Caste: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

In 2015, economists at Princeton University announced the results of a study: the death rate of middle-aged white Americans was rising for the first time since 1950. Every other ethnic group in America had seen their mortality rates fall during the same period. The deaths—largely from alcoholism, suicide, and drug overdoses—were termed “deaths of despair,” and they were linked to the most precariously situated members of the U.S.’s dominant caste. Political scientists gave the deaths a name: “dominant group status threat.” In other words, sensing the success of an outgroup, the dominant group begins to feel threatened and indeed despairing.

Working-class white people in the U.S. are the members of the dominant caste who most “need the demarcations of caste” in order to feel secure and superior as their societal position erodes. Reliant on the illusion of their inherent superiority, these people were losing everything—even the protective barrier of their whiteness.

In the 1960s, when civil rights legislation opened up the labor pool to members of the subordinate caste, members of the dominant caste—who’d been sold lies about their inherent superiority and given total control of the social system for centuries—suddenly had to contend with the potential possibility of a subordinate-cast person subsuming their own place in society. A caste system, Wilkerson argues, “makes a captive” of everyone who lives inside of it.

Caste, then, became something anxious white people in the U.S. began feeling the need to protect at any cost. Even though white families presently have ten times the wealth of their Black counterparts, those same working-class white families saw the socioeconomic prosperity of Black families as a direct threat and began to perceive themselves as being suddenly vulnerable.

As the subordinate caste in the U.S. won greater protections and opportunities for social mobility throughout the second half of the 20th century, overt racism transformed into a more hidden form of silent antagonism and unconscious bias. Negative messaging about African Americans and other racial or ethnic minorities persists in American culture, and the tiers of caste continue to inform these unconscious stereotypes that people begin internalizing in infancy. White felons are still likelier to win jobs than African Americans with no criminal records, and they are still more likely to be refused medical attention or prescribed life-saving medications. This ongoing exclusion costs lives.

In spite of the inequities and stereotypes that perpetuate the U.S.’s caste system, working-class white people continue to perceive any erosion to that system as a threat. When Barack Obama instituted the Affordable Care Act, one white taxi suffering from liver problems driver told a physician conducting research on the health of disaffected white people in Middle America that he’d rather die than sign up for Obamacare—and, unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to him.