Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.

The election would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one’s own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even of the planet itself.

The year 2017 would become the deadliest to date for mass shootings in modern American history.

was a malignant narcissist, a danger to the public.

one who had never served in either war or public office, unlike every man before him, and one whose rhetoric seemed a homing device for extremists?

You educate yourself.

Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.

Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one,

the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.

“the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order.”

American slavery, which lasted from 1619 to 1865, was not the slavery of ancient Greece or the illicit sex slavery of today. The abhorrent slavery of today is unreservedly illegal, and any current-day victim who escapes, escapes to a world that recognizes her freedom and will work to punish her enslaver. American slavery, by contrast, was legal and sanctioned by the state and a web of enforcers. Any victim who managed to escape, escaped to a world that not only did not recognize her freedom but would return her to her captors for further unspeakable horrors as retribution. In American slavery, the victims, not the enslavers, were punished, subject to whatever atrocities the enslaver could devise as a lesson to others.

Difference between slavery now and back in early America.

What the colonists created was “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world,”

“For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the ‘human race’ and into a separate subgroup that was to remain e...

Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.

“No one was willing,” Baptist wrote, “to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

“For the horrors of the American Negro’s life,” wrote James Baldwin, “there has been almost no language.” This was what the United States was for longer than it was not.

the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.

No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved....

Wow. Slavery lasted so very long.

“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.

I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company’s reputation, but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.

race as we have come to know it is not real. It is a fiction told by modern humans for so long that it has come to be seen as a sacred truth.

keeps the focus on a single individual rather than the system that created that individual,

it may be more constructive to focus on derogatory actions that harm a less powerful group

In debating “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,” wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”

Anti semitism, aryan nation—they looked to the United States. Wow.

Western Europeans had long been aware of the American paradox of proclaiming liberty for all men while holding subsets of its citizenry in near total subjugation.

only the “surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint.”

By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States “was not just a country with racism,” Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. “It was the leading racist jurisdiction—so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.” The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.

Wow. We have been just as bad as hitler in many ways.

“Their overwhelming interest was in the ‘classic example,’ the United States of America.”

“American laws were the main foreign precedents for such legislation.”

“The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”

and thus no one person was complicit, and yet everyone was complicit.

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later.

They were punished for being in the condition that they were forced to endure.

Which is why people and groups who seek power and division do not bother with dehumanizing an individual. Better to attach a stigma, a taint of pollution to an entire group.

Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.

dominant group status threat.

The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

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.”

political discourse has usually reinforced prevailing stereotypes of a lazy, inferior group getting undeserved handouts, a scapegoating that makes the formal barriers all the more unjust and the resentments of white working-class citizens all the more tragic.

On handouts

as much as 80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it,

So, despite holding no explicit racial prejudices, they nonetheless hold implicit bias that’s deep in their subconscious.

The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses.

Statistics on incarceration for equal crimes black vs white

has helped bring the overall teenage pregnancy rate to the lowest levels recorded in the modern era.

“You can’t really smash the system if you don’t understand how it works,” Davis told him.

The resistance to Davis’s work inadvertently proved the very theories Davis had devoted his life to exposing.

Under the spell of caste, the majors, like society itself, were willing to forgo their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate.

Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important.