Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
By Isabel Wilkerson
Random House
Late in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson recounts a conversation in 2018 with fellow journalist Taylor Branch on the state of race relations in America. Branch described the situation as reminiscent of the 1950s on the eve of the Second Reconstruction. Wilkerson countered that the situation was reminiscent of the approximately 70 years beginning around 1880, when white supremacism defied the promised anti-racism of the First Reconstruction. Branch’s optimism soon waned. He declared that the key question of the moment was how many Americans, given a choice between democracy and whiteness, “would choose whiteness?” Wilkerson writes that “[w]e let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess …”
The outcome of the 2020 presidential election offers an ambiguous answer. By selecting Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the United States electorate dodged utter and immediate ruination by depriving Donald Trump of a second term. Nearly half the electorate, however, some 70 million voters, preferred Trump. And the Trumpist Republican Party gained seats in the House of Representatives and seems likely to hold on to its majority in the Senate. Tens of millions of Americans indicate that they are all too ready to choose whiteness over democracy.
In Caste, Wilkerson seeks to reveal the horrific lineage of the racism pervasive in American society. Hasn’t this tragic tale been told at length before? Yes, it has. Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, first published in 1968, remains unsurpassed in its analysis of the origins of Anglo-American Negrophobia. And there exists a library of books exposing the centrality of racial slavery, the betrayal of Reconstruction, the depredations of Jim Crow segregation, the resistance to the civil rights movement, and the persistence of the race line. But the educational radiations of even great books fade quickly, while there exists a constant need to instruct newly maturing audiences. The great Samuel Johnson once observed that “[p]eople need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.” Caste is an elaborate reminder of things that many Americans of all races would just as soon forget. It is a catalog of racial degradation.
Wilkerson is worth reading as a curator of racial wrongs. The offense she mines most deeply is slavery, noting that “[t]he vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.” Wilkerson impresses upon readers in vivid detail what slavery meant, showing how “loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.” She quotes the Virginia General Assembly mandating in 1662 that “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother,” a provision that revised the English common law under which children inherited the status of the father. This revision was an acknowledgment of the frequency with which enslaved Black women were bearing children fathered by white masters. The revision was also an incentive for sexual exploitation to continue, since children born of it enlarged masters’ estates. This provision, Wilkerson writes, “converted the black womb into a profit center … as neither mother nor child could make a claim against an upper-caste man, and no child springing from a black womb could escape condemnation to the lowest rung.”
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The mistreatment of Black women under slavery has seldom received the attention it warrants. Abolitionists did focus upon this feature of “the peculiar institution”; it was, for example, an important aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But after the Civil War, when defeated Confederates and their allies succeeded in concocting an influential myth of plantation benevolence, mention of the slave regime’s pervasive sexual criminality was resolutely repressed. It remained, however, an excruciating presence in the minds of many Blacks. “I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me,” Malcolm X declared. This summer, during the George Floyd moment, the Black poet Caroline Randall Williams authored a striking column in The New York Times challenging the valorization of Confederates by monuments across the country, but particularly in the South. “[I]f they want monuments,” she wrote, “well, then, my body is a monument.” Damning her white male ancestors, she observed: “I have rape-colored skin.”
Wilkerson is similarly attentive to the sexual tribulations of Black men, particularly their victimization at the hands of those who have believed widespread tales that Black men are obsessed with white women and thus threatening to the purity of white bloodlines. She describes in detail the lynchings of Black men accused of sexual crimes against white women. The most memorable of the stories she recounts, however, involves neither a man nor an accusation of rape. In 1943 in Live Oak, Florida, a 15-year-old Black boy named Willie James Howard sent a Christmas card to a white girl named Cynthia. When he learned that his card may have displeased the girl, Howard wrote a note of apology in which he said, “I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you, all we want [is] to be your friends.” The next day, in retribution for this violation of racial etiquette, the girl’s father and two other white men dragged Willie James and his father to the banks of the Suwannee River. They “hog-tied Willie James and held a gun to his head. They forced him to jump and forced his father at gunpoint to watch him drown. Held captive and outnumbered as the father was, he was helpless to save his only child.” The men who committed this crime admitted that they abducted the boy but claimed that he jumped into the river on his own. No criminal prosecution against them was ever undertaken.
