Part 6: Backlash Summary

In Chapter 25, Wilkerson describes the election of Barack Obama to the US presidency as an event that broke through caste norms. Given this, she says, it is unsurprising that there was such a profound backlash to Obama’s election. Political conservatives made it their mission to prevent Obama from winning a second term; lawmakers and other officials from the dominant caste felt entitled to talk down to the president. Wilkerson argues that birtherism and the Tea Party, two notable right-wing movements of the Obama years, were both symptoms of resistance to the idea of a Black president.

Chapter 26 steps forward to the end of the Obama administration and the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Wilkerson shares her early—and, as it happens, prescient—conviction that Donald Trump would have a serious chance at winning the White House. She attributes Trump’s victory to his ability to tap the “insecurities and disaffection” of white American voters, citing various social scientists and political observers to support this claim. Reviewing voter preferences by race and gender, Wilkerson sees in the 2016 election a “blueprint” for the caste structure of the United States.

Chapter 27 discusses another phenomenon widely associated with the late 2010s—the removal of Confederate monuments amid threats of violence. Wilkerson holds that building of such monuments—and the naming of schools and streets after Confederate generals—was a deliberate power play intended to remind subordinate-caste Americans of their assigned place in society. Opposition to the removal of one monument to Robert E. Lee was so entrenched, she reports, that the construction crew had to work under cover of night with a police escort. In Germany, Wilkerson points out, Hitler’s bunker was unceremoniously paved over with a parking lot, and monuments were erected to the victims—not the perpetrators—of the Holocaust.

The brief, single-scene Chapter 28 circles back to the summer of 2015, when incidents of police brutality led to the protests that first won national recognition for the Black Lives Matter movement. Wilkerson recalls a series of conversations with historian Taylor Branch in which they debated how far back the country had gone because of newly inflamed caste prejudices. Branch suggests the 1950s; Wilkerson says the 1880s.

Chapter 29 outlines the “price” of caste in terms of life expectancy, mass incarceration, and overall loss in human potential. She argues that many of the policies widely accepted in other wealthy nations—for example, in health care and public education—are nonstarters in the United States because of caste-ist attitudes. The COVID-19 pandemic, Wilkerson suggests, provides a depressingly clear example of how the country’s caste hierarchy, by promoting infighting and hindering cooperation, prevents it from responding effectively to crises.

Part 6: Backlash Analysis

One marked difference between the US caste system and that of India is the shape of the “caste pyramid.” Of the major castes of India, the uppermost (the Brahmins) constitute less than 5% of the population, and a further 15% or so come from the Kshatriya, or second-uppermost caste. The dominant caste in the United States, in contrast, is still a majority and is projected to remain so for decades. In that sense, the “pyramid” in the United States is quite top-heavy and not truly pyramidal in shape. Nonetheless, Part 6 describes the ways in which white Americans are taught to see and present themselves as under siege. Wilkerson calls particular attention to the anxiety surrounding the year 2042, when a much-publicized 2008 census projection held that non-Hispanic whites would be a minority in the United States.

That figure is worth contextualizing a bit further, as “minority” simply means “less than 50% of the population.” Articles reporting on the 2008 projection often conflated or encouraged the conflation of an absolute majority with political and economic power. Thus, a Guardian article from August 2008 claims that “the dominance of non-Hispanic white people . . . will be whittled away.” Wilkerson argues, however, that there is no reason to think the fortunes of white Americans will decline simply because they constitute 49% rather than 51% of the population. Researchers tracking population changes since 2008 have, moreover, argued that the very rhetoric of “decline” facilitates racial extremism: in fact, according to the projections, no one traditionally defined racial group will represent a majority of Americans. Thus, it would be clearer—if less sensational—to say that 2042 marks the projected date when non-Hispanic white Americans go from being a majority to a plurality.