Part 2: The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions Summary

To further explain caste systems, Chapter 4 offers the analogy of a play in which everyone’s part and costuming is determined at birth. People are rewarded for playing their roles well and punished for deviating from them. Wilkerson says that in the case of the United States, this “play” began in 1619, when racial distinctions between African and European Virginians were made for the first time. Laws forbidding intermarriage followed, and by the end of the 17th century, chattel slavery was deeply entrenched in the colonies’ politics and economies. Black Americans (Wilkerson generally opts for the term African-Americans) were systematically dehumanized and were punished viciously for the slightest infractions. The Civil War ended slavery, but new forms of repression came about after Reconstruction. As they arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries, European immigrants came to be seen as “white”—a category that did not exist in their homelands. Likewise, Wilkerson reports, contemporary Africans are not “black” until they come to a country, such as the United States, that makes use of such racial divisions.

Chapter 5 shows some of the ethnographic reporting that Wilkerson widely used in The Warmth of Other Suns. She tells of a Black Texan woman named Miss Hale—first name Miss, last name Hale—whose father gave her that name so that the dominant caste (i.e., white people) would have to show at least formal respect by using the proper title. Wilkerson then pivots to her own experience as a New York Times reporter who was denied an interview because the interviewee did not believe she, a Black woman, could be the reporter he was awaiting. “His caste notions of who should be doing what in society had [. . .] blinded him,” Wilkerson observes.

In Chapter 6, Wilkerson asks the reader to contemplate how strange it would be if height, not race, were to become the basis for discrimination in society. This world of Talls and Shorts, she says, seems preposterous, and it is easy to see that height is an arbitrary way to divide people into groups. The “illogic of race” seems normal only because it has been repeated so often for so long. Next, Wilkerson reflects further on the relationship between race and caste. She contends that racism is not “the only term or the most useful term” to describe the systemic inequalities in the United States. Individual attitudes of bigotry, she suggests, are symptomatic of a larger system that attempts to keep people fixed in their societal roles.

Chapter 7 recounts Wilkerson’s experiences traveling to India to learn about the caste system there. The parallels to the American situation are explained, and the Dalits—the lowest caste, formerly called the Untouchables—are introduced in detail. Wilkerson notes that in both India and the United States, the abolition of slavery only led to the lowest caste being held in less formal types of servitude, such as debt bondage. She cautions that the two systems are not identical; the Indian system is much older and has a much more complicated hierarchy.

Chapter 8 describes the artificial and deliberate acceleration of caste prejudice under the Nazis, who, as Wilkerson notes, used US race laws as the blueprint for their anti-Jewish discrimination. In discussing the Nazis’ racial purity laws, she points out that they could not quite bring themselves to enact a “one-drop rule” like that in some Southern US states.

Chapter 9, a series of brief scenes entitled “The Evil of Silence,” sharpens the comparison from the previous chapters by juxtaposing Nazi genocide and lynching from the 20th-century American South. She observes that for many bystanders, lynching was a gruesome form of entertainment—so much so that picture postcards were widely sent as souvenirs.

Part 2: The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions Analysis

In Part 2, Wilkerson points out the arbitrariness of caste, meaning its lack of a real basis in differences of intelligence, beauty, morality, or other clearly desirable qualities. She does this most strikingly through the conceit of the Talls and the Shorts in Chapter 6. This example contains the added lesson that the cutoff between upper and lower caste is itself arbitrary. People form a continuum of heights, skin colors, and ancestries, and it is not at all obvious why “five foot eight,” “one-quarter Jewish ancestry,” or “one drop of African blood” should be taken as a clear dividing line between groups of people. Wilkerson argues that caste markers are inherently arbitrary and that it is only through constant reinforcement and reiteration that they come to seem natural.

Another point, introduced earlier but expanded greatly in Part 2, is that caste systems around the world have major commonalities. Thus, those trying to understand and fight casteism in one country can learn from the experiences of others in seemingly quite different cultures. In Part 1, Wilkerson focused on the uniqueness of the American political moment surrounding the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Here, she broadens the picture across both time and place to show that caste-based violence and bigotry are not uniquely American issues, even if they take a unique form in America. Indeed, in showing how the Nazis relied on American models for their own caste regime, Wilkerson provides proof that one society can learn lessons about caste—in the Nazis’ case, the wrong lessons—from another.