Caste

Caste

by

Isabel Wilkerson

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Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S. Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S.  Theme Icon
Caste as a Global Problem  Theme Icon
How Caste Sustains Itself Theme Icon
The Costs of Caste Theme Icon
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.  Theme Icon

Throughout Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson argues that the United States has always structured its society around a polarized caste system. A caste system is a social hierarchy created on the basis of characteristics like race or religion, in which dominant castes control subordinate ones. While the word “caste” is most commonly associated with the caste system in India, the book suggests that the U.S. has its own caste system that divides citizens based on “rigid, arbitrary boundaries” centered on race. In the U.S. caste system, white people make up the dominant caste, and Black people make up the subordinate one. Race and caste are both social constructs—but Wilkerson describes race as the visible “skin” of social hierarchy in the U.S., while caste is the invisible skeleton. The book argues that present-day divisions in the U.S. along social, political, and economic lines are all rooted in American society’s allegiance to its race-based caste system.

U.S. society, the book suggests, is organized by a caste system in which race is the “visible cue” that indicates which caste a person belongs to. The U.S.’s caste system has only two poles: the dominant caste, comprised of white people, and the subordinate caste, comprised of Black people. “Race is what we can see,” writes Wilkerson, suggesting that physical traits (like skin color) have arbitrary meaning in U.S. society and are used to entrap people in the caste system’s prescribed categories. But caste, unlike race, is unseen—it’s the invisible “infrastructure” that holds each group in its place based on the group members’ physical traits. By dividing people based on their appearance, caste creates a value system that exists “beyond the reaches of [one’s] awareness.” Caste is, essentially, the invisible guide to how people automatically assess those around them.

This rigid caste system in the U.S. has created intense social division throughout the country’s relatively young history. In the colonial era, white European settlers used biblical scripture—the story of Noah cursing his son Ham’s dark-skinned sons, for example—to justify their enslavement of Africans. The settlers needed a labor force to help bring the New World into being—and by making an arbitrary distinction between whiteness and Blackness, they were able to dehumanize and control an entire group of people. By the antebellum (or pre-Civil War) era, a huge swath of the U.S.’s economy depended on slave labor. White people brutalized and killed enslaved people of the subordinate caste in order to maintain their own power. The dominant caste was seen as inherently superior, while the subordinate caste was seen as inherently inferior. And having even “one drop” of African blood excluded a person from entry into the dominant caste. Society was, in short, rigidly stratified. After the Civil War, there was a brief period called Reconstruction during which newly free African American people were granted new rights as they adjusted to life outside of slavery. But this period was short-lived, and soon, Jim Crow laws (which were designed to segregate society and excuse continued violence against Black people) were enacted in the South. These laws upheld casteism, maintained a deeply divided society, and kept the dominant caste in power.

Even today, the book suggests, caste continues to define how U.S. society functions. Members of the subordinate caste are more likely to face health problems brought on by the stresses of the dehumanizing caste system. For instance, in the U.S., Black people suffer from higher rates of high blood pressure and diabetes, conditions associated with elevated levels of stress hormones. The dominant caste’s fear of losing power in society dictates the U.S.’s political climate at any given moment. For example, Wilkerson argues that in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “celebrity billionaire” Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by appealing to a white voter base who feared losing power following the presidency of Barack Obama, a Black man. And even basic, everyday interactions—like dining in a restaurant, seeking help with home repairs, or traveling on public transportation—are defined by caste-based power struggles. In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson (who is Black) recalls an instance when she and a white friend experienced terrible service while dining in a restaurant. Her friend was enraged to realize that the way the staff was treating them (compared to other tables of all-white diners) was due to Wilkerson’s subordinate caste position. But Wilkerson thought that “If I responded like that every time I was slighted, I’d be telling someone off almost every day,” making it clear that caste severely impacts her everyday experience as a Black woman.

The present-day social divisions in the U.S. cannot be mended until the country recognizes caste’s role in creating those divisions and resolves to dismantle the caste system. What Isabel Wilkerson calls “the radicalization of the dominant caste” is the first step to getting rid of caste in the U.S. It is those in power—white Americans—who need to acknowledge the caste system and advocate for the subordinate caste. By reckoning with the truth about what the U.S. was founded on—that is to say, a system that subordinates anyone who isn’t white—more and more upper-caste people might be inspired to speak and act out against the American caste system. What will ultimately dismantle caste, the book suggests, is people’s capacity to responsibly educate themselves about caste and work to dismantle it through interpersonal connections. For instance, Isabel Wilkerson speaks of how she got through to an aloof white plumber who came to her house, connecting with him by confiding in him about the recent loss of her mother (which led him to open up about the loss of his own mother). The artificial divisions that have defined the United States’ society, politics, and economy keep people from true freedom. But by recognizing, rejecting, and replacing caste with empathy and advocacy, the U.S. may yet be able to create a society in which everyone is truly “free.”

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Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S. Quotes in Caste

Below you will find the important quotes in Caste related to the theme of Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S. .
Chapter 2 Quotes

America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. […] When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Old House
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country's X-ray up to the light.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Old House
Page Number: 17
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Adolf Hitler
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number One Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 104
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Two Quotes

It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether separate measure of one's standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Three Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Four Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 129
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Five Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Old House
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Six Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Seven Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 153
Explanation and Analysis:
Pillar Number Eight Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Mrs. Elliott (speaker), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Page Number: 169
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Tushar
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

If the lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste's inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement of fear for their very survival. "If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?" The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

This was the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition. […]

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 223
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 238
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Under the spell of caste, the majors, like society itself, were willing to forgo their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Satchel Paige
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 293
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Robert E. Lee
Page Number: 346
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 29 Quotes

Compared to our counterparts in the developed world, America can be a harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations. It is the price we pay for our caste system. In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one's own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)
Page Number: 353
Explanation and Analysis: