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| Isabell Wilkerson |
“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even… Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.”
We don’t need to look too far back in American history to find chilling examples of this truth.
“Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. ‘Its foundations are laid,’ said Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, ‘its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…”
Within the opening pages of CASTE The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson expands upon the work of her previous book, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS. This time concentrating on, with laser focus, the toxin of white supremacy circulating in the soul of America.
“Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.”
One of Wilkerson’s main points is that it is a rigid and deep caste system in the U.S. that enables white supremacy and racism to function with such high efficiency.
“Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of a subordinate caste seem normal and righteous… The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners whose crime was that they were born with dark skin. Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.”
Although the Civil War brought a legal end to slavery, Wilkerson points out that afterward, “The dominant caste (whites of European descent), devised a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly… People on the bottom rung could be beaten or killed with impunity for any breach of the caste system, like not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough or trying to vote.”
She continues: “The colonists made decisions that created the caste system long before the arrival of the ancestors of the majority of people who now identify as Americans. The dominant caste controlled all resources, controlled whether, when, and if a black person would eat, sleep, reproduce, or live. The colonists created a caste of people who would by definition be seen as dumb because it was illegal to teach them to read or write, as lazy to justify the bullwhip…”
Over a hundred years later, James Baldwin reflected upon the situation with amazing precision: “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life, there has been almost no language.”
In a nutshell, Wilkerson argues that America’s caste system was based on an arbitrary factor of skin color – upon which is built the equally arbitrary foundation of race.
“Thus, each new immigrant – the ancestors of most current-day Americans – walked into a preexisting hierarchy, bipolar in construction, arising from slavery and pitting the extremes in human pigmentation at opposite ends. Each new immigrant had to figure out how and where to position themselves in the hierarchy of their adopted new land. Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority. Somewhere in the journey, Europeans became something they had never been or needed to be before. They went from being Czech or Hungarian or Polish to white, a political designation that only has meaning when set against something not white.”
Wilkerson argues that the color of one’s skin became the foundation upon which an American caste system was built. “It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.”
She explains, “In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positioning and restricting those positions… Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.”
Wilkerson explores other caste systems, like that of India, and what was created in Nazi Germany.
“Mindful of appearances beyond their borders, for the time being at least, the Nazis wondered how the United States had managed to turn its racial hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage.”
In short, the Nazis, while seeking to establish their own set of rules (Nuremberg Laws) that enabled the deadly persecution of Jews and other groups deemed threats to Aryan culture, looked to the United States’ own system.
“This code extended for generations,” writes Wilkerson, but “[Y]ears after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americans were still being brutalized for the least appearance of stepping out of their place… In 1948 a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi, was severely beaten by two whites, wrote historian James C. Cobb, ‘because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.’”
And the situation persists, in modified form, to the present day. “If there is anything that distinguishes caste, however, it is, first the policing of roles expected of people based on what they look like, and second, the monitoring of boundaries – the disregard for the boundaries of subordinate castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominant caste, to keep the hierarchy in place…
“With the resurgence of caste after the 2016 election, people in the dominant caste have been recorded calling the police on ordinary black citizens under a wide range of ordinary circumstances.”
Midway through her book, Wilkerson gives her response while researching the Nazi caste system. She notes, “Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth – that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than one would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away… It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unjust minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place… Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.”
It is the insidious nature of caste, deeply rooted in our own human foibles, that gives caste its alarming power.
For anyone left wondering about the problem with continued use of the Confederate flag or significance of monuments to the Confederacy, Wilkerson explains, “It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statutes of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals…”
Unlike the U.S., Germany has handled the remembrance of the Holocaust with profound moral character. “They built a range of museums to preserve the story of the country’s descent into madness… In Germany displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi.”
The final portion of CASTE is powerful as Wilkerson wraps up her examination of this complex issue.
She begins by sharing a bit of a conversation she had in November 2018 with Taylor Branch, an eminent historian of the Civil Rights movement. They were talking about the inevitable demographic changes in the population make-up of the United States. The prediction that the white caste would be in the minority by 2042. She asked Taylor what that would mean.
“The real question,” Branch replied, “would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
As the answer to that question is being worked out, the costs of America’s caste system are numerous and well-documented – like disparities in income and health that affect every one of us.
Wilkerson points to a need for a change of heart in order to begin to overcome the entrenchment of caste.
“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things we cannot change; a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry – superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.”
She continues, “A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist – in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be.”
But there is hope.
“Once awakened, we then have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity.”
Wilkerson makes the point that “As it stands, the United States is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be outnumbered by people not of European descent within two decades.”
She concludes that “This will be a test of the cherished ideal of majority rule, the moral framework for caste dominance in America since its founding. White dominance has already been assured by the inherited advantages of the dominant caste in most every sphere of life… Will the United States adhere to its belief in majority rule if the majority does not look as it has throughout history? This will be the chance for America either to further entrench its inequalities or to choose to lead the world as the exceptional nation that we have proclaimed ourselves to be.”
As to which way America will go, Wilkerson suggests that “It turns out that everyone benefits when society meets the needs of the disadvantaged… Many of the advancements that Americans enjoy and that are under assault in our current day – birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, the right to vote, laws against discrimination on the basis of gender, race, national origin – are all the byproducts of the subordinate caste’s fight for justice in this country and ended up helping others as much as if not more than themselves.”
The choice is ultimately up to each one of us.
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