Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Cover image, based on a photo by Bruce Davidson at Magnum Photos[1] | |
| Author | Isabel Wilkerson |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Robin Miles |
| Cover artist | Greg Mollica (based on photo by Bruce Davidson) |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Random House (US) Allen Lane (UK) |
Publication date | 4 August 2020 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type |
|
| Pages | 496 |
| Awards | |
| ISBN | 978-0-593-23025-1 |
| OCLC | 1147928120 |
| 305.5122 | |
| LC Class | HT725.U6 |
| All identifiers refer to the hardcover edition unless otherwise noted | |
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. The book describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system—a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. Wilkerson does so by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, and she explores the impact of caste on societies shaped by them, and their people.
Caste, which followed Wilkerson's 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns, was met with critical acclaim and commercial success. It won or was nominated for several awards, and was featured prominently on nonfiction bestsellers lists and year-end best-books lists. It received a film adaptation in 2023, Origin, written and directed by Ava DuVernay.
In Caste, Wilkerson identifies eight "pillars of caste", or features of caste systems in various societies:[4]
- Divine will: the belief that social stratification is beyond human control, either divinely ordained or a natural law, as in the biblical story of the curse of Ham that was used to justify Black inferiority in the U.S.
- Heritability: the belief that social status is acquired at birth and immutable, as codified e.g. in the U.S. "one-drop rule" that determined Black ancestry
- Endogamy: the prohibition of sex and marriage between castes, as in the former U.S. anti-miscegenation laws
- Purity and pollution: the belief that the dominant caste is "pure" and must be protected against pollution by the inferior castes, as shown in the segregation of facilities for bathing, eating, education, etc. in the U.S. Jim Crow era
- Occupational hierarchy: the reservation of the more desirable occupations for the superior castes, as enshrined in U.S. Jim Crow laws that restricted Black people to farm or domestic work
- Dehumanization and stigma: the denial of individuality and human dignity of lower-caste individuals, as through the various arbitrary punishments and restrictions to which enslaved and free Black people were subject to in the U.S., down to racist carnival games.
- Terror and cruelty: as means of enforcement of the caste system and control of lower-caste people, as through the whippings of slaves or the lynchings of Black people in the U.S.
- Inherent superiority and inferiority of castes: the belief that people of one caste are inherently superior to those of other castes, expressed e.g. in restrictions on clothing or displays of status by lower-caste people (such as driving a car).
Wilkerson illustrates these pillars through examples from three caste systems: those of India, Nazi Germany and the United States.
She goes on to describe the "tentacles of caste": the various ways in which a caste system society permeates the workings of a society infected by it. These include the anxious efforts of upper-caste people to retain their superior social status even while their economic status crumbles (hence the "necessity of a bottom rung", or the perceived need to prevent lower-caste success), unconscious biases embedded in a society's culture that perpetuate the caste system, or the function of lower-caste people as scapegoats.[5] In her view, the caste framework also helps explain the participation of lower-caste people (Jewish kapos, Black police officers) in the oppression of their fellow caste members: caste systems self-perpetuate by rewarding those lower-caste people who comply with the system, thereby keeping the lower castes divided.[6]
Wilkerson continues by describing the "consequences of caste", which degrade people of all castes. Among them are the "narcissism of caste", which makes culture revolve around and idealize the dominant caste, or the Stockholm syndrome that serves as a survival mechanism for lower-caste people but helps keep them captive, or the physiological stress experienced by lower-caste people that reduces their life expectancy.[7] She addresses the mechanisms of backlash against attempts to transcend the caste system, as exemplified by the first lower-caste U.S. president (Barack Obama) being succeeded by one intent on reinforcing the system (Donald Trump), and the importance of the "symbols of caste", such as swastikas or Confederate flags, to the perpetuation of the system.[8] She concludes that societies in the grip of a caste system pay a harsh price for it: the distrust between castes translates into brutal criminal justice systems, and minimal or dysfunctional public health or social welfare systems – and as a result, a reduction in welfare for all but the most affluent, compared to other societies. In Wilkerson's view, the comparatively poor performance of the U.S. in the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the high rate at which it impacts lower-caste Americans, are one example of such effects.[9]
Finally, Wilkerson asks whether a "world without caste [that] would set everyone free" can exist. She concludes that it is possible – as in the dismantlement of Nazism after World War II – but that it requires both the bravery of individuals and an enormous effort of collective will especially by the dominant caste, given how deeply caste systems, like a chronic disease, are embedded in and shape societies.[10]
Wilkerson argues that the social constructs of race and caste are not synonyms, but that they "can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin."[11]
Netflix produced a film adaptation of the book, titled Origin and directed by Ava DuVernay.[12] The film, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga and Niecy Nash-Betts, had its world premiere at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on September 6, 2023[13] and a theatrical release in the U.S. in January 2024. It received generally favorable reviews.
