Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

worked. “There are two flight attendants in the back,” he said. “They can help you when you get back there.”

Marginalized people have a hard enough time moving about in a world built for others. Now it was as if I were taking up space that belonged to its rightful passengers. It came as a shock to me, perhaps because this clipped dismissal came from a man whose generation would not be expected to hold such retrograde assumptions.

I went back and sat up straight, across the length of the country. The caste system had put me in my place.

“Hey, I can’t go back any further!” I told him in a plea for

help, loud enough for everyone around me to hear. He said nothing, as if I were not there, as if nobody were there, as if the laws of physics or privacy did not apply.

A silence of complicity had overtaken the entire first-class cabin, and I was alone in a packed compartment.

But that day, with so very little at stake to themselves, they chose caste solidarity over principle, tribe over empathy.

He hadn’t intervened. He, too, seemed powerless. He couldn’t likely have taken the risk. This was an upper-caste man assaulting a lower-caste woman, and the lead attendant was lower caste himself.

see. The lead attendant likely felt it would do him no good to get involved. In a caste system, things work more smoothly when everyone stays in their place, and that is what he

her.” Over the course of American history, black men have died for doing far less to white women than what he did to me that night.

In 2017, a Vietnamese-American passenger was dragged off a United Airlines plane in Chicago, suffering injuries to his head and knocking out some of his teeth. The airline had discovered that it had overbooked the flight, and no passenger took the airline up on offers of compensation in exchange for giving up their seats. The airline chose four passengers, at random by computer, to be ejected.

The first three passengers left the plane without incident, but the Vietnamese-American man, a physician named David Dao, said he had an urgent need to get back to his patients. He said he had paid his fare and should not have to give up his seat. The airline called security to remove him, and he was dragged by his legs in front of stunned passengers. Captured on a video that quickly went viral,

News, “I just cried.”

“I just went to the doctor, and he tells me I have high blood pressure and early signs of diabetes,” he said. “And I am just fifty-four. The effects of spending my entire adult life as a black man in this country are making me sick forty years ahead of my own father back in Nigeria.”

The friction of caste is killing people. Societal inequity is killing people. The act of moving about and navigating spaces with those whom society has trained us to believe are inherently different from us is killing people, and not just the targets. Studies are showing that prejudice itself can be deadly.

This shows that it is “possible to override our worst impulses and reduce these prejudices,” wrote the psychologist Susan Fiske. But to do so in a meaningful way requires forethought, an awareness of the unconscious biases passed down through the generations, and the chance for people different from one another to work together as equals, on

the same team, with shared goals that “require cooperation to succeed,” Fiske said. Outside of sports and the military, American society provides few such opportunities.

On the other side of the caste system, scientists have connected a key indicator of health and longevity—the length of human telomeres—to one’s exposure to inequality and discrimination, primarily focusing on the telomere lengths of African-Americans.

chromosome. The more frequently a cell divides, the shorter the telomeres become, wearing out the cell in a process that public health scientist Arline Geronimus, in her pioneering 1992 work, termed weathering. It is a measure of premature aging of the cells, and thus of the person bearing those cells, and of the early onset of disease due to chronic exposure to such stressors as discrimination, job loss, or obesity.

ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites, whose resources might better help them weather life’s challenges.

All of these groups appear to be paying a price when they step outside of the roles assigned them in the hierarchy. “High levels of everyday discrimination contribute to narrowing the arteries over time,” said the Harvard social scientist David R. Williams. “High levels of discrimination lead to higher levels of inflammation, a marker of heart disease.”

People who face discrimination, Williams said, often build up a layer of unhealthy fat, known as visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, just under the skin. It is this visceral fat that raises the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and leads to premature death. And it can be found in people of all ethnicities based on their experience of discrimination.

Thus, people of color with the most education, who compete in fields where they are not expected to be, continually press against the boundaries of caste and experience a lower life expectancy as a result. The more ambitious the marginalized person, the greater the risk of what evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves calls “the out-of-place principle of social dominance.”