Confronting one of the great mysteries of modern times, Wilkerson asks how it was that the America that twice elected Barack Obama to the presidency could turn around and elect Donald Trump? For her, Obama’s election amounted to the “greatest departure from the script of the American caste system” in the history of the United States. She suggests, though, that there were indications from the outset of Obama’s rise that his ascendancy would mark not so much a harbinger of new possibilities as a miracle with little likelihood of repetition. “To break more than two centuries of tradition and birthright,” she observes, “it would take the human equivalent of a supernova.” Noting that Obama is the child of a white American mother and a Black man born in Africa, Wilkerson hypothesizes that the origin story of the former president freed many whites inclined to support him from having to think about commonplace racism or commonplace Blacks. White folks, she ventures, “could regard him with curiosity and wonderment and even claim him as part of themselves, if they chose.” Even so, only 43 percent of whites who voted supported Obama in 2008, and only 39 percent supported him in 2012.
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In Wilkerson’s view, the story of the white reaction that culminated in the election of Donald Trump is largely the tale of a massive racial freak-out by whites. Many of them have been unhinged, she argues, by anxieties over racial status. They are fearful of the demographic transformation that will make them a minority in a few decades. And they resent the emergence of people of color who are sufficiently assertive to proclaim the virtue of being unapologetically Black. Many millions of white Americans grew up under the spell of an unspoken curriculum which taught that the USA was a white man’s country. For them, the spectacle of a Black family occupying the White House was shocking indeed.
Many commentators have struggled to explain why whites of modest means vote for Republican candidates whose pro-rich economic policies seem so apparently at odds with the interests of those voters. For Wilkerson, there is no mystery. As she sees it, many of the middling whites who vote for Republicans are not victims of false consciousness but consumers and practitioners of caste consciousness. In supporting politicians who are either consciously or unconsciously committed to perpetuating the traditional racial pecking order, many whites are voting their interests—as they define those interests. The comfort of being ahead of “them” even in the grip of decline is a sufficient psychological premium that many whites are willing to “forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in [America’s racial] hierarchy as they had known it.” That is why, Wilkerson concludes, in “the pivotal election of 2016 … the majority of whites voted for the candidate [Donald Trump] who made the most direct appeals to the characteristic most rewarded in the caste system. They went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the hierarchy.”
Wilkerson argues that racism is a toxin that hurts not only racial minorities but the entire population. She insists that racism, as much as anything else, accounts for the primitive and truncated state of American social welfare policy. She maintains that racism vitiates the interracial communal empathy needed to undergird generous governmental supports for those in need. “Caste does not explain everything in American life,” Wilkerson observes, “but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste.” It is because of racial caste that “the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.” Infant mortality in the United States is the highest among the richest nations. American women are more at risk of death during pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy countries. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, while life expectancy is the lowest among the 11 highest-income countries (beneath the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark).
Wilkerson’s deployment of the idea of caste, however, sheds little new light on our understanding of racism. She writes that “[c]aste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” She observes that a caste system “uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.” She posits that in the American caste system, “race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.” She declares that while caste is “fixed and rigid,” “[r]ace is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition.” These various formulations, albeit initially interesting, do not offer substantial guidance in exploring the race question in America.
Nor did I glean much from her comparisons of anti-Black repression in the United States and the repression of Jews in Germany and “untouchables” in India. She portrays these examples of oppression as uniquely similar, writing that “[t]hroughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.” Is there really an analytic payoff in grouping these three regimes? Or are they just the ones with which Wilkerson and her likely audience are already most familiar? To make the claim of uniqueness persuasively, one would have had to study many brutally repressive, rigidly hierarchical societies across the globe and over many eras and then make comparisons among them. There is little indication of such study in Wilkerson’s volume.
