Author Isabel Wilkerson argues that life in the United States is defined by a dual-poled caste system in which white people comprise the dominant caste while Black people comprise the subordinate caste. Throughout U.S. history, she suggests, a collective scrambling to get as close to the dominant caste as possible has defined relations among people of different races and ethnicities who have come to the U.S. in search of better futures.
Race is the visible agent of caste, while caste is the unseen “infrastructure” that holds each of American society’s racial and ethnic groups firmly in their places. The hierarchy of caste defines every aspect of contemporary American life—and it’s why the U.S., in spite of its vast wealth and political power, continues to lag in terms of overall happiness, literacy, and social programs like universal healthcare. In seeking to uphold the dominant caste’s superiority at every turn, Wilkerson argues that the U.S. has handicapped itself greatly. The U.S. is like an old house, Wilkerson suggests. And unless Americans begin to really examine what it is that keeps that house standing—and what problems threaten its structural integrity—they will never be able to repair their country’s ills.
Wilkerson sharpens her arguments about the existence of an American caste system by drawing comparisons to the world’s most recognizable caste system—the Hindu caste system which has existed in India for millennia—and the caste system manufactured by the Nazi Party during the Third Reich. While these systems were (and are) very different from the one in the U.S., every caste system is defined by how it forces people to play a role assigned to them at birth. This makes people unable to recognize others’ humanity—and once someone has been dehumanized by the caste system, it’s easy to continue perpetuating violence and humiliation against them.
There are many “pillars” that keep the caste system standing: the Indian caste system, for instance, posits that the god Brahma created the castes from different parts of his body). In the American caste system, white, European Christians used the biblical story of Noah’s curse on the dark-skinned sons of his child Ham to justify enslaving African people. Other pillars that uphold caste include caste-based violence and terror, caste’s perceived heritability, and the idea upper castes are inherently pure while the lower castes are inherently polluted.
Caste intrudes into every aspect of daily life in the U.S. and India—in large part because of the “urgent necessity of a bottom rung” to keep the dominant castes feeling secure in their social positions and their power to influence the world around them. This means that members of the subordinate castes will often physically or emotionally harm one another in an effort to get as close to the dominant caste and its attendant privileges as possible. It also means that when the dominant caste’s power and longevity is threatened, chaos can break loose.
Toward the end of the book, Wilkerson seeks to tie upper-caste anxieties about losing power and authority to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and to the rise in anti-Black and anti-Semitic violence, police brutality, and flagrant racism. These phenomena led to violent conflicts like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Any “change in the script,” Wilkerson argues, leads to a sharp resurgence of caste. The presidency of Barack Obama, a Black politician, was a major deviation in a centuries-long script where the dominant caste was able to punish, humiliate, brutalize, and murder the subordinate caste with impunity.
The only solution to the problem of caste, Wilkerson argues, is a collective societal effort across the spectrum of the caste system. Upper-caste individuals must shed the false belief that they are inherently superior or entitled to special privileges and power. Instead, they must work to elevate the voices of those in the subordinate castes. Societies around the world are being held back from progress due to their allegiances to their caste systems—social programs are suffering, violence rates are increasing, and people are more divided than ever. But with open-hearted attempts to connect to people of other castes and focus on what all humans have in common, society may be able to achieve a world without caste. Only them, Wilkerson suggests, will everyone truly be free.
