Casteism in the United States: “The Origins of Our Discontents”

Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has long focused on the issues of race and discrimination in the United States. In 2010, she published her first novel-length work, a critically acclaimed, 600-page chronicle titled The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. In her debut, Wilkerson tells the stories of black southerners from 1915 to 1970 who choose to leave their hometowns for new lives in the north, changing the face of our country.

A decade later, in the late summer of 2020, Wilkerson published her second work, an epic of equal proportions titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I first came across Wilkerson’s book through a New York Times’ list of most anticipated titles, and I was captivated by its cover; in a stark, civil-rights-era photo, we see a collage of faces, both black and white, packed closely together and staring forward. Each individual face seems to tell its own story. Some turn to speak to their neighbors, while others laugh, adjust their glasses, or peer forward to watch whatever event has brought together such a crowd. I was instantly drawn in and eager to discover what story author Isabel Wilkerson had to share within the book’s pages. 

In Caste, Wilkerson argues that, more than race or class, America’s rigid and unrelenting caste system is the cause of our country’s greatest divides. Her claim is undoubtedly bold, and she supports it rigorously with historic detail and years of diligent, inspired research. I came away from Caste feeling as though a new America had been revealed to me, an America governed by a historic set of rules that influences our lives each and every day. I came away from Caste understanding that, in order to create a more just and equitable future, we must all do the work of actively learning about and confronting the caste system that defines every interaction in our country today.

Here are five major takeaways from Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Caste, race, and class are all distinct from one another, but they are also intrinsically linked.

In the opening pages of her book, Wilkerson is quick to define exactly what she means when she uses the word caste: “A caste system is an artificial construct, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups” (17). Caste is an invisible infrastructure of superiority that holds every individual “in their place,” and race is the visible agent of this force. Wilkerson writes that the arbitrary physical traits of race are like a “historic flash card” that shows others where one falls within the caste system, determining “how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold,” and so on (18). 

The two entities of race and caste, although different, coexist and reinforce one another. Wilkerson clarifies that, throughout her book, she will use dominant caste to refer to white Americans, middle caste instead of Asian or Latino, and lowest caste in place of African-American. 

Class, then, according to Wilkerson, divides society economically. Still, caste distinctions are stronger than class distinctions. Even the richest among those in the lowest caste are seen as socially and historically inferior to the poorest of those in the dominant caste. 

Race is an arbitrary, man-made invention with no basis in science or biology.

Every caste system relies heavily on having a bottom rung, and a means of measurement must be decided upon in order to determine who will be placed in this position. According to Wilkerson, caste emerged when English Protestants and other European descendants with guns and resources used African captives as slaves in the fight for North America and subsequent creation of the “New World” (23). Anthropologist Ashely Montegu adds that “the idea of race was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste” (66). Should it have been more convenient at the time, height could have been chosen as a means of discrimination and control. 

When the first human genome was mapped in 2000, it was determined that all humans are 99.9 percent the same. A geneticist working on the project, J. Craig Venter, noted that “race is a social concept, not a scientific one” (66). When we say “Black” in America, we do not necessarily mean the espresso-dark skin of an first-generation immigrant from Madagascar, whose hair has a looser curl. A woman whose grandparents were from Japan, and whose skin might be far whiter than most, is not considered “white” because of minute differences in the folds of her eyelids. The actual color of an individual’s skin is insignificant; when we talk about race, we’re actually talking about learned social meanings and stereotypes.

Slavery was not a chapter in our country’s history, but the basis of its economic and social order.

Slavery existed in the United States for longer than it has not, and it will take until the year 2111 for African-Americans as a group to have been free for as long as they were enslaved. Slavery established the caste system that dictates our behavior even today. Wilkerson quotes legal historian Ariela J. Gross, who says that slavery in America 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'” (45). This ideology so perverted the balance of power that it became “normal” and even “righteous” for upper-caste individuals to degrade individuals from the lowest caste, an idea that has persisted years beyond the end of slavery, developing into a culture of police brutality and white supremecy that continues to exist–and perhaps even thrive–in modern day. 

The world’s three predominant caste systems, the caste systems of India, the Third Reich, and the United States, are far more similar than they are different.

The Indian caste system goes back millenia and is bound by the Hindu beliefs of reincarnation and karma. The Indian caste rankings, known as varnas, are determined not by an individual’s race, but by the significance of their ancestry and name, their village, and the occupation of their forefathers. Today, after generations embedded in the caste system, an individual’s ranking can also be determined by their bearing, accent, and clothing. Individuals in the lowest caste, once termed Untouchables, are today called Dalits.

When Martin Luther King Jr. visited India during the time of the United States’ Civil Rights Movement, he was initially shocked when introduced to a crowd of Dalit students as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America” (22), until he realized that, like the caste system in India, a similar caste system governs the lives of all African-Americans in the so-called “Land of the Free.”

In the early stages of the Third Reich, Nazi leaders created the Nuremberg Laws to establish Aryan superiority in Germany. Legal historian James Q. Whitman wrote that in debating “how to institutionalize racism… they began by asking how Americans did it” (79), and the new government even wrote a number of laws based off of the Jim Crow laws of the American south. German leaders were “impressed” by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste according to historian John Spiro, and Hitler marveled at America’s “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death” (81).

In Germany today, museums and memorials preserve the country’s “descent into madness.” Where Americans maintain statues of Confederate soldiers, the Germans chose to unceremoniously pave over Hitler’s gravesite. In Germany, displaying the Swastika is punishable by three years in prison, while in the United States, the confederate flag abounds. 

Restitution has been and continues to be paid to survivors of the Holocaust, but in America, it was the slaveholders who received restitution after the Civil War.

Wilkerson suggests that by recognizing the parallels between the caste systems of India, the Third Reich, and the United States, we can support one another and learn from the actions that have been and are being taken to overcome inequity and discrimination across the world. German history stands as proof that a caste system can be created, and it can be dismantled.

Even the most well-intentioned individuals must confront their unconscious bias in order to create a more equitable world.

According to Wilkerson, we must think of our country as an old house. One day, a crack may appear in the ceiling. Another day, we might notice a discolored patch of brick or a welt in the plaster. We could choose to ignore these signs, and they’d continue to grow worse. Or, we could put the effort into fixing them as they arise, knowing that we live in an old house and we can’t ever declare the work to be over. Cracks and deteriorations will not fix themselves.

Wilkerson emphasizes that, if we are born into a dominant caste, we can choose not to dominate, and instead choose to practice radical empathy by making connections across caste lines, educating ourselves about the experiences of others, and recognizing that it is “the actions and inactions of ordinary people that keep the mechanism of caste running” (383). Those born into the subordinate caste must work their hardest to resist the boxes and roles forced upon them by others. 

The caste system cannot be taken apart by a single law or single person. It is our responsibility, in each of our own lives, “to correct the ruptures we have inherited.”

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To learn more about America’s invisible caste system, check out this interview between Isabel Wilkerson and 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson.

To further educate yourself about race in America, read Annabelle’s “Systemic Racism and a Historical Reality” and Alexa’s “Five Ways to Learn About Racial Justice This Week.”

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