According to the review aggregator Book Marks and its parent organization, Literary Hub, the book has received critical acclaim.[14][15] Having analyzed 35 reviews of the book using their four-tier rating system, categorizing 21 as "rave", 4 as "positive", 9 as "mixed", and 1 as "pan", Literary Hub named it number one of "The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2020".[15] The only negative ("pan") review recorded by the site came from Tunku Varadarajan[16] writing for The Wall Street Journal.[17] The book received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly,[18] The Library Journal,[19] Kirkus,[20] and Booklist,[21] and was also reviewed by Kwame Anthony Appiah,[22] Dwight Garner,[11] Gillian Tett,[23] Fatima Bhutto,[24] Kenneth W. Mack,[25] Sunil Khilnani,[26] Gaiutra Bahadur,[27] Emily Bernard,[28] Lauren Michele Jackson,[29] Carlo Wolff,[30] Colin Grant,[31] Mihir Bose,[32] Matthew Syed,[33] and Yashica Dutt,[34] among others.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, for the cover story of The New York Times Book Review in August 2020, wrote that the book is "elegant and persuasive" and that it "is at once beautifully written and painful to read."[22] Dwight Garner, in The New York Times, described Caste as "an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."[11] Publishers Weekly called Caste a "powerful and extraordinarily timely social history" in its starred review of the book.[18] The Chicago Tribune wrote that Caste was "among the year's best" books, while The Washington Post called the epilogue "a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic language".[35][36]
Tunku Varadarajan gave the book a mixed review, writing that Wilkerson "never offers a convincing argument for why American history and society are better examined through the lens of caste than of race" and "scarcely acknowledges that modern America has made vast strides to address racism."[16] Time magazine called the book a "transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America."[37] The New York Journal of Books commended Wilkerson's body of work, writing, "Caste draws heavily on the powerful mingling of narrative, research, and visionary, sweeping insight that made Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns the definitive contemporary study of African Americans' twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time."[38]
Oprah Winfrey, after choosing the book for her 2020 Summer/Fall book club selection, said: "Of all the books I've chosen for book club over the decades, there isn't another that is more essential a read than this one."[39] The book was also listed as one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2020.[40]
Caste's honors include the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography[2],the AudioFile Earphones Award for the audiobook edition in 2020.[3], the Carl Sandburg Literary Award[41] and the New York University Axinn Foundation Prize.[42] The book was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize[43], the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award,[44] and the 2021 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.[45] Caste was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction,[46] the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award,[47] and the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction[48].In December 2020, Literary Hub analyzed 41 year-end best-books lists and reported that the book was among the most recommended of the year, making fifteen of the analyzed lists.[49] The lists include Time, who placed Caste at the top of its list of the 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, calling it an "electrifying work that reframes injustice and inequity in the U.S."[50]
| Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Goodreads Choice Award | History & Biography | Won | [2] |
| AudioFile Earphones Awards | Won | [3] | ||
| Nonfiction | Nominated (longlist) | [46] | ||
| Kirkus Prize | Nonfiction | Nominated (finalist) | [43] | |
| Los Angeles Times Book Prize | Current Interest | Won | [51] | |
| 2021 | PEN/Jean Stein Book Award | N/A | Nominated (longlist) | [47] |
| PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award | Nonfiction | Nominated (finalist) | [45] |
The book became a number one New York Times nonfiction best-seller in early November 2020[52] and, as of the September 26, 2021, issue, had spent 58 weeks on The Times nonfiction best sellers list.[53] It is also a USA Today Best Seller, having debuted on August 13, 2020, the book peaked at number three and has spent 21 weeks on the list as of January 5, 2021.[54] According to Publishers Weekly, the book had sold over half a million copies by the close of 2020.[55]
- Hardcover: Wilkerson, Isabel (4 August 2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-593-23025-1. OCLC 1147928120. (496 pp.)
- Digital: Wilkerson, Isabel (4 August 2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-593-23026-8. OCLC 1147928120. (496 pp.)
- Audiobook (CD): Wilkerson, Isabel (18 August 2020), Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Miles, Robin, New York: Random House Audio, ISBN 978-0-593-39669-8, OCLC 1176245188 (870 minutes)
- Audiobook (MP3): Wilkerson, Isabel (4 August 2020), Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Miles, Robin, New York: Random House Audio, ISBN 978-0-593-33980-0, OCLC 1182631574 (867 minutes)
- Paperback: Caste: the origins of our discontents. Random House trade paperback. 14 February 2023. ISBN 9780593230275. OCLC 1369859133.
The book is published in the UK under the title Caste: The Lies That Divide Us.[56]
- Caste discrimination in the United States
- The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers of 2020
- The Color of Law
- ^ "The 13 Best Book Covers of August". Literary Hub. 2020-08-28. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ a b c Williams, Sydney (8 December 2020). "Goodreads Choice Awards 2020: Best 20 books this year". NBC News. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ a b c "Caste by Isabel Wilkerson Read by Robin Miles | Audiobook Review". AudioFile. August 2020. ISSN 1063-0244. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Caste, pp. 99–164
- ^ Caste, pp. 171 et seq.
- ^ Caste, pp. 238 et seq.
- ^ Caste, pp. 263 et seq.
- ^ Caste, pp. 311 et seq.
- ^ Caste, pp. 353 et seq.
- ^ Caste, pp. 361 et seq.
- ^ a b c Garner, Dwight (July 31, 2020). "Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' Is an 'Instant American Classic' About Our Abiding Sin". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
- ^ Jackson, Angelique (14 October 2020). "Ava DuVernay to Write, Direct and Produce 'Caste' Film Adaptation at Netflix". Variety. ISSN 0042-2738. Retrieved 2020-10-14.
- ^ Patten, Dominic (6 September 2023). ""Ava DuVernay Talks 'Origin', Neon Sale, Some Venice History & Global Appeal of Justice". Deadline. Retrieved 6 September 2023.
- ^ "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". Book Marks. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ a b "The Best Reviewed Nonfiction of 2020". Literary Hub. 2020-12-16. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ a b Varadarajan, Tunku (August 28, 2020). "'Caste' Review: The High Cost of Feeling Superior". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660.
- ^ "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". Book Marks. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ a b "Nonfiction book review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". Publishers Weekly. ISSN 0000-0019.
