Caste

Each day, Wilkerson writes, “the curtain rises” on a huge stage, and a play that has been “running for centuries” begins anew. Each actor wears a costume assigned at birth and performs a role they never chose—one they inherited from those that have come before them. Everyone in the cast knows who the lead is, who the sidekicks are, and who is working hard backstage. Cast members become associated with their characters and absorb how they’ve been typecast to the point that they become the roles assigned to them. Everyone is playing a part—and veering away from the script has serious consequences. No one in the modern-day U.S., Wilkerson argues, is really themselves; everyone is just a “player on a stage,” an actor in a drama that began long ago. 

Before the United States of America was even formed, a caste system was born in the colonies. Initially, one’s religion—not skin color—defined their place in society. So, Africans and indigenous people were seen as belonging to the lowest rung of society because they were not Christian, not because they weren’t white. But more and more Africans began converting to Christianity in the years following their arrival in the new world in 1619. As a result, colonists were threatened by the “full participation” in society of people who were supposed to be the laborers that would extract wealth from the soil of the new world.

The struggling colonies desperately needed manpower to cultivate tobacco, sugarcane, rice, and cotton—crops that many Africans were already familiar with. African laborers could be identified easily because of the color of their skin, whereas English or Irish laborers who escaped bondage could easily hide out and blend in due to their white skin. So, they were quickly seen as the logical replacement for the source of labor that many white Europeans didn’t want to provide.

Many modern-day Americans would like to see slavery as a “sad, dark chapter” in the nation’s history. But slavery was, in fact, the basis of the social and economic structure that persists in the U.S. to this day. For a quarter of a millennium, Wilkerson writes, slavery defined America—and in many ways, it still does. Slavery was a part of everyday life in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century—and even though some people decried it as a horror and an abomination, it was legal and sanctioned by the state and by a complex “web of enforcers.”

Under American slavery, human beings were transformed into currency. Because Black people were considered subhuman (and incapable of feeling pain or injury), they were tortured in uniquely horrific ways—and any enslaved person who tried to defend themselves was subjected to even more violence. Enslaved people were forced to work for upwards of 15 hours a day until 1740, when their workdays were capped at 15 hours during the summer months and 14 during the winter months. Extracting the most profit possible from each enslaved body was the only goal slaveholders had. And yet no one in the South—or anywhere else in the fledgling country—was willing to admit that “they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture,” writes historian Edward Baptist.

The goal of slavery was to tilt the balance of power so profoundly that the degradation of the subordinate caste became normalized—and even righteous. Plantations were, in reality, forced labor camps—and the genteel, upstanding men and women who ran them were torturers. It took war, the deaths of nearly a million soldiers, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to bring slavery to its knees. But even then, the dominant caste was not done inflicting its wrath upon the subordinate one.

After slavery was abolished, the dominant caste turned to a “labyrinth” of laws and the pseudoscience of eugenics in order to keep the subordinate caste at the bottom of society. Already, the dominant caste had, through their paternalistic control of enslaved people and their refusal to pay or educate them, created a group of people whose every action could be criminalized.

As new immigrants began arriving in the U.S. from Europe, they walked into a bipolar caste system in which whiteness reigned supreme. Each new European who arrived was suddenly classified as white—a designation that only existed in opposition to Blackness. But becoming white meant that these new immigrants were forced to participate in the subordination of the lowest caste and become oppressors themselves.

Because members of the subordinate caste were forced to repress everything about themselves—their emotions, their talents, their bonds with one another—the members of the dominant caste could live under the delusion that they were innately different from and superior to the very people whom they controlled. This hierarchy was handed down from generation to generation, and today, Americans continue to inherit “distorted” perspectives of one another. Caste is the blueprint for their social, economic, and psychological interactions at every level of society.

Wilkerson reflects on a talk she gave in London, England many years ago. A Nigerian-born playwright approached her after her lecture and stated that there were “no black people in Africa.” The woman went on to elaborate: Africans define themselves based on their historic tribes and ethnic groups, such as Igbo and Yoruba and Ndebele. “They are not black. They are just themselves,” the playwright said, and it is only upon arriving in America that Africans “become black.” This statement fueled Wilkerson’s belief that caste deprives people of their most essential selves, slotting them into roles they never asked to play.