Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In December 2017, Wilkerson attended an international academic conference on caste, excited when she was able to sit in the front row without any pushback, as might have occurred in the US. She attended because she wanted to take a more systematic approach to her emerging feelings of overlap between Dalits and African Americans. The conference, too, proved riddled with hierarchy, as Wilkerson found when she faced the consequences of deliberately not mentioning her status as an award-winning author. She quickly found that professors were unwilling to share papers and were generally not friendly. She met a man named Tushar, a geologist, on a similar mission to hers. He had grown up in India troubled by the social inequality he saw, even as a member of a relatively privileged caste, the warrior-soldiers. He quickly grew impatient with the conference’s lack of attention to how the system came to be.

Wilkerson’s most astonishing moment from their conversation comes when, after she explains caste in the US, she discovers that Tushar does not know to which caste she belongs. She has never been asked this before and had been prepared for him to stereotype her, as “Hollywood and the news media have exported demeaning images of African-Americans for generations, which means our reputations often precede us, and not for the better” (175). When she answers that she is equivalent to a Dalit, Wilkerson states, “My answer was further confirmation of what he considered a disease” (176). He recounts many stories of caste to her, including his own sister’s suffering because her skin was darker, and her frantic efforts to make it appear lighter. For Wilkerson, their kinship is from their outsider status, their escape from systems that do not embrace their real selves: “We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author” (177).

Wilkerson describes a demographic study from 2015 describing rising death rates among middle-aged White men at a time when death rates among all other demographics were going down. The economists who conducted the study called them “deaths of despair” as many were due to “suicide, drug overdoses, and liver disease from alcohol abuse” (178). These kinds of demographic changes can cause insecurity in the dominant caste, “born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status” (180). Working class whites, who had always depended on the racial hierarchy to confirm their superiority, found themselves in a more economically precarious position as union labor declined and wages stagnated beginning in the 1970s. This insecurity reached its peak in 2008, as White Americans grappled with the economic recession at a time when one man from the lower caste was “rising to the highest station in the land” (182).

In the United States, some aspects of the favored status of upper caste people were created by policy; however, government’s role has in some ways remained “invisible and has left distortions as to how each group got to where they are, allowing resentments and rivalries to fester” (184). For example, says Wilkerson, “Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s […] largely excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians” (184). Home ownership was also racialized, as lenders denied federally financed mortgages to African Americans based on the demographic geography of neighborhoods. The result, Wilkerson notes, was a lasting advantage for White Americans that created profound wealth disparities, which the dominant culture attributes to inherent characteristics of African Americans rather than to policy.

Another reinforcement mechanism for these systems is “unconscious bias,” and it is so pervasive that not only do “80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans […] a third of black Americans hold anti-black bias against themselves” (186). Far from being inconsequential:

These autonomic responses contribute to disparities in hiring, in housing, in education, and in medical treatment for the lowest-caste people compared to their dominant-caste counterparts and, as with other aspects of the caste system, often go against logic (187).

Criminal records for White Americans do not prevent them from getting hired more frequently than Black Americans with college degrees and no such record. The contemporary opioid crisis impacts White Americans in higher numbers because doctors are more willing to provide pain medication to this group, but there is no comprehensive addiction policy because the punitive thinking around addiction came to be in the 1990s, when crack cocaine predominantly devastated Black communities. White individuals are willing to “die of whiteness” (189), as the title of one popular book casts it, rather than expand programs like Medicaid they perceive as benefitting the undeserving. 

Turning back to the Bible, Wilkerson describes the practice of spiritually affixing all of the ancient Israelites’ sins onto a goat they then sent into the wilderness—the “scapegoat.” A similar dynamic exists in caste systems, as “the lowest caste performed the unwitting role of diverting society’s attention from its structural ills and taking the blame for collective misfortune” (191). Lynching served this function in the modern United States after the Civil War, when “Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war. Well into the twentieth century […] lynchings served as a form of ritual human sacrifice before audiences sometimes in the thousands” (192). It is equally apparent in the modern legal system, as “thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry” (192).

Wilkerson takes great pains to establish that much of this blame is emotional and not based in logic. While white Americans critique affirmative action or consider themselves victims of racism when they are not hired for a job, this is unconscious bias and racialized grievance; “there simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding” (192). White women are in fact the “primary beneficiaries” of most programs intended to produce educational or employment equality.

Wilkerson uses anecdotes to demonstrate that scapegoating has harmful consequences for all of society. In October of 1989, a White, married, and upper-middle-class couple in suburban Boston experienced what looked like a senseless tragedy: On their way home from a childbirth class, they were shot at close range driving through the majority-Black neighborhood of Roxbury. The pregnant woman, Carol Stuart, died immediately, and her infant son lived only 17 days. The husband said their attacker was a “black man with a raspy voice […] the dragnet yielded a thirty-nine-year-old unemployed black man with a criminal record whom Charles picked out in a police lineup” (194).

Police paid little attention to how long it took Charles to seek medical help, his large number of life insurance policies for his wife, his affair with an employee at his furrier business, or the friends to whom he had confided to about his lack of desire to become a parent. Eventually, Charles’s brother Matthew exposed the scheme to murder Carol Stuart. When it looked likely his brother would testify against him, Charles Stuart committed suicide.

Wilkerson notes that while Stuart himself bears the most responsibility, “the caste system was his unwitting accomplice,” as he knew that people would “see the scapegoat caste as singularly capable of any depravity, and would deflect any suspicion away from him” (196). Wilkerson argues that these dynamics make for a society that is “less safe” as they allow cultural norms of innocence to contradict evidence. She wonders whether Carol Stuart might still be alive were it not for the caste system.

Turning to the more recent past, Wilkerson recalls a series of package bombs in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2018. The first victim was a Black man, and law enforcement officers speculated he might have blown himself up. A second bomb killed a Black high school student and talented violinist, and a third victim was an elderly Latina woman. It took 10 days for law enforcement to treat these as related crimes, and the investigation only picked up “warp speed” when White people were also among its victims. After this, a White man was arrested for the crimes in a day. Wilkerson uses this case to illustrate how the American caste system treats those on its lower rungs as “expendable” rather than treating threats to them as a universal problem.

A similar mechanism was at work for much of 2013 and 2014, as most of America ignored West Africa’s Ebola epidemic until American aid workers became ill, with much more time devoted to case tracking and treatment once an infected man arrived in the United States and passed the disease to his nurses. Though the increasingly globalized world should likely have made Ebola of immediate concern, “The contagion had initially not been seen as the global human crisis it was” (201).