Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Major and Minor Quotes

“He could see what his countrymen chose not to see.” (“The Man in the Crowd,” p. xvii)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: Caste begins by describing a moment from early in the Nazi regime and asking some pointed questions about the “crowd” that supports casteism or at least silently goes along with it. Wilkerson claims that understanding casteism is, first of all, a matter of “seeing” but that seeing is a choice. It is possible and even commonplace to ignore the absurdities on which a caste system is founded and to overlook the harm that such a system causes. One’s life experiences can open one’s eyes to the evils of casteism—the man in the crowd Wilkerson describes, the lone dissenter, was an “Aryan” man in love with a Jewish woman. Yet many others must also have known that Jews were not Untermenschen (“under-men”), but they went along with the lie out of fear or greed.

Wilkerson goes on to argue that although many today “would like to believe” that they too would have stood up to the madness of caste, most would not actually do so in light of the risks and costs. In a totalitarian society like Nazi Germany, defying caste prejudices could easily mean death; even in the comparatively liberal environment of present-day America, people sometimes die for protesting against casteism. Several of Wilkerson’s historical examples will return to the themes raised in this brief passage, such as the policing of caste hierarchies against dissent and the role of silent complicity in perpetuating them.

“Not one of us was here when this house was built.” (Ch. 2, p. 14)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: As soon as she begins discussing race and caste in the United States, Wilkerson recognizes that some people will disavow responsibility for the crimes of the past. These people, she concedes, have a point: no one living today was alive during the American Civil War or of voting age when the major Jim Crow legislation was passed. Some Americans descended from recent immigrants or who are themselves immigrants may lack even an ancestral connection to the era of slavery. The “house” of American society, with all its built-in flaws, was constructed and maintained over the centuries, and its foundations were laid some 400 years ago.

Nonetheless, argues Wilkerson, those living in the United States today have inherited this house, and its problems—even if they originated in the past—must still be dealt with in the present. Wilkerson also urges readers to recognize a moral obligation not to let the house deteriorate further, even though they are not the ones who designed it. A dwelling that is unsound, she suggests, will eventually be dangerous to all who live in it, whether they live in spacious upper-story rooms or a cramped basement. Although much of Caste is devoted to describing the structural flaws that correspond to caste, in the epilogue, Wilkerson briefly envisions what it would be like to live in a post-caste America, a “house” that is not only propped up but radically remodeled.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater [. . .] guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.” (Ch. 2, p. 17)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: Wilkerson offers a variety of metaphors to show the pervasive power of caste, which is sometimes blatant in its effects and sometimes subtle. One of her recurring analogies is that of a theater performance. The first time she presents the analogy, in Chapter 2, the members of a society are described as audience members who are “ushered” to their seats without necessarily realizing who is seated where. This image shows caste in its subtle, subconscious aspect, as a force that people may not realize is operating in their everyday interactions.

Later, in Chapter 4 (“A Long-Running Play”) and Chapter 10 (“Central Miscasting”), Wilkerson offer a more developed version of the analogy, in which society’s members are the actors, assigned their roles at birth and expected to perform them fully. This represents the more overt operations of caste in controlling who occupies what station in life, who plays the lead and who is relegated to the chorus. Both versions of the theater analogy are helpful in understanding caste and its characteristics. At different times and in different ways, as Wilkerson shows, members of a caste society are both witnesses to and performers of the caste “play.” The theater analogy gains further relevance from the fact that literal stage and screen works have often been used to reinforce caste roles, as when Hollywood studios cast Black actors as servants or subordinates and white actors into starring roles.

“Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation.” (Pillar Number 4, p. 129)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: In this chapter and throughout the book, Wilkerson explains how caste systems perpetuate themselves through self-fulfilling prophecies. Members of lower castes are excluded from formal education and then described as unintelligent; they are prohibited from owning businesses and then deemed unfit for business leadership. “Dirty” and physically laborious jobs are assigned to subordinate-caste persons, who are then seen as themselves unclean yet suited to hard labor.

