Caste Characters

Miss Hale is one of Wilkerson’s interview subjects. Her father gave her the first name “Miss” after growing up in the mid-20th century and witnessing how white people refused to call Black people by the honorifics “Miss” or “Mister.”

Wylie McNeely was a Black teenager who was publicly burned alive in 1921 in East Texas.

Willie James Howard was a Black teenager who was lynched in 1943 after sending a Christmas card signed “L” (for “love”) to a white coworker at the dime store in Florida where he worked.

Mrs. Elliott was an elementary school teacher in 1960s Iowa. She conducted a caste-based experiment in her classroom by ranking students and affording them certain privileges based on their eye color. The exercise illustrated the arbitrary, unfair nature of casteism and racism in the U.S.

Wilkerson met a man named Tushar—a member of the Kshatriya caste—at a conference on caste in London. Wilkerson and Tushar bonded over the idea of being “miscast” in their respective caste systems.

Burleigh and Mary Gardner were a married white couple who traveled to Natchez, Mississippi in the 1930s to conduct an anthropological study of caste in the Jim Crow South alongside Allison and Elizabeth Davis.

Heather Heyer was a Virginia woman who was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 after a white supremacist agitator drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors. Heyer was 32 years old at the time of her death.

Gwen Ifill was an American journalist, newscaster, and writer. In 1999, she became the first African American woman to host a nationally televised politics and public affairs program.