I started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, with two particular thoughts in mind. First, having absolutely loved her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I was certain that my investment in reading Caste would be repaid several times over. Second, it goes without saying that I, and virtually every other white person in America, need to be repeatedly schooled about the African American experience and how white supremacy has imposed relentless and almost overwhelming burdens on Black people since the first Africans were transported in chains to colonial America. Indeed, that white supremacy has not led to the complete genocide of African Americans is due largely to the vitality, endurance and resistance of Black people in the United States.
Without a true understanding of the struggle of African Americans to survive systemic inequality and to achieve equal rights under the law, it is too easy for white people to assure ourselves that the fight to dismantle white supremacy is not ours. But to understand that white privilege includes the assumption that Black people must fight their own battles, one only needs to consider how many times we hear whites claim that they are colorblind, or that their immigrant heritage absolves them of responsibility for the racism that took root in American life centuries ago and endures today.
Trump voters are perhaps the best examples of whites who have been made impatient and angry by the very notion of #Black Lives Matter and by last year’s regular demonstrations protesting police killings of people of color. But the persistent demonstrations are both a marker of fatigue with 400 years of oppression and exploitation and an increasingly powerful mobilization against the system that maintains those conditions. Those who are tired of that very visible resistance to inequality and discrimination need to recognize that though such mass activism doesn’t happen every single day, it will persist, and it will increase, until the very idea of whiteness has relinquished its hold on the white majority.
It is that reality, and the losses that throwing away lives and talent, impose on all of us that white people need to understand. In our iniquitous world, my white privilege is a constant. And though I cannot change the color of my skin (or my class background or my gender or my gender identity or my sexual orientation), if we are to prosper together in a world in which all lives do, in fact, matter, then we must separately and collectively reject what has been imposed on us. As Wilkerson writes,
“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things that we cannot change; a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.
“The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not a collective will to maintain them.
“A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be (pgs. 379-380).”
A first consequence of such “truths,” faithfully believed by the vast majority of white Americans for centuries, is the exclusion of people of color, and the loss of much of the energy, creativity and brilliance they would have brought to bear on the American project. Together we might have built a United States of America that at this point in time had come much closer to fulfilling the promise expressed in the nation’s foundational documents and by our most celebrated visionaries. Neither should we overlook the fact that so many of those visions of a better America were first articulated by Black voices, like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.
Why a discussion of caste?
Before I had gotten very far into the book, I had a number of conversations with people, both black and white, who wondered why anyone would bother to examine the impact of caste when race seems to be the root cause of so much that is wrong in American society. The book’s subtitle, “the origins of our discontents,” clearly signals Wilkerson’s intent to persuade us that we should see the characteristics of caste systems as the foundational problem that must be addressed by efforts to promote comprehensive social change. But in 2020, the year in which events supercharged the notion that Black lives matter, the odds rose dramatically that a significant number of Americans, perhaps a majority, would be inclined to say that race, not caste, is the origin of our discontents.
Still, Wilkerson asserts that race is the mechanism that orders the underlying caste system in the United States. “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive,” she writes. “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. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place (pg. 19).”
Caste itself is such a rigid and comprehensive mechanism of social control that understanding it in detail is necessary to the work of dismantling it. In pursuit of that understanding, Wilkerson identifies the Indian caste system, which has endured and evolved for 2,000 years or more, and the fleeting, but ferocious treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, which expropriated Jewish labor and wealth before moving on to the almost complete extermination of European Jewry, as the two closest analogs to the caste system in place in the United States. Writing about the similarities between the three distinct structures, Wilkerson defines “the eight pillars of caste.” These pillars uphold “a belief system, the piers beneath a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root…it did not matter whether the assumptions were true.” It only mattered that people came to assume that they were true.
“These are the pillars of caste, the ancient principles that I researched and compiled as I examined the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies,” Wilkerson writes. “These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were at one time or another burrowed within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function (pg. 99).”
A new nation is being born
Early in the book, Wilkerson writes that
“…in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history, whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be.
“Then, that fall, in the midst of what seemed a cataclysmic financial crisis and as if to announce a potential slide from preeminence for the caste that had long been dominant, an African-American, a man from what was historically the lowest caste, was elected president of the United States. His ascension incited both premature declarations of a post-racial world and an entire movement whose sole purpose was to prove that he had not been born in the United States, a campaign led by the billionaire who was now in 2016 running for president himself (pg.6).”