The greatest departure from the script of the American caste system was the election of an African-American to the highest office in the land. History has shown that there would be consequences to this disruption of the social order, and there were.

What follows is not an analysis of the presidency of Barack Obama, but rather a look into the caste system’s response to his ascension and the challenges it would place in his path.

any. His growing up in Hawaii, the son of an immigrant from Kenya and of a white woman from Kansas, was free from the heaviness of slavery and Jim Crow and the hard histories of regular African-Americans. His story did not trigger the immediate discomfort in the dominant caste, unlike those of everyday black people, who, if you scratch their family trees long enough, you run into a sharecropper cheated at settlement or an ancestor shut out of a neighborhood because of redlining, people for whom these injustices were not history, but their own or their foreparents’ actual lives.

Rather, his origin story freed people in the dominant caste from having to think about the unsavory corners of American history.

him. As with other recent Democrats running for president, he won despite the bulk of the white electorate.

In the former Confederate state of Mississippi, only one in ten white voters pulled the lever for Obama.

“The cultural divides of the Civil War on racial grounds,” wrote the political scientist Patrick Fisher of Seton Hall University, “can thus still be considered to be influencing American political culture a century and a half later.”

Lyndon B. Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is said to have predicted that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation for having stood up for the citizenship rights of African-Americans.

Combined with census projections of an end of the white majority by 2042, Obama’s victory signaled that the dominant caste could undergo a not altogether certain but still unthinkable wane in power over the destiny of the United States and over the future of themselves and their children, and their sovereign place in the world. “The symbolism of Obama’s election was a profound loss to whites’ status,” Jardina wrote.

It meant that people who had always been first now had to consider the potential loss of their centrality.

That sense of fear and loss, however remote, “brought to the fore, for many whites,” Jardina wrote, “a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group,” a sense of needing to band together to protect their place in the hierarchy.

caste. A new party of right-wing detractors arose in his wake, the Tea Party, vowing to “take our country back.”

His opponents called him the “food stamp” president and depicted the president and the First Lady as simians.

Between 2014 and 2016, states deleted almost 16 million people from voter registration lists, purges that accelerated in the last years of the Obama administration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. States enacted new voter ID laws even as they created more barriers to obtaining this newly required ID. Together, these actions had the cumulative effect of reducing voter participation of marginalized people and immigrants, both of whom were seen as more likely to vote Democrat. “A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws,” wrote the commentator Jonathan Chait, “if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.”

Contrary to the wistful predictions of post-racial harmony, the number of hate groups in the United States surged from 602 to more than 1,000 between 2000 and 2010, the middle of Obama’s first term in office, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A 2012 study found that anti-black attitudes and racial stereotyping rose, rather than fell, as some might have hoped, in Obama’s first term. The percentage of Americans who expressed explicit anti-black attitudes ticked upward from 48 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012, but the percentage expressing implicit bias rose from 49 percent to 56 percent.

With rising resentments, it would not be surprising that attacks on African-Americans might not only not have abated but would worsen under the unprecedented reversal of the social hierarchy.

It was a trend that would make police killings a leading cause of death for young African-American men and boys, these deaths occurring at a rate of 1 in 1,000 young black men and boys.

firm against many of his ambitions and nominees, shutting down the government time and again, refusing to confirm or even consider his Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

The caste system had handcuffed the president as it had handcuffed the African-Americans facedown on the pavement in the videos that had become part of the landscape.

Which is why Obama’s presidency and his high approval ratings “masked an undercurrent of anxiety about our changing nation,” according to Jardina. “It hid a swell of resistance to multiculturalism, and a growing backlash to immigration.”

Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe that a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics.

The liberal take was that working-class whites have been

voting against their interests in supporting right-wing oligarchs, but that theory diminishes the agency and caste-oriented principles of the people. Many v...

circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term.

This!

the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.

was weakly related to their own job security but strongly related to concerns that minorities were taking jobs away from whites.”

In fact, “no other factor predicted changes in white partisanship during Obama’s presidency as powerfully and consistently as racial attitudes,” they said.