Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

The researchers consider this kind of group hypervigilance to be what they call “ ‘racialized economics’: the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.”

status….Whiteness is now a salient and central component of American politics. White racial solidarity influences many whites’ worldview and guides their political attitudes and behavior.”

Consciously or not, many white voters “are seeking to reassert a racial order in which their group is firmly at the top.”

Seen from a caste perspective, Clinton perhaps suffered from a version of the Bradley Effect—inflated polling numbers that do not materialize on Election Day due to people telling pollsters what they believe is the socially acceptable answer about their voting plans but then choosing differently in the voting booth.

If you are insecurely situated somewhere in the middle—below the very top but above the very bottom—you may distance yourself from the bottom and hold up barriers against those you see as below you to protect your own position.

“Trump was ushered into office by whites concerned about their status,” Jardina writes, “and his political priorities are plainly aimed at both protecting the racial hierarchy and at strengthening its boundaries.” These are people who feel “that the rug is being pulled out from under them—that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their group’s advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.”

bases. The Republican reverence for its base of white evangelicals stands in stark contrast to the indifference often shown the Democratic base of African-Americans, who are devalued for a host of reasons, among them their suppressed status at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

“What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics,” writes Seth Dowland, associate professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University and author of Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right.

People identifying as white evangelicals, regardless of their personal religiosity, “rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation,” Dowland writes. “They have proven to be loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims. The triumph of gay rights, the persistence of legal abortion, and the election of Barack Obama signaled to them a need to fight for the America they once knew.”

crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled.

The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them.

subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected

statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

It was psychic trolling of the fir...

compelled Frederick Douglass to remind Americans that “there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought

to cause us to forget,” adding that “it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”

Among the memorials in his honor well beyond the South, there came to be plaques and busts of him in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, elementary schools named after him in Long Beach and San Diego, and five different Robert E. Lee stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service. Usually, it is the victors of war who erect monuments and commemorations to themselves. Here, an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other.

audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there

are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”

Mayor Landrieu gave a speech that day to remind citizens of why this needed to happen. “These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” he said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”

They were more than mere statuary. “They were created as political weapons,” he would later write, “part of an effort to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side not just of history, but of humanity.”

The stones undulate and dip toward the center, where the ground hollows out, so that when a visitor reaches the interior, the traffic noise dies away, the air grows still, and you are trapped in shadow, isolated with the magnitude of what the stones represent. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe who perished during the Holocaust.

Gestapo. “Here lived Hildegard Blumenthal, born 1897, deported 1943, died in Auschwitz,” reads a stumbling stone clustered among others outside an apartment building in western Berlin.

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

This chapter offers compelling examples to learn from and what memorials and restitution for slavery and lynching should look like

An American author living in Berlin, who happens to be Jewish and to have been raised in the South, often gets asked about Germany’s memorials to its Nazi past. “To which I respond: There aren’t any,” Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, has written. “Germany has no monuments that celebrate

the Nazi armed forces, however many grandfathers fought ...

In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi.

In Germany, there is no death penalty. “We can’t be trusted to kill people after what happened in World War II,” a German woman once told me. In America, the states that recorded the highest number of lynchings, among them the former Confederate States of America, all currently have the death penalty.

In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid, to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the twentieth century, not only went free but rose to become leading figures—southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors.

It was through these station doors that thousands of Jews took their last look at their beloved Berlin before being forced onto trains that would carry them to their deaths. This fact, this history, is built into the consciousness of Berliners as they go about their everyday lives. It is not something that anyone, Jew or Gentile, resident or visitor, is expected to put behind them or to just get over. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who they are because it is a part of what they have been. They incorporate it into their identity because it is, in fact, them.

This is the complicated integrative history it is faced and seen

“Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,” some students once told him, echoing what others have said. “And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”

He believed then that the country had been hurled back to the 1950s, which he said he found hopeful, actually, because it could be the beginning of a breakthrough.

“It is building up to a crisis for those who want to will this away,” he told me,

“So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

“This is a civilization searching for its humanity,” Gary Michael Tartakov, an American scholar of caste, said of this country. “It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own.”

The caste system had a way of policing the behavior of everyone in its wake to keep everyone in their assigned places.

his. He began to see himself differently, to see the illusion of his presumed superiority, that he had been told a lie, and that his father had been told a lie, and that trying to live up to the lie had taken some part of his father away. For this, he bore a heavy guilt and shame over the tragedy that had befallen the family and a memory that would not leave him. He wanted to be free of

He shared this realization with a Dalit he had come to know and told him of a decision he had made. “I have ripped off my sacred thread,” he told the Dalit, a professional man. “It was a poisonous snake around my neck, and its toxic venom was getting inside of me.”

“My message would be to take off the fake crown. It will cost you more to keep it than to let it go. It is not real.

It is just a marker of your

programming. You will be happier and freer without it. You will see all of humanity. You will find your true self.” And so he had discovered. “There was a stench coming from my body,” he said. “I have located the corpse inside my mind. ...

If I responded like that every time

I was slighted, I’d be telling someone off almost every day.

Part of me resented that she could go ballistic and get away with it when I might not even be believed. It was caste privilege to go off in the restaurant the way she did. It was a measure of how differently we are treated that she could live for over forty years and not experience what is a daily possibility for any person born to the subordinate caste, that it was so alien to her, it so jangled her, that she blew up over it.

We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.

“The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me,” Einstein

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

And so he did. He co-chaired a committee to end lynching. He joined the NAACP. He spoke out on behalf of civil rights activists, lent his fame to their cause. At a certain point in his life, he rarely accepted the many honors that came his way, but in 1946 he made an exception for Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylva...

“The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people,” Einstein told the graduates at commencement, “but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

He became a passionate ally of the people consigned to the bottom. “He hates race prejudice,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “because as a Jew he knows what it is.”