Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Thank you to every open-minded soul who has embraced this book and welcomed its truths and its deeply researched history into your mind and spirit. I hear from readers all the time who say that it has reshaped the way they see the world. 'Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' is not an argument but a labor of love and a prayer for humanity. Thank you for reading it.

The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.

I cannot tell you how meaningful this chapter is to me or how much work went into it. Before I had written a single word, I knew that the story of anthrax resurfacing in the Siberian tundra would be the opening. I happened to hear a news brief in the summer of 2016, just a line or two, about a heatwave that was melting the Russian permafrost, exposing anthrax that had been dormant since World War II and was sickening the local people. It sounded otherworldly to me. I instantly saw it as an allegory for the resurgence of hatreds and hostilities in the American election that year and the dangers facing humanity and the planet itself. I had only a few key words to go on as I began my research into exactly what happened that summer in Siberia. I had to research the history, people and geology of a part of Russia I hadn't known existed. I had to research the mechanisms of anthrax, the symptoms of exposure, the effects on the local people. I had to track down accounts of the massive undertaking of relocating the villagers and trying to dispose of the pathogen, all of which, in the alchemy of narrative, led me to research silent earthquakes and the means of detecting them. I ended up doing all of this just for a few paragraphs in a single chapter. The anthrax story is the kind of thing that might initially seem extraneous, that might puzzle a few readers, while intriguing others, but it was central to the mission of the book, of awakening us to what we otherwise might not see. And I am grateful that so many people had faith in the writing to keep turning the pages to see how it all comes together.

Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.

The old house metaphor is the image that readers bring up more than any other. It came to me through my own love of old houses. While I was researching the book, a section of the plaster ceiling in a bedroom began to separate. We brought in inspectors to try to solve it. One inspector used an infrared light. Others went into the attic and onto the roof. The bow in the corner had come from a long ago leak that had grown beyond notice, unattended by a series of previous owners. Now a section of the ceiling was threatening to cave in on itself and perhaps take the rest of the ceiling with it. I hadn't caused this problem, and had, in fact, been the one to install the new roof. But it fell to me to fix it or suffer the consequences. Contractors offered to trim out it out and sheet-rock over it. But a plasterer said that the only way to really fix it was to tear out the plaster, down to the beams, inspect and rebuild the rotting lath and replaster the whole ceiling. And so we did. It took days to scrape and inspect, recast and reconstruct. And when it was done, I could breathe free, knowing, as we now are called upon to do in our era, in the house we all live in, that it was sound and secure, not merely patched and covered over, but maybe even better than it was, for ourselves and for the generations that come after us.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

This is a definition of caste that came after 25 years of studying it, discussing it, observing it, living it, and then testing it against other ways of looking at the word and the world. I built on the definition over time, adding and deleting a point or phrase, refining it until it had been distilled to a comprehensive description that could apply to most any caste system.

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

As with the previous definition, this passage came to me after years of observation, research and contemplation. Amazingly enough, these passages were first written on a Blackberry that I carried around with me for much of the time I was working on this book. I was constantly breaking it out to record an observation, unimpeded by location or available light, whenever a moment of clarity or inspiration struck.

In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.

Every caste system uses a means of determining rank in its hierarchy -- religion, language, color, place of origin or other, often immutable, characteristics. As Americans, we're accustomed to race as the primary means of division, the historic basis for establishing rank in the hierarchy. Here, I'm describing the interplay between the phenomena of caste and race in our society. How is one used in the service of the other?

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

The idea of caste being the bones and race the skin came to me as I was trying to invoke imagery not only to refine the definitions but to make these ideas come alive for the reader. Throughout the book, I was seeking to build upon the work of the anthropologists who went into the Jim Crow South and lived and studied it, people like Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner, John Dollard and Hortense Powdermaker, who emerged from their fieldwork using the language of caste.

The use of inherited physical characteristics to differentiate inner abilities and group value may be the cleverest way that a culture has ever devised to manage and maintain a caste system.

Some other caste systems use metrics so subtle that many outsiders may not be able to tell the difference between the dominant and subordinate groups. But by using physical characteristics to determine who could be slave or free, who was assigned to the bottom or the top, our country consigned a whole group of people to the bottom, based on what they looked like. Thus one's historic place in the hierarchy is visible on sight, at the very first glance.

Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation.

This foreshadows the chapter on slavery, which became the social, political and economic framework from 1619 onward, more than a century before there was a United States of America, and which became the foundation of caste in our country.

“See those birds,” the Oracle says to him. “At some point a program was written to govern them.” She looks up and scans the horizon. “A program was written to watch over the trees and the wind, the sunrise and sunset. There are programs running all over the place.” Some of these programs go without notice, so perfectly attuned they are to their task, so deeply embedded in the drone of existence. “The ones doing their job,” she tells him, “doing what they were meant to do are invisible. You’d never even know they were here.” So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.

This chapter on The Matrix came to me as if it wanted to be in the book and needed only to alert me to that necessity. It came to me at the end of an hours-long dive into a rabbit hole that began with my daughterly sorrow upon hearing of the death of the mother of the actress Rashida Jones. The news hurled me back to the grief of losing my own mother only a few years before, and I found myself pulled into the life of Peggy Lipton before she had married the impresario Quincy Jones and retired from acting to raise her daughters. Lipton had been an "It Girl" of the 1960s and had co-starred in a television show called "The Mod Squad," considered cool and cutting edge at the time because of its multiracial cast. I became intrigued with the show, the clips I found online, and the other actors in it. I discovered that one of the actors, Clarence Williams III, had been married to the actress Gloria Foster, who, it turned out, had played the role of the enigmatic Oracle in The Matrix. I got pulled into the history of the film series that afternoon, as if I were on a mission whose purpose was then unknown, and then saw a clip of Foster from the second film in the franchise. As I watched her speak of the silent programming of everything in that fictional world, I immediately saw the connection to the subconscious programming that reinforces the hierarchy I was writing about. When you are immersed in a project and open to the inspirations around us, the things that we need seem to arrive to us unbidden. Serendipity made it possible for that chapter to exist.

“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.

Here, James Baldwin is reminding us that race is a human invention that had no meaning before people who happened to look different from one another converged onto this land as a hierarchy was forming. He is showing how arbitrary and artificial the concept of race is, that color is a fact but race is a social construct.

Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away…It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations. Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.

I wrote this entire chapter, "The Euphoria of Hate," about the worshipful throngs greeting Hitler in 1940, in a single sitting. I wrote it as I watched a chilling four-minute film reel of the Nazi rally. I was sickened and immobilized. Other museum-goers walked past, so I had the viewing room all to myself. I sat watching the reel over and over, translating my horror and revulsion into words on my Blackberry. I sat there until the revelations were complete. Those words became this chapter.