In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race—caste being a 400-year-old hierarchy placing white people at the top and Black people at the bottom. In this guide, we’ll explore:
According to Wilkerson, caste describes a man-made social order developed to rank the value of certain groups of people. This order is based on the assumed supremacy of one group and assumed inferiority of others according to heritage, personal characteristics, religious preferences, or economic status. More often than not, Wilkerson argues, the characteristics used to delineate groups are arbitrary and benign in other contexts. They only become important when one group uses them to segregate people and assign parameters for the appropriate behaviors of each group.
(Shortform note: Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, agrees that skin color, the defining characteristic of the American caste system, was originally a neutral signifier. According to Kendi, modern racist ideas sprang up out of racist policies: People needed a way to justify economically self-serving policies, so they used skin color as a marker to decide who to exclude, then invented rationale to justify that decision. If those policies never existed, we wouldn’t associate any darker or lighter skin colors with any inherent meanings.)
Wilkerson believes that while race and caste are not synonyms, they support each other within American culture. Race is the physical evidence of difference and the set of meanings assigned to that evidence. Caste is how we organize that evidence to maintain division among groups and ascribe the appropriate lifestyles. Therefore, Wilkerson believes it would be more accurate to refer to someone who discriminates against another race as a casteist, not a racist. That’s because, according to the author, the definition of racism has changed over time.
Originally, racism signified one group that uses their social power to oppress another group based on race. However, Wilkerson argues that in the last century, racism has become synonymous with beliefs, actions, and character. Today, if you’re a racist, it means you hate people who are not like you and condone oppression. Wilkerson believes that this misunderstanding is why the dominant caste flinches at the term. The author argues that if racism were understood as a byproduct of casteism, society might actually be open to acknowledging racial problems.
Are “Race” and “Caste” Really Different?
To understand the difference between race and caste, it helps to understand how other scholars define “racism.” As Ijeoma Oluo describes in So You Want to Talk About Race, there are two culturally accepted definitions of racism. The first is personal (bias against a person based on their race), and the second is structural (racially biased power structures and institutions that discriminate against a particular racial group). Wilkerson argues that most people rely on the personal definition, while only social scientists tend to use the structural definition.
Wilkerson’s solution to the confusion over how to define “racism” is to focus on caste, not race. However, her description of caste as the structure of American inequality sounds almost identical to the second (systemic) definition of racism. If this sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone: Multiple reviewers have questioned whether there’s a meaningful difference between discussing “casteism” and discussing “systemic racism.” They argue that Wilkerson’s distinction is arbitrary and weak. Other reviewers, however, argue that reframing the situation in terms of caste “neatly lift[s] the mind out of old ruts,” even if readers don’t fully buy into Wilkerson’s logic.
Wilkerson believes there are three main examples of caste systems in history—the American South, India, and Nazi Germany.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson’s list of the primary examples of caste systems in history contains a notable exclusion: the apartheid system that governed South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Like the systems in Nazi Germany, India, and the US, the South African caste system was codified into law and impacted every aspect of citizens’ lives, including where they could live and work, who they could marry, and even which train car they could ride in.)
According to the author, the American caste system is divided into two primary castes: The dominant caste consists of people considered “white,” and the lowest caste consists of people considered “Black.” This system has its roots in the American institution of slavery, which was the standard mode of operation on American soil for 246 years, from 1619 to 1865.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson focuses her analysis on these two groups because racial tensions in the United States have historically revolved around the distinction between “white” and “Black.” While focusing specifically on anti-Black discrimination is valuable, ignoring anti-Native American discrimination seems like a significant oversight, since some scholars estimate that roughly 13 million Indigenous people in what is now the United States lost their lives to dominant caste violence, disease, and racism between 1492 and 1900.)
Wilkerson describes how, in the eyes of enslavers, slaves weren’t people—they were symbols of commerce. Their sole purpose for existing was to serve as the machine that generated profits for the landowners. Slaves could be traded like cattle, auctioned like farm machinery, or given away as gifts. They had no say in who they worked for or where they were sent, and they could be separated from loved ones without question. One owner might brand his slaves to stake a claim to them, and owners often sold children to cover debts or settle disputes.
(Shortform note: The fact that enslavers thought of enslaved Africans as property, not people, somewhat undercuts Wilkerson’s argument that American society during slavery was universally understood as a caste system. Enslavers may not have thought of enslaved Africans as a lower caste because caste systems only apply to people, not to property. Therefore, while outside observers and enslaved people might have viewed this society as a caste system, enslavers may have disagreed.)
According to Wilkerson, after Reconstruction (a 12-year period of federally enforced racial equality following the end of the Civil War), dominant caste people in the American South swiftly reclaimed their power through discriminatory laws. These laws dictated where Blacks could live, what types of jobs they could hold, and how they could be educated. Generation after generation grew up within this distorted system, and the author argues that today, the continued suppression of the subordinated caste is normal.
(Shortform note: These laws are known as Jim Crow laws (“Jim Crow” was originally a popular minstrel show character portrayed by an actor in blackface). In addition to the formal laws that Wilkerson mentions, the Jim Crow era also featured a number of social codes that dictated behavior. For example, Black people could not show physical affection to one another in public or sit in the front seat of a white person’s car.)
Wilkerson describes a strong historical connection between India and the United States. In both countries, the dominant caste persecuted the lowest caste, developed laws to maintain this unfair social order, and tortured the lower caste members who broke them. After centuries, both countries abolished the lawful caste system—yet in both cases, the legacy of those social orders persists in the modern era.
According to the author, the difference between the two systems is in the structures of the castes. Contrary to the largely bipolar caste system in the United States, India’s caste system was an intricate system of many castes and subcastes. The five main castes included the 1) Brahmin, 2) Kshatriya, 3) Vaishya, 4) Shudra, and 5) the Dalits. The Dalits were most commonly referred to as “Untouchables,” and fall so low on the social hierarchy that they’re not technically considered part of the caste system at all.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention that, while Indian caste divisions are rooted in Hinduism, converts to other religions (like Islam and Christianity) often replicate the caste system in their own communities. This means that, in addition to traditional Dalits, there are separate groups of “Dalit Muslims” and “Dalit Christians.” In the upper castes, there are also separate groups for Muslim converts from higher castes (called “Ashrafs”). These divisions further complicate the Indian caste system.)
Did the Indian and American Caste Systems Contribute to Pandemic Outcomes?
According to Wilkerson, it’s no coincidence that the United States and India were the two countries with the most documented cases of Covid-19 by mid-2021. In an Instagram post, she argued that the active caste systems in both countries played a contributing role in the devastation caused by the pandemic. She believes that in both the United States and India, the active caste system encourages disregard for people outside one’s own caste, which in turn promotes self-serving behavior at the expense of lower-caste people who may be more at risk of getting sick.
Data from both countries indicate that Wilkerson may be right. In India, Dalits migrant laborers were the first to lose their jobs when pandemic restrictions went into effect, worsening the already rampant poverty among members of the lowest caste. Even worse: Many Dalits who did develop Covid-19 were turned away from hospitals on the basis of caste. Similarly, in the United States, the pandemic disproportionately impacted communities of color, and many people of color struggled to access vaccines when they became available.
According to Wilkerson, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system are very similar—and those similarities are intentional. She argues that when creating their caste system (which was designed to separate the dominant Aryan caste from the subordinate caste consisting of Jewish people and other minorities), Nazi leaders were fascinated with the legal system of discrimination in America—particularly the regulations dictating who belonged to which caste. In America, anyone with even one drop of African blood was subordinate. (Shortform note: The Nazis weren’t the only oppressive regime to take inspiration from American racism to create their own caste systems. In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah describes how the politicians devising the South African apartheid system also studied American race relations for inspiration.)
As Wilkerson tells it, the Nazis actually felt the American one-drop law was too harsh. In the end, they adopted a hybrid law based on the laws of Texas and North Carolina, which stated that any person beyond simple classification as dominant or subordinate would be judged based on their associations. The resulting law defined a Jew as anyone who either 1) had three Jewish grandparents, or 2) had two Jewish grandparents and associated with Jews or practiced Judaism. Jews were stripped of their citizenship and prohibited from marrying or having intimate relations with Germans. (Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention that this law defined whether a person was Jewish based on their grandparents’ religious associations, regardless of whether those grandparents were ethnically Jewish. This shows that the Nazis thought Judaism itself (and not just ethnic Jewish heritage) was a polluting social force.)
The Nazi Caste System Encompassed Other Groups Beyond Jewish People
While Wilkerson primarily focuses on Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, there were several other groups who made up the lowest caste in the Nazi caste system. The Nazis imprisoned, tortured, and killed untold numbers of non-Jewish people, including Polish, Romani, and Black people; gay men; children and adults with disabilities; Christian clergy; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others. Historians debate how many non-Jewish victims died during the Holocaust, but the number is somewhere in the millions.
For caste systems, Wilkerson believes there are eight tenets that uphold the structure and allow for unquestionable participation by the related societies. As each tenet is repeated and supported by attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, it becomes rooted in civilization. Wilkerson argues that once all of these eight beliefs are ingrained, they become the standard mode of life in the form of social hierarchies.
(Shortform note: Not all definitions of caste agree that all eight of these tenets are needed for a caste system to form. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines caste systems as “ranked, hereditary, endogamous social groups, often linked with occupation,” which encompasses just three of Wilkerson’s eight tenets. It’s possible that this definition is more limited because it focuses more specifically on the Indian caste system whereas Wilkerson seeks to define caste systems more generally.)
We’ve renumbered the eight tenets for logical flow. The first two tenets describe justifications for the caste system; the next four relate to maintaining the system; and the final two describe how the dominant caste mistreats the lower caste in each system.
According to the author, when a belief system is said to be the will of God, it becomes nearly impossible to argue against the legitimacy of its claims. The will of an all-knowing spiritual power is at the heart of both the Indian and American castes. (Shortform note: Avatthi Ramaiah, an Indian sociologist, agrees with Wilkerson’s argument that divine justification upholds the caste system. He argues, “As long as Hinduism is strong, caste will be strong, and as long as there is caste, there will be lower caste.”)
According to the author, no caste system could survive without the collective belief in the unequivocal superiority of one caste over another. This belief was and is still at the heart of every interaction between the dominant caste and subordinate caste in America.
(Shortform note: How do people in the upper caste uphold this sense of ingrained superiority? Robin DiAngelo argues it’s through what she calls “the ideology of individualism.” In White Fragility, she claims that white people reassure themselves of their own superiority by telling themselves that all their successes were earned through hard work, and that people who are less successful just haven’t worked as hard. White people who embrace this ideology conclude that they must simply be naturally superior to people of color, ignoring the fact that people of color face barriers to success that white people don’t (such as racial prejudice and economic inequalities).)
According to Wilkerson, even with the other tenets in place, there’s always the possibility that reality might slip into the social consciousness and expose the injustice of how the subordinate class is treated. To keep this from happening, she argues, the dominant caste must change the collective view of the subordinates from humans to objects. If society sees the underclass as mere objects, the abhorrent actions taken against them become more palatable. (Shortform note: According to psychologist Paul Bloom, Wilkerson is correct to frame mass dehumanization as a deliberate strategy on the part of the upper caste. This contradicts the previous, widespread assumption that people in power inadvertently dehumanized others because they genuinely believed they were less than human.)
According to the author, a caste system can only work if there are clear laws to determine who belongs in each caste. Wilkerson argues that the best way to do this was to identify someone’s caste at birth. Thus, ancestral lines became another way to maintain the rankings of each group. Whatever caste you were born into would be yours for life and that of all generations to follow. (Shortform note: This is still true in many places. For example, as recently as 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that whatever caste a person is born into is their caste for life—even if they marry someone from a different caste.)
According to Wilkerson, the third step in maintaining the caste structure is to ban interracial relationships. Endogamy is the restriction of marriage to only those from the same caste.
Wilkerson believes that the purpose of endogamy is to protect the dominant caste’s bloodline and emphasize the differences between the different castes. When families are isolated according to caste, a person’s interest or investment in the lives of other families diminishes. In not sharing the landscape of love and family building, members of the dominant caste have little reason to be concerned about the happiness and satisfaction of the lowest caste’s livelihood. Furthermore, the bans on relations among castes enable the dominant caste to curate the type of population they want.
(Shortform note: This is an instance of Wilkerson focusing on the social logic of the caste system rather than the economic motivations behind it. Wilkerson highlights how endogamy laws prevented social ties between people of different castes, but other scholars have noted another purpose for these laws: They prevent upper-caste people from passing property or resources down to lower-caste people. This helps to ensure that the highest caste maintains control of the country’s resources.)
Wilkerson argues that for all the other tenets of a caste system to be upheld, the dominant caste must define their race in an irreproachable way and safeguard that definition at all costs. The easiest way to create this unassailable distinction is through a sense of racial purity that can be compromised by the mere presence of a lower-caste person. Wilkerson describes how, in India, the Untouchables had to keep a certain number of feet away from the dominant caste. Likewise, segregation in America kept Black Americans isolated from the dominant caste in almost every facet of life.
(Shortform note: While Wilkerson suggests that this tenet was implemented similarly in each caste system, that wasn’t the case. The Nazi caste system arguably put more emphasis on “racial purity” than the Indian or American systems—while these systems merely sought to enforce the boundaries between castes, the Nazis’ ultimate goal was to create a 100% “pure” German race by eliminating any possible threats to the Aryan bloodline through mass murder. They called this the “Final Solution.”)
The building of a society requires labor; according to the author, in a caste structure, the division of labor determines who will build the foundation and who will use that foundation to thrive. The menial tasks required to lay the foundation for progress are given to the subordinate caste, solidifying their place as the backs on which everyone else steps. This is true in both India and the United States.
(Shortform note: The author doesn’t go into detail about how this tenet applied in Nazi Germany. The Nazis established forced labor camps where Jews and other prisoners worked for no pay under inhumane conditions. This served two purposes for the Nazi regime: It created a constant supply of laborers to do the nation’s most backbreaking jobs, and it was a tool of the “Final Solution” because prisoners were often literally worked to death.)
In addition to relegating them to the lowest jobs, Wilkerson argues that physical violence and psychological terror are two strategies dominant castes use to keep the subordinate caste in line. With both behaviors, the dominant caste reminds the subordinate caste of their place in society and their power over them. (Shortform note: The science of trauma supports Wilkerson’s point here. In The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma (such as enduring constant violence and terror from the upper caste) creates a sense of learned helplessness. In other words, in the face of unrelenting violence, members of the lower caste may feel too trapped and hopeless to fight back.)
So far, we’ve learned the basics of Wilkerson’s theory of caste and the eight tenets that support a caste system. In Part 3, we’ll learn about the lasting impacts of caste systems on individuals and society.
According to the author, caste tensions in post-Civil Rights era America simmered beneath the surface until the 21st century, when they erupted into vocal, explicit racism. Why did this happen? Wilkerson argues it’s because the changing landscape of justice after the Civil Rights Movement likely created aftershocks in lower- and middle-class white Americans’ sense of security in their status. They were suddenly faced with a different reality than that of their parents and grandparents, who’d enjoyed privileges because of their white skin in both the social and economic spheres. Many felt that their main source of identity—their superior status as white—was slipping through their fingers. Without it, they’d be forced to accept the realities of their difficult economic situation without the comfort of upper-caste superiority.
(Shortform note: Additionally, in Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild describes how this sudden loss of status and identity happened at the same moment that people from marginalized groups (such as women, people of color, and LGBTQ people) were beginning to celebrate and find value in their identities. This was an unacceptable role reversal for many white Southerners.)
Rather than face this existential crisis head-on, Wilkerson argues, many white Americans turned their discomfort with subordinate advances into rage. They angrily believed that the rising status of Black people meant a lower status for white people—and a threat to their very existence. (Shortform note: This zero-sum mentality can be dangerous. For example, the white man who murdered nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 was motivated by the fact that “Blacks were taking over the world” and felt he needed to defend the white race.)
