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
In 2014 and 2015, the Charleston church massacre occurred, and there were mass demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. These events, and other “unmask[ings]” of racism in the U.S., led Wilkerson to write a piece on what was happening across the country. One of her contacts, a historian named Taylor Branch, told her that it seemed as if the country had been hurled back into the 1950s. The two met again for coffee in 2018, just after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh. They agreed based on the state of the nation that things were looking more and more like the late 1920s—the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany. They wondered aloud how many people would, if given the choice between democracy and whiteness, choose whiteness—but neither was willing to answer the question.
Throughout the book, Wilkerson expresses her desire for social change in the U.S.—and her belief that the country’s caste system can still be dismantled. But this passage illustrates her and her colleagues’ fear that those in power will always try to remain in power, even at great cost to those around them. Caste has dictated much of the U.S.’s development over the centuries—and if the dominant caste has panicked so severely in the last decade, it’s likely that they’ll continue clinging to their power to the detriment of others.
Themes
