Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This phenomenon “is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups

perceived to be inferior,” writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one...

By the middle of the twentieth century, 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.”

Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “need the demarcations of caste more than upper class

whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.”

Who are you if there is no one to be better than? “It’s a great lie on which their identity has been built,” said Dr. Sushrut Jadhav, a prominent Indian psychiatrist, based in London, who specializes in the effects of caste on mental health.

The more recent forms of state-sanctioned discrimination, along with denying pay to enslaved people over the course of generations, has led to a wealth gap in which white families currently have ten times the wealth of their black counterparts. If you are not black and “if you or your parents were alive in the 1960s and got a mortgage,” wrote Ben Mathis-Lilley in Slate, “you benefited directly and materially from discrimination.”

Toward the end of the twentieth century, social scientists found new ways to measure what had transformed from overt racism to a slow boil of unspoken antagonisms that social scientists called unconscious bias.

They are not lying to you when they say, ‘I didn’t treat this person differently, and I treat everyone the same.’ They mean it because, consciously, that is the way they see themselves. These implicit biases shape their behavior in ways they are not even aware of. The research suggests that about 70 to 80 percent of whites fall into this category.”

Worse still, society was less prepared for the opioid crisis than it might have been had it not missed the chance to build a comprehensive framework for dealing with substance abuse in the 1990s, when it was the subordinate caste that was in need of help. The crack cocaine epidemic of that era was dismissed as an urban crime problem rather than addressed as a social and health crisis, considered a black problem rather than a human one.

“The scapegoater feels a relief in being lighter,” Perera wrote, “without the burden of carrying what is unacceptable to his or her ego ideal, without shadow.” The ones above the scapegoat can “stand purified and united with each other, feeling blessed by their God.” In the American

“Whites were unified in seeing the Negro as a scapegoat and proper object for exploitation and hatred,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal, a leading social economist in the 1940s. “White solidarity is upheld and the caste order protected.”

It’s a form of status hyper-vigilance, 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 is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, 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.

resident. This is the self-perpetuating mischief 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.

strangers became so common a feature of American life that these episodes have inspired memes of their own, videos gone viral,

Louis. It is a distant echo of an earlier time when anyone in the dominant caste was deputized, obligated even, to apprehend any black person during the era of slavery.

been recorded calling the police on ordinary black citizens under a wide range of ordinary circumstances,

“You’re in a Yale building,” an officer said, “and we need to make sure that you belong here.”

From her car, the woman trailed Corey Lewis, their babysitter, as he drove from a Walmart to a gas station and to his home after he did not permit the woman, a complete stranger, to talk with the children alone to see if they were all right.

Afterward, a reporter asked one of the children, ten-year-old Addison, what she would tell the woman who followed them that day. Her father told the Times her response: “I would just ask her to, next time, try to see us as three people rather than three skin colors, because we might’ve been Mr. Lewis’s adopted children.”

When you are raised middle class and born to a subordinated caste in general, and African-American in particular, you are keenly aware of the burden you carry and you know that working twice as hard is a given. But more important, you know there will be no latitude for a misstep, so you must try to be virtually perfect at all times merely to tread water. You live with the double standard even though you do not like it. You know growing up that you cannot get away with the things that your white friends might skate by with—adolescent pranks or shoplifting on a dare or cursing out a teacher. You knew better, even if you were so inclined, which I wasn’t and never have been.

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 and disoriented, trying to make sense of a public violation that seemed all the more menacing now that I could see it in full. The quiet mundanity of that terror has never left me, the scars outliving the cut.

Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us

War: “The masters feared their former slaves’ success,” he wrote, “far more than their anticipated failure.”

itself. As it was, the white soldiers were refusing to fight in the same trenches as black soldiers and refusing to salute black superiors.

“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 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.

There the police chief arrested Woodard on charges of disorderly conduct. At the bus stop and later in jail, the police chief beat him and jabbed his eyes with a billy club, blinding him. The next day a local judge found him guilty as charged, and, though he asked to see a doctor, the authorities did not get him one for several more days. By the time he was finally transferred to an army hospital, it was too late to save his eyesight. He was blind for the rest of his life.

the fact that Woodard was in uniform at the time he was beaten and that the initial assault occurred at a bus stop on federal property.

But the federal trial ran into caste obstructions in South Carolina. The local prosecutor relied solely on the testimony of the bus driver who had called the police, the defense attorney hurled racial epithets in open court at the blinded sergeant, and, when the all-white jury returned a not-guilty verdict for the police chief, the courtroom broke out in cheers.

It had been revealed during the trial that Woodard had apparently said “yes” instead of “yes, sir” to the police chief during the arrest. This, combined with the elevated position his uniform conveyed, was seen as reason enough for punishment in the caste system. After the trial, the police chief who had admitted to jabbing Woodard in the eyes went free. Woodard went north to New York as part of the Great Migration. The northern white judge assigned to the case lamented, “I was shocked by the hypocrisy of my government.”

“If a Negro rises, he will be careful not to become conspicuous, lest he be accused of putting on airs and thus arouse resentment,” wrote the ethnographer Bertram Schrieke.

example has taught him that competition and jealousy from the lower classes of whites often form an almost unsurpassable obstacle to his progress.”

Election Day in 1920,

the “single bloodiest election day in modern American history.”

On March 5, 1892, six white men stormed People’s Grocery. The black grocer and his supporters fired upon the intruders, wounding two of them.

One of Moss’s dear friends was the journalist Ida B. Wells, and this lynching is what set her on her lifelong mission to awaken the country to the terror of lynching.

“He was murdered with no more consideration than a dog….The colored people feel that every white man in Memphis who consented in his death is as guilty as those who fired the guns which took his life.”

“Moss was murdered for running a better business than his white competitor,”

The lowest caste was to remain in its place like an ill-fitting suit that must constantly be altered, seams and darts re-sewn to fit the requirements of the upper caste, going back to the enslavers who resented displays of industriousness and intellect in the people they saw themselves as owning.

Instead, the rewards and privileges flowed from upholding the caste order.

And it reminded everyone in the subordinated caste that they would only rise with the permission of the dominant caste, and on its terms, and only as long as they kept to the role assigned them. They were to be given no quarter, no latitude to imagine themselves in any place other than the bottom rung.

turnabout

It is in these ways that a caste system shape-shifts and protects its beneficiaries, a workaround emerges, provisions are made, and the hierarchy remains intact, even in the face of challenges from the highest authority in the land. This is how a caste system, it seems, manages always to prevail.

full power of the state treating them not as children but as threats to society. It was a scene that would be hard to imagine occurring with a young girl from the same caste—the dominant caste—as the officer. Within days, the officer resigned, but the incident demonstrated the depth of assumptions about who belongs where in a caste society, and the instantaneous walls erected and punishments meted out for breaching those boundaries even in our era.

Caste puts the richest and most powerful of the dominant caste at a remove, in the penthouse of a mythical high-rise, and everyone else, in descending order, on the floors beneath them. It consigns people in the subordinate caste to the basement, amid the flaws in the foundation and the cracks in the stonework that it appears others choose not to see.

Thus caste can pit the basement-dwellers against themselves in a flooding basement, creating an illusion, a panic even, that their only competition is one another.