According to the author, the first harbinger of renewed racial animosity was the 2008 election of Democrat Barack Obama and the resulting vengeful quest by many white Americans to restore power to the dominant caste.
(Shortform note: Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the 2008 election presented such a threat to the established racial order that assassination was a looming threat. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security authorized Secret Service protection for then-Senator Obama beginning in 2007, a full 18 months before he was first elected president. This is the earliest any president has received Secret Service protection.)
Wilkerson describes how the number of hate groups in America doubled during Obama’s first term, as did anti-Black sentiments in mainstream society. The dream that Obama’s election was a sign of a post-racial America quickly evaporated. (Shortform note: Wilkerson is right to conclude that white reactions to Obama’s election caused the sudden surge in hate groups. One scholar found that the rate of new hate groups slowed significantly after 2016 because “Trump’s election signaled the closing of the perceived threats that drove hate groups to form during the Obama administration.”)
According to Wilkerson, the result of this resurgence of hate and anti-Black sentiment was increased violence against Black Americans. Harkening back to the days of Jim Crow lynchings, unarmed Black citizens were killed during encounters with law enforcement at an alarming rate. The number of incidents grew to such a degree that studies found that Blacks were five times more likely to be killed by police than whites were, making death at the hands of police a leading cause of death for Black males. Black men and boys suddenly had a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying at the hands of police officers.
(Shortform note: The data for deaths in police custody have additional nuances that Wilkerson doesn’t cover. Research shows that, overall, Black men are more than twice as likely to die at the hands of police officers than white men. However, age plays an important role: For white men, the risk of being killed by police is most concentrated between the ages of 20 and 35, after which it dwindles; for Black men, the risk stays high well into their 40s. This may be because, in general, people see Black men as more threatening than white men, so officers may perceive even older Black men as threats that require force to subdue.)
In 2016, America prepared to vote for Obama’s successor. Wilkerson argues that this election was the catalyst that revealed the white resentment and deep-rooted racism that had built up during the Obama administration. As the 2016 election race picked up momentum, Donald Trump became the spokesperson for all the rage and fear felt by many white Americans for some time. His racist rhetoric spawned an ideology that empowered them to feel comfortable waving their prejudice flags. His followers became fiercely loyal and vocal about their similar desire to return America to a time when white supremacy was the norm.
Understanding Southern Trump Supporters’ Motivations
The reasons why people supported Trump are perhaps even more nuanced than Wilkerson suggests, as evidenced by the work of sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who interviewed conservative voters in the American South in the years leading up to the 2016 election. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild describes how the threat of losing majority race status reflects the loss of social status that white conservatives feel they’ve suffered as other groups (like women, people of color, and LGBTQ people) have gained more cultural power. For many southern white conservatives, the progress of groups who don’t share their traditional values feels like a deeply personal attack on their way of life.
According to Hochschild, this explains why many conservative voters continually vote “against their own interests” (meaning they vote for leaders and policies that negatively impact their quality of life): They’re voting in their own emotional interest by protecting their values and identity, even if that means voting against their own economic interests. This explains why working-class, Southern, white Americans voted for Trump in 2016, despite the fact that his economic policies catered to the richest Americans.
According to Wilkerson, the mobilization of this faction of supporters was too great for Hillary Clinton to overcome. Donald Trump—and the return to upper caste dominance that he symbolized—won the day. As a result, violence against those in the middle and lower castes spiked across the country. Ultimately, 2017 became one of the deadliest years in history, with an onslaught of mass shootings in public places, including schools, concerts, and churches. (Shortform note: Hate crimes spiked from 6,121 reported incidents in 2016 to 7,175 incidents reported in 2017. According to FBI data, the number has continued to hover above seven thousand every year since.)
Wilkerson argues that perhaps the most telling evidence of the extreme division among Americans was the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. president used the virus to spread anti-Chinese sentiments and blamed the media for inflating the severity of the virus, going as far as calling it a hoax. In the end, the virus grew at a faster rate in the United States than in any other country, leaving several hundred thousand dead and millions infected. (Shortform note: The coronavirus pandemic disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Asian communities, further contributing to racial division in the United States. Additionally, anti-Asian hate crimes rose 145% from 2019 to 2020, and one study found a direct link between Trump’s pandemic rhetoric and a surge of online anti-Asian hate speech.)
According to Wilkerson, the only way to dismantle caste in society is for each of us to open our minds and hearts enough to see how we’ve been manipulated into division. That’s because our actions and thoughts feed the machine of hate and prejudice based on superficial physical traits.
Wilkerson argues that no one chooses to be born into one caste or another, but we do choose whether to abide by the confines those castes dictate. A person born into the dominant caste can choose to uplift others in the subordinate caste. A person born into the subordinate caste can choose to break the barriers around them.
Dismantling Caste: Mindsets, Policies, or Both?
Other scholars disagree with Wilkerson’s conclusion that individual actions and mindsets are the driving force behind the caste system. For instance, in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi argues that it’s impossible to dismantle American racism by ignoring policy and focusing on individual mindsets. Kendi believes we should focus on changing racist policies first rather than trying to educate people out of racist mindsets and hoping for downstream change.
There is a middle ground between these perspectives. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo strikes a balance between Wilkerson’s focus on mindset and Kendi’s focus on policy. She lays out strategies for individuals to make policy changes (such as voting for antiracist candidates and supporting affirmative action policies) and develop an antiracist mindset by engaging with art and music from Black artists.
Wilkerson reminds us that the subordinate caste is not responsible for constructing the caste system; therefore, they are not responsible for dismantling it. Instead, people in the dominant caste must take responsibility for the system and use their privilege to dismantle it. (Shortform note: In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo also argues that the first step to dismantling the caste system is for white people to acknowledge the way they benefit from the current system. She goes further by saying that while acknowledging privilege can be uncomfortable, white people should lean into that discomfort and remember that it pales in comparison to the pain that experiencing racism causes.)
In Wilkerson’s view, dismantling caste once and for all requires radical empathy, which is more than just imagining what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes. Radical empathy is the active choice to educate ourselves about others’ experiences by listening to the personal accounts of those we don’t understand. We must acknowledge that our understanding of another’s life is shallow and only those living the experience have the right to qualify its effect on their lives. We can imagine what it would be like to have one arm, but we cannot tell someone with one arm how they should feel about their challenges.
Six Steps to Develop Radical Empathy
Wilkerson calls for radical empathy, but what does that look like in practice? Terri E. Givens, author of Radical Empathy, lays out six steps on the path to radical empathy:
Be willing to be vulnerable.
Become grounded in your own identity.
Open yourself to the experiences of others.
Practice empathy.
Take action.
Create change and build trust.
Givens emphasizes that these steps don’t often happen on their own—they take deliberate, consistent practice. If you belong to the dominant caste, you can practice these steps yourself the next time you interact with someone from a lower caste: Start by being vulnerable, challenge yourself to truly listen to and believe their experiences, and take concrete actions to help improve the situation.
This may not be easy—as Robin DiAngelo describes in White Fragility, white people often respond to people of color’s descriptions of racism with hostility or denial because they perceive them as a personal attack rather than an opportunity to learn and grow. If you find yourself getting uncomfortable, remember that the caste system has cost millions of people their lives—dismantling it is crucial and worth a little discomfort to achieve.
In Caste, Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal winner Isabel Wilkerson explores America’s unacknowledged caste system and how the concept of “caste” explains the country’s legacy of discrimination better than the concepts of race and class alone.
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist who previously served as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. In 1994, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism; later, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the 2015 National Humanities Medal.
Wilkerson has taught journalism and narrative nonfiction at Harvard, Princeton, Emory, Northwestern, and Boston University. Since publishing Caste in 2020, she’s also become an in-demand speaker. She was the keynote speaker at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and the University of Chicago’s 31st annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wilkerson has also conducted video interviews with notable figures such as Barack Obama, filmmaker Ken Burns, and author Jacqueline Woodson.
Connect with Isabel Wilkerson:
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Caste was published in August 2020. It is Wilkerson’s second book, published exactly 10 years after her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which chronicled the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during the 20th century. The Warmth of Other Suns was a New York Times bestseller and won six literary awards. Wilkerson’s research for The Warmth of Other Suns inspired her to write Caste.
Caste was published in 2020, at the end of a summer characterized by nationwide protests of police brutality and systemic racism in response to the murder of George Floyd. The book was also published during the Covid-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected Black and Latinx communities. Wilkerson references the pandemic late in the book.
Caste follows in the footsteps of other popular books on race and racism in the United States. These books often serve a particular purpose: Some are practical guides to talking about racism (such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race) while others offer an explanation for why racism is such a widespread problem in the first place (like Jennifer Eberhardt’s Biased and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility). Caste falls into the second category.
Wilkerson’s thesis is that caste—not race—is the primary factor that defines race relations in America. This sets Caste apart from other books in the genre, which focus on race as the primary factor underlying racism. However, many of these books focus on systemic racism (the racial prejudice inherent in institutions like government, finance, and popular culture) rather than interpersonal racism (the racially prejudiced beliefs or behavior of individual people). The definition of systemic racism is very similar to Wilkerson’s definition of caste; as a result, Caste uses different language to address many of the same issues as other popular books on race.
Upon its release, Caste became an instant bestseller, particularly after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Oprah’s continued support (including an entire podcast series dedicated to the book) helped turn Caste into a household name among readers: By 2021, the book had more than 30,000 reviews on Amazon. Barack Obama also listed Caste as one of his “Favorite Books of 2020.”
In October 2020, Netflix announced that a film adaptation of Caste is in development. The film will be written and directed by Ava DuVernay, who previously directed “13th,” a critically-acclaimed documentary about systemic racism in America.
According to book review aggregator Book Marks, Caste is the number one best-reviewed nonfiction book of 2020. One New York Times reviewer, Dwight Garner, called it “the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far” because Wilkerson uses her journalistic skills to weave historical facts, sociological analysis, and powerful emotional appeals into one cohesive account. Other reviewers praised Wilkerson’s poetic use of imagery and metaphor.
Reviewers were split in their evaluation of Wilkerson’s focus on caste rather than race. Garner argues that using the concept of caste to reframe conversations about race in America helps readers see the issue with fresh eyes, and that “the reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment.”
On the other hand, some social scientists who study race and journalists who are familiar with caste systems were critical of the emphasis on caste over race. For example, one Wall Street Journal reviewer argued that Wilkerson doesn’t successfully make the case that race and caste are two different things in America. Another reviewer argued that the comparisons between the caste systems in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany are more superficial than Wilkerson admits. The same reviewer also highlights the fact that Wilkerson doesn’t address the economic underpinnings of racism (for example, the fact that slavery was the engine of American capitalism).
Wilkerson’s journalism background is on display in Caste. While she provides plenty of data to back up her points, her focus is on telling the story of the American caste system and how it impacts everyone in the social hierarchy. For this reason, Caste is punctuated with stories of real people’s experience with the caste system, including many anecdotes from Wilkerson’s own experience as a Black woman. These stories make the book engaging and accessible; however, for the sake of brevity, we’ve eliminated their details and focused instead on the general principles they illustrate.
Caste is organized into seven parts, each discussing a different theme of Wilkerson’s caste theory, followed by an epilogue. For clarity, we’ve rearranged the book’s principles and distilled them into four parts. In Part 1, we’ll give an overview of how Wilkerson defines caste and how different caste systems around the world compare to the American system. In Part 2, we’ll unpack the eight characteristics that Wilkerson argues apply to every caste system. In Parts 3 and 4, we’ll learn how the American caste system impacts the health and wellbeing of individual Americans and society as a whole. Finally, in the Epilogue, we’ll learn Wilkerson’s proposed solutions to the problem of caste.
Throughout this guide, we’ll explore reviewers’ critiques of Caste in more depth. We’ll also compare Wilkerson’s ideas to those of other books on the subject of race, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race. In this guide, we’ll explore:
In this first part of the guide, we’ll discuss the definition of “caste” and how it differs from “race.” Then, we’ll compare the American caste system to two other notable examples of caste systems: India and Nazi Germany.
According to Wilkerson, caste describes a man-made social order developed to rank the value of certain groups of people. This order is based on the assumed supremacy of one group and assumed inferiority of others according to heritage, personal characteristics, religious preferences, or economic status. More often than not, Wilkerson argues, the characteristics used to delineate groups are arbitrary and benign in other contexts. They only become important when one group uses them to segregate people and assign parameters for the appropriate behaviors of each group.
(Shortform note: Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, agrees that skin color, the defining characteristic of the American caste system, was originally a neutral signifier. According to Kendi, modern racist ideas sprang up out of racist policies: People needed a way to justify economically self-serving policies, so they used skin color as a marker to decide who to exclude, then invented rationale to justify that decision. If those policies never existed, we wouldn’t associate any darker or lighter skin colors with any inherent meanings.)
Once a caste system is in place, the supporting evidence for the apparent inferiority and superiority of certain groups is enforced until it becomes the inherent beliefs of a culture. According to Wilkerson, when society buys into these beliefs, the laws and principles guiding them are no longer questioned. The dominant group becomes free to treat the lower groups however they see fit to maintain their distinction. This treatment is often cruel so as to debase and diminish the spirit of the lower castes.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson arguably understates the impact of not questioning these underlying beliefs about caste. In Biased, social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt argues that after hundreds of years, the laws of the American caste system are so unquestioned that all Americans—regardless of their own caste—hold some degree of implicit anti-Black bias. These biases may be so deeply ingrained that we don’t even realize we have them.)
Wilkerson argues that America’s current caste system is based on differences in people’s appearance; specifically, skin color. This arbitrary manner of differentiating one group from another is what developed the concept of race. Without it, race would not carry the importance it does today or even be something we assign meaning to.
According to the author, race is an unwavering line drawn in the sand because it’s immediately noticeable. Skin color becomes the obvious, immediate cue that triggers ingrained stereotypes and assumptions about how different groups of people fit into society. Wilkerson argues that as these beliefs deepen, so do the expectations for what a certain group is capable of, where they should live, what they’re allowed to achieve, and what freedoms they can possess. These expectations get passed from generation to generation without question, enhancing social inequities and injustice for all future generations.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention here that although caste systems are common in many societies around the world, very few of them use physical markers like skin color to divide people into different castes. Ethnicity, religion, and inherited occupations are far more common markers of social status in hierarchical societies. This means that the American caste system is one of the most inescapable—a person could theoretically change their religion, but they can’t change their skin color.)
Wilkerson believes the word “race” and the derivatives of “racism” and “racist” are so ingrained in our cultural vernacular that we may not understand the true nature of those words. Race originated as a means to differentiate dominant power from subordinate inferiority based on skin color, and over centuries, it has become a weighted term. But Wilkerson believes the meaning the term attempts to convey is arbitrary because the distinction is arbitrary.
(Shortform note: The arbitrary nature of race explains why, as we’ll see, American lawmakers have spent so much time debating exactly what constitutes membership of a particular race, as well as why those definitions have changed over time. Racial distinctions don’t reflect a stable, underlying reality—they’re constantly updated to support the dominant group’s interests.)
Racial Categories Aren’t Biological Facts
Wilkerson describes “race” as a social concept that loads centuries of acquired meaning onto otherwise neutral traits like skin color. On the other hand, many people believe that race is a biological fact because people of different races often have distinct genetic predispositions for certain diseases or health outcomes, such as high bone density or sickle cell anemia. However, according to biological anthropologist Alan Goodman, people who view race as a biological reality are confusing the socially-constructed concept of “race” with the very real concept of geographic origin.
Goodman and Wilkerson agree that arbitrary racial labels lump everyone with dark skin and tightly curled hair into the “Black” category. However, people in this category have a wide array of geographic origins (meaning their ancestors lived in different places). According to Goodman, geographic origin is what actually determines someone’s biology. Take sickle cell anemia, for example: The gene variant that causes the disease is common in West Africa (as well as India, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East) but almost nonexistent in the rest of the African continent. That means that not all Black people have an increased risk for sickle cell anemia, and that not everyone who carries the gene for the disease falls under the “Black” label. In other words, race isn’t the salient factor in determining biological “facts” like disease predisposition—geography is.
