caste

Caste: The Lies That Divide Us (Allen Lane) by Isabel Wilkerson

No Democratic president has won the majority of white-American votes since 1963, Isabel Wilkerson notes towards the end of this timely, important work. That year, Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the civil rights act, which, after four centuries, finally conferred citizenship upon African-Americans. Johnson predicted that the Democrats would lose the southern states for a generation. This prophecy was a serious understatement. These racial faultlines continue to define US politics to this day.

In Caste, Wilkerson – a journalist who, in 1993, became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer – argues that racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of black people in America, describing it instead as a caste system. The book offers a searing description of the nature of caste – a stratified, internalised hierarchy – which is instructive far beyond America’s elections. Wilkerson frames racism as the skin of something deeper; complex structures that determine standing and respect, assumptions of competence and access to resources.

As Wilkerson explains, we assert and confer status subconsciously, by “knowing without thinking that you are one up from another, based on rules not set down on paper”. The perceived rise of lower castes – through increased political agency and demographic change – can prompt fear amongst those in the top caste, something which has recently played out in US politics: “Contrary to wistful predictions of post-racial harmony . . . anti-black attitudes rose, rather than fell . . . in Obama’s first term.”

Caste does not shy away from describing the performative violence that ensures that the bottom rung remains immovable, making this work both vivid and at times tough going. This includes well-known examples, such as Jim Crow-era lynchings. The descriptions of entire towns cheering on vigilante murder chime with caste-based atrocities in India. Other parallels are less well known, such as the obsession with purity that the American caste system shares with India’s – for example, the imagined pollution of swimming pools by African-American bodies.

The book peels back the layers of the social mechanics that maintain America’s rigid hierarchy. This is what the American dream has been built on, and it is far from predetermined by the simplistic western notion of “race”. As Wilkerson shows, almost all rungs of the American caste system are allowed to dream, as long as they partake in the subjugation of those at the bottom: African-Americans, upon whose misery waves of new citizens have gained validation, in a literal economic sense as well as spiritually. As Wilkerson writes: “Who are you if there is no one to be better than?”

A common assertion on the left is that supporters of Donald Trump, particularly working-class voters, are “voting against their interests”, but Wilkerson argues that this analysis misses a fundamental point. “Many voters, in fact, made an assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits . . . to preserve what their actions say they value most – the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.”

Caste provides a lucid description of dynamics that extend far beyond the States. Caste systems, most notably India’s, work through the continual struggle of caste groups in the churn of societal ladder-climbing, as they aspire for status by worship of the highest echelons of the caste, while simultaneously distancing themselves from and subjugating those at the bottom. “Everyone in the caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste.”

As discussions of race and racism take on great urgency this year with the global Black Lives Matter movement, Caste gives us a timely insight into why, despite changes in the law and seemingly progressive reforms in the United States and elsewhere, our societies are still plagued by ancient tribalisms.

This article is from the New Humanist winter 2020 edition. Subscribe today.