Caste: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

The term “scapegoat” comes from an ancient Hebrew ritual in which one goat was sacrificed to the Lord to cleanse and atone for their peoples’ sins, while a second goat was kept alive. The high priest would confess all the misdeeds of the Israelites to the second goat, then cast it out into the wilderness to suffer for the sins of others. Now, a scapegoat is a person or group blamed for causing or attracting misfortune. And in a caste system, the lowest caste is often the scapegoat cast: Jewish people were scapegoated for Germany’s failure in WWI, for instance, and the Dalits were scapegoated for the sins of their past lives. After the Civil War, Black people in the U.S. were scapegoated for the loss of that war and the end of slavery.

To this day, Black Americans are scapegoated for the problems that disproportionately plague Black communities because of casteism and inequality. Scapegoating blames larger societal ills on those with the least power—and scapegoating always worsens in times of social, political, or economic strife. 

Wilkerson tells the story of a Boston couple, Charles Stuart and Carol DiMaiti Stuart, who were expecting their first child in the fall of 1989. While driving home one night through a working-class neighborhood, they were allegedly attacked by a Black man in a jogging suit. Carol was shot in the head, and Charles was shot in the stomach. Charles lived, but Carol and her unborn baby died. Authorities instituted a manhunt for the person responsible. But as the investigation continued and Charles picked out a Black suspect from a lineup, inconsistencies in his story began to emerge. It turned out that Charles had, along with his brother, plotted his wife’s murder because he was too cowardly to ask for a divorce. When Charles’s brother came forward, it became clear that Charles had counted on society’s impulse to scapegoat Black people for violent crimes.

In 2018, a series of bombs went off around the Austin, Texas area—they were being left on people’s doorsteps as packages, and they killed several people. Because the bomber’s first victims were African American and Latina, no one paid attention to the stories or suspected that a serial bomber was on the loose—but when a bomb went off in a more affluent, whiter neighborhood, the authorities got involved and threw all of their resources into tracking down the bomber. They found him within 24 hours, illustrating the fact that scapegoats are, by definition, unimportant and expendable.

The 2014 Ebola epidemic began in West Africa—but the Western world paid little attention to the hemorrhagic disease until it reached the shores of the U.S. Eleven thousand people died—but Ebola wasn’t seen as a global problem because it didn’t primarily affect white countries. It would take another, deadlier outbreak for global society to recognize just how inseparable and interconnected the world truly is, regardless of race, class, or caste.