Wilkerson argues that race is a tool used to separate people and justify different standards of living: In the eyes of dominant-caste people, perpetuating the idea that people of a certain race are “different” or “lesser” justifies treating those people differently. In reality, people of different races aren’t that different at all. In fact, a study of human genomes 20 years ago showed that all humans are 99.9% the same genetically. Genetic scientists discovered that every person on Earth descended from a handful of tribes in Africa, and over 100,000 years, the different generations migrated out of Africa and into other lands. This means that the distinctions we hold as truth based on the artificial idea of race are a distortion of our true ancestry.
Skin Color Is an Evolutionary Adaptation
You may wonder why humans have such a wide variety of skin colors if we’re all genetically the same. Wilkerson doesn’t address this question, but research shows that skin color is determined by the presence of a pigment called melanin, which blocks the sun’s UV rays. These rays are beneficial in small quantities (for example, our bodies need UV exposure in order to produce enough vitamin D) but harmful in larger quantities.
Over millions of years, ancient humans evolved to produce the perfect amount of melanin based on where they lived. Darker-skinned people’s ancestors lived closer to the equator, where they were exposed to direct sunlight; as a result, they evolved to produce more melanin as a natural form of sunscreen. On the other hand, lighter-skinned people’s ancestors migrated away from the equator to places where the sunlight was weaker; they evolved to produce less melanin, which helped their bodies maximize what little sun exposure they got. Thus, skin color is merely an evolutionary adaptation, rather than a sign that different groups of people are fundamentally “different.”
Wilkerson believes that while race and caste are not synonyms, they support each other within American culture. Race is the physical evidence of difference and the set of meanings assigned to that evidence. Caste is how we organize that evidence to maintain division among groups and ascribe the appropriate lifestyles. Therefore, Wilkerson believes it would be more accurate to refer to someone who discriminates against another race as a casteist, not a racist. That’s because, according to the author, the definition of racism has changed over time.
Originally, racism signified one group that uses their social power to oppress another group based on race. However, Wilkerson argues that in the last century, racism has become synonymous with beliefs, actions, and character. Today, if you’re a racist, it means you hate people who are not like you and condone oppression. Wilkerson believes that this misunderstanding is why the dominant caste flinches at the term. The author argues that if racism were understood as a byproduct of casteism, society might actually be open to acknowledging racial problems.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson is right that dominant caste members often flinch at the term “racist.” For example, during a 2021 debate on voting restrictions that would primarily impact people of color, the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives asked lawmakers not to use the word “racism” in their comments. However, despite this discomfort, scientific studies don’t support Wilkerson’s hope that eliminating the word “racism” will diffuse the conversation around race—in one study, researchers found that white participants felt threatened even by the term “diverse conversations.”)
According to Wilkerson, the only way that real equality and justice will happen in America is if we stop looking for the red flags of racism and start focusing on the mindsets and microaggressions that continue to hold the lowest caste in place. We must recognize our biases as elements of a caste because we all unconsciously participate in the American caste system, especially by simply accepting that this is “just the way things are.” Wilkerson urges us to stop believing that the racial hierarchy of our country is natural. We must accept people for who they are, rather than what we believe their physical features mandate.
Are “Race” and “Caste” Really Different?
To understand the difference between race and caste, it helps to understand how other scholars define “racism.” As Ijeoma Oluo describes in So You Want to Talk About Race, there are two culturally accepted definitions of racism. The first is personal (bias against a person based on their race), and the second is structural (racially biased power structures and institutions that discriminate against a particular racial group). Wilkerson argues that most people rely on the personal definition, while only social scientists tend to use the structural definition.
Wilkerson’s solution to the confusion over how to define “racism” is to focus on caste, not race. However, her description of caste as the structure of American inequality sounds almost identical to the second (systemic) definition of racism. If this sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone: Multiple reviewers have questioned whether there’s a meaningful difference between discussing “casteism” and discussing “systemic racism.” They argue that Wilkerson’s distinction is arbitrary and weak. Other reviewers, however, argue that reframing the situation in terms of caste “neatly lift[s] the mind out of old ruts,” even if readers don’t fully buy into Wilkerson’s logic.
The confusion about race and caste leads to a contradiction in terms of Wilkerson’s proposed solutions for racial inequality in the United States. By shifting the conversation to “caste,” Wilkerson seems to be arguing that we should refocus on the systems and structures that hold up racist beliefs, rather than those beliefs and labels themselves. However, the solutions that she proposes first in this section and again near the end of the book ignore those structures in favor of addressing individual racist mindsets, microaggressions, and personal assumptions about the nature of race in society. Ultimately, these solutions are still important (even if they’re not fully consistent with Wilkerson’s thesis) because to truly dismantle the caste system, we need to act on both a personal and systemic level.
Wilkerson believes there are three main examples of caste systems in history—the American South, India, and Nazi Germany. In this chapter, we’ll explore the basic structure and function of each of these systems and note their similarities.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson’s list of the primary examples of caste systems in history contains a notable exclusion: the apartheid system that governed South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Like the systems in Nazi Germany, India, and the US, the South African caste system was codified into law and impacted every aspect of citizens’ lives, including where they could live and work, who they could marry, and even which train car they could ride in.)
According to the author, the American caste system is divided into two primary castes: The dominant caste consists of people considered “white,” and the lowest caste consists of people considered “Black.” This system has its roots in the American institution of slavery, which was the standard mode of operation on American soil for 246 years, from 1619 to 1865.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson briefly mentions a “middle caste” composed of people who don’t fit into either the dominant or subordinate group, such as Native American and Asian American people. However, because racial tensions in the United States have historically revolved around the distinction between “white” and “Black,” she focuses the majority of her analysis on the upper and lower castes rather than the middle caste. While focusing specifically on anti-Black discrimination is valuable, ignoring anti-Native American discrimination seems like a significant oversight, since some scholars estimate that roughly 13 million Indigenous people in what is now the United States lost their lives to dominant caste violence, disease, and racism between 1492 and 1900.)
To understand why slavery played such a pivotal role in forming the American caste system, we need to understand how and why chattel slavery began in America. According to Wilkerson, the Europeans who claimed the land that was to become the United States of America in the 1600s saw an opportunity to build a prosperous existence—but to do so, they needed to turn the wilderness they found into civilization. The indigenous people were unwilling to give up their ancestral land, so the European settlers murdered or exiled them. Then, the Europeans searched for a group of people they could control to extract the untapped resources of this pristine landscape.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson’s story of how the European settlers overcame the indigenous people they met is arguably missing some crucial detail. A reason why the Europeans were so easily able to conquer the indigenous population is that even before they began their all-out assault on these peoples, they’d already indirectly weakened them. When Europeans began settling in the Americas, they brought over diseases like smallpox that the native population had never encountered, which launched a full-scale epidemic among Indigenous Americans. As a result, the native population had fewer resources to resist European encroachment on their land.)
Initially, European settlers chose to enslave African people—not because of their dark skin, but because of their religion. According to the author, for centuries, religion was the guiding distinction between who had power and who didn’t in Europe. At the top were Protestants, who used the Bible as evidence of their God-given superiority. British Christian missionaries conquered other undeveloped nations and exerted their power by colonizing the natives. Therefore, Wilkerson argues, the Europeans saw non-Christian African people as their inferiors and had no qualms about transporting them to the new world to build their kingdoms.
However, Wilkerson argues that once Africans started to convert to Christianity, the religious distinction vanished, and the Europeans needed a new way to justify their subordination. The obvious choice became the stark contrast in skin tone. Thus, they invented two classifications of people—those with light skin became one group called “white,” and those who were not white became “Black,” or the opposite of white.
Enslavers Debated Converting Enslaved People to Christianity
Wilkerson notes that religion was the original justification for slavery. However, she doesn’t explore the fact that as a result of this initial justification, slaveholders and other colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries were divided on whether converting enslaved Africans to Christianity was wise.
According to Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped From the Beginning, the idea of enslaving fellow Christians created a moral quandary for enslavers—if enslaved people converted to Christianity, it would elevate them closer to equal caste status with enslavers, who would then feel guilty for inflicting torturous treatment on them. The laws of the time reflected this tension: In the British-ruled American colonies, it was technically illegal to enslave a Christian, and at least one formerly enslaved woman had successfully sued for her freedom on those grounds.
However, despite the drawbacks for enslavers, some prominent colonial figures promoted religious conversion as a tool of subjugation. They felt that if they converted enough enslaved Africans, they could convince them that being a dutiful slave was the surest path to salvation, which would reduce the likelihood of them ever challenging the established social order. In their eyes, a Christian slave was a more docile slave. The laws in the colonies soon evolved to allow for the existence of Christian slaves.
Wilkerson describes how, in the eyes of enslavers, slaves weren’t people—they were symbols of commerce. Their sole purpose for existing was to serve as the machine that generated profits for the landowners. Slaves could be traded like cattle, auctioned like farm machinery, or given away as gifts. They had no say in who they worked for or where they were sent, and they could be separated from loved ones without question. One owner might brand his slaves to stake a claim to them, and owners often sold children to cover debts or settle disputes.
(Shortform note: The fact that enslavers thought of enslaved Africans as property, not people, somewhat undercuts Wilkerson’s argument that American society during slavery was universally understood as a caste system. Enslavers may not have thought of enslaved Africans as a lower caste because caste systems only apply to people, not to property. Therefore, while outside observers and enslaved people might have viewed this society as a caste system, enslavers may have disagreed.)
The institution of slavery made slave owners wealthy beyond imagination. (Shortform note: Some scholars estimate that the richest enslavers would have been billionaires in today’s dollars.) According to the author, this benefit helped the dominant caste validate and normalize the forced labor and torture of the lowest caste. Furthermore, the dominant caste grew accustomed to punishing the subordinate caste for any behavior that threatened their power, and they had the full force of the law on their side. This mode of life cemented the ideologies of the dominant caste into an American culture that perpetuated well after slavery ended.
The violence involved in this domination, including whippings, sexual assault, and starvation, is too horrible for many modern Americans to acknowledge or examine. Wilkerson argues that acknowledging this vicious behavior goes against the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and democracy that are at the heart of American society, historically and today. But intentional ignorance allows the cycle of violence to perpetuate. (Shortform note: This reluctance to acknowledge the horrors in America’s history has contributed to widespread debates over whether teachers should include information about systemic racism in their curricula. Opponents think that dwelling on systemic racism will actually perpetuate racism rather than help to eliminate it because they believe that discussing institutional racism paints white people as fundamentally bad and Black people as “helpless victims.”)
Wilkerson Undervalues the Impact of Capitalism on Caste Hierarchies
While Wilkerson acknowledges that slavery was an economic institution, some reviewers argue that she doesn’t fully analyze the role of economic self-interest in creating and maintaining racial inequality. For example, one Boston Review writer points out that the word “capitalism” doesn’t appear even once in Caste’s nearly 500 pages. The same reviewer argues that this is a major omission on Wilkerson’s part because it is impossible to fully analyze the racial hierarchy of the United States without analyzing the economic structure that created that hierarchy in the first place.
Wilkerson’s omission of any discussion of capitalism is particularly glaring because, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, American slavery reveals a major flaw in capitalism as an economic structure: It provides no natural check against human greed and cruelty. According to Harari, the theory of capitalism relies on the assumption that employers will reinvest their profits in the workforce by creating more jobs. However, enslavers sidestepped that responsibility and chose instead to eliminate payment for their workers altogether, resorting instead to motivating them with unspeakable violence rather than fair pay. The nature of the capitalist system enabled this violence by allowing the cruelest enslavers to reap the most profit.
Wilkerson describes how after Reconstruction (a 12-year period of federally enforced racial equality following the end of the Civil War), dominant caste people in the American South swiftly reclaimed the power they’d been forced to give up. Once federal troops withdrew from the South, the dominant caste created laws that instigated a new type of oppression of the subordinate caste. The laws dictated where Blacks could live, what types of jobs they could hold, and how they could be educated.
(Shortform note: These laws are known as Jim Crow laws (“Jim Crow” was originally a popular minstrel show character portrayed by an actor in blackface). In addition to the formal laws that Wilkerson mentions, the Jim Crow era also featured a number of social codes that dictated behavior. For example, Black people could not show physical affection to one another in public or sit in the front seat of a white person’s car.)
At this time, more European immigrants began to arrive at Ellis Island, and a new indoctrination into American society took shape. According to the author, the caste hierarchy based on skin color was the leading principle of the nation, and if immigrants wanted to make it in America, they had to get on board. People who had no experience with or prejudice against Blacks before now joined a system of hatred to survive and thrive. Wilkerson believes this scenario efficiently kept those of African heritage at the bottom despite their freedom from slavery.
(Shortform note: In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari argues that this exchange is at the heart of immigration in all countries, not just the United States. Immigrants assimilate and adopt the normative attitudes of their host country; in exchange, they’re welcomed into the fabric of their host country’s society.)
Generation after generation grew up within this distorted system, and the author argues that today, the continued suppression of the subordinated caste is normal. Their continued debasement helps justify their status as lesser humans, and those in the middle caste still understand that to curry favor with the dominant group, they must dehumanize the lowest.
(Shortform note: While Wilkerson describes how members of the middle caste have embraced this phenomenon out of necessity, other authors have pointed out how the dominant caste strategically encouraged this pattern. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how, throughout history, powerful members of the dominant caste have protected their power by encouraging middle caste and less-powerful dominant caste people to dehumanize the lowest caste. For example, wealthy planters in the American colonies gave poor white planters scraps of power over enslaved people, such as allowing them to lead slave patrols. That way, they could minimize the threat of poor white people and enslaved Africans joining together to overthrow the wealthy plantation owners.)
Wilkerson describes a strong historical connection between India and the United States. Both countries were invaded and conquered by British colonialists. The invaders forced indigenous people of each country out of their homelands and created hierarchies to distribute power to those asserting themselves as the dominant caste. (Shortform note: Wilkerson somewhat oversimplifies the history of India’s caste system here, perhaps to strengthen the parallel between the Indian and American systems. According to other scholars, British colonial rulers didn’t actually create the Indian caste system—they merely codified an existing, centuries-old social hierarchy into law, making caste boundaries more rigid in the process.)
In both countries, that dominant caste persecuted the lowest caste. Wilkerson describes how both countries developed laws to maintain this social order and tortured the lower caste members who broke them. After centuries, both countries abolished the lawful caste system—yet in both cases, the legacy of those social orders persists in the modern era.
According to the author, the difference between the two systems is in the structures of the castes. Contrary to the largely bipolar caste system in the United States, India’s caste system was an intricate system of many castes and subcastes. The five main castes included the 1) Brahmin, 2) Kshatriya, 3) Vaishya, 4) Shudra, and 5) the Dalits. The Dalits were most commonly referred to as “Untouchables,” and fall so low on the social hierarchy that they’re not technically considered part of the caste system at all.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention that, while Indian caste divisions are rooted in Hinduism, converts to other religions (like Islam and Christianity) often replicate the caste system in their own communities. This means that, in addition to traditional Dalits, there are separate groups of “Dalit Muslims” and “Dalit Christians.” In the upper castes, there are also separate groups for Muslim converts from higher castes (called “Ashrafs”). These divisions further complicate the Indian caste system.)
Did the Indian and American Caste Systems Contribute to Pandemic Outcomes?
According to Wilkerson, it’s no coincidence that the United States and India were the two countries with the most documented cases of Covid-19 by mid-2021. In an Instagram post, she argued that the active caste systems in both countries played a contributing role in the devastation caused by the pandemic. She believes that in both the United States and India, the active caste system encourages disregard for people outside one’s own caste, which in turn promotes self-serving behavior at the expense of lower-caste people who may be more at risk of getting sick.
