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
The election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, represented the greatest departure from the script of the American caste system in U.S. history. Obama was a Harvard-trained lawyer, a U.S. senator, a Constitutional scholar, and an idealist. He was also a family man whose biracial identity told a story the caste system was willing to accept. After his inauguration, Americans began telling themselves that U.S. society was post-racial—but this ignored the fact that the majority of white Americans did not vote for him.
In this chapter, the book alleges that Barack Obama’s presidency represented “a change in the script” of the long-running play that is the U.S. caste system. But many people saw Obama’s election as a sign that racism (and casteism) were over. This, the book posits, is false—in fact, his election ushered in a period of backlash that allowed caste to resurge in the U.S.
Themes
Since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, white voters began moving away from the Democratic Party, anxious about the erosion of their “sovereign place” in the world. For many of these voters, the election of a subordinate-caste man to the highest office in the land was a “nightmare” that would need to be resisted and remedied. Throughout Obama’s presidency, the opposition party obstructed his proposals and harassed him in Congress. Jan Brewer, Arizona’s white Republican governor, was even photographed wagging her finger in his face and shouting at him during a visit to Phoenix.
Though Barack Obama attained one of the highest possible achievements in American society, he faced racism throughout his time in office. His presidency suggested to some that white people no longer had supreme power in the U.S.—and many dominant-caste people found themselves terrified and affronted by that prospect. Though the U.S. appeared to be in a period of social unity, social division was on the horizon.
Themes
The rise of the right-wing Tea Party movement vowed to “take [their] country back,” while the birther movement claimed that Obama was a foreign national who hadn’t been born in the United States. Republicans purged voter registrations lists and made registering to vote more difficult across the country. Anti-Black hate groups and police violence against Black Americans skyrocketed.
Wilkerson suggests that the dominant caste wanted to take power back and restore the U.S. to an earlier era—one defined by casteism and white supremacy. The dominant caste feared that it was losing power—and it was not shy about resisting that loss.
Themes
In spite of the roadblocks in his way, Obama managed to push through meaningful legislation on healthcare, climate change, clean energy, and more. But each accomplishment only flared the anger and resentment of members of the dominant caste, who saw his presidency as an inexcusable disruption of the status quo. When Obama was elected to a second term in 2012, a white 64-year-old Floridian man, who’d joked about killing himself if Obama won reelection, was found dead in his Key West home of a prescription pill overdose.
The fact that a white man committed suicide after Obama’s reelection—preferring to end his life than live in a country with a Black president—speaks to how serious an issue caste still is in the United States. Many members of the dominant caste could not tolerate a social hierarchy that was not centered around their supremacy.
Themes
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