Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Caste, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S.
Caste as a Global Problem
How Caste Sustains Itself
The Costs of Caste
Summary
Analysis
Wilkerson writes about an experiment that took place in the town of Riceville, Iowa in the late 1960s. All of the children in Mrs. Elliott’s third-grade class were white—but after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the teacher wanted to teach her dominant-caste students what it felt like to be judged by something arbitrary. So, one morning, Mrs. Elliott announced that for the rest of the day, brown-eyed students would be entitled to lesser privileges than their blue-eyed classmates.
In this section of the book, Wilkerson pivots from how caste sustains itself to what caste costs global society. Here, by turning to an experiment that took place among a group of schoolchildren, Wilkerson shows that teaching young and impressionable people about caste’s arbitrary, cruel nature is an important step in dismantling caste systems.
Themes
After essentially ascribing Jim Crow law to the brown-eyed students in her classroom, Mrs. Elliott noted that those children performed poorly in class and faced cruel taunts from their blue-eyed classmates. When the roles were reversed, the brown-eyed children delighted in the opportunity to take vengeance against their former oppressors. The experiment revealed that a lifetime of being oppressed because of an arbitrary physical trait has intense psychological ramifications.
Mrs. Elliott’s experiment showed her students the unfairness of caste—and also revealed that even on an incredibly short timeline (for example, the length of a school day), being separated into castes harms and destabilizes people. Only by showing how ridiculous caste is—like in this experiment, or through Wilkerson’s earlier example of “Talls” versus “Shorts”—can societies begin to grasp the senseless harm caste has done to the world.
Themes
