Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020

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Themes

The Invisibility of Power

Wilkerson repeatedly points out that caste is omnipresent but not often considered, except for those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies and punished most for its existence. Using the metaphor of a house, she argues that America’s foundations are inextricable from its caste system, though this may be an unpleasant truth. She argues that once we understand the foundations, the only healthy way forward is to address their consequences: “any further deterioration, is, in fact, in our hands” (16). She extends the metaphor further when she summarizes the plot of the film The Matrix, quoting a character who describes the programs and says, “you’d never even know they were here” (34).

Invisibility, for Wilkerson, can never mean a lack of consequence. She recounts many instances from her own life as well as from history, to encourage the reader to understand, whatever their caste position, that the dynamics she describes are real. She makes similar arguments about the amount of knowledge required for survival in America: Understanding the dominant caste is key to everyday social interactions, as Wilkerson herself recognizes when she appeals to the plumber’s humanity to get her basement fixed.

Physical and Emotional Violence as Key to Caste

Wilkerson looks unblinkingly at the horrific legacies of caste, especially in the United States. Forced enslavement depended on horrific torments and allowed upper caste people virtually unlimited power. The prevalence of rape as a tool of White Supremacy has “insidious” consequences, as it also conveyed higher status on those who most resembled the White ideal. Lynchings, which Wilkerson also describes at length, were another key enforcement mechanism, so routine in American culture that commemorating them was a form of entertainment for dominant caste elites.

Wilkerson’s study of India points out the lasting psychological scars of caste, as the Dalit she meets in the United States remains afraid to ask for his basic needs to be met as a customer in stores. He feels captive in a system that has marked his entire adulthood.

Law as an Instrument of Caste

Wilkerson points out frequently that law and morality are separate issues. Segregation in the United States was legal, as was slavery. Nazi atrocities were legal, as was India’s caste system. Indeed, Nazi lawyers took great pains to study other legal systems founded on inequity and were stunned by the degree of segregation they found in American life, taking much of their own thinking on these matters from American eugenicists and the Jim Crow South.

She also makes it clear that the existing American legal system still reinforces caste: Charles Stuart was able to deflect suspicion from himself for the murder of his wife by blaming a Black man, and the first victims of the 2018 Austin bombings were blamed for their own deaths due to their race and caste positions. The shootings of unarmed Black people by police officers are perhaps the starkest example of this institutionalized support of caste, though Wilkerson’s personal encounter with DEA agents in the airport reinforces that even nonviolent encounters with law enforcement produce terror.

The Role of Caste in the 2016 Election and the 2020 Pandemic

Though she describes historical phenomena at some length, one of Wilkerson’s other goals is to explain how America arrived in its troubling present. Many people were stunned at the results of the 2016 election and the elevation of an unqualified xenophobe to the nation’s highest office. Though Wilkerson makes it clear that she shares this horror—after all, she can only whisper about it when she finds Gwen Ifill at a Washington party—she is far from shocked. Her goal, instead, is to indicate that the 2016 election was a natural extension of the caste system reasserting itself and that there is nothing aberrant about it.

Similarly, the Covid-19 pandemic is compared to the anthrax escaping the Siberian permafrost: While the Russian scientists eventually diagnosed the problem, America has not truly cured itself. Instead, in 2020, the virus led the country’s imperiled foundations to surface in new and tragic ways.