While the concept of a caste system (or social hierarchy) might be most closely linked with the Hindu caste system in India, caste systems exist all around the world. As early as 1916, American eugenicists pointed to the caste system in India as the inspiration for and parallel to the Jim Crow (or racial segregation) laws in the U.S.’s Southern states. And in 1934, when the leaders of the Nazi Party gathered in Berlin to begin drafting the Nuremberg Laws—the codes they would use to dehumanize Jewish people and exclude them from participating society—they turned to those very same Jim Crow laws for guidance for implementing a rigid, arbitrary hierarchy in their society. Caste’s arbitrary divisions affect societies around the world, dehumanizing and subordinating many different groups of people. As such, Isabel Wilkerson argues that caste is a global problem—one that must be carefully, systematically dismantled if global society is to flourish.
The U.S., Nazi Germany, and India all structure (or once structured) their societies based on caste systems. The caste system in India is the world’s oldest and most intricate. By dividing individuals into five major varnas (main castes) and thousands of jatis (subcastes based on the divine will of the god Brahma), Indian society has kept its society divided for millennia. Those in the subordinate caste (the Untouchables, or Dalits) are relegated to menial jobs and excluded from public spaces, while those in the dominant caste (the Brahmins) wield power over the members of every caste below them—all because of the category a person is born into. Similarly, the U.S. caste system—in which white people comprise the dominant caste and Black people comprise the subordinate caste—is centuries old. It has defined the country’s social relations, politics, and economy since its foundation, stigmatizing African Americans and excluding them from equal opportunities. Yet the book points out that it’s still difficult for Americans to recognize that their society is indeed structured around caste. Perhaps the most infamous example of a caste system is Nazi Germany’s, in which “Aryan” Germans comprised the dominant caste, and Jews and other marginalized groups comprised the subordinate caste. This system was “accelerated” in the sense that it was created, enforced, and dismantled all within the span of about a decade. Yet the swiftness with which the Nazis were able to sequester, dehumanize, and exterminate a whole subset of their society speaks to how powerful caste is. By examining these societies’ very different (yet fundamentally connected) caste systems, the book suggests that caste itself is a cruel, arbitrary way to organize a society. Just as the Nazis’ campaign of dehumanization and terror was eradicated, so too must societies like the U.S. and India dismantle their caste systems in order to restore dignity and humanity to the people they’ve subordinated.
The book suggests that it is important for humanity as a whole to recognize and abolish castes for the good of the “collective human body.” As long as people rank others based on arbitrary, fixed traits, there will never be meaningful social progress or an end to caste-based violence. Wilkerson suggests that in the U.S., the brutal lynchings of the Jim Crow South have been transformed into the police killings of the 21st century. Moreover, the segregation laws that kept the subordinate caste confined to certain jobs and restricted from certain public spaces still ripple through society in the form of housing projects and other unofficially segregated spaces. Caste continues to unconsciously drive how people in the U.S. interact with one another—and until more people awaken to caste’s continued hold on U.S. society, it will continue to claim lives and limit what certain people can achieve. In writing about attending various conferences on caste in India and London, Wilkerson was taken aback by how upper-caste people infringed thoughtlessly on the conversations of lower-caste people. She also observed how lower-caste people struggled against the forced subservience that Indian society ingrained in them even after immigrating to other countries. This illustrates that caste still dictates how people in India—and even those living abroad—relate to one another, preventing lower-caste people from truly participating as equals in society. “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom,” writes Wilkerson in the concluding passages of Caste. Here, she uses the plural pronoun “we” to illustrate the fact that caste is indeed a global issue—one that affects everyone who lives in a caste system. Caste, she implies, can’t be dismantled by an outside force, nor can this process happen all at once. Individuals need to take accountability for the “ignorance” that has allowed caste to become a global problem and invest in their own “enlightenment” and the enlightenment of others regarding caste’s harmful effects.
The book offers a view of what global society might look like if, beginning on the individual level, people in societies around the world began resisting caste. In a world without caste, Isabel Wilkerson writes, people might stop trying to constantly assert their dominance over others. Rather, people free from caste would “look upon all of humanity with wonderment” and see one another as members of the same remarkable species. By dismantling caste, countries around the world would be able to invest in their citizens’ well-being and in humanity’s collective survival. In an age of climate crisis and global political turmoil, caste only impedes global society’s ability to move forward. By working together to dismantle caste around the globe, the “succeeding generation” after our own will learn from our successes. But if humanity doesn’t do so, caste will only continue to limit how unified, how healthy, and how successful global society can be.