- ^ Sendaula, Stephanie (August 2020). "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". Library Journal. ISSN 0363-0277. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ "Caste". Kirkus Reviews. 15 June 2020. ISSN 1948-7428.
- ^ Bush, Vanessa (July 2020). "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by By Isabel Wilkerson". Booklist. ISSN 0006-7385.
- ^ a b Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2020-08-04). "What Do America's Racial Problems Have in Common With India and Nazi Germany?". The New York Times Book Review. ISSN 0028-7806. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Tett, Gillian (30 July 2020). "Why we need to talk about caste in America". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Bhutto, Fatima (2020-07-30). "Caste by Isabel Wilkerson review – a dark study of violence and power". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Mack, Kenneth W. (31 July 2020). "Running deeper than race: America's caste system". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
- ^ Khilnani, Sunil (7 August 2020). "Isabel Wilkerson's World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Bahadur, Gaiutra (2020-11-25). "Is America Trapped in a Caste System?". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Bernard, Emily (2020-08-04). ""Caste" Is a Trailblazing, Must-Read Book on the Birth of Inequality". O, The Oprah Magazine. ISSN 1531-3247. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Jackson, Lauren Michele (2020-08-03). "Caste Offers a New Word for Injustice in America, Not a New Way of Thinking". Vulture. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Wolff, Carlo (5 November 2020). "Journalist's dissection of caste systems shines light on racial dynamics in the U.S." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. ISSN 1068-624X. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Grant, Colin (30 October 2020). "Caste: The lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson book review". Times Literary Supplement. ISSN 0307-661X. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Bose, Mihir (17 October 2020). "Caste: The Lies that Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson: heartrending but too simplistic". The Irish Times. ISSN 0791-5144. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Syed, Matthew (9 August 2020). "Caste by Isabel Wilkerson review — a country divided by race". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Dutt, Yashica (17 September 2020). "Feeling Like an Outcast". Foreign Policy. ISSN 0015-7228. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ Borrelli, Christopher (August 3, 2020). "Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' is about the strict lines that keep us apart — lines that are more than race or class". Chicago Tribune. ISSN 1085-6706.
- ^ Qureshi, Bilal. "Isabel Wilkerson knows that effective discussions about race require new language. That's where 'Caste' comes in". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2020-11-17.
- ^ Worland, Justin (23 July 2020). "''Racism' Did Not Seem Sufficient.' Author Isabel Wilkerson on the American Caste System". Time. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
- ^ Nathans-Kelly, Steve (August 2020). "a book review by Steve Nathans-Kelly: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". New York Journal of Books. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
- ^ Haber, Leigh (2020-08-05). "Oprah Is Sending 500 Copies of Her New Book Club Pick to CEOs and Leaders". O, The Oprah Magazine. ISSN 1531-3247. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ Simret, Aklilu (18 December 2020). "Barack Obama lists his favorite books of 2020". CNN. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ "Isabel Wilkerson, Nate Marshall Receive 2020 Chicago Public Library Foundation Awards". 14 October 2020.
- ^ "Isabel Wilkerson Receives Inaugural NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize".
- ^ a b "Raven Leilani's debut novel 'Luster' wins $50,000 Kirkus prize". USA Today. 6 November 2020. ISSN 0734-7456. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ "2020".
- ^ a b "Announcing the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists". 10 February 2021.
- ^ a b "National Book Awards 2020". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
- ^ a b "Announcing the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Longlists". PEN America. 2020-12-22. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ "2021 Winners". 18 October 2020.
- ^ Temple, Emily (2020-12-15). "The Ultimate Best Books of 2020 List". Literary Hub. Archived from the original on 2020-12-15. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
- ^ "The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020". Time. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved 2020-11-23.
- ^ Pineda, Dorany (2021-04-17). "Winners of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes announced". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 2021-04-17. Retrieved 2021-04-17.
- ^ "Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction - Best Sellers". The New York Times Book Review. November 1, 2020. ISSN 0028-7806. Retrieved 5 January 2021.
- ^ "The New York Times Best Seller List. Fiction" (PDF). Hewes. September 26, 2021. Retrieved 26 March 2023.
- ^ "Caste". USA Today. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ "Hardcover Frontlist Nonfiction". Publishers Weekly. 4 January 2021. ISSN 0000-0019. Retrieved 2021-01-05.
- ^ Ghadiali, Ashish (2020-08-31). "Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson - review". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 2023-10-26.
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Books of The Times
Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin
By Dwight Garner
Published July 31, 2020Updated Jan. 21, 2021
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A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.
I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
[Listen to Isabel Wilkerson on Sway: A Black and Asian Female V.P. Doesn’t Mean We’ve Escaped Caste.]
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Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.
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Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.
[ This book is one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. ]
This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”
Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” The reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment. She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.
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A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”
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Isabel Wilkerson, whose new book is “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”Credit...Joe Henson
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”
Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “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.”
Wilkerson does not shy from the brutality that has gone hand in hand with this kind of dehumanization. As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience. To feel the heat of the furnace of individual experience. It’s the kind of resolve Americans will require more of.
“Caste” gets off to an uncertain start. Its first pages summon, in dystopian-novel fashion, the results of the 2016 election alongside anthrax trapped in the permafrost being released into the atmosphere because of global warming. Wilkerson is making a point about old poisons returning to haunt us. But by pulling in global warming (a subject she never returns to in any real fashion) so early in her book, you wonder if “Caste” will be a mere grab bag of nightmare impressions.
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It isn’t.
Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.
She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?
She runs further with the notion of white resentment than many commentators have been willing to, and the juices of her argument follow the course of her knife. What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”
In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”
Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.
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“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It’s a book that changes the weather inside a reader.
