Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Main Ideas

Caste as Global Phenomenon

Wilkerson published Caste as the United States was facing a national reckoning over its history of racial inequality. The May 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked the largest racial justice protests in half a century and drew widespread public attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. The COVID-19 pandemic, which was in its earliest stages as Wilkerson finished her book, had further highlighted the lingering fault lines in America’s health care system, with members of the subordinate castes (to use Wilkerson’s terms) disproportionately falling ill and dying from the coronavirus. As Wilkerson discusses in Part 1 of Caste, incidents of racially motivated violence and vigilante policing had been on the rise for years when her book was published.

Many authors, before the spring of 2020 and since, have offered analyses of the United States’ unique history of racial injustice and have proposed ways of moving forward. Wilkerson draws on several of these works, but a major contribution of Caste is to place the American situation in a global context. Without denying the distinctive characteristics of race relations in the United States—such as the legacy of slavery, the failures of Reconstruction, and the emergence of Jim Crow laws—Wilkerson insists on the value of a comparative approach. She argues that casteism is a worldwide phenomenon rooted in human psychology and needs to be approached as such. Looking at how caste regimes have played out in India and Germany, Wilkerson suggests, will ultimately help in diagnosing and fighting casteism in the United States.

Fighting Casteism

Throughout Caste, Wilkerson uses many vivid analogies to describe how caste structures operate and to explain how casteism has managed to persist in the United States and other societies. In Part 1 alone, she likens caste to a virus that can lie dormant without being killed off; a structural flaw in an old house that gradually worsens over time; and “the wordless usher in a darkened theater,” telling everyone where to sit. Later, she expands this theater analogy to suggest that participants in a caste society are not just observers of the performance but actors with socially assigned roles.

Apart from drawing the reader’s attention to the sheer pervasiveness of caste, these images help to show that caste often operates behind the scenes. Thus, the full scope of its effects can easily be missed—in fact, caste is practically designed to operate in this subconscious way. Just as vigilance is necessary to keep a virus contained or a house in good repair, alertness to caste and its effects is a prerequisite to a more equal society. A person attending the “performance” of society may realize, vaguely, that caste dynamics are at work without recognizing that they are being “ushered” to a particular social status in their day-to-day interactions. A person playing a part in a caste society may feel—indeed, is encouraged to feel—that they earned their role instead of being assigned it at birth. Recognizing how caste operates while already living in a caste society is in Wilkerson’s view a major but necessary challenge.

The United States as a Caste Society

Part of Wilkerson’s goal in drawing comparisons to India and Germany is to get her American readers to understand social inequality in the United States from a new perspective. As she argues throughout her book, the language of caste has been applied to the United States for more than a century, though mostly by social scientists. Wilkerson cites examples from historians, sociologists, and activists, among others, to show that the idea of the United States as a caste society is not a new one. As she describes the eight pillars of caste and identifies American examples of each, Wilkerson chips away at doubts about the relevance or appropriateness of caste terminology for a US social setting.

Still, as Wilkerson notes, most people in the United States are used to framing discussions of social injustice in terms of race or perhaps class; the academic use of caste has not caught on with the broader public. In Chapter 3, Wilkerson further recognizes that the language of caste “may be more commonly associated with other cultures,” most notably India. However, she argues that this very unfamiliarity is an asset, since it will make readers stop and think about who is in the “dominant” or “favored” caste and who is “subordinate” or “disfavored” in the United States. For this reason, Wilkerson frequently uses caste terminology instead of, or alongside, more familiar racial or ethnic descriptors.