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Caste as a Global Problem ThemeTracker
Caste as a Global Problem Quotes in Caste
The great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment. Those who accept their programming get to lead deadened, surface lives enslaved to a semblance of reality. They are captives, safe on the surface, as long as they are unaware of their captivity. […] People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage.
Day after day, the curtain rises on a stage of epic proportions, one that has been running for centuries. The actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being, to merge the assignment with their inner selves and how they are seen in the world.
Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs.
The Nazis needed no outsiders to plant the seeds of hatred within them. But in the early years of the regime, when they still had a stake in the appearance of legitimacy and the hope of foreign investment, they were seeking legal prototypes for the caste system they were building. They were looking to move quickly with their plans for racial separation and purity, and knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans.
The villagers were not all Nazis, in fact, many Germans were not Nazis. But they followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels, the Nazis having seized the advantage of this new technology, the chance to reach Germans live and direct in their homes anytime they chose, an intravenous drip to the mind. The people had ingested the lies of an inherent Untermenschen, that these prisoners—Jews, Sinti, homosexuals, opponents of the Reich—were not humans like themselves, and thus the townspeople swept the ash from their steps and carried on with their days.
The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures. In both countries, the subordinate castes were consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement, owing to the sins of the past.
Endogamy enforces caste boundaries by forbidding marriage outside of one's group and going so far as to prohibit sexual relations, or even the appearance of romantic interest across caste lines. It builds a firewall between castes and becomes the primary means of keeping resources and affinity within each tier of the caste system. Endogamy, by closing off legal family connection, blocks the chance for empathy or a sense of shared destiny between the castes.
Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.
When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam hammered into place to anchor the foundation. That piece is called the mudsill, the sill plate that runs along the base of a house and bears the weight of the entire structure above it. The studs and subfloors, the ceilings and windows, the doors and roofing, all the components that make it a house, are built on top of the mudsill. In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon.
Both Nazi Germany and the United States reduced their outgroups, Jews and African-Americans, respectively, to an undifferentiated mass of nameless, faceless scapegoats, the shock absorbers of the collective fears and setbacks of each nation. Germany blamed Jews for the loss of World War I, for the shame and economic straits that befell the country after its defeat and the United States blamed African-Americans for many of its social ills. In both cases, individuals were lumped together for sharing a single, stigmatizing trait, made indistinct and indistinguishable in preparation for the exploitation and atrocities that would be inflicted upon them. Individuals were no longer individuals.
The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society. They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment. But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body.
From the beginning, the power of caste and the superior status of the dominant group was perhaps never clearer than when the person deemed superior was unquestionably not.
An otherwise neutral trait had been converted into a disability. The teacher later switched roles, and the blue-eyed children became the scapegoat caste, with the same caste behavior that had arisen the day before between these artificially constructed upper and lower castes. […]
Classroom performance fell for both groups of students during the few hours that they were relegated to the subordinate caste. The brown-eyed students took twice as long to finish a phonics exercise the day that they were made to feel inferior.
"I watched my students become what I told them they were," [Mrs. Elliott] told NBC News decades later.
[Tushar and I] had both been miscast, each in our own way, and could see through the delusion that had shaped and restricted us from the other side of our respective caste systems. We had broken from the matrix and were convinced that we could see what others could not and that others could see it, too, if they could awaken from their slumber.
This was the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition. […]
It can lead those down under to absorb into their identities the conditions of their entrapment and to do whatever it takes to distinguish themselves as superior to others in their group, to be first among the lowest.
One cannot live in a caste system, breathe its air, without absorbing the message of caste supremacy. The subordinated castes are trained to admire, worship, fear, love, covet, and want to be like those at the center of society, at the top of the hierarchy. In India, it is said that you can try to leave caste, but caste never leaves you.
People who appear in places or positions where they are not expected can become foot soldiers in an ongoing quest for respect and legitimacy in a fight they had hoped was long over.
In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the United States, the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi.
For most of his life, he had worn the sacred thread as if it were strands of hair from his head. Removing it amounted to renouncing his high caste, and he considered the consequences, that his family might reject him if they knew. He would have to determine how to manage their knowing when the time came.
He was now born a third time, the shades lifted in a darkened room in his mind.
"It is a fake crown that we wear," he came to realize.
In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. […] We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.
A world without caste would set everyone free.
