Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson defines caste as a system that “sets the presumed supremacy of one group up against the presumed inferiority of other groups, on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits” (17). These systems are always designed by those who seek to preserve their power and that of their descendants. Caste is also about “power—which groups have it and which do not” (17). Wilkerson argues that “casteism” may be more useful to understanding American social problems, as people may be invested in maintaining existing hierarchies without relying on “hatred.”

Caste also has a meaning specific to India—the assignment of people to different social groups based on the sacred texts of Hinduism. The word “caste” entered the English lexicon from a Portuguese term, applied to India by Portuguese traders who visited the country and observed its social divisions. They used their word for racial division and applied it to another culture (66).

Wilkerson makes frequent note of affinities between Dalits, the lowest caste in India, and African Americans. Indian social activist Bhimrao Ambedkar corresponded with Black scholar and activist W.E.B. Dubois, and Wilkerson calls Ambedkar “the Martin Luther King of India” (32). Wilkerson notes that artificial hierarchies are common in human societies but that caste has had the most enduring consequences in the three countries her book analyzes in depth. 

The highest and lowest castes, respectively, in India’s religiously defined caste-system. Dalits are sometimes also called “untouchables,” but this is not the name they use for themselves. As in the United States, caste in India still determines social, educational, and cultural opportunity, though formal legal equality was established after India became independent from Britain. Like Black people in the United States, Dalits were expected to remain physically distant from Brahmins to as not to “pollute” them. Wilkerson discovers that she can decode who belongs to which caste, through observing gestures and behavior, particularly the tendency of Brahmins to speak over Dalits. Scholars of caste have long noted affinities between the two systems of inequality, and Wilkerson continues their work by employing a similar comparative frame. 

Named for the Greek for “good growth,” the pseudoscientific study of inherited traits was pioneered by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in the late 19th century. The idea that racial or national purity could be safeguarded by preventing less desirable traits from being passed on became fashionable in much of Europe and North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Wilkerson notes that Nazis avidly studied the prominent eugenicists of the United States, and the race laws enacted in the South, to construct their own legal system, which particularly targeted Jews. Eugenics promoted the forced sterilization of those deemed dangerous to the national gene pool, and many US states permitted forced sterilization of citizens, as Nazi Germany did. A 1919 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, upheld the practice, and it has never been formally overturned.

Originally a character in a minstrel show, invented by a White man to mock and satirize Black people and their manner of speech, “Jim Crow” became a staple of 19th-century American popular culture. Minstrel shows frequently featured White performers painting their faces a darker color to further mock and dehumanize Blackness. Jim Crow laws are the name given to legislation in the United States passed after the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. These laws banned Black people from voting, enforced legal segregation in schools and public places, and banned interracial marriage. The Jim Crow legal system persisted in practice until civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions made it illegal. In practice, White people resisted all desegregation efforts, and Alabama notoriously retained its ban on interracial marriage until 2000.