Book Review: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents"

Isabel Wilkerson's difficult but beautifully-written book forces the reader to acknowledge the truths about America

Every so often, you read a book that sears you with its intensity, that forces you to take a good hard look, not just at the world and the society that you live in, but also at yourself and your part in sustaining inequality and injustice. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is one such book. Through a comparison of three different cultures—Germany under the Nazis, the United States (particularly under slavery and Jim Crow), and India—she shows how caste, even more than race, is the foundational structure upon which they were and are built.  

Through a combination of macro and micro analysis, Wilkerson shows us how caste serves as a sort of society-wide infrastructure. It’s not just that it’s a social phenomenon that all of us encounter; it’s so much a part of how we think of the world that it’s hard to think outside of it. In particular, she delineates eight different strategies by which caste is propagated and maintained: divine will and the laws of nature; heritability; endogamy and the control of marriage and mating; purity vs. pollution; occupational hierarchy; dehumanization and stigma,; terror as enforcement, cruelty as a means of control; and inherent superiority vs. inherent inferiority. “It mattered little whether the assumptions were true, as most were not,” she writes. “It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelties to which they had grown accustomed, inequalities that they took to be the laws of nature.” Caste is ultimately a collective fiction, but that doesn’t lessen its power to inflict misery.

Indeed, there are many parts of Caste that are painful and difficult to read, even for me, a member of America’s dominant caste. There are graphic descriptions of lynchings, for example, and haunting evocations of the Holocaust and the daily indignities suffered by the Dalits of India. And, of course, there are also the more mundane expressions of caste, including personal reflections of Wilkerson’s when she was dismissed or diminished because others saw her as less than because she is Black, as when a man she had intended to interview refused to believe that she was from The New York Times. 

These sorts of incidents might seem innocuous to those who occupy the dominant caste but, when they are repeated over and over and over again, when they become so much a part of one’s daily existence that they become routine, they take a tremendous emotional and spiritual toll. But then, that’s precisely the point of the book: caste is a constantly self-replicating form of violence. It isn’t static, but instead manifests itself anew every time it is challenged from below. 

Again and again, the book asks us to think about the deadening and stifling effects of caste, not just upon those who are forced to occupy the lowest rungs of the hierarchy but those at the top. The dominant caste finds its own collective soul tarnished by its participation and complicity in the maintenance of the system, which is why, ultimately, they must take the lead in dismantling it. “We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago,” she writes, challenging the oft-voiced white protest, “but we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing what happened in previous generations at the hand of or to people who look like us to set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who did not look like us often do not share.” 

It is here that the example of Nazi Germany is most useful. While there are those in Germany who wonder whether younger generations should be held accountable for the past, most young people put it this way: “for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.” It’s a powerful acknowledgment that those living in the present have a responsibility, not just to remember what has transpired in the past, but also to the future, to make sure that such atrocities are never forgotten. Such an interface is what true acknowledgment looks like. In the United States, by contrast, there has never been a true accounting of the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow. As Wilkerson points out, there’s a great deal of truth to the old saying that the Confederacy lost the war but won the peace. How else to explain the fact that there are still many in the north who wave Confederate flags, or that there are so many statues and other memorials to the generals of a group of states that committed treason so that they could continue to own other human beings? If the United States ever hopes to be able to come to terms with its violent past, it needs to face it squarely, rather than continuing to deflect, to dress bigotry in the flimsy clothes of heritage.

I suspect that this book will make a lot of white people uncomfortable. If I’ve learned one thing from being a white person for the last 37 years of my life, it’s that white people, by and large, absolutely cannot stand either being called a racist (or even having it suggested, however obliquely, that they are). However, it’s precisely because so many white people have difficulty seeing the reality that Black people inhabit each and every day that a book like Caste is so vitally important. It’s one of those books that strips away the layers of illusion that Americans are so fond of using, that forces each and every one of us to look at the unvarnished truth. The presidency of Donald Trump and its aftermath, particularly the storming of the Capitol, have shown us that the caste system is alive and well in America, and that we must heed the call to dismantle it if we are to save ourselves from spiritual perdition.

Wilkerson ends the book with a radical call to envision a world without caste. In fact, the last line of the book is, in its own way, the most moving. “A world without caste,” she writes, “would set everyone free.”

Let us hope that such a world is nearer than we think.