Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.

If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key that opens the door to whatever we may have in common, whether cosplay or Star Trek or the loss of a parent, it could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste.

In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.

None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward.

Because of the caste system, we more readily turn against one another. Because of caste, we insufficiently protect our own. Because of caste, along with other breakdowns in society, our democracy is in danger.

There is no time for infighting or tribalism or self-centered egotism or internal division. We need a clear-eyed focus on the threats to our democracy. We have all unwittingly been enlisted into a fight we did not wish to join. The circumstances in which we find ourselves require us to step out of the presumed safety of our isolated corners and to stand up for what we believe in and urgently pursue the world we want to live in and a more livable future.

The structure of caste is maintained by the people within it, up and down the hierarchy, and thus the solutions must account for both the structure that holds inequality in place and the individuals who keep it running.

The challenges we face require structural reimagining and a lasting and meaningful reconstruction of our society. They call for a massive reeducation of our citizenry to lay bare the full history of this country so that every citizen can know the ways in which the state has systemically favored some groups and excluded others and can become aware of the urgent, long-overdue need to atone for past and current injustices and rectify continuing disparities for the collective healing of our nation.

If we truly want to end caste, each of us, every single one of us, needs to search our souls for the ways in which we may be complicit in upholding caste and stereotype and hierarchy, as our society has so cleverly trained us to do, and to consciously work against this programming in our everyday lives if we are ever to overcome it. One reason why we haven’t ended caste is that too many people benefit from it and not enough people see reason enough for it to end.

We in this country have the opportunity to set a standard for how to work together to create a truly egalitarian, multiethnic democracy, a stronger, all-encompassing, reconstituted version of ourselves as a society, and to prove to ourselves and to the world that the divisions we have inherited do not have to be our destiny.