It doesn’t take much imagination to connect the prediction that whites, and white supremacists, would be outnumbered by people of color by 2042, to a number of other markers that link to the attack on the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. That list includes the hardships that working class Americans, southern and rural white workers among them, suffered in the economic collapse that exploded in the fall of 2008; the election of Barack Obama that followed; Donald Trump’s birther campaign to delegitimize Obama’s presidency; Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s six-year effort to obstruct Obama’s leadership; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; and Trump’s 2016 election victory (and 2020 defeat). The extremist mob on Jan. 6 might not have been explicitly aware of the details of the coming demographic change, but they surely sensed in the political tensions and economic difficulties of the last decade that the consolations they once obtained from whiteness were in serious jeopardy.
For some poor whites who live in isolated white communities, not being black has meant that come hell or high water, they were still white and not sentenced to life at the bottom of the American caste system. The teachings of caste, the pillars of caste, as outlined by Wilkerson, had long ago persuaded them that someone other than themselves were deservedly ranked lower. They may not see the end of the caste system coming, but their panic and hysterical fears of stolen elections and welfare queens and masses of refugees camped out on our southern border are a sign that they feel the fragility of white supremacy in their bones.
If the majority only knew…
White Americans, Nazis, and Brahmin elites imposed a structure on their own people and culture that divided their own populations for the purpose of stealing wealth and labor, with the goal of maximizing their own comfort and ease. Wilkerson elaborates insights from Erich Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who, in the process of writing about fascism and racism in 1964, eerily describes the president who Donald Trump (and Trumpism) has been these last four years (pg. 271):
“Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychanalysis and his personal experience,” Wilkerson writes. “He saw firsthand the Nazi appeal to the fears and insecurities of everyday Germans in the lead-up to the Nazi takeover.
“If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews,” Fromm wrote, “one can easily recognize the distorted character of their respective judgments. Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and fabrications. If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.”
Comparing the American and German supremacist systems, Fromm observed that people marginalized by poverty, unemployment, lack of education and low-paid labor are nevertheless elevated by caste. A person in this group might be persuaded that despite their individual difficulties, “I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—'I am white;’ or ‘I am Aryan,’” Fromm wrote.
“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own,” Wilkerson writes, crediting Fromm with the insight.
I think it’s telling that Wilkerson begins the book quoting James Baldwin and Albert Einstein. In tandem, the two quotes speak volumes about Wilkerson’s intent.
Baldwin: “Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they know what I said was true.”
Einstein: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.”
Actually, what Baldwin was in the habit of saying was clearly understood and known to be true by a healthy percentage of the people who took the time to read his work, African Americans, especially. Nor was he the first to make similar points; he was one in a distinguished line of largely Black writers who have been speaking truth to a white-dominated country for generations. What has historically gone missing in that equation was an audience of white believers large enough to change the perspective of the majority; to persuade white people that the dream of a community characterized by inclusiveness and equity offered something to whites that surpasses the consolations of caste. Hence, Einstein’s wish that the indifferent majority come to understand the root of the evil with which we all live.
Clearly, Wilkerson set out to write the book that would define that unacknowledged reality thoroughly. It follows that if the end of white supremacy will grow out of the continuing activism of African Americans and other communities of color, and the growing numbers of white Americans who have been schooled by Black Lives Matter, by the disproportionately black and brown casualties of the pandemic and now, finally, by Isabel Wilkerson’s book, then Einstein’s prediction that we are on the road to a cure will finally become the reality of our collective lives.
Underway: The collapse of white supremacy
Though Wilkerson does not say so, reading her book has caused me to rethink my own understanding of American history. In particular, I am persuaded that 22nd century historians will identify the hundred-year period from the end of World War II to the middle of this century (1947-2042, say) as the final phase of the 400-year long struggle against white supremacy. Tim Black, the oral historian of the Great Migration as it manifested in Chicago, and, for more than 60 years a progressive political activist in the city, told me once (he was my high school history teacher) that returning World War II veterans, both Black and white, came back to the city on fire with the belief that they could lead the city and the country toward racial justice and equity.