Data from both countries indicate that Wilkerson may be right. In India, Dalits migrant laborers were the first to lose their jobs when pandemic restrictions went into effect, worsening the already rampant poverty among members of the lowest caste. Even worse: Many Dalits who did develop Covid-19 were turned away from hospitals on the basis of caste. Similarly, in the United States, the pandemic disproportionately impacted communities of color, and many people of color struggled to access vaccines when they became available.
According to Wilkerson, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system are very similar—and those similarities are intentional. She argues that when creating their caste system (which was designed to separate the dominant Aryan caste from the subordinate caste consisting of Jewish people and other minorities), the Third Reich’s members were particularly influenced by the American eugenics movement: for instance, the Nazis adopted the term “subhuman” to describe the Jews, a term introduced by American eugenicists. Furthermore, prominent American eugenicist Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, influenced Adolf Hitler to the point that he wrote Grant a letter and called the book his Bible.
(Shortform note: This would not be the last time the Nazis took inspiration from the American eugenics movement. During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, several Nazis on trial for war crimes (such as forced sterilization of Jewish people) defended themselves by citing Buck v. Bell, an American Supreme Court case that upheld a Virginia law allowing the state to forcibly sterilize people it deemed “genetically unfit for procreation.”)
In addition to eugenics, Wilkerson argues that Nazi leaders were fascinated with the legal system of discrimination in America and took a deep dive into American laws. According to Wilkerson, one young Nazi scholar who’d attended college in Arkansas detailed his astonishment with the lengths the Americans took to protect their dominant caste. He was particularly amazed by the regulations dictating who belonged to which caste: In America, anyone with even one drop of African blood was subordinate. (Shortform note: The Nazis weren’t the only oppressive regime to take inspiration from American racism to create their own caste systems. In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah describes how the politicians devising the South African apartheid system also studied American race relations for inspiration.)
As Wilkerson tells it, the Nazis actually felt the American one-drop law was too harsh. In the end, they adopted a hybrid law based on the laws of Texas and North Carolina, which stated that any person beyond simple classification as dominant or subordinate would be judged based on their associations. The resulting law defined a Jew as anyone who either 1) had three Jewish grandparents, or 2) had two Jewish grandparents and associated with Jews or practiced Judaism. Jews were stripped of their citizenship and prohibited from marrying or having intimate relations with Germans. (Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention that this law defined whether a person was Jewish based on their grandparents’ religious associations, regardless of whether those grandparents were ethnically Jewish. This shows that the Nazis thought Judaism itself (and not just ethnic Jewish heritage) was a polluting social force.)
The Nazi Caste System Encompassed Other Groups Beyond Jewish People
While Wilkerson primarily focuses on Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, there were several other groups who made up the lowest caste in the Nazi caste system. The Nazis imprisoned, tortured, and killed untold numbers of non-Jewish people, including Polish, Romani, and Black people; gay men; children and adults with disabilities; Christian clergy; and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among others. Historians debate how many non-Jewish victims died during the Holocaust, but the number is somewhere in the millions.
Reflect on the impact of the white-dominated caste system in the U.S. on your life.
What caste are you part of? While growing up, what were you taught about your caste and other castes?
How has your caste status affected you in key areas of your life—for instance, in your upbringing, education, your church or religion, your choice of job and your career progression, where you live, and whom you socialize with?
When and how have you rejected the strictures or privileges of your caste status?
What are your beliefs about the caste system in the United States today? (For instance, do you think it should be dismantled entirely or replaced with a new system based on something other than skin color?)
Each of the three examples of caste systems we explored in Part 1 represents a belief system, and every belief system is governed by a set of tenets. For caste systems, Wilkerson believes there are eight tenets that uphold the structure and allow for unquestionable participation by the related societies. The tenets are:
As each tenet is repeated and supported by attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, it becomes rooted in civilization. Wilkerson argues that once all of these eight beliefs are ingrained, they become the standard mode of life in the form of social hierarchies.
(Shortform note: Not all definitions of caste agree that all eight of these tenets are needed for a caste system to form. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines caste systems as “ranked, hereditary, endogamous social groups, often linked with occupation.” This definition encompasses only the second, third, fifth, and eighth of Wilkerson’s eight tenets. It’s possible that this definition is more limited because it focuses more specifically on the Indian caste system whereas Wilkerson seeks to define caste systems more generally.)
In Part 2, we’ll explore these eight tenets in more detail. In this chapter, we’ll explore the two tenets that were used to justify the creation of a caste system: laws of divinity and ingrained superiority.
According to the author, the first tenet involves divine intervention. When a belief system is said to be the will of God, it becomes nearly impossible to argue against the legitimacy of its claims. (Shortform note: Avatthi Ramaiah, an Indian sociologist, agrees with Wilkerson’s argument that divine justification upholds the caste system. He argues, “As long as Hinduism is strong, caste will be strong, and as long as there is caste, there will be lower caste.”)
The will of an all-knowing spiritual power is at the heart of both the Indian and American castes. Let’s explore each system in detail.
In India, this divine justification for the caste system comes from Hinduism. As Wilkerson describes, ancient Hindu scriptures contain an account of the creation of the universe. The story involves a god who took the form of a man named Brahma and set out to create the world. From his mouth, he created the Brahmin; from his arms, the Kshatriya; from his thighs, the Vaishya; and from his feet, the Shudra.
According to Wilkerson, the part of the body from which they were created determined their status and role in society. The Shudra, who were made from Brahma’s feet (the lowest body part) would be the lowest form of civilized man and work as servants; the Brahmin, on the other extreme, came from Brahma’s head and were therefore the highest caste. A fifth caste was too shameful to be made from Brahma’s body—they were the reincarnation of all the bad karma of the past. This group was not to be looked at or touched, hence, they became the Untouchables.
(Shortform note: This description of the caste system comes from a sacred Hindu text called the Rig Veda. Some scholars believe this verse wasn’t originally part of the Rig Veda and was inserted later on in order to justify the existing caste system. If that’s true, the story serves as a religious justification of the caste system but did not originally inspire it, undermining Wilkerson’s argument. Furthermore, even if the Rig Veda did originally include caste justifications, scholars have pointed out that other Hindu holy texts contain contradictory accounts of the creation of the different castes. In general, contrary to Wilkerson’s assertion that divine texts created India’s current caste system, many scholars believe the passages in those texts carried little weight until British invaders hijacked them as a way to separate and control the Indian population.)
Just like Hindu scriptures, Wilkerson asserts, the Old Testament of the Bible contains a story that has historically been used to justify a caste system. One day, Noah (of ark-building fame) became inebriated on wine from his vineyard and passed out nude in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, entered the tent and saw his father exposed. When Noah heard that Ham had seen his naked body, he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, and all of his descendants to a life of servitude. (Shortform note: While Wilkerson’s telling reflects the canonical version of the story, some scholars argue that Ham’s sin wasn’t just seeing his father naked—he sexually assaulted Noah as he slept. This would explain why the punishment was so severe for a seemingly minor crime.)
According to Wilkerson, as this story was passed down over generations, it grew to include a description of Ham as dark-skinned. Therefore, she argues, those with light skin viewed all dark-skinned people as descendants of Ham and, thus, rightfully destined for a life of indentured servitude. The Europeans used this story to justify their colonization and enslavement of the African people.
(Shortform note: In Stamped From the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi argues that early enslavers didn’t buy into the “curse theory” because they also enslaved non-Black people. However, by the 1500s, more enslavers turned to the Curse of Ham as a way to explain differences in skin color and justify enslaving more native Africans. Kendi calls these later enslavers “the first known segregationists” because they believed African people were fundamentally inferior to white people.)
The Nazi Party Had No Need for Divine Justification
In her introduction to the Eight Tenets of Caste, Wilkerson argues that these eight tenets underlie all three caste systems she studied—however, she makes no mention of Nazi Germany in this section.
Why does she omit this system? It could be because the Nazis’ approach to religion was complex and doesn’t fit neatly into Wilkerson’s model of divine justification for caste. Officially, the Nazi Party endorsed “Positive Christianity,” a blend of Nazi antisemitic values and traditional Christianity (today, Positive Christianity is not recognized as a legitimate sect by any major Christian churches). Some Nazi leaders also argued that Jesus was not Jewish and that his original mission was to promote Aryan values.
However, official party documents clarified that loyalty to the party itself should supersede any religious ties. Thus, while Nazi leaders may have used religious language to win over the mostly Christian population of Germany at the time, they didn’t actively promote a divine justification of the new caste system. In other words, religion didn’t inspire the Nazis’ racism because racism was their religion.
Another way societies have historically justified caste systems is through a belief in ingrained superiority. According to the author, no caste system could survive without the collective belief in the unequivocal superiority of one caste over another. This belief was and is still at the heart of every interaction between the dominant caste and subordinate caste in America.
Wilkerson argues that all of the other tenets of caste culminate in this superior mindset. She believes each person must clearly understand the innate inferiority of the subordinate caste spiritually, physically, and mentally to legitimize the unhindered, blatant subjugation of them. One caste must be seen as deserving of the good life, and the other must be seen as subhuman and deserving of the ills they’re forced to live with.
(Shortform note: How do people in the upper caste uphold this sense of ingrained superiority? Robin DiAngelo argues it’s through what she calls “the ideology of individualism.” In White Fragility, she claims that white people reassure themselves of their own superiority by telling themselves that all their successes were earned through hard work, and that people who are less successful just haven’t worked as hard. White people who embrace this ideology conclude that they must simply be naturally superior to people of color, ignoring the fact that people of color face barriers to success that white people don’t (such as racial prejudice and economic inequalities).)
Wilkerson describes how the dominant castes in India, Nazi Germany, and America created laws and protocols that highlighted the roles of the subordinate caste. One very visible signifier of lower-caste inferiority was through clothing. The South Carolina Negro Code of 1735 decreed that slaves could only wear the cheapest and most uncomfortable fabrics available in the colonies. (Shortform note: Other scholars have clarified that “field slaves” were forced to wear the roughest clothing, while “house slaves” who served the enslaver’s family directly were afforded better clothing.) In one part of India, lower-caste people weren’t allowed to wear upper-body clothing at all—instead, both men and women were expected to bare their chests as a sign of respect to the upper caste. In Nazi Germany, Jewish prisoners who arrived at the concentration camps wearing fine clothing were subjected to uniquely horrific punishments.
(Shortform note: Why has clothing been used so successfully as a status symbol and status enforcer in many cultures throughout history? One American study found that people are less likely to physically intrude on the personal space of someone wearing high-status clothing. Therefore, forcing people in the lowest caste to wear poor-quality clothing is a very effective way to bolster a sense of upper-caste superiority.)
Once a society installs a caste system, the dominant caste must work hard to maintain the system and ensure no one questions their right to rule. According to the author, dominant castes across the world have historically used four main tactics to accomplish this: dehumanization at the group level and laws of heritage, love, and purity. Let’s explore each of these tenets of caste in detail.
According to Wilkerson, even with the other tenets in place, there’s always the possibility that reality might slip into the social consciousness and expose the injustice of how the subordinate class is treated. To keep this from happening, Wilkerson argues, the dominant caste must change the collective view of the subordinates from humans to objects. If society sees the underclass as mere objects, the abhorrent actions taken against them become more palatable. (Shortform note: According to psychologist Paul Bloom, Wilkerson is correct to frame mass dehumanization as a deliberate strategy on the part of the upper caste. This contradicts the previous, widespread assumption that people in power inadvertently dehumanized others because they genuinely believed they were less than human.)
Dehumanizing an entire segment of society is a huge undertaking. To accomplish this, Wilkerson argues, the dominant caste must create a stigma about the subordinate caste powerful enough to quiet all sense of reason. This stigma nullifies the natural empathy people feel when they witness others’ suffering—especially people they know personally.
(Shortform note: Our natural empathy for people we know personally suggests that, if we formed personal relationships with people from stigmatized groups, we’d automatically see them as more human. That’s the idea behind “contact theory,” which was first proposed by Gordon Allport in the 1950s. In Biased, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt describes one of the caveats of contact theory: Interracial contact must happen under very specific conditions, otherwise it can actually worsen stigmas.)
Wilkerson argues that when a group is stigmatized, any member of that group takes on the stigma of the entire group, and individuals stop being individuals. She also notes the dominant group must remove all notions of humanity from the subordinate group to be able to suppress the group’s freedoms and remain in power. (Shortform note: We could also consider endogamy laws, which we’ll discuss in detail later, as part of this campaign. Endogamy prevents people of the dominant caste from forming any kind of family bond with people in the subordinate caste, which helps to ensure that they’ll never see subordinate caste people as human beings.)
According to the author, one of the ways dominant castes dehumanize people is by scapegoating them for the problems in society. For instance, the Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The entire nation finally had someone to condemn for the deterioration of their lives after the war. This scapegoating lumps everyone in the subordinate caste into one culpable group, rather than seeing each group member as an individual.
(Shortform note: Scapegoating doesn’t just help to enforce caste, as Wilkerson claims. Hans Rosling, author of Factfulness, argues that scapegoating is also a mental shortcut that people use as an excuse not to examine their own behavior. For example, in reality, Germany lost World War I not because of the Jews but because German leaders’ military strategy backfired. The Germans didn’t want to examine this national failing, so they projected blame elsewhere.)
Wilkerson argues that one way to enact mass dehumanization is to remove all markers of individuality until everyone in a given group looks exactly the same. She describes how the Nazis and the American colonists removed these markers of individuality from the subordinate caste in similar ways. For example, in the concentration camps, the Germans stripped Jews of their names and identified them only with numbers. (Shortform note: In Auschwitz, one of the largest concentration camps, the Nazis went so far as to tattoo identification numbers onto prisoners’ bodies. This accomplished a secondary form of dehumanization: It removed prisoners’ bodily autonomy and right to consent.)
Similarly, according to Wilkerson, when the American colonists brought the Africans ashore to the new land, they took them to auction blocks. Like the Nazis did with the Jews, dominant caste Americans stripped the Africans of their native names and tribal identities and forced them to take whatever names their owners gave them. (Shortform note: As a quiet act of rebellion, many slaves used their owner-given names in public and a second, private name with family and friends. These private names typically reflected enslaved peoples’ African roots.)
India’s Lowest Caste Faces Dehumanization
Wilkerson doesn’t mention how dehumanization plays out in the Indian caste system. Like their American and Jewish counterparts, Dalits in India have faced horrifying dehumanization. For centuries, Dalits were subject to “untouchability,” a fundamental form of dehumanization in which certain people are considered so “unclean” as to be subhuman.
While untouchability is now technically illegal in India, the practice has survived in many places. As a result, Dalits face rampant discrimination. They’re not allowed to worship in the same temples or use the same eating utensils as upper-caste people. If any Dalit dares to break these social rules, they’re subject to horrific punishments, such as being scalped, burned alive, lynched, or paraded naked through the streets. The continued dehumanization is so severe that Dalit advocacy groups brought pet dogs to a 2016 protest to show how dogs are treated better than lower-caste human beings in India.
When we look back on past atrocities against humanity, Wilkerson argues, we often believe we would have behaved differently. While that might be true for some of us, it’s not true for everyone. Several studies (such as the Milgram experiment) show that people are capable of acting violently toward another with little to no provocation. (Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t explicitly clarify the link between acting violently toward people and dehumanizing them. One journalist describes the connection this way: “If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the ‘other’ is a psychological loophole that can justify them.”)
Where do these violent instincts come from, and why are we so easily persuaded to dehumanize others? Wilkerson believes desensitization to violence in society is one culprit. Children who grow up in a culture that dehumanizes black people often pass that legacy of dehumanization down to their own children. These inherited beliefs desensitize people to the humanity of others deemed not like them and to the real consequences of abuse in people’s lives. (Shortform note: Science supports this conclusion. In Biased, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt describes how parents with strong racial biases tend to raise children with equally strong biases.)