While reading “Caste,” I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
By Isabel Wilkerson
474 pages. Random House. $32.
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Review
Book Reviews
'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation Is In Treatment Of Black Americans
August 10, 20205:00 AM ET
By
Hope Wabuke
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonRandom House
To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading — to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to craft deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched evidence — both historical and contemporary — in harmonious structures of language and form.
Now, in her sophomore effort, the former New York Times Chicago bureau chief does not disappoint. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing — a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis.
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What is caste? According to Wilkerson, "caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that "what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system."
Wilkerson's central thesis is that caste, while a global occurrence, achieves its most violent manifestation in the treatment of American Blacks, set at the lowest level in society through historical and contemporary oppression, marginalization and violence — all legally maintained through systems of law and order. "The English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist from of race ideology," Wilkerson writes, quoting the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley.
Wilkerson establishes a correlation between American Blacks, whom she names the "American untouchables" and the Indian "untouchables," or Dalits, as the lowest caste; while whites in America are the dominant, highest caste equivalent to the Indian Brahmins. Describing the treatment of Blacks in America, Wilkerson writes:
"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to convene an owner's debts or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."
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Wilkerson's argument is based on an exploration of what she names the three resonant caste systems in history: the Indian caste system, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system — which the Nazis researched when creating their own. "There were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world," Wilkerson writes, citing Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman as evidence: "'Their overwhelming interest was in the 'classic example,' the United States of America."
Wilkerson supports her analysis with an immense compendium of documented research that spans centuries. Through her detailed historical research, she unearths evidence that the violence toward Blacks that the American caste system espoused was too much even for the Nazis; they balked at replicating some of the more horrific acts of American racism toward Blacks. "[Herbert] Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers who thought American law went overboard," Wilkerson writes, while others, like Hans F. K. Günter, thought the American laws so outrageous as to be untrue.
Caste, Wilkerson posits, is dependent upon the dehumanization of the other, most powerfully seen in the use of Jews and Blacks as the subject of horrific experiments by the respective dominant caste systems of Germany and America. "German scientists and SS doctors conducted more than two dozen types of experiments on Jews and others they held captive," while "in the United States, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia," Wilkerson writes.
One of the most poignant examples Wilkerson describes is the violence done by Dr. J. Marion Sims, lauded as the founder of American gynecology, on the bodies of Black women:
"He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was not painful enough to justify the trouble. ..."
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Wilkerson says Sims would "invite leading men in town and apprentices in to see for themselves. He later wrote, 'I saw everything as no man had seen before.' "
Medical experiments were also carried out on Black men and Black children: Wilkerson notes Harriet Washington's research in Medical Apartheid in which a plantation doctor "made incisions into a black baby's head to test a theory for curing seizures" with "cobbler's tools" and "the point of a crooked awl." The horror is legion.
Wilkerson documents the pogroms of violence against the caste of American untouchables as waves throughout history — whether the violence of slavery or the waves of vigilante violence that that rose during Reconstruction and have continued since; incidents such the Ocoee, Fla., massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., are set in a continuum that meets with the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Ala., 40 years later in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof on a Black church five years ago. This violent terror is a marker of the caste system, Wilkerson writes. The descriptions are vivid in their horror; the connections travel across history and time to resonate in the mind.
This structural move is a classic trademark of Wilkerson's style, and one of the attributes of her unique voice that imbues her writing with such textured depth. Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows us an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste.
Caste is divided into six sections exploring the various aspects of caste: its origins, its sustainment and far-reaching "tentacles," and its effects — whether detrimental health for the givers and receivers of racism or the expected white supremacist backlash to the election of the first president of recognizable Black heritage: "The ability of a black person to supplant the racial caste system," Wilkerson writes, quoting the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was "the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted."
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Although a claim can be made that the opening chapter or two on the fallout of the 2016 election appear dated, this to be fair, is only because of what has happened to America in the interim since Wilkerson penned those words.
What is problematic is the glaring absence of Africa in a book that aims to position itself as a seminal text on the concept of a global caste system and the positioning of Blackness within that global caste system. Wilkerson glances at this briefly with a scant mention of South Africa in a couple of paragraphs and by quoting a woman identified only as a Nigerian playwright saying that "there are no Black people in Africa" — and then keeps it moving. Both are moments that do need to be unpacked. It is understandable why Wilkerson does not walk through this door to explore caste in Africa — Caste is 400 pages before adding the impressive list of research sources. But if Wilkerson is not opening that door, there does need to be an acknowledgement of why not, an acknowledgement of that absence.
Simply put: With colonization, European colonizers brought their caste system to Africa and implemented it over the already existing caste systems among many African ethnic groups.
Perhaps the absence of Africa is because of the caste system Wilkerson speaks of itself — to get people in the dominant caste to care about a narrative about Blackness and Brownness, about the lower castes, there must be a strong presence of whiteness in the conversation because it is the dominant caste system within the narrative.
And thus the caste system rears its head to affect a work about the caste system in real time.
This points, ultimately, to the role of personal accountability within a caste system. What does one do with this knowledge of the violence of caste? Does one perpetuate it? Eradicate it?
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Interestingly, Wilkerson at times seems to argue not for an eradication of caste, but to create space for her, and others she meets, who have been miscast in their "caste" — regulated to the lowest caste when by intelligence or other attribute they should be in the higher caste, or vice versa. "We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author," Wilkerson writes. Even the ending "Awakening" section, couched as a look forward, is depicted less of an articulation of the possibilities of a world without caste, and more of her desire simply to be seen as equal to those of the dominant caste.
