Abstract
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is critically important to understanding both United States history and the contemporary world. In a book that is based on extensive research yet is accessible to a wide audience, Wilkerson argues that what is generally called racial oppression, or more recently white supremacy, is a caste system that predates the formation of the United States, is as fundamental to the country as its much-touted liberty and freedom, and endures today. As Wilkerson freely admits, this analysis is not new but it is one that ought to have been revived long ago, or perhaps never abandoned in the first place. Wilkerson’s focus is on the caste system in the United States which is structured on a Black/white binary irrespective of gender, yet her book is a must read for feminists and academics who address gender in their research and teaching. Incorporating caste into our work brings an invaluable clarity to a feminist intersectional analysis. And because that structure necessarily includes the dominant as well as the subordinate caste, the privilege whites, including white women, have is basic to the analysis of institutions as well as individuals.
As with Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, I was drawn into her narrative through stories and metaphors. Yet, I found this book very painful to read. Wilkerson details the unrelenting horrors wreaked on the Africans brought to what would become the Americas, on the 12 generations of their descendants who were enslaved, on the generations who lived through the 88 years of brutal and legal discrimination in the north and the south. She connects this history to the contemporary consequences of the caste system in the commonplace police murder and mass incarceration of Black people, rampant voter suppression that began on the day the Supreme Court eviscerated the central feature of the Voting Rights Act, an enormous racial gap in wealth, increasing school segregation, and the many other ways Black people are kept on the bottom of the US hierarchy. Although I have been working on bringing a racial analysis to the center of my gender studies scholarship and teaching for decades, I could not read Caste without taking breaks. The experience of reading this book is, in itself, an argument to bring a caste analysis to the United States’ and other race-based systems of oppression. Caste remains fundamentally intact, she argues, despite some changes, including the election and re-election of Barak Obama as President.
Addressing the difference between racism and caste, Wilkerson maintains that since the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, racism does not have a clear and consistent definition and is often reduced to individual acts, character flaws, and attitudes rather than being recognized as a fundamental structure of society in the United States. To bring this aspect to definitions of racism it must be modified as in the phrases “institutional” or “structural” racism. Caste, on the other hand, is by definition, an infrastructure that orders society by ranking groups into fixed and rigid hierarchies providing an “operating system for economic, political and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation” (p. 24). Created to justify enslaving Africans and their descendants for the free labor they provided and clearly defining which groups of people could be enslaved, the development of caste was a decades-long process beginning when the first Africans were brought to the shores of North America to eventually create the wealthiest nation in the world. Europeans, who controlled the slave trade, also reaped enormous profits through the converting human beings into commodities.
In Wilkerson’s view, class does not constitute a caste system since it is not rigid and fixed. Although moving up in the class system is difficult, it is possible. Losing class status is more common and movement both up and down is evidence of the fluidity of class.
Wilkerson identifies what she calls the eight pillars of caste and presents overwhelming historical and contemporary evidence for the centrality of these pillars to the definition of a caste system. She deploys them to argue for the correspondences between caste as it is conceptualized and practiced in India, Nazi Germany, and the U.S. She defines the pillars as: 1. divine will and the laws of nature; 2. heritability; 3. endogamy and the control of marriage and mating; 4. purity vs pollution; 5. occupational hierarchy; 6. dehumanization and stigma; 7. terror and cruelty; 8. inherent superiority vs inherent inferiority. Nothing in the ideology upholding these pillars and the practices that result from them are unfamiliar. The response to the candidacy and presidency of Barak Obama, from unprecedented attacks on him in the halls of Congress to the meteoric growth of white supremacist groups, is evidence that his ascendence to the highest office in the land breached these pillars. Although his presidency did not come close to overturning the system, it unleashed a fury among some whites and Donald Trump rode and fomented their anger all the way to the White House. I am writing these words the day after the United States Capitol was invaded in an insurrection encouraged by the 45th President and his supporters in Congress who refused to accept the results of the election. Democracy in the United States is hanging in the balance, the result perhaps of continuing to ignore what is so obvious. Wilkerson’s book helps us to understand the deep resistance to any challenge to the caste system.
To make her case, Wilkerson compares our system to India’s and Nazi Germany’s finding that while the hierarchies may be different, all three systems for designating people into fixed hierarchies are based in the eight pillars is the same. The Germans actually studied the US system and found it very helpful in establishing their Aryan Nation and its murderous regime. They greatly admired eugenicists and lynching, but they also felt that some aspects of the US system went too far such as the “one drop” rule.
One of the differences between the US and India is that the caste system has not been denied in India, perhaps because when caste was set in place the country was not a democracy, while the very existence of a caste system or even racism is routinely denied and undercut in the US. To underscore both the invisibility of caste in the United States and its similarity to the Indian system, Wilkerson tells the story of Martin Luther King Jr.’s self-described pilgrimage to India where he was the guest of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He met with high school students whose families had been Dalits (previously “Untouchables”) and was shocked when the principal introduced him as a “fellow untouchable from the United States of America” (p. 23) . Upon a moment’s thought, however, he realized that he was an Untouchable as were all Black people in the United States. Conceptualizing the United States’ system of racial hierarchy as caste makes it fundamental to both its history and the current situation.
Caste in the US developed alongside the growing notions of liberty, freedom and democracy during the revolution and in the creation of the nation. The dichotomy between these two realities has long been used in arguments for racial and gender justice. James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, among others, reminded us again and again that we ignore that dual history and its connections to our contemporary world at our peril. Baldwin argued that white America remains adolescent and therefore unable to recognize reality or to know their country or themselves. Activists from the Civil Rights Movement to this day also urge a reckoning with the reality of this dichotomy and its destructive force on our society. A recognition that the United States is a caste system does not allow the denial of that dichotomy and the damage it does to all of us.
The US constitution begins with the words, “We the People.” From the time they were written many have asked who those words include and who they exclude. Since at least the 19th century African American women have also been asking white feminists a similar question – who does the women’s movement represent? Even before Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote the now iconic article that theorized intersectionality, Black and other women of color insisted that gender alone is not sufficient for an analysis of their lives or for any women’s lives. More recently, Jennifer Nash and others have critiqued the ways that scholars have used the ideas of intersectionality but have not centered race or have eliminated it entirely. Conceptualization of US society as a caste system necessarily brings race into the center as well as identifying whites as belonging to the dominant caste. That is not to say that other social identities are not important as well, but we cannot ignore caste or relegate it to the margins. Wilkerson’s analysis of caste deepens feminist intersectional analysis and brings much needed insistence on the centrality of race to all of our intellectual and activist work.