Caste

 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

Here's another book that I arrived at through an author's previous work. That one was The Warmth of Other

Sons, which was one of the first nonfiction books I had read in quite some time. It told the story of the wave of black migration from the south to northern and western cities, and its brilliance was the way Wilkerson grounded the tale of this group in the stories of four individuals. They became characters that, by the time the book was over, had become something akin to friends. 

This is a different sort of book. It is very clearly an argument that we Americans need to begin thinking of the divide between groups of people not as a function of race and racism but of caste and casteism. Wilkerson compares segregation and racial stratification in the US to similar systems in India and, more horrifyingly, Nazi Germany. In making these comparisons, she identifies eight "pillars" of caste, including divine will, control of marriage, an emphasis on purity, inheritability, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and inherent superiority/inferiority. It is hard, after reading this section, to disagree that what we have in the US is, in fact, a caste system.

What Wilkerson makes less clear, however, is why it matters. Even the review in The Week seems to miss this point, saying instead that it replaces the "tenuous language of racial animus with a sturdier lexicon" and that it "wrenches out established way of thinking about race out of its rut and encourages us to see it anew". But it is more than these vagaries. I think Wilkerson is arguing that we need these new words because of how misunderstood the old ones are (and always have been). Wilkerson points out that racism is often conflated with prejudice. We think of racism as mean statements or overt acts of hatred. It is therefore easy for people to absolve themselves of racism. They don't hate. They don't use slurs. So they aren't racist, right? Well, no. Because in its true sense, racism is, by definition, a structural phenomenon. Racism isn't perpetrated by individuals so much as it is imposed upon individuals as they bump up against a system designed to denigrate. The point is not whether we as individuals have prejudices against people with different skin colors. The point is that these prejudices are baked into almost every aspect of our lives. We are racist because we live in a racist system that very few of us do much to change. By removing the very charged, and very misunderstood, "r word" from the equation, Wilkerson argues that we can better see systematic discrimination for what it is. In a sense, it absolves the individual while indicting the group, both past and present. 

At least that is what I think she is arguing. I could be wrong. Because at the end of the book when she finally gets around to discussing what should be done to rectify the system, Wilkerson seems to imply that the best we can do is act individually when we can. "Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste," she writes. "Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean." This is a lovely thought, and maybe it is right, but it feels disheartening to learn that all I can do with the knowledge she has imparted is to do my best to treat the people I come into contact with as equals. Wilkerson's ideas aren't all that original; in fact, rather than breaking new scholarly ground, her book is really a synthesis of others' thinking about the relationship between racism and caste. So what I was really hoping for was a new way of looking at ways forward and on that front Wilkerson does not seem to deliver. (Not that she claims to: she compares herself to a house inspector, who, obviously, only investigates the integrity of a home rather than making any necessary repairs.) At the end of the book, Wilkerson reminds us that we are responsible "with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom." I continue to find that elusive.