Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

“This is not America,” or “I don’t recognize my country,” or “This is not who we are.” Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.

YES PREACH IT

Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

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.

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race

is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.

In the same way that black and white were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the

roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform. Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

The use of inherited physical characteristics to differentiate inner abilities and group value may be the cleverest way that a culture has ever devised to manage and maintain a caste system.

U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.”

is hard to know what effect his exposure to the social order in America had on him personally. But over the years, he paid close attention, as did many Dalits, to the subordinate caste in America. Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans and of their descendants in the pre–Civil War United States. Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jotiba Phule found inspiration in the abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide.”

So interesting that globalization is seen as a new phenomenon when countries affect each other and share commonalities and always have. Yet our history books look at us in a vacuum. This provides a little more context for the pics of BLM signs in India last summer

At first, religion, not race as we now know it, defined the status of people in the colonies. Christianity, as a proxy for Europeans, generally exempted European workers from lifetime enslavement. This initial distinction is what condemned, first, indigenous people, and, then, Africans, most of whom were not Christian upon arrival, to the lowest rung of an emerging hierarchy before the concept of race had congealed to justify their eventual and total debasement.

Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world.

For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.

The secretary of the U.S. Navy expressed horror at the sight of barefoot men and women locked together with the weight of an ox-chain in the beating sun, forced to walk the distance to damnation in a state farther south, and riding behind them, “a white man on horse back, carrying pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing.”

These sorts of anecdotes are extremely interesting when you consider how many people make nonsense excuses like "It was a different time and people didn't know any better back then."

What the colonists created was “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world,” wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross. “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 enslaved for generations in perpetuity.”

But from the time of enslavement, southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed. “No one was willing,” Baptist wrote, “to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”

It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that 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. That will not come until the year 2111.

“Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.” What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.

Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

As they settled into their chairs to hash out what would eventually become the Nuremberg Laws, the first topic on the agenda was the United States and what they could learn from it. The man chairing the meeting, Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice, introduced a memorandum in the opening minutes, detailing the ministry’s investigation into how the United States managed its marginalized groups and guarded its ruling white citizenry.

In their search for prototypes, the Nazis had looked into white-dominated countries such as Australia and South Africa, but “there were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world,” Whitman wrote. “Their overwhelming interest was in the ‘classic example,’ the United States of America.”

While the Nazis praised “the American commitment to legislating racial purity,” they could not abide “the unforgiving hardness” under which “ ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks,” Whitman wrote. “The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”

Some argue in hindsight that people who were enslaved were seen as too valuable to be hurt or killed. That argument disregards the many instances of humans trashing their own property, of absentee slumlords who get by with the least maintenance of their buildings, for example, with often catastrophic consequences. But more important, it misinterprets violence as merely damage to one’s property, presumably rare and against the interest of the “owner,” when it was actually a terror mechanism that was part of the regular maintenance of an unnatural institution, part of the calculus of American slavery.

America was fighting in World War II, and the public school district in Columbus, Ohio, decided to hold an essay contest, challenging students to consider the question “What to do with Hitler after the War?” It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.”

We prejudge complicated breathing beings in ways we are told never to judge inanimate objects.

Little more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor, and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in America, at 27 percent. But a 2017 study by Travis Dixon at the University of Illinois found that African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two-thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news.

Upon entry to the American caste system, immigrants learn to distance themselves from those in the basement, lest they land there themselves.

The old eugenics hierarchy of presumed value still lurks beneath the surface. A woman whose grandparents immigrated from Poland might say to an Irish-American—whose status is perceived as higher than hers—that they came from Austria (justifying it to herself by recalling the shifting borders in the twentieth century). But the same woman might “admit” that they came from Poland to an African-American of presumed lower rank, whom she had no need to impress, her higher status secure and understood.

I wouldn't have believed this a few years ago but I see and hear it in Ohio all the time.

Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country’s first black president. An estimated 43 percent went for him in 2008. Thus, a solid majority of white Americans— nearly three out of every five white voters—did not back him in his first election, and fewer still—39 percent—voted for him in 2012. In

Never been prouder to have voted for an unpopular choice. Yes, we can!

“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.”

With our current ruptures, it is not enough to not be racist or sexist. Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations. In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant.

A world without caste would set everyone free.