When a Pulitzer Prize winner publishes her second book, which was ten years in the making, it is bound to catch the attention of fans and critics alike. Caste: The Origins of our Discontents has caused quite a flutter in the review columns of major newspapers and magazines. Some reviewers have used superlatives and hailed her work as an “instant American classic”, while others have admired her flawless storytelling skills but found her commitment to the mission she set out on understanding a millennia-old phenomenon, caste—not strong enough. In her words, her intention “to cast light onto its history, its consequences and its presence in our everyday lives” remained incomplete according to the latter group of reviewers who thought that she failed to fathom the complexities of the original Indian caste system entirely.

The reason that piqued my interest and led me to examine the book closely is Wilkerson’s decision to add “caste” to the already rich lexicon of terminologies that exist to explain race-based discrimination in America. Why is “race” as a term not sufficient to explain the persistent discrimination in the U.S. anymore? Is it because it has been used too much? Is it because the practice of racism has been made illegal in America yet it is very much present in everyday lives? All these questions rattled around in my mind as I started reading the book.

It is a topic Wilkerson happened to stumble upon when she was writing her first book. In The Warmth of Other Suns, she looked into the history of the Great Migration and that made her realize the need to explore the history of American racism and to locate it in the broader and more global context and systems of exploitations.

So, she came up with her big theory—”America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system.” She defined the caste system as “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…” and uses “rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.”

Her project interweaves insights from multiple disciplines—anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, and history. Writing with piercing authority, Wilkerson discusses three caste hierarchies in world history—those of India, America, and Nazi Germany—and unearths the shared principles “burrowed deep within the culture and suconsciousness” of each. The book is divided into seven parts, each looking at a different aspect of the American caste system.

The Chapters

The first part locates why the discussion of caste has become important in the present context in America. She compares ‘race’ through the lens of caste with a pathogen that is hidden but not removed entirely. It gets reactivated when the time is right. America was hit with a bout of white supremacist anxiety in 2008 when amidst a cataclysmic financial crisis, an African-American man was elected president of the United States. “His ascension incited… premature declarations of a post-racial world…” which proved wrong by 2016 as America entered a heightened phase of “isolationism and tribalism.”

Wilkerson is aware that caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive, that they can and do co-exist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. There is a need to look at caste because that is the ‘bone’ structure while the race is just a manifestation of that—the ‘skin’. One can detect the influence of intellectuals and activists like W.E.B. Du Bois, social economists like Gunar Myrdal, and anthropologists like Ashley Montagu in her interpretation. She has studied the writings of B.R. Ambedkar and applied his lens of caste to comprehend the persistence of race in America.

The second part dips into the history of slavery in the Southern American states and goes back further to the origin of the word ‘caste’ which descends from a Portuguese word, “casta” which means breed. Caste is typically viewed as local and essentially Indian but Wilkerson suggests the opposite. She takes caste to the global platform, packing into a single frame India’s millennial social order, America’s 400 hundred-year-old racial hierarchy, and Germany’s Third Reich’s 12-year enforcement of Aryanism. Playing with the semantics, bending hierarchical terminologies, and applying it to multiple realities obviously causes friction and this book is full of them.

The third part discusses the eight pillars or principles upon which a caste system is constructed. It is peppered with anecdotes from history that are the perfect recipe for heartbreaking stories. She makes observations that illuminate that neither wealth nor celebrity status has been able to insulate those born into the subordinate caste, the African-Americans. An interesting discussion of purity of race is unpacked and a strew of subcastes come tumbling out. Griffe is 3/4^th Black blood, Marabon is 5/8^th, Mulatto is half, and so on. India’s complex maze of subcastes are mentioned too fleetingly; it seemed that the discussion ended before it could truly make a point. Throughout the book, Wilkerson never really goes into an elaborate discussion of the original Indian caste structure. Yes, the book is about the American caste system ultimately but it would have helped if a chapter could be devoted to India and its caste system solely. Similarly, it does not cover many details about the Third Reich either. One understands her ambition to see a pattern of discrimination in the three systems but she doesn’t see this grandiose plan through.

The fourth part enters into the psychological realm. It investigates how the caste system spares no one, not even the upper caste folks. The caste is “like the wind, powerful enough to knock down but invisible as they go about their work.” Many talents fall into the black hole of caste, never to recover again. The intergenerational plight and burden of dignity lost to the unfair caste system is enough to break spirits forever. Wilkerson’s narration of an experiment carried out in the late-960s Iowa by a teacher on her third-graders, separating the blue-eyed children from the brown-eyed and giving them special privileges, particularly stands out in its impact showing how segregation can emotionally fracture people’s minds.