In this, Wilkerson leans to biology. She offers the example of wolves as her support for the necessity of this hierarchal structure — the necessity not just of the alpha, but of the omega, or the underdog, beaten and abused by the others, the "untouchable." When the underdog dies, she writes, the whole pack is destabilized. No one wants to be the lowest of the low, "the scapegoat," but the pack needs one to survive.
Without the untouchable, Wilkerson argues here, society collapses. The untouchable is needed. Wilkerson just does not want to be one.
Writes Wilkerson:
"The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or seen as qualified for alpha positions — as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries — not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste."
I would argue that the tragedy, rather, is the need for these positions such as "omega" to still exist, which then justifies the need for this caste structure and its continued existence — even if it exists with Wilkerson's proffered edit that would allow an individual, no matter "background or caste," to hop into their desired caste and profit from the continued oppression of others the caste system welds.
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If we are to look at biology as evidence, let us consider the research of Eli D. Strauss and Kay E. Holekamp on hyenas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which offers another model for social positioning. Within the hyena community, as with wolves, there is a strict hierarchy of dominant caste and lower castes. But, if a female understands the hierarchy as unjust and challenges a more dominant member of the higher caste and her female peer group agrees with her, they will rise up across caste and challenge the dominant caste; if this female cross-caste coalition wins, the hierarchy is destabilized, and this radical feminist hyena and her cross-caste pack become the new dominant caste.
It is not enough, but it is a start.
Let us think not just about our own individual desires to be seen as a member of the dominant caste and benefit accordingly, but about the necessity to challenge this entire system of oppression radically. Let us think not just about replicating oppressive patriarchal systems but about alternative models such as matrilineal cross-cultural communication and connection.
Let us look not to the wolves, but to the hyenas.
Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
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Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
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“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.
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In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.
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"Magnificent . . . a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality . . . Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us."--O: The Oprah Magazine
"This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing. . . . Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word 'racism, ' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature. . . . It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing . . . Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic language."--Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post
"A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America."--Justin Worland, Time
"Magisterial . . . Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls. . . . Caste roams wide and deep, lives and deaths vividly captured, haloed with piercing cultural critique. . . . Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists."--Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Brave, clear and shatteringly honest in both approach and delivery . . . Extrapolating Wilkerson's ideas to contemporary America becomes an unsettling exercise that proves how right she is and how profoundly embedded into society the caste system is. . . . Her quest for answers frames everything and acts as the perfect delivery method for every explanation."--Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle
"Caste draws heavily on the powerful mingling of narrative, research, and visionary, sweeping insight that made Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns the definitive contemporary study of African Americans' twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time."--Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books
"Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure."--Kwame Anthony Appiah, TheNew York Times Book Review
"Wilkerson's book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it."--Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post
"Should be required reading for generations to come . . . A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships."--Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe
"[Caste] should be at the top of every American's reading list."--Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune
"An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice . . . This is an American reckoning and so it should be. . . . It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time."--Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian
"Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing . . . Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice. . . . A useful reminder to India's many upper-caste cosmopolitans . . . that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world's oldest democracy, and the world's largest."--Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror
"It is bracing to be reminded with such precision that our country was built through genocide and slavery. But Ms. Wilkerson has also provided a renewed way of understanding America's longest, fiercest trouble in all its complexity. Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down."--Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
"Like Martin Luther King, Jr. before her, Isabel Wilkerson has traveled the world to study the caste system and has returned to show us more clearly than ever before how caste is permanently embedded in the foundation and unseen structural beams of this old house called America. Isabel Wilkerson tells this story in prose that is so beautiful, the only reason to pause your reading is to catch your breath. You cannot understand America today without this book."--Lawrence O'Donnell
"This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all."--Library Journal (starred review)
"This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system."--Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine's list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
Product details
Publisher : Random House (4 August 2020)
Language : English
Hardcover : 544 pages
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T. Hill
5.0 out of 5 stars Great readReviewed in Australia on 19 April 2024
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Really enjoying this book so far. I was intrigued to read it after going to see the movie Origin. The movie is true to the book in terms of the author’s journey. I’m finding it very easy and interesting to read, unlike some non-fiction books which can be hard to follow
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Cindy
4.0 out of 5 stars The book tells it as is - There’s so much to learnReviewed in Australia on 10 January 2021
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Great education for anyone who cares to know and learn!
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Belinda
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, well researchedReviewed in Australia on 5 May 2021
Synopsis:
In Caste, Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson makes a bold and compelling argument that an unspoken caste system shaped America as we know it, and that that same caste system continues to define social, political, and educational structures in the US.
The author provides a well researched narrative blended with individual examples and her own personal history to show how this rigid ranking and hierarchy of humans based on skin colour in the US has links to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.
Through exploration of the impact of caste systems on healthcare, politics, life expectancy and culture (amongst other things), she makes a compelling argument for the dismantling of caste systems for the betterment of mankind.
My thoughts:
This has been on my to be read pile since it's release so I was glad to do a group read with @readingwithcamille to help pull apart some of the themes and discuss ideas.
This book required lots of highlighting of important paragraphs, ideas and quotes which I have subsequently revisited and reflected on.
I found the book to be very well researched and the author's arguments were certainly compelling, particularly in regards to the comparisons in India and Nazi Germany. Reading about slavery and the history in the Jim Crow South was disturbing and not for the faint hearted, but provided context as to how the current systems in the US came to light. I also found the book provided some context as to how and why Donald Trump was elected, and was very nearly re-elected.
It wasn't a 5 star read for me as the individual stories whilst adding emphasis, were not provided with references or discussion about how the information was sourced - as such, for me, they lacked rigour as evidence of her argument and were somewhat distracting in an otherwise well researched and referenced book.