The Stanford Prison Experiment Shows How Easily People Dehumanize Others
The Milgram experiment that Wilkerson uses to support her argument inspired the famous “Stanford prison experiment,” in which college students were randomly assigned to be either “prisoners” or “guards” in a mock prison environment. Even though the students knew the roles had been randomly assigned, they embraced them to the point that the “guards'' enthusiastically tortured the “prisoners” by demanding physical exercise, refusing to let them use the restroom, or spraying them with fire extinguishers. Conditions deteriorated so quickly that the experiment was halted after just six days.
The Stanford prison experiment is unique because it was specifically designed to replicate real-life instances of lower-caste dehumanization, such as Nazi concentration camps. The researchers made the volunteer prisoners wear stocking caps to simulate having their heads shaved, answer only to an identification number rather than their names, and wear an ill-fitting uniform. The experiment showed that average people, given a chance to exercise arbitrary power over others, would easily embrace these hallmarks of dehumanization.
According to the author, a caste system can only work if there are clear laws to determine who belongs in each caste. Wilkerson argues that the best way to do this was to identify someone’s caste at birth. Thus, ancestral lines became another way to maintain the rankings of each group. Whatever caste you were born into would be yours for life and that of all generations to follow. (Shortform note: This is still true in many places. For example, as recently as 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that whatever caste a person is born into is their caste for life—even if they marry someone from a different caste.)
In India, according to the author, children took the status of their father, which was also common in European countries. But Wilkerson argues that colonial Virginians had to use a different tactic because the nature of their caste was different. Many slaveholders impregnated slave women. If the child were to be assigned the caste of their father, there would be dominant caste members that were half-subordinate.
Therefore, as Wilkerson describes, Virginians changed the structure to serve the dominant caste, the first such deviation from the old world traditions. The law in the colonial South not only stated that children would take on the status of the mother but also gave ownership of the child and any descendants to the father. Therefore, a slave owner could now impregnate a slave woman, and the baby would automatically be another slave he owned.
Sally Hemings: Demanding Freedom for Enslaved Children
Wilkerson presents heritage as an insurmountable barrier to escaping intergenerational caste labels. However, there are notable exceptions to this trend. For example, one of the most famous enslaved women in American history was able to partly skirt this rule and successfully negotiate for her children’s freedom.
Sally Hemings was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson from 1774 until his death in 1826. When Sally was 14 years old, she accompanied Jefferson and his daughter to France, where she was legally free. At age 16, she became pregnant with Jefferson’s child and struck a deal with him—she would return to the United States with him (thereby giving up her legal freedom) in return for “extraordinary privileges” for her unborn child.
While that child did not survive, Sally and Jefferson had five more children together, four of whom survived into adulthood. The older two children were informally released from slavery in their early 20s and allowed to blend into white society, while the younger two were formally emancipated in Jefferson’s will. In total, Sally spent an additional 36 years in slavery in an effort to ensure her children could become free citizens of the United States, an outcome that was unheard of for enslaved people at the time.
Wilkerson believes that in this type of fixed categorization at birth, there is no hope for movement by anyone within the caste system. Most notably, while many members of the subordinate class are able to elevate their status by becoming famous, they’re still subjected to the same beliefs about and treatment of members of their caste due to their heritage. For example, in 2021, three Black players on England’s national soccer team faced virulent racist attacks after missing penalty kicks during the final game of the European Football Championship. This is just one example of how fame and fortune don’t erase a person’s caste status or the oppression they experience from the dominant caste, as they don’t erase that person’s heritage.
Some Reviewers Accuse Wilkerson of Elitism
Wilkerson’s argument in this section implies that upper-class Black people are the biggest victims of the caste system because they’re often denied the privileged treatment that upper-class white people enjoy. As a result, several reviewers have accused her of elitism. For example, NPR reviewer Hope Wabuke criticized Wilkerson for not advocating for dismantling the caste system entirely: Instead, Wilkerson seems to argue for merely changing the current caste system so that upper-class Black people can enjoy its benefits. Wabuke sums up Wilkerson’s argument by claiming that Wilkerson wants the lower caste classification to still exist: She (as an upper-class Black person) just doesn’t want to be classified in this way herself.
Africana Studies professor Charisse Burden-Stelly, writing in the Boston Review, also criticized Wilkerson for focusing on the plight of upper-class Black Americans. Burden-Stelly argues that Wilkerson “effectively positions her poor experiences on first class flights… as a comparable type of violence to lynching, police brutality, and even the breakup of enslaved families.”
According to Wilkerson, the third step in maintaining the caste structure is to ban interracial relationships. Endogamy is the restriction of marriage to only those from the same caste.
Wilkerson believes that the purpose of endogamy is to protect the dominant caste’s bloodline and emphasize the differences between the different castes. When families are isolated according to caste, a person’s interest or investment in the lives of other families diminishes. In not sharing the landscape of love and family building, members of the dominant caste have little reason to be concerned about the happiness and satisfaction of the lowest caste’s livelihood. Furthermore, the bans on relations among castes enable the dominant caste to curate the type of population they want.
(Shortform note: This is another instance where Wilkerson focuses on the social logic of the caste system rather than the economic motivations behind it. Wilkerson highlights how endogamy laws prevented social ties between people of different castes, but other scholars have noted another purpose for these laws: They prevent upper-caste people from passing property or resources down to lower-caste people. This helps to ensure that the highest caste maintains control of the country’s resources.)
According to the author, American endogamy has its roots in colonial Virginia. In 1691, Virginia officially outlawed interracial marriage, becoming the first colony to do so. Over the next 300 hundred years, 41 of the 50 states followed suit. Marriage between castes was banned, and the punishment for anyone who broke this law was a $5,000 fine or 10 years in prison. According to the author, some states even added a provision that no law could ever be passed to overturn the marriage ban.
As the author describes, an unknown number of people suffered horrific abuses and death because of endogamy laws. The punishment against lower caste men was most often lynching, but women from the dominant caste were also severely punished for their actions against the laws. In the reverse relationship between a dominant caste man and lowest caste woman, only the woman was punished. Wilkerson argues that the double standard showed that dominant caste men were free to do whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted at any time without punishment.
(Shortform note: This is an example of intersectionality, which is the idea that people hold various degrees of privilege based on their unique combination of identities. This explains why, as the author describes, white men have historically held so much power: They hold (at least) two privileged identities (white and male), so they frequently face fewer consequences than people with just one privileged identity (such as white women or Black men).)
Endogamy in the American Colonies
Contrary to Wilkerson’s account, Virginia’s 1691 law was not the first endogamy law in the American colonies. In 1664, Maryland passed a law stating that any English (white) woman who married an enslaved African man would become enslaved to her husband’s master, as would the couple’s children. The law does not mention any punishment for white men marrying enslaved women. By comparison, the terms of Virginia’s 1691 endogamy law were much different: If any white person was found guilty of marrying a (free or enslaved) Black person, they would be permanently banished from the state of Virginia.
According to Wilkerson, a Gallup poll in 1958 affirmed that the legacy of endogamy was firmly in place in America. Ninety-four percent of the dominant caste stated their disapproval of marriage between different races. Even so, in 1967, the Supreme Court finally revoked the endogamy laws. However, not all states complied with the federal mandate. Alabama continued to ban interracial marriage until 2000, and the measure to overturn the ban was passed with only 60% of the vote.
The End of American Endogamy
Wilkerson tells us when American endogamy laws were finally overturned, but she doesn’t tell us how that change happened: namely, the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case. The plaintiffs, Richard and Mildred Loving, were legally banished from the state of Virginia for 25 years for the crime of “cohabiting as man and wife” as an interracial couple before the Supreme Court overturned the ruling.
The Loving v. Virginia ruling permanently changed the state of American marriage laws and was even listed as a precedent in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. Public opinion of interracial marriage has also evolved: In 2013, nearly 50 years after Loving v. Virginia, a Gallup poll found that 87% of Americans support interracial marriages. Gallup officials say this is “one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history.”
Wilkerson argues that for all the other tenets of a caste system to be upheld, the dominant caste must define their race in an irreproachable way and safeguard that definition at all costs. The easiest way to create this unassailable distinction is through a sense of racial purity that can be compromised by the mere presence of a lower-caste person. Wilkerson describes how, in India, the Untouchables had to keep a certain number of feet away from the dominant caste. Likewise, Nazis banned Jews from using public pools and beaches. And segregation in America kept Black Americans isolated from the dominant caste in almost every facet of life.
(Shortform note: While Wilkerson suggests that this tenet was implemented similarly in each caste system, that wasn’t the case. The Nazi caste system arguably put more emphasis on “racial purity” than the Indian or American systems—while these systems merely sought to enforce the boundaries between castes, the Nazis’ ultimate goal was to create a 100% “pure” German race by eliminating any possible threats to the Aryan bloodline through mass murder. They called this the “Final Solution.”)
According to the author, segregation in the United States was all-encompassing in the early centuries and well into the 20th century. For the dominant caste, the fear of being “polluted” was especially strong in the water. The author describes how, by the turn of the 20th century, whites believed so strongly in the noxiousness of dark skin that there was almost nowhere a Black person could swim in public waters. Like the Nazis had with the Jews, Black Americans were banned from beaches, lakes, and pools across the country.
(Shortform note: This form of discrimination left a deadly legacy that Wilkerson doesn’t explore: Overall, Black children are three times more likely to drown than white children because their families were banned from swimming for decades, so many of them never learned to swim. This disparity peaks between the ages of 11-12, when Black children are a full 10 times more likely to drown in a swimming pool than white children.)
Wilkerson describes how the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of segregation in 1896, in a case in which a Black New Orleans man refused to move from the whites-only car on a train. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Louisiana. According to Wilkerson, the decision set forth a new mandate, known as “separate but equal,” which legitimized segregation under the guise that equal facilities would be provided to the lowest caste. This mandate became ingrained in American culture and stayed that way for the next 70 years.
(Shortform note: While Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized segregation in the eyes of the law, cracks were beginning to show, and even a member of the dominant caste started to question whether “separate but equal” was just discrimination by another name. The case was decided with a 7-1 ruling. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote: “Everyone knows that the statute in question had its origin in the purpose, not so much to exclude white people from railroad cars occupied by Blacks, as to exclude colored people from coaches occupied by or assigned to white persons.”)
According to Wilkerson, purity laws enabled the dominant caste to keep their system fixed and justify measures taken to exclude others from their constitutional rights. Blacks had to use back entrances for white establishments, couldn’t be outside after sundown, and couldn’t learn to read or write for decades. They were only allowed to take on dirty and abhorrent jobs, which reinforced the dominant caste’s designation of Blacks as dirty and abhorrent people. The author argues that these beliefs remained strong even after the Civil Rights Movement.
The Lasting Fear of “Polluted” Spaces
The fear of Black people “polluting” the spaces they occupy still persists to this day. In Biased, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt describes a 2016 study she conducted to test this theory. Eberhardt and her team created two sales listings for a suburban home that were identical except for a single photo of the current owners—one listing showed a photo of a white family, the other listing showed a photo of a Black family. Both families had the same number of children, wore the same outfits, stood in the same room of the house, and were equally clean-cut. Ultimately, participants in the study were willing to pay a full $22,000 more for the house if they thought the previous owners were white. In other words, the cultural belief in Black “pollution” is so strong that people are willing to pay thousands of dollars to avoid occupying spaces where Black people have lived.
Another aspect of the American, Indian, and Nazi German caste systems is the rampant mistreatment of the lowest castes. Wilkerson argues that this mistreatment often manifests in two ways: the division of labor and widespread terror and violence. In this chapter, we’ll explore each in detail.
The building of a society requires labor; according to the author, in a caste structure, the division of labor determines who will build the foundation and who will use that foundation to thrive. The menial tasks required to lay the foundation for progress are given to the subordinate caste, solidifying their place as the backs on which everyone else steps. This is true in both India and the United States.
(Shortform note: The author doesn’t go into detail about how this tenet applied in Nazi Germany. The Nazis established forced labor camps where Jews and other prisoners worked for no pay under inhumane conditions. This served two purposes for the Nazi regime: It created a constant supply of laborers to do the nation’s most backbreaking jobs, and it was a tool of the “Final Solution” because prisoners were often literally worked to death.)
The author describes how, for most of American history, Black people were relegated to the lowest-regarded and most backbreaking labor positions. Even when the country became more progressive, the dominant caste found ways to control the professional ranks of the subordinate caste. According to Wilkerson, by the mid-20th century, more Blacks became educated and worked in highly skilled occupations. But they couldn’t rise above a member of the dominant caste. Top-level executive positions were out of the question because a Black person couldn’t be a white person’s superior.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t mention it here, but we can infer that this caste tenet in particular explains the violent backlash to the election of Barack Obama: a Black man who some white people may have believed to have “risen above his station”. We’ll discuss Obama’s rise to power and the subsequent backlash more in Chapter 9.)
One area where the racial division of labor is especially prominent is the entertainment industry. According to Wilkerson, the presence of subordinate caste members in the entertainment industry started during the era of slavery. She describes how slave owners demonstrated their dominance by forcing slaves to merrily entertain them and their guests (a humiliating prospect considering their lot in life). They arguably felt entitled to their slaves’ performance. According to Wilkerson, this early need to entertain helped develop a tradition of performing in the subordinate community, which translated over generations into a prowess for the arts and athletics. Wilkerson argues that these roles are not threatening because the performers are pleasing the dominant caste, and the dominant caste still controls the related industries.
(Shortform note: This is still largely true today—the dominant caste occupies most leadership roles in the sports and entertainment industries. For example, while people of color make up 43% to 81% of the three largest professional sports leagues in the U.S., there were still only six team owners of color (including just one Black person—Michael Jordan). The same is true in the arts: One study found that 93% of film studio senior executives are white; and while the number of Black music executives has increased recently, industry insiders are skeptical whether this represents lasting change or a passing trend.)
Dominant Caste Audiences Feel Entitled to Subordinate Caste Performance
While Wilkerson discusses white entitlement to performance in the context of slavery, this trend arguably continues today: Even in the 21st century, members of the dominant caste often feel entitled to be entertained by Black artists and athletes. This sense of entitlement helps to explain the intense backlash that elite athletes Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles received when they pulled out of high-level competitions in 2021 to protect their mental health. In a podcast interview, sports journalist Jemele Hill argued that, “What’s really bothering people when they are reacting so vehemently and angrily toward [Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka] is the fact that these two women have said, ‘I choose me over your entertainment, over your ability to watch me perform.’”
Wilkerson argues that even with the success of musicians and athletes in the early parts of the 20th century, Black actors didn’t enjoy the same success as white actors. Because film and television emulate real life, the industry relegated Black actors to roles that emphasized their subordinate status. Much of this had to do with the legacy of minstrel shows, in which dominant caste members played caricatures of subordinate people in what is known as “blackface.” The minstrel shows involved slapstick routines portraying Blacks as jolly jesters unaware of their inferior nature and suffering.
(Shortform note: While Wilkerson primarily focuses on the American South throughout Caste, including the historic South’s fondness for minstrel shows, some sources say minstrel shows were actually more popular in the North. These shows often featured the character “Jim Crow,” who ultimately gave his name to the suite of post-Reconstruction segregation laws that kept Black people relegated to the lowest caste.)
The author describes how, as a result of the minstrel shows, Black actors only received roles as silly, ignorant, and melodramatically loyal servants. For example, Hattie McDaniel became the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for her role as the plump and devoted maid in “Gone With the Wind.” In the film, her character was so fiercely loyal to her owner, Scarlett O’Hara, that she turned against her own caste. (Shortform note: It’s worth noting that “O’Hara'' is an Irish surname, and the protagonist of “Gone With the Wind” is canonically Irish. This shows that people of Irish descent were firmly considered “white” by the 1930s (when both the book and movie were released), despite Irish immigrants having uncertain racial status in the previous century.)
According to Wilkerson, the dominant caste found these roles acceptable and comforting despite being historically inaccurate. Black slaves were anything but plump considering the rations they were forced to live on, and few would have been tasked to work in their owners’ homes instead of in the fields. But the image of fat and happy slaves belied the ugliness of that dark period. (Shortform note: For this reason, Black activists have consistently protested “Gone With the Wind.” When the film was first released, activists outside one theater held signs proclaiming, “You’d be sweet too under a whip!” and “‘Gone With the Wind’ HANGS the free Negro!”)
“Gone With the Wind” and America’s Attitude Toward Black Actors
“Gone With the Wind” is a clear example of the dominant caste’s contradictory attitude toward Black entertainers. For example, while McDaniel won an Oscar for her performance as “Mammy,” she was barred from attending the Atlanta premiere of the movie. A studio employee clarified that, while Southerners wouldn’t mind seeing McDaniel join the film’s other stars on stage before the premiere, she wouldn’t be welcome to sit in the audience during the showing or use the all-white theater’s restrooms or dressing rooms. In other words, the dominant caste saw Black actors as tools for their own entertainment, not as fellow human beings.
As time has passed, the dominant caste has eased restrictions just enough to serve their needs in some way while still maintaining supremacy. Although successful subordinate caste members today have been able to achieve fame and wealth, thereby raising their class status, the cap on how high they’re allowed to rise is still in place because of the original occupational narrative. (Shortform note: This is especially true in business. By July 2021, only three of the Fortune 500 companies had Black CEOs. The same is true in politics, despite efforts to increase diversity: In 2021, there were just three Black senators and zero Black governors. However, there is some reason to hope. The House of Representatives is now 13% Black, which accurately reflects the demographics of the general American population.)
In addition to relegating them to the lowest jobs, Wilkerson argues that physical violence and psychological terror are two strategies dominant castes use to keep the subordinate caste in line. With both behaviors, the dominant caste reminds the subordinate caste of their place in society and their power over them.
(Shortform note: The science of trauma supports Wilkerson’s point here. In The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how trauma (such as enduring constant violence and terror from the upper caste) creates a sense of learned helplessness. In other words, in the face of unrelenting violence, members of the lower caste may feel too trapped and hopeless to fight back.)
According to the author, both the Nazis and Americans relied heavily on violence and terror to dominate their subordinate castes. Whippings and hangings were common in both Nazi Germany and the American South. These punishments were often for minor infractions or in response to seeming insolence by a subordinate caste member.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t describe how this tenet applies to the Indian caste system. According to a 1999 Human Rights Watch report, members of the Dalit caste are often the target of violence. This is especially true for Dalit women—according to official sources, 10 Dalit women experienced sexual assault for every day of 2019.)
People in the American dominant caste lynched, hung, sexually assaulted, and burned at the stake subordinate members from the moment they brought them to the new world and well into the 20th century. According to Wilkerson, these actions were unlawful when the victim was from the dominant caste, but there were no restrictions on the level of violence directed toward the subordinate caste.
(Shortform note: While there were some laws designed to protect Black Americans from violence, these laws were often ignored in practice. For example, in most states, it was technically illegal for an enslaver to kill a slave. However, in practice, enslavers were almost never prosecuted for killing an enslaved person—in the century leading up to the Civil War, the states of Virginia, South Carolina, and Texas each only executed one slaveholder for the crime of killing a slave.)
As Wilkerson describes, the dominant caste also kept subordinates in a consistent state of psychological terror to further diminish their spirit. According to the author, dominant castes in both America and Nazi Germany took this subjugation further by uplifting one member of the subordinate caste to a power position. In the concentration camps, the kapo was the head prisoner in charge of the other Jews in their cell block. On the plantation, the head slave was called the slave driver. Both positions were given enough power to discipline the other prisoners if necessary, which created dissension among the subordinate castes.
(Shortform note: While upper caste enforcers often used this practice to sow division and turn lower caste prisoners against one another, Wilkerson doesn’t mention how their strategy sometimes backfired. For example, in Liebe Mutti, concentration camp survivor Jerzy Pindera describes how the head prisoners in his camp also led the underground resistance effort. They used their special privileges to ensure that food and medicine were distributed fairly among the inmates while working to undermine the Nazis at every opportunity.)
Wilkerson believes violence and terror reminded the enslaved of how little power they had over their bodies and warned others to stay in line. But when slavery was abolished, the investment the dominant caste had in those black bodies disappeared, and the nature of the violence and terror changed.
The favored action against blacks after Reconstruction changed from whippings to lynchings, often from highly visible trees that townspeople passed by every day. The author describes how, until the 1950s, there was a lynching in America every three or four days. The time of physical imprisonment was over, but the psychological imprisonment continued, as Black people had to live with the terrifying knowledge that they could be murdered at any time at the slightest whim of a white person.
(Shortform: Lynching was such an impactful trend in American history that in 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative created a stirring memorial to the victims. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice features one column for every county where a lynching took place, with the names of the victims inscribed on the column. The columns are suspended from the ceiling; as visitors progress through the memorial, the floor slopes downward, so that the columns eventually appear to be dangling above visitors’ heads just as the bodies of lynching victims would have. The sheer number of columns illustrates what a present threat lynching was and gives insight into the constant terror it inspired in Black communities.)
So far, we’ve learned the basics of Wilkerson’s theory of caste and the eight tenets that support a caste system. In Part 3, we’ll learn about the lasting impacts of caste systems on individuals. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how the American caste system impacts people in the dominant caste.
Although the dominant caste’s actions aim to oppress the subordinate caste, Wilkerson believes the effects often create repercussions for dominant members, as well. As an example, she cites a 2015 study in which researchers discovered an increasing mortality rate in middle-aged white Americans from middle- to lower-income demographics between 1998 and 2013. During this period, Americans of similar age and class from marginalized groups didn’t experience this same increase, nor did those from other Western nations. In fact, both groups had experienced decreases in their mortality rates.
According to the author, many of the deaths experienced by white Americans aged 45 to 54 were “deaths of despair,” such as suicide, drug overdoses, and substance-related diseases. Some hypothesized that these deaths were due in part to stagnating wages in blue-collar jobs that created financial instability. Yet other Western nations and marginalized American groups also experienced this financial instability and were not dying at faster rates. Therefore, Wilkerson argues, researchers turned to another hypothesis—“dominant group status threat,” or the insecurities that arise when people in the upper caste feel their dominant status slipping as other groups climb the ladder.
(Shortform note: The authors of the 2015 study note that the number of additional lives lost to deaths of despair during this period (compared to the 1979-1998 rate) is comparable to the number of lives lost to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This shows the huge impact of the phenomenon, perhaps even bigger than Wilkerson imagined.)
Dominant Group Status Threat Predicts Support for Trump
Dominant group status threat is a powerful force. While Wilkerson links it to negative health outcomes for white Americans, it can also predict the outcome of presidential elections. A 2016 study showed that the rate of “deaths of despair” in a given county predicted support for Donald Trump in that county in the 2016 presidential election. Additionally, in Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild argues that white working-class voters are facing a loss of social status, and voted for Trump because he symbolized the return of that status. We’ll further explore how dominant group status threat led to Trump’s election in Chapter 9.
Why did dominant group status threat develop among white Americans in the 21st century? Wilkerson argues that the changing landscape of justice after the Civil Rights Movement likely created aftershocks in lower- and middle-class white Americans’ sense of security in their status. They were suddenly faced with a different reality than that of their parents and grandparents, who’d enjoyed privileges because of their white skin in both the social and economic spheres. Many felt that their main source of identity—their superior status as white—was slipping through their fingers. Without it, they’d be forced to accept the realities of their difficult economic situation without the comfort of upper-caste superiority.
(Shortform note: Additionally, in Strangers in Their Own Land, Arlie Hochschild describes how this sudden loss of status and identity happened at the same moment that people from marginalized groups (such as women, people of color, and LGBTQ people) were beginning to celebrate and find value in their identities. This was an unacceptable role reversal for many white Southerners.)
Rather than face this existential crisis head-on, Wilkerson argues, many white Americans turned their discomfort with subordinate advances into rage. They angrily believed that the rising status of Black people meant a lower status for white people—and a threat to their very existence. (Shortform note: This zero-sum mentality can be dangerous. For example, the white man who murdered nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 was motivated by the fact that “Blacks were taking over the world” and felt he needed to defend the white race.)
According to Wilkerson, this discomfort exposed the dominant caste’s inherent biases against the subordinate caste. Inherent bias differs from overt racism in that the associated behaviors are invisible and often unintentional. Wilkerson argues that dominant caste members may act in prejudicial ways toward others based on preconceived judgments, even when they believe they’re progressive thinkers. The consequences of bias are disparities in who people hire, rent apartments to, sell houses to, admit into educational institutions, and provide medical care for.
(Shortform note: Jennifer Eberhardt goes into much more detail about racial bias and its causes in Biased. She argues that these implicit biases are the product of our natural impulse to divide the world into categories (like Black, white, male, female, and so on). Our brains use these categories as mental shortcuts to make sense of the world—instead of putting in the effort to get to know each individual person, we naturally make assumptions about them based on their category as a way to conserve mental resources. Those assumptions can result in prejudicial treatment.)
Implicit bias in healthcare has detrimental effects for the middle and subordinate castes. Wilkerson argues that Black patients receive poorer care and less treatment than white patients do, despite suffering more illnesses. (Shortform note: According to a 2020 study, this pattern of medical prejudice is part of the reason Black people were 3.57 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than white people.)
Doctors are also more reluctant to prescribe pain medications to people of color than white patients. Wilkerson argues that biased beliefs about pain tolerance are at the root of this disparity. (Shortform note: Research supports Wilkerson’s conclusion. A 2016 study found that half of all white medical students surveyed held at least one racially-biased false belief about pain tolerance, such as “Black people’s skin is thicker than white people’s.” The same study found that people who hold these beliefs tend to prescribe less powerful pain medications to Black patients than to white patients in the same amount of pain.)
However, Wilkerson believes that, in withholding pain medications from marginalized patients, doctors actually safeguarded them from the catastrophic epidemic of opioid addiction. Conversely, in readily prescribing opioids to white patients, doctors created a pathway for this group to become consumed by this addiction—which is one of the most significant contributors to the increase in mortality rates of middle-aged white Americans.
The opioid crisis is not the first substance abuse crisis to hit American soil. However, according to the author, previous epidemics (like crack cocaine) mostly affected Black communities, and anti-Black bias prevented public health officials from investing resources into what they saw as a “Black problem.” Instead of providing substance abuse treatment solutions for these communities, they incarcerated addicts, resulting in the disproportionate number of black inmates in today’s penitentiaries. However, if officials had created treatment frameworks to help the subordinate caste address the crack cocaine epidemic, those systems would be in place now to help the thousands of white Americans suffering from opioid addiction.
Lawmakers Treat Black and White Drug Users Differently
Other scholars have discussed the U.S. government’s differing responses to the crack and opioid epidemics in more detail. For instance, in The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes how the U.S. government’s response to the crack epidemic was part of the highly racialized “War on Drugs.” In 1986, in response to increased concern about the dangers of crack cocaine, the government passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act—a law that established mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes. However, the same minimum sentence applied to vastly different amounts of different drugs: five grams of crack cocaine (which was more common in Black communities) versus 500 grams of powder cocaine (which was more common among white drug users). In other words, the average white person caught with cocaine would have to possess 100 times more of the drug than the average Black person to get the same prison sentence. (In 2010, the Fair Sentencing Act reduced this disparity from 100 to 1 down to 18 to 1.)
To contrast, the American opioid crisis began in the 1990s. However, unlike the crack epidemic, the government didn’t respond with an instant crackdown, and opioid abuse wasn’t declared a public health emergency until 2017. Researchers have noted the difference in language surrounding the two crises: Politicians and the media characterized the crack epidemic as a “criminal justice issue”, but they deemed the opioid crisis a “public health issue.” Even the legislative response was different: In 2019, a group of Democratic senators introduced the Opioid Crisis Accountability Act, which proposed to hold drug suppliers (in this case, pharmaceutical companies) responsible for the crisis, rather than individual drug users (nearly 90% of whom are white). This further demonstrates how American society views white people as helpless victims and Black people as violent perpetrators when it comes to drug abuse.
According to Wilkerson, the dominant caste’s beliefs in an innate right to be in control give them a sense of entitlement and the authority to police the actions of the subordinate caste. This causes three general problems that we’ll explore in this chapter: First, upper caste entitlement can lead to violence; second, people in the lower caste internalize and reproduce that violence; and third, society misses out on the talents of people from the lower caste, who are arbitrarily prevented from assuming positions of power.
Historically, white people have been so convinced of their own superiority that they responded with resistance and criminal acts to any effort by the subordinate caste to uplift their lives. According to the author, Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan were both responses to Reconstruction, and the subordinate caste faced angry mobs in both the North and South in response to progress, with the mobs specifically targeting blacks who showed signs of prosperity. (Shortform note: Unfortunately, these backlashes can sometimes prevent or slow future progress. According to historian Lawrence Glickman, moderate lawmakers are often reluctant to support legislation that advances racial equality for fear of setting off white backlash among their constituents.)
According to Wilkerson, white entitlement creates scenarios in which white citizens feel justified in monitoring black behavior and policing it if necessary. Over the last decade, technological advances have allowed society to witness these incidents for themselves on video.
In most of these videos, the offending white citizen is operating under a similar presumption—a Black citizen is behaving or existing outside the confines of what is expected of their status. The subordinate behavior raising red flags is often innocuous and has included everything from bird watching in Central Park to loading groceries into their own cars. Wilkerson believes the videos of these incidents expose the unconstituted intrusion of white people into the daily lives of Black people. Often, the self-deputized white person is criticized or fired from their job following the release of the video. Yet despite the public outcry against these actions, this behavior continues.
(Shortform note: While these videos alone haven’t been enough to stop white people from self-deputizing, they’re still a valuable tool for shining a light on everyday racism. Civil rights activists in the 1950s and ‘60s set a precedent for this: They understood the power of capturing racist behavior on film and continually lobbied news crews to send cameras to their marches and demonstrations. This power extends to videos of police encounters with Black citizens. For example, the video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer played a large part in the officer’s trial and ultimately led to him being convicted of murder.)
According to the author, the humiliation experienced by the Black citizen is only one negative consequence of these incidents. The offender wastes valuable law enforcement time and energy and creates danger for the Black citizen when they cavalierly call the police on them. This latter consequence is potentially the most damaging given the high death rate of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officers. For example, in 2019, 23-year-old Elijah McClain died in police custody after someone called 911 to report he was “wearing a ski mask and waving his arms” while walking home. According to McClain’s friends and family, he was anemic and wore the ski mask to keep warm, and he was waving his arms because he was dancing to music.
(Shortform note: Since calling the police can be so dangerous, what should we do instead? Wilkerson doesn’t elaborate, but here are some suggestions: For non-life-threatening situations, consider the Community Resource Hub’s list of 12 alternatives to calling the police, such as talking to your neighbors personally if their music is too loud. You can also find a list of local resources in your city, such as domestic violence hotlines and crisis centers, that may be able to de-escalate a situation without involving the police. By using these alternative resources, you’ll avoid wasting law enforcement resources and keep your Black neighbors safer.)
Wilkerson believes that one reason white people feel so justified in self-deputizing is the deeply unfair way the media portrays Black people. According to her, media outlets grossly exaggerate the trials and tribulations of the Black community. Today, only one in five Black Americans is poor, and Black people make up only about 27% of the poor population. In contrast, white Americans account for 66% of the nation’s poor population. However, 59% of the poor people depicted in news stories are Black and only 17% are white. The result is a skewed perspective on Black poverty. This false representation by the media further stigmatizes the subordinate caste and promotes white self-deputizing.
Is Media Representation of Poverty a Bigger Problem Than Poverty Itself?
Some reviewers took issue with Wilkerson’s argument that media representation of Black poverty is a bigger problem than poverty itself. For instance, Charisse Burden-Stelly of the Boston Review questioned why Wilkerson focused on the public perception of Black poverty instead of the underlying, racially-skewed causes of poverty itself. Burden-Stelly concludes that this choice is probably part of Wilkerson’s repeated insistence that “oppression and exploitation are understood through indignities that starkly remind the Black elite of their Blackness.”
