All of global society, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste suggests, pays a price for a caste system (a social hierarchy that ranks people based on fixed, arbitrary categories) that rewards few while punishing many. The book suggests that the United States in particular suffers because of its allegiance to a rigid caste system, resulting in an inaccurate understanding of their country’s history and unequal access to things like healthcare and education. By pointing out how societies around the world are hindered by their devotion to caste, the book suggests that members of the dominant castes will often act and vote against their own interests—no matter the cost—if it means upholding the caste system that gives them a sense of worth, power, and dominance.
The general welfare of caste-based societies always suffers, because people in dominant castes don’t want people in subordinate castes to have privileges that those in dominant castes want reserved exclusively for them. One of the costs of caste is that societies centered around caste systems often have false understandings of their own histories. And what’s worse, a nation that won’t look back on its past is fundamentally incapable of recognizing what’s happening in its present. The U.S., which downplays the impact of slavery on its present social atmosphere, has very little understanding of how its own caste system has influenced it over the years. A country that can’t even see the costs of caste, then, cannot understand how caste is hampering its progress. Another cost of caste is the loss of potential. By dehumanizing, stigmatizing, and ostracizing the subordinate castes, countries actively hamper their own growth. Albert Einstein—widely considered to be one of the greatest scientists who ever lived—was a member of the subordinate (or even subhuman) caste in Nazi Germany’s caste system because he was Jewish. By referring to Einstein as an example, the book implies that many brilliant minds may have been suppressed by caste. In this way, the world’s collective progress may have already been stymied by caste in unknowable ways.
One of the most damaging costs of caste can be seen in the U.S.’s healthcare and education systems. Though the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it lags behind other developed countries on several fronts. The U.S. does not provide its citizens with any form of free or low-cost healthcare coverage, and many people who need affordable healthcare or government benefits aren’t able to access that aid. The U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, the highest rate of public mass shootings, and the highest infant mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. Moreover, American students’ test scores compare poorly to those in other developed nations, and the U.S. ranks only 18th in global happiness. All of these problems disproportionately impact the subordinate class, which is comprised of Black Americans—so remedying them would mean that the U.S. would have to invest in the health, success, and well-being of its subordinate caste. But the book suggests that the country would rather let all of its citizens suffer than treat them all equally, because to do so would be to afford equality to the subordinate caste. Furthermore, scientists have tried to understand the psychological and physiological costs of casteism. New research shows that the psychological trauma of living in the subordinate caste is linked to high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. It can also result in shortened and weathered DNA strands (which shortens lifespan) as well as high blood pressure, diabetes, and other diseases. These health problems disproportionately affect Black people (the subordinate caste) in the U.S.—and yet they’re often blamed on the subordinate caste, rather than the dominant caste’s poor treatment of the subordinate caste.
The book posits that even when all of these societal costs are considered, the dominant caste will continue to see them as necessary or inevitable because of their own desire to cling to power. The dominant castes’ power comes from the historical precedent of that power—caste is an often irrational (yet still powerful) enclosed loop. By keeping the subordinate castes down, the dominant castes are able to sustain their claims to superiority. In the U.S., especially, the creation of healthcare and education initiatives, stronger social programs, and even reparations for slavery (repaying descendants of enslaved people) would require the dominant caste to relinquish some of its power in order to invest in the prosperity of the subordinate caste. Wilkerson terms this phenomenon “dominant group status threat,” and she suggests that when a dominant group’s status is perceived to be under threat, an attempt to restore that power through any means necessary is inevitable. Even though these initiatives would improve U.S. society as a whole, preserving the caste system is, to the dominant caste, seemingly worth the costs that they, too, incur. The challenge of contemporary times, the book posits, is finding a way to “see through the […] layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have.” In the process, humanity may yet be able to honestly weigh the costs of caste against its ever-diminishing benefits to a small subset of global society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Costs of Caste ThemeTracker
The Costs of Caste Quotes in Caste
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