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Brad Smith
1.0 out of 5 stars So bloody boringReviewed in Australia on 26 January 2021
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Why does everyone love a victim? There is a singular theme of a downtrodden section of society. It has been acknowledged so move on.
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Floyd Sully
5.0 out of 5 stars A literary tour de forceReviewed in Canada on 23 May 2024
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What an amazing writer. Her work is so packed with history and analysis. A great read.
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Rene Andrew
4.0 out of 5 stars Very insightfulReviewed in the United Arab Emirates on 5 August 2024
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Race is a complicated issue, this book illustrates another layer to an already complicated, yet unnecessary situation in our times. Read and learn.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Good to readReviewed in Belgium on 27 July 2024
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Still reading since is quite long. Was advised by some american friends.
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Bridget Koehler
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended!Reviewed in Spain on 17 April 2024
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Excellent! Thoughtfully detailed work by the author. Can be informative and certainly very beneficial to anyone who may be curious about how “one up-one down/ “Us vs. them” mentality is still working its power and control in the larger society. The author put forth an incredible book.
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K.holst
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and sadReviewed in Germany on 4 April 2024
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The story of slavery and what followed in the USA. The author goes back and forth between now and then, and you realize that little has change for a black person today. Very well written and extremely intereting.
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- 2020 non-fiction books
- Racism in the United States
- United States caste system
- Random House books
- Books about race and ethnicity in the United States
- American history books
- Books about African-American history
- Non-fiction books about racism
- Non-fiction books adapted into films
- English-language books
- Books about the caste system in India
- Books about Nazi Germany
- J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize-winning works
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Books of The Times
Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin
By Dwight Garner
Published July 31, 2020Updated Jan. 21, 2021
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A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.
I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.
I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.
[Listen to Isabel Wilkerson on Sway: A Black and Asian Female V.P. Doesn’t Mean We’ve Escaped Caste.]
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Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.
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Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.
[ This book is one of our most anticipated titles of August. See the full list. ]
This is a complicated book that does a simple thing. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times and whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, avoids words like “white” and “race” and “racism” in favor of terms like “dominant caste,” “favored caste,” “upper caste” and “lower caste.”
Some will quibble with her conflation of race and caste. (Social class is a separate matter, which Wilkerson addresses only rarely.) She does not argue that the words are synonyms. She argues that they “can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” The reader does not have to follow her all the way on this point to find her book a fascinating thought experiment. She persuasively pushes the two notions together while addressing the internal wounds that, in America, have failed to clot.
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A caste system, she writes, is “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning.”
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Isabel Wilkerson, whose new book is “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”Credit...Joe Henson“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. She observes that caste “is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.”
Wilkerson’s usages neatly lift the mind out of old ruts. They enable her to make unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans. Each country “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.”
Wilkerson does not shy from the brutality that has gone hand in hand with this kind of dehumanization. As if pulling from a deep reservoir, she always has a prime example at hand. It takes resolve and a strong stomach to stare at the particulars, rather than the generalities, of lives under slavery and Jim Crow and recent American experience. To feel the heat of the furnace of individual experience. It’s the kind of resolve Americans will require more of.
“Caste” gets off to an uncertain start. Its first pages summon, in dystopian-novel fashion, the results of the 2016 election alongside anthrax trapped in the permafrost being released into the atmosphere because of global warming. Wilkerson is making a point about old poisons returning to haunt us. But by pulling in global warming (a subject she never returns to in any real fashion) so early in her book, you wonder if “Caste” will be a mere grab bag of nightmare impressions.
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It isn’t.
Her consideration of the 2016 election, and American politics in general, is sobering. To anyone who imagined that the election of Barack Obama was a sign that America had begun to enter a post-racial era, she reminds us that the majority of whites did not vote for him.
She poses the question so many intellectuals and pundits on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests?
She runs further with the notion of white resentment than many commentators have been willing to, and the juices of her argument follow the course of her knife. What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, “was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.”
In her novel “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggested that “maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium and acute.”
Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word “racism,” yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.
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“Caste” deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It’s a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It’s a book that changes the weather inside a reader.
While reading “Caste,” I thought often of a pair of sentences from Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Underground Railroad.” “The Declaration [of Independence] is like a map,” he wrote. “You trust that it’s right, but you only know by going out and testing it for yourself.”
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
By Isabel Wilkerson
474 pages. Random House. $32.
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Review
Book Reviews
'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation Is In Treatment Of Black Americans
August 10, 20205:00 AM ET
By
Hope Wabuke
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonRandom House
To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading — to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to craft deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched evidence — both historical and contemporary — in harmonious structures of language and form.
Now, in her sophomore effort, the former New York Times Chicago bureau chief does not disappoint. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing — a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis.
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What is caste? According to Wilkerson, "caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that "what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system."
Wilkerson's central thesis is that caste, while a global occurrence, achieves its most violent manifestation in the treatment of American Blacks, set at the lowest level in society through historical and contemporary oppression, marginalization and violence — all legally maintained through systems of law and order. "The English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist from of race ideology," Wilkerson writes, quoting the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley.
Wilkerson establishes a correlation between American Blacks, whom she names the "American untouchables" and the Indian "untouchables," or Dalits, as the lowest caste; while whites in America are the dominant, highest caste equivalent to the Indian Brahmins. Describing the treatment of Blacks in America, Wilkerson writes:
"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to convene an owner's debts or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."
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Wilkerson's argument is based on an exploration of what she names the three resonant caste systems in history: the Indian caste system, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system — which the Nazis researched when creating their own. "There were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world," Wilkerson writes, citing Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman as evidence: "'Their overwhelming interest was in the 'classic example,' the United States of America."