A closer look at the statistics supports Burden-Stelly’s point that Black poverty itself deserves Wilkerson’s attention. While Wilkerson reports that only 27% of poor people are Black, Black people make up just 13% of the overall population of the United States—therefore, they’re significantly overrepresented in the poor population. What’s causing that disparity? Scholars say it’s because Black Americans have faced constant (and constantly evolving) forms of discrimination and have never had a truly equal economic playing field.
According to the author, the dominant caste’s sense of ingrained entitlement is often so powerful that it crosses caste lines. When that happens, members of the lowest caste internalize the dominant caste’s standards and use them against their fellow lower caste members as people attempt to climb the ladder high enough to avoid being on the bottom. (Shortform note: This intra-caste animosity isn’t a universal response to being in the lowest caste. For example, instead of holding people to white standards, the Black power movement encouraged people to take pride in being Black.)
Wilkerson believes that one of the most significant forms of this prejudice is colorism, or the intra-caste classification of rank based on how close a subordinate caste person’s skin color is to white. This intra-caste grouping is especially tragic considering the likely cause of lighter skin tones in Black people—the sexual assault of their ancestors by enslavers. (Shortform note: Colorism is not unique to the Black community—white people are equally guilty of perpetuating the idea that lighter brown skin is better than darker brown skin. This is one reason that even intentionally diverse marketing campaigns (often led by predominantly white marketing companies) tend to only feature people with lighter skin.)
Intra-caste discrimination also impacts the experiences of Black immigrants. Wilkerson describes how, much like the European immigrants who gained favor in America by turning against the subordinate caste, Black immigrants tend to fall into the same ideological trap—they emphasize their specific ethnicity (for example, Nigerian or Jamaican) as a way to distance themselves from Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved. In other words, they adopt the dominant caste’s disdain for Black Americans as a strategy to keep themselves off the bottom rung of the social hierarchy.
(Shortform note: While Black immigrants may display prejudice against U.S.-born Black Americans, they are still victims—not perpetrators—of systemic racism in America. According to an immigrant advocacy group, Black immigrants are more likely to be detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and have higher bond amounts set for their release than non-Black immigrants. They’re also more likely to be put in solitary confinement while in ICE custody, more likely to face deportation, and more likely to be denied asylum than non-Black immigrants.)
According to Wilkerson, the dominant caste’s assumed alpha status hinders innovation by barring subordinate leaders from using their skills to change the world. But history is full of other examples in which the dominant caste has held back subordinate progress from society to the detriment of many. The dominant caste has consistently refused to acknowledge the achievements of subordinates to protect their own status and keep subordinates down.
One example of this trend is the story of Benjamin Montgomery, who was born into slavery in the American South. Montgomery was a gifted mechanic who managed the plantations of Jefferson Davis (who would eventually serve as President of the Confederate States of America) and Davis’ brother, Joseph. Montgomery noticed that steamboats carrying supplies to the plantations couldn’t navigate shallow waters, so he invented a new type of propeller that would allow them to do so. However, in 1858, Montgomery’s patent was denied because “a machine invented by a slave, though it be new and useful, cannot, in the present state of the law, be patented.”
While it’s impossible to know for sure, Montgomery’s invention may have impacted the tide of the American Civil War if he’d been able to patent and produce it. Historians agree that the better-developed railroad system in the North played a major role in the Union Army’s ultimate success because it allowed for faster distribution of troops and supplies. Without as many railroads, the Confederacy couldn’t keep up—and without Montgomery’s shallow water propeller design, they couldn’t use the many rivers in the region as a reliable form of transportation.
Acknowledging Black Talent Within the Logic of Caste
Wilkerson argues that the dominant caste will refuse to acknowledge lower-caste talent, even if accepting that talent would be in their own self-interest. This trend takes on an interesting dynamic in the case of Benjamin Montgomery—namely that both Jefferson Davis and Joseph Davis did recognize Montgomery’s talent, so much so that they both (unsuccessfully) attempted to patent his idea on his behalf. Jefferson Davis even amended patent law in the Confederacy after rising to power to allow for patents for enslaved people’s ideas. This contradicts Wilkerson’s argument that the dominant caste will never recognize Black talent when it benefits them.
However, Wilkerson isn’t totally wrong. While the Davis brothers saw the value in Montgomery’s idea, they approached the issue in a way that upheld the existing caste system. The patent law that Jefferson Davis enacted made it possible for enslavers to patent the ideas of the people they enslaved. His rationale was that, because slaves were seen as the property of their enslavers (not actual people), their ideas should automatically become the enslaver’s intellectual property. In other words, Davis recognized that subordinate caste members can have good ideas, but didn’t believe they should own the rights to their own inventions.
In addition to causing social disruption, Wilkerson argues that the American caste system negatively impacts the health of lower and upper-caste Americans. In this section, we’ll learn more about these negative health outcomes and how the psychology of caste contributes to them.
According to the author, the caste system damages the health of the lowest caste because the psychological strain of constantly navigating prejudice and discrimination damages the body. The body produces higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone released in response to a crisis, when danger is perceived, and consistent high levels of cortisol damage muscle tissue and the circulatory and digestive systems. Fear also restricts blood flow to the heart. The result is poor heart and immune system functioning, leading to a number of deadly diseases.
However, according to Wilkerson, prejudice doesn’t just damage the bodies of the receivers. Studies show it has similar damaging effects on the perpetrator. Harboring negative emotions or hate also increases blood pressure and releases cortisol. One study found that even simple negative interactions created massive responses in the body. A group of prejudiced white Americans had the same physiological threat responses when forced to interact with a minority as those recorded during combat or car accidents.
White People Can Escape the Negative Health Effects of Caste, but Black People Can’t
While the caste system negatively impacts the health of all Americans, white people face a lesser burden than Black people. The same study that found that highly-prejudiced white people experienced higher levels of cortisol in interracial interactions also found a caveat: After a few weeks of practice with building interracial friendships, the white participants’ cortisol levels reduced significantly.
For Black Americans, on the other hand, the negative health effects of caste are often inescapable because discrimination is inescapable. A 2019 review of scientific studies of discrimination found that only 9% of Black participants reported that they’d “never” been the target of racial prejudice or discrimination. The same study reported that 60% of Black participants had experienced unfair treatment from the police and 57% did not receive equal pay or promotions at work compared to their white colleagues.
As Wilkerson describes, this widespread discrimination subjects Black people to floods of stress hormones like cortisol. Research shows that experiencing discrimination frequently is associated with elevated levels of cortisol all the time, even in calm moments when discrimination isn’t happening. Over time, elevated cortisol can have negative impacts beyond what Wilkerson describes. According to the Mayo Clinic, overexposure to cortisol can also lead to anxiety, depression, weight gain, sleep problems, digestive problems, and impaired memory.
In Wilkerson’s view, these negative health outcomes are partly due to the different group mindsets that the caste system demands of the upper and lower caste. For the dominant caste, that mindset is collective narcissism. Narcissism describes the way in which one inflates their sense of self and entitlement to suppress deep-seated insecurities. In a caste system, the dominant caste embodies collective narcissism by establishing themselves as the standard of beauty and their way of life the standard of normalcy.
(Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t fully define collective narcissism. Narcissism can happen at the individual level (“I’m the best”) or the collective level (“My group is the best”). Research shows that, while individual narcissism can sometimes lead to collective narcissism, that doesn’t always happen. In fact, the opposite can also happen: People can develop collective narcissism as a strategy to compensate for low individual self-esteem.)
According to the author, few people can get over this narcissism enough to view the world from another’s perspective. Awareness requires effort, and when your group defines the standard of life, that effort feels unnecessary. (Shortform note: As Wilkerson argues, this inability to see the world from another’s perspective has dangerous consequences. Studies show that there is an “empathy gap” between people of different races. To overcome this gap, white people need to do two things: critically examine the implicit biases they hold about Black people as a whole, and actively try to empathize with individual Black people in their lives.)
Furthermore, when individuals can frame their lives as a representation of the “proper” functioning of a nation, their identities become the national identity, and they lose the distinction between their survival and the nation’s survival. Wilkerson argues that equating individual survival with national survival creates a fascist political system, which leads to extreme racialism. (Shortform note: Science backs up Wilkerson’s conclusion. A 2020 article found that collective narcissism predicts support for national populist regimes, which can sometimes develop into outright fascism.)
The author argues that, in order to survive the collective narcissism of the dominant caste, members of the subordinate caste must learn and internalize the dominant caste’s expectations, standards, and codes and adjust their behavior accordingly. Adjusting behaviors is second nature for people living on the margins of society. Their extreme powers of perception must function at all times so they can navigate life without repercussions.
(Shortform note: Adjusting behavior like this is called “code-switching.” For Black Americans, code-switching frequently involves changing how they speak, express emotions, or greet other people in order to avoid negative stereotypes. Unfortunately, code-switching requires constant vigilance, which can negatively impact work performance and contribute to burnout.)
According to Wilkerson, the biggest adjustment expected from the subordinate caste is to provide forgiveness to dominant members for their infractions against them. The subordinate caste is expected to rise above their trauma and anger and absolve the dominant caste for their actions, thereby absolving them of the sins of the past (including slavery, police killings, and racial terrorism). Through this blanket absolution, the white community can skew reality to disguise the violent and oppressive nature of their actions.
(Shortform note: Journalist Stacey Patton argues that Black Americans are the only ones who bear this burden of expected forgiveness. Patton points out that “After 9/11, there was no talk about forgiving al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden.” In other words, when white Americans experience trauma (or when Americans of all races face terrorism that isn’t related to anti-Black bias), they don’t face the same expectation to immediately forgive the persecutor.)
Now that we’ve addressed the individual consequences of caste, let’s take a look at the impact of caste systems on entire societies. In this chapter, we’ll explore the shift that happened in the U.S. in 2008 that sparked a resurgence of inter-caste tensions.
According to the author, caste tensions in post-Civil Rights era America simmered beneath the surface until the 21st century. The first harbinger of renewed racial animosity was the 2008 election of Democrat Barack Obama and the resulting vengeful quest by many white Americans to restore power to the dominant caste.
(Shortform note: Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the 2008 election presented such a threat to the established racial order that assassination was a looming threat. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security authorized Secret Service protection for then-Senator Obama beginning in 2007, a full 18 months before he was first elected president. This is the earliest any president has received Secret Service protection.)
Most white Americans didn’t vote for Obama in either of his elections. According to the author, only 43% of white Americans voted for Obama in 2008, or two in every five white voters. The percentage dropped to 39% in 2012. (Shortform note: In contrast, a full 95% of Black voters voted for Obama in 2008 and 93% voted for him in 2012. Additionally, the 2008 election saw a surge of minority voters, who made up a bigger share of the overall electorate than ever before.)
These numbers aren’t surprising because most white voters lean Republican. Wilkerson believes this is because, since the 1960s, the Republican party has positioned itself as the party that upheld Christian values, maintained laws that favored the dominant caste, and pushed against efforts to grant access to those seen as inferior. In contrast, the Democratic party branded itself as the party that represented all people, regardless of race or economic status.
The line was drawn between the political parties following the path paved by the caste system. In response, many white voters, even those claiming to be progressive, switched allegiance to the Republican party because it represented their race’s interests. Therefore, white voters saw Obama’s election as a threat to not only their political identity but their racial identity as well.
(Shortform note: According to political scientist Vincent Hutchings, the Black exodus from the Republican party began even earlier, in the 1930s, because Black voters approved of Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt’s economic response to the Great Depression. By the 1960s, two-thirds of Black voters were already registered Democrats; by 2014, almost 90% of Black voters were Democrats. White voters, on the other hand, are much more split: About 51% lean Republican while about 43% lean Democratic.)
According to the author, many in the dominant caste did everything they could to make Obama’s presidency as difficult and ineffectual as possible. Congress denied or created barricades to almost every action Obama attempted to make, forcing him to rely on executive orders to accomplish anything. (Shortform note: While Obama did have to contend with a hostile Congress as Wilkerson describes, his use of executive orders wasn’t out of the ordinary. According to data from the American Presidency Project, Obama issued roughly the same number of executive orders in his two terms in office as his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose party dominated both the Senate and the House of Representatives during his presidency.)
More damaging in Wilkerson’s eyes were the efforts to push back racial progress. Republicans created several laws aimed at making it harder for many Americans to vote. Several states erased approximately 16 million voter registrations and required new registration procedures that made it easier to deny someone their right to vote. One such strategy was the requirement of new state-sanctioned IDs that were difficult to obtain and could be dismissed for something as small as a misplaced apostrophe in a name. These restrictions specifically targeted marginalized communities. (Shortform note: Wilkerson doesn’t go into detail explaining why these laws are so discriminatory. According to the ACLU, up to 11% of U.S. citizens don’t have government-issued photo identification. That’s because these forms of ID (like driver’s licenses and passports) cost money, and people from marginalized groups are less likely to have discretionary income to spend.)
In addition, Wilkerson describes how the number of hate groups in America doubled during Obama’s first term, as did anti-Black sentiments in mainstream society. The dream that Obama’s election was a sign of a post-racial America quickly evaporated. (Shortform note: Wilkerson is right to conclude that white reactions to Obama’s election caused the sudden surge in hate groups. One scholar found that the rate of new hate groups slowed significantly after 2016 because “Trump’s election signaled the closing of the perceived threats that drove hate groups to form during the Obama administration.”)
According to Wilkerson, the result of this resurgence of hate and anti-Black sentiment was increased violence against Black Americans. Harkening back to the days of Jim Crow lynchings, unarmed Black citizens were killed during encounters with law enforcement at an alarming rate. The number of incidents grew to such a degree that studies found that Blacks were five times more likely to be killed by police than whites were, making death at the hands of police a leading cause of death for Black males. Black men and boys suddenly had a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying at the hands of police officers.
(Shortform note: The data for deaths in police custody have additional nuances that Wilkerson doesn’t cover. Research shows that, overall, Black men are more than twice as likely to die at the hands of police officers than white men. However, age plays an important role: For white men, the risk of being killed by police is most concentrated between the ages of 20 and 35, after which it dwindles; for Black men, the risk stays high well into their 40s. This may be because, in general, people see Black men as more threatening than white men, so officers may perceive even older Black men as threats that require force to subdue.)
In 2016, America prepared to vote for Obama’s successor. Wilkerson argues that this election was the catalyst that revealed the white resentment that had built up during the Obama administration.
According to Wilkerson, the American public had two options for who would be their new leader. As she describes it, in one corner, there was Hilary Clinton, a highly experienced woman representing the moderate and liberal factions of society. In the other was Donald Trump, a conservative man with a penchant for using hateful rhetoric about anyone different and a history of inappropriate and illegal behavior against women. Many people believed the choice was a no-brainer, but they weren’t prepared for the wave of unseasonable prejudice that would expose the toxins below the surface of American society.
(Shortform note: The election of Donald Trump came as a shock even to expert political forecasters. For example, on the day of the election, famed forecaster Nate Silver gave Trump just a 28.6% chance of winning, despite having correctly predicted election results in all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election and 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 election. Other analysts gave Trump even slimmer odds, ranging from 1% to 15%.)
So how exactly did Trump win? According to Wilkerson, he won because people choose who to vote for based on the traits that are most important in their own lives—which, for many white voters, was their privileged racial identity. Therefore, when a majority of the dominant caste entered the voting booths in 2016, the candidate who supported their highest-ranked characteristic—their whiteness—received their vote. Trump promised to restore power to the white race, and the promise was too enticing to pass up.
(Shortform note: While Wilkerson’s analysis of voter psychology is interesting, it’s not enough to explain Trump’s victory because Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Furthermore, nearly 40% of white people voted for Clinton—not Trump. Trump’s victory arguably had more to do with the fact that five electoral college voters who had pledged to vote for Clinton ultimately voted for someone else—like Colin Powell, the former secretary of state and prominent Republican figure who wasn't even running for president.)
In Wilkerson’s view, the most surprising representation of this psychology were white women voters. Instead of supporting the first female presidential candidate and helping to make history for their gender, 53% voted for a man accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and misconduct (to contrast, only 4% of Black women voted for Trump, while 94% voted for Clinton). For white women, promoting their caste became more important than breaking the glass ceiling in the White House. These results show that the national psychology that elected Trump had more to do with caste traditions than anything else.
(Shortform note: Further analyses have shown that the 53% statistic isn’t actually true: In reality, experts think closer to 47% of white women voted for Trump. However, given that at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct since the 1970s, it’s still significant that nearly half of white women voters cast their vote for him.)
Wilkerson argues that the immense divide between the candidates’ ideologies created an equally large divide in the American public. The choice became one of supporting equality, moral values, and justice or protecting a way of life long dead but awaiting a resurrection by those who’d grown increasingly frustrated with the costs of diversity and equality in their lives. (Shortform note: Wilkerson’s argument that only one side was promoting “moral values” may be a bit oversimplified because what counts as “moral” depends on which values are most important to you. For example, for many conservatives, tradition and hard work are “moral values” that may outweigh equality and justice. Thus, people on both sides likely voted in light of their own values.)
In Wilkerson’s view, the consequence of that ignited flame was an uncovering of deep-rooted racism. As the 2016 election race picked up momentum, the Republican candidate became the spokesperson for all the rage and fear felt by many white Americans for some time. His racist rhetoric spawned an ideology that empowered them to feel comfortable waving their prejudice flags. His followers became fiercely loyal and vocal about their similar desire to return America to a time when white supremacy was the norm.
Understanding Southern Trump Supporters’ Motivations
The reasons why people supported Trump are perhaps even more nuanced than Wilkerson suggests, as evidenced by the work of sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who interviewed conservative voters in the American South in the years leading up to the 2016 election. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild describes how the threat of losing majority race status reflects the loss of social status that white conservatives feel they’ve suffered as other groups (like women, people of color, and LGBTQ people) have gained more cultural power. For many southern white conservatives, the progress of groups who don’t share their traditional values feels like a deeply personal attack on their way of life.
According to Hochschild, this explains why many conservative voters continually vote “against their own interests” (meaning they vote for leaders and policies that negatively impact their quality of life): They’re voting in their own emotional interest by protecting their values and identity, even if that means voting against their own economic interests. This explains why working-class, Southern, white Americans voted for Trump in 2016, despite the fact that his economic policies catered to the richest Americans.
According to Wilkerson, the mobilization of this faction of supporters was too great for Clinton to overcome. Donald Trump—and the return to upper caste dominance that he symbolized—won the day. As a result, violence against those in the middle and lower castes spiked across the country. Ultimately, 2017 became one of the deadliest years in history, with an onslaught of mass shootings in public places, including schools, concerts, and churches. (Shortform note: Hate crimes spiked from 6,121 reported incidents in 2016 to 7,175 incidents reported in 2017. According to FBI data, the number has continued to hover above seven thousand every year since.)
Politically, Wilkerson believes the new president was polarizing Americans even further. Revelations about corruption by his administration came to light, and for the third time in history, the president was tried for impeachment. The Democrat-led House of Representatives voted to impeach, but the Republican-dominated Senate acquitted him. The president’s victory became a victory for his supporters and validated his behaviors to date. (Shortform note: In January 2021, the House of Representatives brought articles of impeachment against Trump for the second time, this time as a result of his support for the January 6th storming of the Capitol building. As before, the Republican-led Senate acquitted him.)
Wilkerson argues that perhaps the most telling evidence of the extreme division among Americans was the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. president used the virus to spread anti-Chinese sentiments and blamed the media for inflating the severity of the virus, going as far as calling it a hoax. In the end, the virus grew at a faster rate in the United States than in any other country, leaving several hundred thousand dead and millions infected. (Shortform note: The coronavirus pandemic disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Asian communities, further contributing to racial division in the United States. Additionally, anti-Asian hate crimes rose 145% from 2019 to 2020, and one study found a direct link between Trump’s pandemic rhetoric and a surge of online anti-Asian hate speech.)
Today, many people feel shocked about the state of things in America. According to Wilkerson, the deep-seated sentiments of white supremacy and hate seemed to sprout overnight, but they were actually there the whole time under the surface. It took the toxic platform and behaviors of one man to thaw the landscape of progress enough to allow the poison to seep out. As a result, Americans are now unsure of what to do with the exposed hate and whether it’s even containable. (Shortform note: While many Americans were shocked about the surge of vocal racism after the 2016 election, that sense of surprise was not universal. In an interview, How to Be an Antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi argues that many people of color didn’t experience the same shock because they grew up enduring racist abuse and were well aware of the country’s racist undercurrent that many white Americans never recognized.)
The American caste system’s impact goes beyond just the political arena. In this chapter, we’ll explore the way the U.S. memorializes the worst days of its caste system and how that approach compares to the way modern Germany memorializes the Nazi’s reign of terror. Then, we’ll discuss other ways the caste system has left a lasting impact on the United States, such as the low measures of health and wellbeing compared to other countries.
One way in which the legacy of caste remains visible in American society is through ongoing Confederate Pride and memorialization. According to Wilkerson, the Confederacy, or the Confederate States of America, was an anti-democracy, pro-slavery group of states that seceded from the United States after the election of Abraham Lincoln. The Confederacy is not part of the American heritage, but rather a separate faction of 11 states that banded together to overthrow the national government to gain their sovereignty. (Shortform note: The Confederacy was small compared to the Union (the name for the collection of states that did not secede from the country), but not so small as to be insignificant. The Union population was about 18.5 million, and the population of the Confederacy was about half that, with 5.5 million free people and 3.5 million enslaved.)
The Confederacy lost the civil war in 1865, and the 13th Amendment officially ended slavery shortly thereafter. Wilkerson describes how Confederate leaders were not prosecuted for treason—instead, they were given amnesty. This lack of punishment allowed these men and their cause to stand as a symbol of passion and pride, rather than the immoral treachery it was. (Shortform note: While Confederate leaders ultimately faced little punishment, President Andrew Johnson (who succeeded Abraham Lincoln) was initially so determined to prosecute them that many Confederate leaders fled to other countries to escape punishment in the immediate aftermath of the war. However, Johnson ultimately softened his approach and signed over 12,000 pardons.)
After the war, monuments and memorials celebrating Confederate leaders cropped up in southern communities. People who’d survived slavery and their descendants were forced to live in environments that celebrated the behaviors of those who fought to permanently remove their agency. Today, more than 1,700 Confederacy monuments sit in town squares, outside courthouses, and in front of schools in America. (Shortform note: Wilkerson’s source for this number is the 2019 version of the “Whose Heritage?” project, run by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). As of early 2021, the SPLC has identified nearly 400 additional Confederate symbols, for a new total of 2100.)
As the 20th century turned into the 21st century, debate over the glorification of these enemies of state blossomed. According to Wilkerson, many in the dominant caste held fast to their beliefs that Confederate leaders were heroes who represented the pride of the South, while opponents saw the monuments as a slap in the face to equality. They believed celebrating the Confederacy was a celebration of a period of time when Blacks were legally enslaved, tortured, and killed.
Wilkerson describes how this tension came to a head in Charlottesville, Virginia in Summer 2017. A group of white supremacists held a rally in downtown Charlottesville to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The previous night, this group marched through the University of Virginia’s campus chanting “Sieg Heil.” (Shortform note: “Sieg Heil” is German for “Hail Victory” and was the Nazi party’s favored slogan.)
Wilkerson describes how, that day in Charlottesville, the rallyists stood waving both Confederate flags and flags imprinted with swastikas, drawing a direct connection between Confederate pride and the Nazis. A counter group formed, and a white supremacist drove his car into their gathering, killing a white woman and injuring several others.
Confederate Monuments Represent the “Lost Cause” of the Old South
Wilkerson doesn’t go into detail about why modern white Southerners are so dedicated to preserving Civil War monuments. The reason is: Glorifying Civil War leaders is a central tenet of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy, which is the idea that the Old South represents an idyllic form of life and the height of American honor. The “lost cause” began in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and became part of the public consciousness through films like Gone With the Wind that glorify Southern antebellum life—slavery included.
Modern believers in the “lost cause” resist the push to remove Confederate monuments because they believe that the Civil War was more about states’ rights than slavery, that most slaves were kept in humane conditions, and that enslaved people were endlessly loyal to their enslavers. Therefore, they categorically deny that Confederate symbols are symbols of racism. Opponents of “lost cause” ideology argue that this narrative is false, and that it has replaced the brutal historical reality of slavery in the minds of many Southerners.
“Lost cause” believers resisted the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville before and after the 2017 rally. However, in July 2021, the city officially removed the statue. According to Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker, removing the statue will help both the city and the country as a whole “grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy Black people for economic gain.”
According to Wilkerson, the way America has chosen to remember the defenders of the caste system is much different from how Germany remembers theirs. The Germans have several memorials and monuments dedicated to the period in which the Nazis reigned, but they focus on remembering and learning from the events, rather than celebrating them.
For instance, the author describes how the Germans commemorate the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust with the stumbling stones, or brass palm-sized squares embedded into the ground throughout the city and other areas. These stones, which total more than 70,000, hold the names of victims. They are essentially headstones placed in front of the homes of the victims that force passersby to stop, bow to read them, and contemplate their meaning. (Shortform note: These “stumbling stones'' extend beyond Germany into 21 additional European countries. They are now collectively the largest decentralized memorial in the world.)
Additionally, Wilkerson describes how the history of the Nazi party is a required part of the curriculum in German schools, and children are taught about the downfall of German society in allowing the mass murder of millions to happen. (Shortform note: Meanwhile, several American states have proposed laws that would prohibit teachers from teaching about the impact of slavery and discriminatory laws.)
The Germans don’t run from the memory of this brutal chapter in their history. They make every effort to educate through memorials, museums, and curriculums so the evil of those times is ingrained in their culture and will never be allowed to happen again. (Shortform note: Unfortunately, even this proactive approach never fully stamped out antisemitism in Germany. In 2019, Jewish people were the targets of nearly 25% of hate crimes in the country.)
The dichotomy between this cultural admonishment of the German caste system and the celebratory nature of America’s is significant in understanding the way America is today. The unwillingness of Americans to address the realities of slavery as more than just a blemish distorts the seriousness of the issues and related crimes against humanity. Modern Americans can separate themselves from the responsibility of defending justice and equality because they’re not forced to acknowledge the abuse and oppression on which their lives are built.
(Shortform note: To further illustrate how prevalent reminders of the caste system are in Germany compared to the U.S., and thus how the mindsets of the two countries differ, let’s compare them based on size and number of memorials. There are 26 Holocaust memorials in Germany, which means there is one memorial about every 5,300 miles. To contrast, the United States is about 28 times larger than Germany but has just 12 memorials to victims of slavery—or one memorial every 316,000 miles. In other words, in America, it’s much easier to forget or ignore the horrors of slavery because visual reminders of it are so few and far between.)
In addition to the debate over Confederate monuments, Wilkerson argues that another lasting impact of the caste system is the fact that America lags behind other countries on various measures of wellbeing. For example, most comparable nations have some form of social or affordable health care for their citizens, but Americans have resisted a national health care system that helps the less privileged.
(Shortform note: While opposition to national healthcare is often cloaked in concerns about socialism, Wilkerson is not the only author to suggest that the underlying motivations have everything to do with race. For instance, in A Promised Land, former president Barack Obama describes how the racially-motivated, right-wing Tea Party posed one of the biggest obstacles to passing the Affordable Care Act.)
According to Wilkerson, America lags behind on other measures as well.
For all of its wealth, power, and prestige, the United States is far behind in terms of quality of life and social and political progress. Wilkerson believes the defining factor that separates America from other nations is the original narrative of the caste system, which has held the nation hostage since its inception. A caste system created a society concerned with their own best interests and lacking empathy for others.
Black America Fares Even Worse on Measures of Wellbeing
The statistics that Wilkerson cites above only tell half the story: For nearly every metric she mentions, Black Americans fare worse than white Americans.
Black men and boys are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than white men and boys.
Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans.
Black women are three times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than white women.
Black people are significantly less likely to report being “very happy” than white people (although this gap has narrowed over time).
These disparities support Wilkerson’s conclusion that what truly holds America back on the world stage is the caste system. If we improve these measures for those in the lowest caste, it would improve the country’s overall averages. Furthermore, focusing on improving life for those in the lowest caste can have far-reaching benefits: For example, some economists have suggested that the best way to improve the overall post-pandemic economy is to focus on supporting Black women.
According to Wilkerson, the only way to dismantle caste in society is for each of us to open our minds and hearts enough to see how we’ve been manipulated into division. That’s because our actions and thoughts feed the machine of hate and prejudice based on superficial physical traits.
Wilkerson argues that no one chooses to be born into one caste or another, but we do choose whether to abide by the confines those castes dictate. A person born into the dominant caste can choose to uplift others in the subordinate caste. A person born into the subordinate caste can choose to break the barriers around them.
Dismantling Caste: Mindsets, Policies, or Both?
Other scholars disagree with Wilkerson’s conclusion that individual actions and mindsets are the driving force behind the caste system. For instance, in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi argues that it’s impossible to dismantle American racism by ignoring policy and focusing on individual mindsets. Kendi believes we should focus on changing racist policies first rather than trying to educate people out of racist mindsets and hoping for downstream change.
There is a middle ground between these perspectives. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo strikes a balance between Wilkerson’s focus on mindset and Kendi’s focus on policy. She lays out strategies for individuals to make policy changes (such as voting for antiracist candidates and supporting affirmative action policies) and develop an antiracist mindset by engaging with art and music from Black artists.
Wilkerson reminds us that the subordinate caste is not responsible for constructing the caste system; therefore, they are not responsible for dismantling it. Instead, people in the dominant caste must take responsibility for the system and use their privilege to dismantle it. (Shortform note: In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo also argues that the first step to dismantling the caste system is for white people to acknowledge the way they benefit from the current system. She goes further by saying that while acknowledging privilege can be uncomfortable, white people should lean into that discomfort and remember that it pales in comparison to the pain that experiencing racism causes.)
In Wilkerson’s view, dismantling caste once and for all requires radical empathy, which is more than just imagining what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes. Radical empathy is the active choice to educate ourselves about others’ experiences by listening to the personal accounts of those we don’t understand. We must acknowledge that our understanding of another’s life is shallow and only those living the experience have the right to qualify its effect on their lives. We can imagine what it would be like to have one arm, but we cannot tell someone with one arm how they should feel about their challenges.
Six Steps to Develop Radical Empathy
Wilkerson calls for radical empathy, but what does that look like in practice? Terri E. Givens, author of Radical Empathy, lays out six steps on the path to radical empathy:
Be willing to be vulnerable.
Become grounded in your own identity.
Open yourself to the experiences of others.
Practice empathy.
Take action.
Create change and build trust.
Givens emphasizes that these steps don’t often happen on their own—they take deliberate, consistent practice. If you belong to the dominant caste, you can practice these steps yourself the next time you interact with someone from a lower caste: Start by being vulnerable, challenge yourself to truly listen to and believe their experiences, and take concrete actions to help improve the situation.
This may not be easy—as Robin DiAngelo describes in White Fragility, white people often respond to people of color’s descriptions of racism with hostility or denial because they perceive them as a personal attack rather than an opportunity to learn and grow. If you find yourself getting uncomfortable, remember that the caste system has cost millions of people their lives—dismantling it is crucial and worth a little discomfort to achieve.
The caste system endures because a majority perpetuates it, either actively or unthinkingly. Reflect on your role and how you can stop participating.
How did you feel overall as you read this guide? What aspects evoked your strongest reaction and why?
What did you learn from this guide about the opposite caste from you? What can and will you do with this knowledge?
What can you do to promote a casteless society in your daily life—for example, in your workplace and profession? In your church? In social/political advocacy?