Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

“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.