, which is why endogamy, which confers an alliance between equals in the eyes of the law, was strictly policed and rape of lower-caste women ignored.

Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it. Dehumanize the group, and you have quarantined them from the masses you

choose to elevate and have programmed everyone, even some of the targets of dehumanization, to no longer believe what their eyes can see, to no longer trust their own thoughts.

Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.

the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, “has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of ‘skin color’ and ‘white supremacy’ as spiritual nourishment.”

The story didn’t even have to be airtight to be believed. It needed only to be plausible.

it would be the rare person who would not absorb the constructed centrality of the dominant group. It would be the rare outliers who would go out of their way to experience the world from the perspective of those considered below them, or even to think about them one way or the other, and the caste system does not require it of them.

“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.”

The caste system primes the dominant caste to experience discomfort, unfairness at the sight of a lower-caste person in a position above their perceived station

and more particularly above them, and may feel the need to restore equilibrium by putting the lower-caste person in their place.

They believe they know who will protect the interests of the trait that gives them the most status and that matters most to them.

“The parties have grown so divided by race,” writes the political scientist Lilliana Mason, “that simple racial identity, without policy content, is enough to predict party identity.”

The 2016 election became a remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America, from highest to lowest status, in a given group’s support of the Republican: White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent.

“I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.”

“The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people,”

“but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

The fact is that the bottom caste, though it bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often been least likely to want to.

You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.