Since the dominant caste does not in fact have the monopoly on intelligence, business sense, or any other useful trait, exceptions constantly pop up: a self-taught author barred from formal schooling or an entrepreneur who succeeds despite repressive laws, biased banking policies, and popular prejudice. Thus, the dominant caste expends considerable time and energy trying to deny or minimize the accomplishments of subordinate-caste individuals. Subordinate-caste members are forced to conform to a lie about their own potential, and they face violence if they falsify the lie by succeeding too well despite caste prejudice. Dominant-caste members, meanwhile, distort their own worldview by pretending to believe that same lie. This waste of human potential on both sides is, for Wilkerson, an important part of the cost of caste systems.

“I watched my students become what I told them they were.” (“Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes,” p. 169)

—Jane Elliott

Analysis: This observation comes from the teacher who conducted the eye-color experiment described at the beginning of Part 4. To teach about discrimination, Elliott assigned her classroom of white third-graders to upper and lower castes based on whether their eyes were blue or brown, then reversed the caste hierarchy the next day. Her remark, made to reporters decades after the experiment, underscores a point about caste dynamics made throughout Wilkerson’s book and articulated in Pillar Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority. Wilkerson points out that although skin color, like eye color or height, is arbitrary, people come to feel that their place in a caste system reflects their inherent worthiness—or unworthiness. Those who are told they are superior can easily become domineering and entitled; those deemed inferior, frightened and resentful.

What Elliott’s experiment showed was just how quickly these sorts of judgments arise: it took as little as 15 minutes for students’ personalities to change in accordance with their new social status. Brown-eyed children came to see the very phrase “brown eyes” as an insult, and their academic performance dropped to match the new low expectations attached to their eye color. Moreover, when the roles reversed, the attitudes did too—and just as quickly. Elliott asked reporters to consider what such treatment does to people’s psychology over the course of a lifetime. Wilkerson, in Caste, poses a similar question over the course of four centuries.

“The stigmatized stratify their own because no one wants to be in last place.” (Ch. 16, p. 238)

—J. Lorand Matory

Analysis: What Matory describes here is the power of caste to distort relationships not just across groups but within them. Wilkerson labels this same phenomenon “last place anxiety” and suggests that, excluded from competition with the dominant caste, those of the lowest caste are instead impelled to compete. This competition can take many forms, exerting a downward drag on perceived upward mobility in financial, professional, or creative domains. Often, however, as Wilkerson notes, intra-caste competition centers on relatively superficial traits—traits that only have meaning in the first place because of the caste hierarchy. She identifies colorism (the assignment of value based on skin color, usually with the connotation of lighter skin being preferred) as one such intra-caste prejudice and alludes to the historical valuing of straight, smooth-textured hair as another.

Similar modes of competition have played out among middle-caste European, Latin American, African, and Caribbean immigrants. As they become acculturated to the caste hierarchy of the United States, members of these groups have often learned to esteem and emphasize the traits already associated with whiteness and to downplay or mask those traits associated with blackness. For members of these groups, Wilkerson suggests, the struggle is not to avoid falling in last place altogether—the caste hierarchy is too strict to permit that—but to avoid being in last place within one’s group and thus closer to the subordinate than to the dominant caste.

“Without a scapegoat [. . .] the people had only themselves [. . .] and they scanned their countrymen for someone else to be better than.” (Ch. 21, p. 279)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: This statement sets the stage for the story of “The German Girl with the Dark, Wavy Hair.” Wilkerson offers this real-life cautionary tale as an illustration of how caste ideals persist even when the dominant caste has succeeded in banishing or eliminating those it deems inferior. The narcissistic aspects of caste consciousness can only work if there is an “other” for the dominant group to weigh itself against, “to be better than.” Thus, in the situation where the subordinate caste is driven away almost entirely—as happened under the Nazis—newer, narrower forms of caste prejudice begin to show themselves.

