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
Author Isabel Wilkerson and her family live in an old house. She recalls a housing inspector using an infrared lens to test a bulging leak in their ceiling and see what was happening inside, where human eyes couldn’t reach. “America,” Wilkerson writes, “is an old house”—she means that it must be continually maintained, and that those who live inside of it must not be afraid to examine the damage within it. While the “house” that modern-day Americans live in may be beautiful on the outside, they cannot delude themselves into thinking that just because they weren’t here when the house was built, they aren’t responsible for the problems with it now.
This introduces the book’s central symbol: an old house. Comparing the U.S. to a house that’s badly in need of examination and repair suggests that Americans must participate collectively in the upkeep of their society. But that’s not possible, Wilkerson posits, without first investigating what exactly is wrong with the house. This kind of deep, existential reckoning is necessary if society is to dismantle caste.
Themes
Like all old houses, the U.S. has an “unseen skeleton”—a caste system that is as central to its operation as wooden beams are to the houses that we live in. Just because a caste system is an artificial construction—something that has been placed into society and that uses arbitrary boundaries and divisions—doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the power to define all of our lives.
Here, Wilkerson suggests that caste is the unseen skeleton of the United States—it’s the framework that holds up and, in many ways, defines the country. But that can change if Americans work together to expose how arbitrary caste is and decide, collectively, that the U.S. can function without the framework of caste.
Themes
Three major caste systems have stood out over the course of human history: the caste system of Nazi Germany, the millennia-long caste system of India, and the race-based caste system of the United States. Each caste system demands that those “deemed inferior” are stigmatized in order to be kept at the bottom, and each caste system draws its power from some kind of “divine will,” whether that comes from a sacred text or a socially accepted (but ultimately false) law of nature.
In this passage, Wilkerson introduces the three major caste systems that the book will discuss. What all of them have in common is the stigmatization and dehumanization of a group of people at the bottom of society. But the specifics of how these caste systems have decided which kind of people to oppress, and how to keep them oppressed, varies.
Themes
The hierarchy of caste guides us all by controlling power, resources, and the way we relate to one another. People in the U.S. participate in the caste system without even being aware of it—Americans have learned to unconsciously divide other humans on the basis of their race, or appearance. Wilkerson likens race to the “language” Americans speak, and caste to the “underlying grammar” that they unthinkingly encode as children. It is an invisible guide to how they process the world around them.
By comparing the instincts that one develops when living in a caste system to a kind of language or grammar, Wilkerson suggests that it’s difficult to forget or change the lessons that caste teaches. She’s urging her readers to see that in a caste system, every participant—whether aware or ignorant of the fact that they’re living in one—unconsciously adopts prejudices.
Themes
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The race a person has been assigned “or are perceived to belong to” is the “visible cue” to their caste. It determines where others, upon seeing them, expect them to live and what jobs others expect them to hold. The words “black” and “white” long applied to people who are neither color but rather some gradation in between, set people at opposite poles and extremes from one another.
By organizing society around a racial hierarchy, the U.S. caste system has reduced its citizens to their outward appearances. Regardless of the fact that race is a social construct (meaning that it’s a social category rather than a biological one), all Americans now find themselves obligated to define themselves based on this dual-poled caste system.
Themes
Caste and race are not synonymous, nor are they mutually exclusive. In the United States, race is the visible agent of caste, which is a force that remains unseen. Caste is the infrastructure that holds each group in place, whereas race is a kind of “shorthand” for where a person belongs in the caste system. Caste is rigid, but race is fluid—and while what qualifies as “white,” or belonging to the dominant caste, has changed over time, the very fact of a dominant caste has not. And even more significantly, the “subordinate caste” is fixed as a kind of “floor” beneath which there is nothing.
A caste system can be based on any criteria: station of birth, religion, or skin color. In the U.S., race happens to be what caste is organized around. But the arbitrary nature of caste doesn’t mean that those who live in the system can see through its cruelties or its lies. Instead, those in a caste system generally learn and abide by its rules unconsciously.
Themes
Everyone, Wilkerson argues, is born into a silent, ancient game, and enlisted onto a team they never chose. We all wear our “team uniform[s]” that signal who we are to everyone else. Caste, more than gender or race, is the category of human division that ranks highest in intensity and in the drive for subordinating others.
This passage illustrates Wilkerson’s weariness with the inescapability of caste. Throughout the book, she will suggest that in order to continue, a caste system relies on the “team” mentality it inspires almost subconsciously in all its participants.
Themes
