Caste: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

Caste requires people at the margins to study the behaviors, protocols, and boundaries of the upper castes simply in order to survive. Navigating the caste system from the bottommost rungs can be a matter of life and death. Not only must lower-caste people learn to carefully intuit the patterns and moods of the upper castes—they must also adjust their own performances based on how they understand the upper caste to perceive them, defaulting to a “script” issued to them long before they were even born. This pattern, Wilkerson suggests, is similar to Stockholm Syndrome—a phenomenon of people bonding with their abusers or captors.

In the fall of 2019, a white female former police officer killed a Black man who was watching TV in his own apartment after she accidentally opened the unlocked door to his apartment believing it was her own. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison with eligibility for parole after five years served. At her sentencing, the brother of the victim and the Black bailiff both approached the crying white woman and hugged her. Then, the female Black judge came down from her bench and prayed over the white woman. If the inverse scenario had happened—a Black man shooting a white woman in her own apartment—such a display would have been unthinkable. This moment, in Wilkerson’s estimation, was a perfect example of the “Stockholm Syndrome” of caste in action.

Wilkerson cites another instance of this phenomenon: in 2014, in the midst of the post-Ferguson protests against police brutality in the U.S., a picture of a Black child holding a sign that read “free hugs” at a group of police officers went viral. The picture disturbed Wilkerson for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on. Years later, it was revealed that two Minnesota women, who were white, had adopted the boy—and five other Black children—to receive money from the state. They held the children captive and starved them. When the authorities began closing in on them after reports of abuse surfaced, the women packed the children into a car and drove them off a cliff, killing everyone in the vehicle.

Many sociologists and cultural critics have observed that when Black victims forgive their white oppressors, they do so in order to survive. But the dominant caste takes that survival mechanism as absolution, or as proof of their superiority. One cannot live in a caste system without absorbing these messages and behaviors. Wilkerson cites the behavior of Dalit scholars she’s met who speak similarly of their fear of members of the upper caste and the compulsion to defer to them at all costs. Even in the U.S., these people feel the need to protect themselves against anticipated rejection and brutality—and so patterns of subservience continue on and on.