In a sense, this story is the mirror image of the “last place anxiety” that Wilkerson alludes to a few chapters earlier. Caste structures condition those on the lowest rung to fight among themselves for closeness—and even superficial likeness—to those at the top. Likewise, this story describes a kind of “first place anxiety” in which a society that has banished or killed off its subordinates and scapegoats begins to search for new ones. This scenario of having to provide ever more stringent proofs of one’s “Aryan-ness” aligns closely with what Wilkerson learns from Bhimrao Ambedkar, namely, that caste is above all a “state of mind.”

“The people voting this way were [. . .] voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system [. . .] was in their interest.” (Ch. 26, p. 327)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: The 2016 presidential election is a recurring subject of discussion in Caste, as it was in American media generally during the four years between 2016 and the publication of Wilkerson’s book. The election sets the stage for the discussion of present-day American casteism in Part 1, appears in the background of many chapters, and serves as the springboard for Wilkerson’s discussions of resurgent police brutality and caste-based vigilantism. Elsewhere in the chapter quoted here, Wilkerson argues that the voter breakdown by demographic matches the current caste arrangements in the United States.

If election results can help in understanding caste—and Wilkerson argues it can—then an understanding of caste can also help in unpacking the results of the 2016 election. In other words, Wilkerson’s position is that caste dynamics are of practical, pragmatic interest to anyone seeking to understand American politics, whatever their goals might be. To her, the widespread complaint among Democrats that people voted for Donald Trump “against their own interests” misses an important part of the picture. It is perfectly consonant with some voters’ interests, Wilkerson says, to elect a president who will “maintain the caste system,” irrespective of his personal conduct or administrative agenda. To ignore or underestimate this powerful vested interest in caste is, she argues, naive.

“He had been told a lie, [. . .] his father had been told a lie, and that trying to live up to the lie had taken some part of his father away.” (Ch. 30, p. 363)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: The next-to-last numbered chapter in Caste tells of a Brahmin who rejects his caste identity because he sees it as fraudulent. His story reinforces what Wilkerson has been saying throughout the book: that caste systems not only distort human relationships but also rob individuals of their self-worth. It is easy to see how this would be true for those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, who are told lies about their unworthiness, but Wilkerson insists that those at the top also suffer from a corrupted sense of self. To return to Wilkerson’s theater analogy, those who are assigned the lead role still face pressure to live up to that role when they may have the aptitude—or indeed the preference—to be a supporting actor.

The unnamed man in this chapter has seen through the illusion of caste because he has witnessed his father try—and fail—to assert mastery over a lower-caste person. The father’s reaction to this failure is somewhat ambiguous, but the fact that he flees his family and his villages suggests that he has lost much of his dignity—even his identity—by not living up to Brahmin ideals. For the son, this tragedy is reason enough to renounce caste in its entirety.

“A world without caste would set everyone free.” (Epilogue, p. 388)

—Isabel Wilkerson

Analysis: At the very end of Caste, Wilkerson holds up an image of what it would mean to live free of the arbitrary constraints imposed by casteism. Significantly, Wilkerson calls for “a world without caste” and not just for an America or an India without caste. In other words, she concludes by reiterating what she has said throughout much of the book: caste and its attendant problems are not exclusive to any one country, so an end to caste-based oppression is worth pursuing worldwide.

Wilkerson’s ideal of freedom likewise transcends individual societies; it is, she says, a state that all people aspire to and one that all can recognize as worth pursuing. She has already provided many examples of what a casteless society is free from: prejudice and the stereotypes it creates but also the unnecessary friction and waste of having to defend one’s place in a hierarchy. In a casteless world, people are free to recognize talent, beauty, and accomplishment wherever and in whomever those qualities appear. Ultimately, Wilkerson suggests that a casteless society is one in which humanity is free to pursue and protect what truly matters, to face common threats such as climate change and public health crises. In that sense, humanity’s survival—and not only its well-being in the present—may depend on creating the kind of freedom that Wilkerson identifies.