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 first wood beam hammered into place to anchor a new home’s foundation is called the mudsill. It is, in Wilkerson’s estimation, the most important piece of the framework. In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottommost caste. Even in the mid-1850s, American politicians like Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina spoke of the necessity for a class to perform “menial duties” and “drudgery”—they themselves used the word “mud-sill” to describe the role this class of people would play. By defining the subordinate caste’s role as society’s “mud-sill,” he revealed the economic purpose of such a hierarchy and cemented the fact that the dominant caste knew exactly what they were doing by creating a floor from which all else would rise.
This passage illustrates that caste is not really about a genuine belief in the inferiority of a certain group of people. Rather, it’s about consolidating and maintaining power and wealth no matter the cost. Members of the dominant caste are aware that they’re manipulating those around and beneath them into a set of false beliefs. Moreover, the only way to sustain those beliefs is to keep those in power from having to perform “menial duties” or “drudgery” when building a society.
Themes
Like the Dalits in India, African Americans were conscripted to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs available—and these restrictions were often written into law throughout the Southern states. When slavery was over, the government was already attempting to place a cap on what Black people in America could ever hope to achieve.
Even after slavery was abolished, the dominant caste could not allow the “mud-sill” of their society to shift. They found ways to keep power and opportunity away from those they relied on to do the work that kept American society functioning.
Themes
Because Blackness became so intimately associated with menial labor, a vicious cycle began to emerge, entrapping Black people in a “circle of subservience.” They were essentially being punished for existing in the conditions that the dominant caste had forced them into. Caste didn’t just enforce a certain type of labor, though—it enforced a certain role that Black people were forced to play, and it entrenched harmful stereotypes that still exist to this day.
Again, this passage highlights the circular, self-perpetuating nature of caste. By conflating a person’s job or role with their inherent makeup, caste suggests that people are in certain roles for certain reasons—even though this idea is false.
Themes
Enslaved Black people were forced to dance or perform for their masters under the threat of a whipping, and the caste system “took comfort in black caricature” as the dominant caste created a stereotype of Black people as “court jester[s].” The first African American to win an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel, won for her portrayal of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind, in which her character confirmed many of these stereotypes for white audiences. Yet this kind of trope or character was an invention of “caste imagination.” In Nazi Germany, too, SS officers in charge of death camps frequently forced Jewish prisoners to dance and perform for them.
By using subordinate castes for their own entertainment, dominant castes remind their subordinates that they reign over their entire lives. The goal of caste is to make any social mobility or change impossible. So, even as slavery was abolished and U.S. society began to grow and progress, the subordinate caste played subservient roles in other ways. And other caste systems around the world—including the one in Nazi Germany—emulated this.
Themes
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