Throughout Caste, author Isabel Wilkerson explores the many ways that caste sustains itself in the United States and around the world. The book points to many examples of how caste systems—which place people in a social hierarchy based on arbitrary categories—keep themselves going. These examples include scapegoating or dehumanizing people in subordinate castes (the lowest categories), as well as suppressing them through police brutality and cruel cultural stereotypes and narratives shown in media. Moreover, those in subordinate castes are given very limited opportunities to escape their stations. The book suggests that caste is a phenomenon of “madness” that echoes through every level of global society, engineered by a dominant caste seeking to “sustain [its power] at all costs.”
In a section of the book entitled “The Pillars of Caste,” Wilkerson calls attention to the many ways through which caste keeps itself going. First, caste sustains itself include reliance on narratives about divine will (the idea that deities or religious figures have willed the existence of caste) and the inherent purity or inherent pollution of different castes. The creation of the Indian caste system by the god Brahma and the accursing of dark-skinned peoples the biblical figure Noah have historically been used to enforce caste. According to Hindu text the Laws of Manu, the god Brahma created the different castes, or varnas, from the different parts of his body. From his mouth he created the Brahmin, the dominant caste; from his limbs he created the middle castes, consisting of warriors and merchants; and from his feet he created the Shudra, or the servant caste. The Untouchables, or the Dalits—the subordinate caste—weren’t even mentioned in the creation of the castes, illustrating that this caste was engineered to exist in such a lowly position that it was outside of the system entirely. Thus, the Untouchables could never rise in society because they weren’t really part of society. In U.S. history, white Protestant colonists from Europe who came to the New World wanted to justify their enslavement of Africans. They turned to the Bible, which featured a story in which the patriarch Noah cursed his grandson, who had dark skin, and claimed that all of his descendants would become the slaves of their betters. These myths suggest that caste systems are natural and morally right—that religious laws predetermine caste. But Wilkerson argues that in actuality, these constructed ideals are arbitrary and false.
Caste also sustains itself by controlling which castes have access to certain social spheres and financial positions. By enforcing endogamy, meaning that members of a certain caste cannot marry outside of their own group, caste controls peoples’ exposure to people from other social classes. This creates even more social insularity while reinforcing the idea that the dominant castes are inherently superior to the subordinate castes. And by controlling which occupations are available to certain castes, the caste system is able to keep subordinate-caste people in demeaning jobs that reinforce the idea they’re not fit for socioeconomic advancement. For example, “Untouchables,” or Dalits, in India—members of the lowest caste—were historically confined to “humble or dirty work” like latrine cleaning. Black Americans were also limited to menial, low-paying jobs after slavery was outlawed in the U.S. The dominant caste is then able to claim that these kinds of jobs are the only jobs the subordinate caste is fit for, because the dominant caste itself has placed them in these roles.
Caste also sustains itself through psychological manipulation of the dominant and subordinate castes through terrorism, dehumanization, and stigmatization. In Nazi Germany, Jews and other oppressed groups were categorized as Untermenschen, or “under-humans.” By stripping these groups of their humanity and stigmatizing them as unfit to live and work alongside the dominant caste, the Nazis were able to manipulate the dominant caste into caring little about the subordinate caste. In India, the “Untouchables,” or Dalits, were also categorized as lowly, unclean, and not even fit for inclusion in the caste system. The stigmatization of the Dalits—and the violence that the upper castes inflicted on them with impunity—kept the “machinery” of caste working.
In the U.S., lynchings were used to terrorize Black people across the country. By reminding African Americans that if they pushed back against the limits of caste, they would be punished with their lives, the dominant caste disincentivized any pushback at all. For instance, a Black boy named Willie James Howard was just 15 in 1943 when he wrote a sweet, vaguely flirtatious Christmas card to one of his white coworkers at a dime store. When the letter was discovered, a group of white men kidnapped, bound, and tortured Howard, ultimately forcing him to jump into a river at gunpoint and drown while his father looked on. Contemporary instances of police brutality, such as the killings of Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray, also psychologically terrorize African Americans. When white officers are able to take the lives of Black people with impunity, the “machine” of caste illustrates that Black lives are not as valuable as other lives. By creating an atmosphere of terror, the dominant castes maintain control over the subordinate castes. In highlighting the myths, narratives, and social practices that sustain caste, the book suggests that the dominant castes have carefully engineered these “pillars” and mechanisms in order to keep power on their side.
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How Caste Sustains Itself Quotes in Caste
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
