Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Discussion Questions

How does caste differ from race or class?

A caste system may or may not be based on racial identity or racial traits. Wilkerson notes that the caste system in the United States is indeed closely tied to race, originating in a colonial-era distinction between people of African and of European origin. Other caste systems, like that of India, do not rest on a concept of race as such; instead, they look to a person’s genealogy and their ancestors’ occupations to determine their caste standing. Moreover, even when a caste system does use racial ideas, the relationship between caste and race can vary from one society to another. The official caste system devised by the Nazis, for instance, created “racial” divisions out of groups of people who had been living together and intermarrying for centuries.

Caste differs from class in that class can change over a person’s lifetime, whereas caste is fixed. Wilkerson describes class as “marked by level of education, income, and occupation” and ultimately of “socioeconomic status.” She notes that individual Black Americans have been able to amass considerable wealth yet still face discrimination on the basis of the caste to which they belong. In her description of the second pillar of caste, heritability, Wilkerson gives an example of this discrepancy. She tells of an incident in which the famous actor Forest Whitaker was harassed and humiliated by a deli worker who suspected him of shoplifting. By standards of wealth and income, Whitaker belongs to the upper class, but Wilkerson argues that he is still vulnerable to mistreatment because of his caste status.

How does a caste system perpetuate?

A caste system perpetuates by restricting political and economic power to some groups and making that power heritable. Over time, this heritability, along with the exclusion of lower castes from intermarrying or moving up the caste ladder, leads to a few major effects. One is that political and economic power itself is consolidated in the upper caste or castes, which forestalls change in the form of fairer laws or redistributive government programs. Another effect is that upper-caste individuals come to see themselves as the natural and rightful owners of the advantages they have accrued. Meanwhile, members of lower castes sometimes internalize the lesson that they do not “belong” in positions of power. Caste uses might (i.e., control over government, industry, and culture) to create the impression of right.

However, as Wilkerson notes throughout her book, caste systems require effort and energy to maintain. Unequal laws get challenged, as happened in the United States with slavery and eventually with segregationist Jim Crow legislation. Subordinate-caste individuals repeatedly break out of the “container” that is set up for them by the prevailing caste system. Thus, dominant-caste members must continually convince themselves, each other, and to an extent, the subordinate castes that the caste system is legitimate. They accomplish this partly through rhetoric and culture, as in the voluminous 19th-century writings about the inequality of the races or the many 20th-century movies with glamorous white stars and childlike Black supporting characters. When rhetoric fails, caste differences are policed with violence, with dominant-caste persons punished for breaking ranks and subordinate-caste persons punished for “not knowing their place.” One group’s energy and ingenuity are wasted in stifling the energy and ingenuity of another.

Who benefits and who is harmed in a caste system?

According to Wilkerson, everyone involved in a caste system ultimately suffers for it in some way. The most obvious harm comes to the members of the subordinate caste, who are treated as less than human and made into scapegoats for social problems. In the three societies Wilkerson examines, the subordinate caste has suffered from abuses that range from condescension and rudeness all the way to torture, forced labor, and death. This form of suffering, especially at its extremes, is hard to ignore even for those within the caste system, and it is easily seen by outsiders, such as the Swedish anthropologists studying race in the United States.

The dominant caste is the obvious beneficiary. Members of the dominant group wield greater economic and political power than they would otherwise, since large groups of potential competitors are excluded on the basis of superficial traits. There is also, as Wilkerson notes, a psychological comfort in having someone to look down upon or to feel “better than.” Yet even the dominant caste loses out, in at least two major ways. First, the enforcement of a caste system leaves human potential untapped: members of the subordinate caste are not as free to develop their artistic, academic, or other talents, while members of the dominant caste are sometimes forced into leadership roles they are unsuited for. Another, subtler cost of caste systems is the self-deception it requires for one group to pretend it is categorically superior to another in the face of constant counterexamples and exceptions. The embrace of this kind of simplistic worldview is, for Wilkerson, a kind of self-dehumanization inflicted by the dominant caste on its own members. 

How has America reckoned with a discriminatory system that precedes the formation of the country?

The process of confronting caste discrimination in the United States has been slow, painful, and precarious, with frequent setbacks. The American caste system, in Wilkerson’s view, originated as early as 1619, when distinctions were first made between European and African people in the colony of Virginia. For 246 years after that, colonial and then state laws allowed for the enslavement of people of African descent. With the abolition of slavery in 1865, a brief period of Reconstruction (1865–1877) gave way to a regime of discriminatory state legislation known as the Jim Crow laws. Only with the civil rights movement, beginning in the 1950s, were most of these laws eventually overturned. Wilkerson gives a broad recounting of this history in Chapter 4, where she describes caste in America as “a long-running play.”

Wilkerson contends that, in fact, American society has not sufficiently reckoned with its caste problem. She observes that despite the official end of segregationist policies, many forms of discrimination remain. People are still punished for not conforming to caste expectations; Wilkerson offers examples from her own experience and that of many others. Assumptions about who “looks like” a leader and who “belongs” in a professional setting still exert undue influence on who gets the opportunity to lead. Ultimately, Wilkerson argues that much work remains before the United States can claim to approach the ideal of a post-caste society.

What is the process of dehumanization?

Dehumanization, which Wilkerson describes as one of the eight pillars of caste, is the process by which a group—racial, religious, or otherwise—is made to be seen and treated as less than human. Religious texts and narratives have sometimes been used as a pretext for one group to dehumanize another. In the United States, Wilkerson argues, members of the dominant caste interpreted the Bible as justifying the mistreatment of darker-skinned people, whose physical appearance was claimed to be the effect of an ancestral curse. Apologists for slavery during the time of the Civil War likewise argued that God had ordained one race to rule and another to serve. The caste system of India has its origins in a legend that does not even mention the lowest caste (the Dalits), suggesting that they lie outside the normal structure of society altogether.

Naming is another means by which dehumanization is put into practice. American slaveholders would assign new names, often derogatory nicknames, to the people they claimed to own. This stripped the enslaved people of identity, personal history, and family heritage, rhetorically reducing them to livestock. Indian surnames likewise reflect caste structure and suggest who is supposed to lead, with those at the top taking on the names of the gods and those at the bottom taking names from their “unclean” trades and occupations. The Nazi concentration camp system dispensed with names altogether and issued numbers to its prisoners, making it easier for the guards to overlook the humanity of their captives.

Importantly, dehumanization is a self-reinforcing process. In each of the societies Wilkerson examines, the dominant castes have restricted access to education and other important paths to participation in society, then argued that the subordinate castes were unfit to participate. In the pre–Civil War American South, for example, it was widely illegal for Black people to learn to read and for anyone to help them do so. The resulting lack of literacy was then held up as a supposed proof of the subordinate caste’s intellectual unfitness. Later, the continued exclusion of Black Americans from higher education, public office, and business ownership was used to “prove” that the subordinate caste was unfit for leadership roles of any kind. Enslavers and concentration camp commanders alike kept their prisoners in inhuman conditions, then treated them as though those conditions defined them. In both cases, the effects of dehumanizing treatment were used as excuses to further dehumanize a group of people.