In the next part, she further examines how fixation with purity causes narcissism and holds both the dominant and the subordinate castes captive. She brings up the concept of Black forgiveness of the dominant caste sins and how it has taken a spiritual form. What remains unsaid is that the Blacks have no choice other than forgiving because they need to survive. The dominant caste or the Whites ask for absolution from the racism that infects all.

The sixth part circles back to where the book started and revisits Barrack Obama’s rise to the presidency and growing resistance to multiculturism. As he got re-elected for a second term the nation saw a wave of backlash as a conservative radio talk show host openly lamented and another common man went to the extent of ending his own life as a way to protest against it. Donald Trump becoming the president in 2016 brought to the surface what had been there all along. The crucial question facing America became—did Americans prefer whiteness over democracy?

A strong case is made against American exceptionalism especially during a pandemic that has the entire world in its grip, that does not discriminate between races and ethnicities. Discussion of caste as a pathogen is rather timely given the backdrop of a pandemic. A virulent virus has exposed the vulnerability of the layers of hierarchy affecting those the most whose caste decides their occupations to be at the bottom of the pyramid with skimpy healthcare coverage.

After spending a long time discussing that caste is essentially systemic and not personal and that it’s almost programed into human DNA and conditions from one’s birth to take up the station assigned to them, the book travels to its concluding part and takes a sharp turn towards assigning the responsibility of bringing about true change to extraordinary individuals. She mentions that some rare people manage to transcend what most are susceptible to and they become the agent of change. The abolitionists who risked their lives to end slavery and the white civil rights activists who helped end Jim Crow are proof that humans can break free of hierarchy sometimes. The brief conclusion, after such a long discussion of unsettling images and stories, leaves one disappointed, and frankly doesn’t represent much hope.

Her ultimate prescription of ‘radical empathy,’ not just passive sympathy calls on everyone to put in the work to educate themselves and to listen with patience to what the other has to say, what their lived reality has to tell.

Collection of Essays

Wilkerson’s grand design to come up with an explanation for the stickiness of race in America is riddled with inconsistencies from a theoretical standpoint as she time travels and crisscrosses continents to give shape to an abstraction that seems more romantic than practical. At places, she gets overly verbose and indulges in providing hairsplitting clarifications leaving nothing to the imagination of the readers. The book is not necessarily for the well-read scholar but for those who are still unfamiliar with the deep-rooted realities of racism in American history.

One has to remember that the book is a hybrid straddling several disciplines with personal stories thrown in here and there and thus lacks structure and can frustrate those who are looking for a systematic thesis. There are entire chapters that make you wonder why they are in the book. One such chapter was devoted to the canine hierarchy and how humans can learn much from it. It’s beautifully written but doesn’t necessarily fit in with the subject matter at hand. The book reads like a collection of essays without a common theme at times and requires some going back and forth to make sense of the relevance and the timeline.

Joy of reading

Her genius as a writer shines through as she spins into her big theory many short stories, chosen and narrated with utmost care. Her ability to paint vivid and emotional word pictures will stay with her readers whether or not the overall theory appeals to them. Wilkerson has attempted to write a complicated book and come out the strongest when she tells her poignant stories. Like that of a Black girl born in Texas following the civil rights era to parents who named her Miss, in defiance of the caste assumptions that required Black people to be addressed by their first names only. At another point, Wilkerson narrates the story of a Dalit, a lower caste Indian who can find simple things like asking a salesman in the U.S. for shoes that are the right size so challenging that he resigns himself to wearing a pair that doesn’t fit. It’s a habit he got used to living in India where he had to endure disrespect and harassment from higher-caste Indians for questioning the store-keepers ever.

She also shares her own experiences as a prominent journalist, a profession that placed her outside her caste-assigned occupation bucket and confused people around her. Most powerful is the story about how a boutique manager in Chicago simply could not believe that she is the Isabel Wilkerson from The New York Times who had asked to interview him, even after she provided him with her identification.

Timing

What makes the book most relevant is timing. It reaches the readers amid an intense debate over the history of racial oppression amid proposals to reform police departments and prisons, to undo the racial foundations of capitalism, and to reconstruct many institutions of American life. Wilkerson reminds us that this is not the first time the United States, like other societies, has dared to challenge its foundational problem.