Wilkerson supports her analysis with an immense compendium of documented research that spans centuries. Through her detailed historical research, she unearths evidence that the violence toward Blacks that the American caste system espoused was too much even for the Nazis; they balked at replicating some of the more horrific acts of American racism toward Blacks. "[Herbert] Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers who thought American law went overboard," Wilkerson writes, while others, like Hans F. K. Günter, thought the American laws so outrageous as to be untrue.
Caste, Wilkerson posits, is dependent upon the dehumanization of the other, most powerfully seen in the use of Jews and Blacks as the subject of horrific experiments by the respective dominant caste systems of Germany and America. "German scientists and SS doctors conducted more than two dozen types of experiments on Jews and others they held captive," while "in the United States, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia," Wilkerson writes.
One of the most poignant examples Wilkerson describes is the violence done by Dr. J. Marion Sims, lauded as the founder of American gynecology, on the bodies of Black women:
"He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was not painful enough to justify the trouble. ..."
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Wilkerson says Sims would "invite leading men in town and apprentices in to see for themselves. He later wrote, 'I saw everything as no man had seen before.' "
Medical experiments were also carried out on Black men and Black children: Wilkerson notes Harriet Washington's research in Medical Apartheid in which a plantation doctor "made incisions into a black baby's head to test a theory for curing seizures" with "cobbler's tools" and "the point of a crooked awl." The horror is legion.
Wilkerson documents the pogroms of violence against the caste of American untouchables as waves throughout history — whether the violence of slavery or the waves of vigilante violence that that rose during Reconstruction and have continued since; incidents such the Ocoee, Fla., massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., are set in a continuum that meets with the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Ala., 40 years later in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof on a Black church five years ago. This violent terror is a marker of the caste system, Wilkerson writes. The descriptions are vivid in their horror; the connections travel across history and time to resonate in the mind.
This structural move is a classic trademark of Wilkerson's style, and one of the attributes of her unique voice that imbues her writing with such textured depth. Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows us an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste.
Caste is divided into six sections exploring the various aspects of caste: its origins, its sustainment and far-reaching "tentacles," and its effects — whether detrimental health for the givers and receivers of racism or the expected white supremacist backlash to the election of the first president of recognizable Black heritage: "The ability of a black person to supplant the racial caste system," Wilkerson writes, quoting the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was "the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted."
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Although a claim can be made that the opening chapter or two on the fallout of the 2016 election appear dated, this to be fair, is only because of what has happened to America in the interim since Wilkerson penned those words.
What is problematic is the glaring absence of Africa in a book that aims to position itself as a seminal text on the concept of a global caste system and the positioning of Blackness within that global caste system. Wilkerson glances at this briefly with a scant mention of South Africa in a couple of paragraphs and by quoting a woman identified only as a Nigerian playwright saying that "there are no Black people in Africa" — and then keeps it moving. Both are moments that do need to be unpacked. It is understandable why Wilkerson does not walk through this door to explore caste in Africa — Caste is 400 pages before adding the impressive list of research sources. But if Wilkerson is not opening that door, there does need to be an acknowledgement of why not, an acknowledgement of that absence.
Simply put: With colonization, European colonizers brought their caste system to Africa and implemented it over the already existing caste systems among many African ethnic groups.
Perhaps the absence of Africa is because of the caste system Wilkerson speaks of itself — to get people in the dominant caste to care about a narrative about Blackness and Brownness, about the lower castes, there must be a strong presence of whiteness in the conversation because it is the dominant caste system within the narrative.
And thus the caste system rears its head to affect a work about the caste system in real time.
This points, ultimately, to the role of personal accountability within a caste system. What does one do with this knowledge of the violence of caste? Does one perpetuate it? Eradicate it?
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Interestingly, Wilkerson at times seems to argue not for an eradication of caste, but to create space for her, and others she meets, who have been miscast in their "caste" — regulated to the lowest caste when by intelligence or other attribute they should be in the higher caste, or vice versa. "We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author," Wilkerson writes. Even the ending "Awakening" section, couched as a look forward, is depicted less of an articulation of the possibilities of a world without caste, and more of her desire simply to be seen as equal to those of the dominant caste.
In this, Wilkerson leans to biology. She offers the example of wolves as her support for the necessity of this hierarchal structure — the necessity not just of the alpha, but of the omega, or the underdog, beaten and abused by the others, the "untouchable." When the underdog dies, she writes, the whole pack is destabilized. No one wants to be the lowest of the low, "the scapegoat," but the pack needs one to survive.
Without the untouchable, Wilkerson argues here, society collapses. The untouchable is needed. Wilkerson just does not want to be one.
Writes Wilkerson:
"The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or seen as qualified for alpha positions — as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries — not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste."
I would argue that the tragedy, rather, is the need for these positions such as "omega" to still exist, which then justifies the need for this caste structure and its continued existence — even if it exists with Wilkerson's proffered edit that would allow an individual, no matter "background or caste," to hop into their desired caste and profit from the continued oppression of others the caste system welds.
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If we are to look at biology as evidence, let us consider the research of Eli D. Strauss and Kay E. Holekamp on hyenas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which offers another model for social positioning. Within the hyena community, as with wolves, there is a strict hierarchy of dominant caste and lower castes. But, if a female understands the hierarchy as unjust and challenges a more dominant member of the higher caste and her female peer group agrees with her, they will rise up across caste and challenge the dominant caste; if this female cross-caste coalition wins, the hierarchy is destabilized, and this radical feminist hyena and her cross-caste pack become the new dominant caste.
