Caste

The fourth pillar of caste is the belief that the purity of the dominant caste must be protected from pollution by subordinate castes. Within caste systems, purity amounts to an obsession. In India, certain rules once existed that defined the number of paces that a subordinate-class person had to stand away from any dominant-caste person. Some of the lower castes even had to wear bells so as to alert members of the upper castes that they were near. Anything that had been touched by an Untouchable was considered polluted and could not be handled by a member of another caste. In Nazi Germany, the Nazis banned Jewish citizens from visiting beaches and public pools.

In the United States, the subordinate caste was essentially “quarantined” in all aspects of life into the middle of the 20th century. In some places, the books used for Black and white schoolchildren weren’t even allowed to be stored in the same place. Segregation throughout the U.S. was so intense and so violent that white ambulance workers wouldn’t even touch a bleeding Black man as he lay dying on a set of railroad tracks in Memphis.

Members of the subordinate caste in the U.S. were banned from beaches, lakes, and pools—just like the Dalits in India and like Jewish people in Nazi Germany. In 1919, when a young Black swimmer accidentally crossed the invisible boundary between the “white side” and the “black side” of Lake Michigan, he was stoned and drowned to death, and his murder set off some of the most intense race riots in U.S. history. The dominant caste refused to share public pools with the subordinate caste, in some cases demanding that pools be drained, cleaned, and refilled after Black people swam in them. Even young Black children were forced to stand behind chain-link fences and watch as their white playmates enjoyed the water.

The caste system of India derived specific rules for the separation of the castes from the sacred text the Laws of Manu. By contrast, the U.S. had to shape its upper caste—and police the maintenance of its purity—as it went along. The U.S. caste system was based on absolutism—that is, the idea that a single drop of blood belonging to another race was pollutive and barred one from belonging to the upper caste. Even South Africa granted privileges on a graded scale based on how much European blood a person of any race was thought to have. 

When the U.S. Congress restricted American citizenship to free white people, whiteness still hadn’t been fully defined. Even Southern European and Eastern European immigrants were seen as insufficiently “pure,” and so as late as 1924, immigration acts restricted immigration to certain quotas. Additionally, in the 1920s, many Southern states began defining, in deeply specific terms, what certain amounts of “African blood” designated a person. A “marabon” was a person who was five-eighths Black, a “mulatto” was one-half, a “sextaroon” was one-sixteenth, and a “sangmelee” was one-sixty fourth.

Those in the middle castes, then, found themselves scrambling to “get under the white tent”—in other words, to be seen as white. Because the U.S. caste system was essentially two-tiered, immigrants from places like Cuba, Japan, and even India were baffled as to how to define themselves. The U.S. rescinded the naturalized citizenships of many people of East and Southeast Asian descent, constantly “shape-shift[ing]” in order to keep the upper caste pure.

While Black Americans comprised the subordinate caste in the U.S., they were essentially treated more like the Dalits in India: outside of the caste system entirely. Just like the Dalits, Black Americans could not drink from certain fountains, live in certain towns, walk through certain doors to certain buildings, or attend public gatherings like circuses or political rallies. As was the case with the Dalits, soon the exclusion and degradation of Black people was used to continually justify their exclusion and degradation.

Members of the dominant caste in the U.S. were taught, from birth, that the members of the subordinate caste were quite literally untouchable. Wilkerson cites an interview with a man who moved from the South to the North for a career as a magazine editor. Even in adulthood, having dedicated himself to unlearning his racist and casteist upbringing, he felt the self-described “madness” of an inexplicable urge to wash his hands after shaking hands with Black coworkers.