Though the Great Migration provided little relief from white supremacy, it did expand the space in which newcomers to the north were free to join organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League. The return of World War II veterans moved by the same spirit that motivated Tim Black added momentum to the struggle. The NAACP, itself, grew from 90,000 members in 1919 to 600,000 members in 1946.
A partial list of the advances against white supremacy that followed those years would have to include the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. By 1968, the expanding community of black activists and their allies experienced exponential growth with the development of Black Power, the Black Arts and African American Studies movements, and new allies in the anti-war, feminist, Chicano, American Indian, gay liberation and environmental movements.
These movements did not always move forward in unity, or adopt common strategies, but even when they disagreed or followed a separate path, they educated each other, identified areas of common struggle and widened the space for social change. In many instances, leadership passed from one organization to another. Groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society contributed new energy and fresh critiques of entrenched elites. But at no time was the path ahead of the liberation movements ever clear of obstacles. Some victories were unsustainable in the face of the forces moving against them, forces aimed at maintaining and reinforcing the white supremacist system.
The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs that began in urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast in the ‘70s initiated a dramatic increase in poverty rates in minority neighborhoods. That in turn set the stage for the growth of the carceral state in America. Prison sentences began increasing even for non-violent offenders as states began passing three-strike laws. With the Reagan-era development of the War on Drugs and a boom in prison construction and private prisons, the process accelerated.
“The term ‘welfare queen’ became a not-so-subtle code for ‘lazy, greedy black ghetto mother.’ The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let ‘some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,’ while ‘you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.’ These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it,” Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow (pg. 49).
Promises to beef up policing and expand the prison system were often only a part of a larger strategy that cut federal budgets, starved aid programs of sufficient funding, and proposed privatizing Social Security. These, too, were racialized attacks on the common good and were most often aimed at creating political advantages for Republicans. But in the 1990’s, Democratic President Bill Clinton launched his own version of the Republican agenda, cutting benefits and time-limiting welfare eligibility, endorsing the passage of a federal three-strikes law, and announcing “the end of big government.”
All of these changes added up to something more than reinforcement of a white supremacist system that had been severely shaken by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They were also a direct assault on the well-being of minority communities, forcing the energy of liberation efforts to refocus on mitigating emergencies in those same communities and on defending them from the relentless assault of the carceral state.
The War on Terror launched by the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks (2003) had the added effect of further diverting funding from domestic needs and drove minorities to seek employment in the military and, ultimately, into an expanding war effort in which people of color would account for the overwhelming majority of casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the face of the economic downturn of 2008, the worst since the Depression, African Americans turned out in unprecedented numbers to elect Barack Obama as president. Despite years of Republican electoral and policy victories, Obama’s election created new anxiety about the strength of the white supremacist system. Donald Trump and a number of other right-wing opportunists launched the birther movement which claimed that Obama wasn’t even an American.
But the liberatory energy that had been diverted and suppressed so effectively during the previous four decades of right-wing counterattack manifested anew in 2013 as Black Lives Matter, which became both a leadership organization and a symbol of the revitalization of a movement to deconstruct white supremacy in the United States. None of this proves decisively that the history of the last seventy-five years can be framed as the final confrontation between the growing and increasingly effective mobilization of African Americans and their allies against the tottering edifice of white supremacy in the United States. That would take a much more detailed investigation of the flow of events since the middle of the 20thCentury. But it seems clear that the struggle to liberate the United States from racism and white supremacy continues to gather momentum and support.
Nothing, certainly not victory, is promised to the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational movement outlined here. But the pandemic, and its disproportionally devastating effect on communities of color, has persuaded a growing number of white Americans that equal justice and equity must be a first priority, that racism and the caste system cost us all more than we can bear. Making the most of this moment in which it is suddenly clear that white supremacists also see the fragility of the racialized caste system that sustains them will require an extraordinary attention to the details, to deconstructing the pillars of caste.
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander outlines the challenge: “If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice today than assuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last (pgs. 18-19).”
It is time to give Isabel Wilkerson the last word:
“In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying acrobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto-Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute—all of those feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.
“In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world, raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is setback from the progression of our species.
“A world without caste would set everyone free (pg. 388).”