It is not enough, but it is a start.
Let us think not just about our own individual desires to be seen as a member of the dominant caste and benefit accordingly, but about the necessity to challenge this entire system of oppression radically. Let us think not just about replicating oppressive patriarchal systems but about alternative models such as matrilineal cross-cultural communication and connection.
Let us look not to the wolves, but to the hyenas.
Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
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Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
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Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
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“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.
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In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.
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Review
"Magnificent . . . a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality . . . Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us."--O: The Oprah Magazine
"This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing. . . . Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word 'racism, ' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature. . . . It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing . . . Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic language."--Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post
"A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America."--Justin Worland, Time
"Magisterial . . . Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls. . . . Caste roams wide and deep, lives and deaths vividly captured, haloed with piercing cultural critique. . . . Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists."--Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Brave, clear and shatteringly honest in both approach and delivery . . . Extrapolating Wilkerson's ideas to contemporary America becomes an unsettling exercise that proves how right she is and how profoundly embedded into society the caste system is. . . . Her quest for answers frames everything and acts as the perfect delivery method for every explanation."--Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle
"Caste draws heavily on the powerful mingling of narrative, research, and visionary, sweeping insight that made Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns the definitive contemporary study of African Americans' twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time."--Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books
"Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure."--Kwame Anthony Appiah, TheNew York Times Book Review
"Wilkerson's book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it."--Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post
"Should be required reading for generations to come . . . A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships."--Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe
"[Caste] should be at the top of every American's reading list."--Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune
"An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice . . . This is an American reckoning and so it should be. . . . It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time."--Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian
"Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing . . . Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice. . . . A useful reminder to India's many upper-caste cosmopolitans . . . that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world's oldest democracy, and the world's largest."--Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror
"It is bracing to be reminded with such precision that our country was built through genocide and slavery. But Ms. Wilkerson has also provided a renewed way of understanding America's longest, fiercest trouble in all its complexity. Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down."--Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
"Like Martin Luther King, Jr. before her, Isabel Wilkerson has traveled the world to study the caste system and has returned to show us more clearly than ever before how caste is permanently embedded in the foundation and unseen structural beams of this old house called America. Isabel Wilkerson tells this story in prose that is so beautiful, the only reason to pause your reading is to catch your breath. You cannot understand America today without this book."--Lawrence O'Donnell
"This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all."--Library Journal (starred review)
"This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system."--Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine's list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
Product details
Publisher : Random House (4 August 2020)
Language : English
Hardcover : 544 pages
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T. Hill
5.0 out of 5 stars Great readReviewed in Australia on 19 April 2024
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Really enjoying this book so far. I was intrigued to read it after going to see the movie Origin. The movie is true to the book in terms of the author’s journey. I’m finding it very easy and interesting to read, unlike some non-fiction books which can be hard to follow
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Cindy
4.0 out of 5 stars The book tells it as is - There’s so much to learnReviewed in Australia on 10 January 2021
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Great education for anyone who cares to know and learn!
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Belinda
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, well researchedReviewed in Australia on 5 May 2021
Synopsis:
In Caste, Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson makes a bold and compelling argument that an unspoken caste system shaped America as we know it, and that that same caste system continues to define social, political, and educational structures in the US.
The author provides a well researched narrative blended with individual examples and her own personal history to show how this rigid ranking and hierarchy of humans based on skin colour in the US has links to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.
Through exploration of the impact of caste systems on healthcare, politics, life expectancy and culture (amongst other things), she makes a compelling argument for the dismantling of caste systems for the betterment of mankind.
My thoughts:
This has been on my to be read pile since it's release so I was glad to do a group read with @readingwithcamille to help pull apart some of the themes and discuss ideas.
This book required lots of highlighting of important paragraphs, ideas and quotes which I have subsequently revisited and reflected on.
I found the book to be very well researched and the author's arguments were certainly compelling, particularly in regards to the comparisons in India and Nazi Germany. Reading about slavery and the history in the Jim Crow South was disturbing and not for the faint hearted, but provided context as to how the current systems in the US came to light. I also found the book provided some context as to how and why Donald Trump was elected, and was very nearly re-elected.
It wasn't a 5 star read for me as the individual stories whilst adding emphasis, were not provided with references or discussion about how the information was sourced - as such, for me, they lacked rigour as evidence of her argument and were somewhat distracting in an otherwise well researched and referenced book.
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Brad Smith
1.0 out of 5 stars So bloody boringReviewed in Australia on 26 January 2021
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Why does everyone love a victim? There is a singular theme of a downtrodden section of society. It has been acknowledged so move on.
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Floyd Sully
5.0 out of 5 stars A literary tour de forceReviewed in Canada on 23 May 2024
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What an amazing writer. Her work is so packed with history and analysis. A great read.
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Rene Andrew
4.0 out of 5 stars Very insightfulReviewed in the United Arab Emirates on 5 August 2024
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Race is a complicated issue, this book illustrates another layer to an already complicated, yet unnecessary situation in our times. Read and learn.
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Good to readReviewed in Belgium on 27 July 2024
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Still reading since is quite long. Was advised by some american friends.
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Bridget Koehler
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended!Reviewed in Spain on 17 April 2024
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Excellent! Thoughtfully detailed work by the author. Can be informative and certainly very beneficial to anyone who may be curious about how “one up-one down/ “Us vs. them” mentality is still working its power and control in the larger society. The author put forth an incredible book.
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K.holst
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and sadReviewed in Germany on 4 April 2024
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The story of slavery and what followed in the USA. The author goes back and forth between now and then, and you realize that little has change for a black person today. Very well written and extremely intereting.
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