Wilkerson writes that while her book “seeks to consider the effects on everyone caught in the hierarchy, it devotes significant attention to the poles of the American caste system, those at the top, European Americans, who have been its primary beneficiaries, and those at the bottom, African-Americans.” What about Native Americans? They are given virtually no attention by Wilkerson. It is frequently said that slavery was America’s “original sin.” Yet much of the land mass constituting the United States of America was seized from Indian nations by conquest, duress, and fraud. Indian peoples have been slaughtered, enslaved, detained, removed, segregated, vilified, and subjected to forced assimilation. Academic historians have documented these atrocities; note, for example, the volumes by Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the Californian Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, and Jeffery Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. Overall, though, the conquest and mistreatment of Native Americans occupy the American mind with nowhere near the saliency of Black slavery and anti-Black segregation. Even liberal politicians routinely render Indian peoples invisible by paeans to “pioneers” who “settled” an “empty” wilderness.
While the misery index among Black Americans—rates of incarceration, impoverishment, unemployment, risk of victimization by criminality, premature death—is scandalously high, the misery index among Native Americans is just as alarming, if not even worse. Black Americans, though, have been far more effective than Native Americans in publicizing their plight, aspirations, and demands. The ubiquity of Black Lives Matter is a reflection of African American power as well as vulnerability.
The ubiquity of Black Lives Matter is a reflection of African American power as well as vulnerability.
Throughout American history, some whites have been willing to subordinate virtually everything—even the survival of their governments—to white supremacy. During the American Revolution, George Washington suggested to his comrades in South Carolina that in order to defeat the British, they might have to arm at least some of their slaves and promise them emancipation as payment for fighting on behalf of the rebels. The South Carolina authorities indicated that they would rather lose to the British than arm their Black slaves. During the Civil War, some secessionists begged their new government to arm slaves and promise them freedom in return for fighting on behalf of the Confederacy. But the racism of the Confederacy prevented it from taking this step even to save itself. During World War II, there were bigots who said that they would prefer to see white soldiers die than have them transfused with blood offered by Black volunteers. Almost two decades later, the governor of Arkansas closed all of the high schools in Little Rock for a year rather than submit to a federal court decision ordering the continued desegregation of one of the schools. Asked why she supported the governor, even though his policy would cost her educationally, a white teenager responded forthrightly: “I’d rather be dumb than go to schools with niggers.”
So, yes, the depth, pervasiveness, and intensity of racism is a profound and inescapable part of the American story. But so, too, are contradictory sentiments, a key feature of the American story that Wilkerson slights. One need not avert one’s gaze from Thomas Jefferson’s wicked hypocrisy to acknowledge the ageless grandeur of his liberatory rhetoric. From Frederick Douglass to Huey Newton, champions of the Black freedom struggle have quoted approvingly Jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal.” One need not defend the moral crimes of the Founding Fathers to note that a faction of them did succeed in preventing the nation’s founding Constitution from expressly embracing or encouraging racial slavery. One need not apologize for the deficiencies of the statesmen who hammered out the Reconstruction Amendments to recognize that they are, as Eric Foner has recently argued, quite exceptional in world history in the extent and alacrity with which they elevated (male) slaves to citizenship and to full participation in government.
Although anti-Black racism has been on vivid and grotesque display throughout American history, it has also been constantly challenged, frequently limited, and even sometimes stirringly routed. An African American was twice elected president of the United States. A Black woman will soon become vice president of the United States. Black voters in South Carolina played a decisive role in elevating Joe Biden to the front of the pack in the campaign to be the Democratic Party standard-bearer. And Black voters constituted a strong and essential segment of the coalition that lifted Biden to the presidency. This summer, during the nationwide protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, African American demonstrators were joined by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators of various racial backgrounds who insisted as one that Black Lives Matter. Many other markers of progress and protest could be pointed to even as we continue to feel the foreboding shadow of Trumpism. Yes, we remain mired in the muck of racial caste. But we are also beneficiaries of anti-racist struggles upon which can be built future campaigns for enhanced racial equity. The struggle for racial decency goes on.
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