Isabel Wilkerson’s landmark book begins with an epigraph from Albert Einstein: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.”
In "Caste," Wilkerson reframes the conversation around race by comparing social inequalities throughout human history to their evolution on American soil. She guides us through our collective history and what she labels “the shapeshifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”
It is not an opinion piece nor something written to deepen the divide. Wilkerson combines impeccable scholarly research with beautiful language and visceral storytelling to tackle the big picture behind our largest and most insidious problem.
“We suffer with a dominant, shrinking group fighting for continued supremacy,” she explains, “while the lower caste is still fighting for full human rights.”
This book struck a chord with me. Predominantly, it was anger over my own ignorance. I was suddenly forced to see that I participated in or at least benefited from systems of institutionalized inequality and injustice. Since that first reading, I’ve come to see the many roadblocks to truth-telling that have been employed over the past 400 years of America’s not-so-unique path.
I was dumbstruck to learn that the GI Bill, which enabled my parents to buy a home and receive an education that secured our future, was a benefit often not provided to the Black veterans who fought alongside my father. I had to acknowledge that I’d been blind to the fact that the healthcare that allowed my brother, me, and our children to grow strong and prosper hadn’t been available to all American children. That marginalized groups must deal with widespread food insecurity, and systemically underfunded schools and social services.
I had been a kid drawn to plants and polliwogs and a young person immersed in the science of our natural world. Always aware that mine was a lucky life, I attributed it to the safety of a stable, loving home. My dad was a firefighter, my mom an ER nurse, and their values of public service and equality were the base of my understanding. Isolated within our post-WWII neighborhood and schools, I rarely interacted with others not of my own “caste” and knew nothing of the struggles outside our pale-skinned, middle-class enclave. Like most baby boom children, I suffered from a lack of accurate history and believed Lincoln had abolished slavery with the 13th Amendment. “Dusted and done,” as my grandmother would have said.
The race riots of the 1960s in Harlem, Watts, and Detroit weren’t covered in my high school civics class, just as Reconstruction and Jim Crow received bare mention in American history. I took for granted lessons on our legal and law enforcement protections, never understanding those institutions were often predicated on capturing runaway slaves and keeping Indigenous and enslaved people in their place. The pockets of poverty and discord that sometimes made the headlines were blips on my radar, happening in other isolated regions of the country, not in the progressive Pacific Northwest.
I missed the significance of transitions when America’s long-simmering racial divide reawakened with overt racism in the second half of the 20th century as many working and middle-class whites began to experience their own sense of inequity when labor, housing, and schools were forced to open to the subordinate caste. Suddenly, we were no longer dealing with cross-burning, epithet-spewing biological racism of the pre-civil rights era, but instead with discriminatory behaviors based on subconscious prejudgments codified by law and social norms.
“Our species has suffered incomprehensible loss over the false divisions of caste,” Wilkerson writes. “The 11 million people killed by the Nazis; the three-quarters of a million Americans killed in the Civil War over the right to enslave human beings; the slow living death and unfulfilled gifts of millions more on the plantations in India and in the American South. ... Whatever creativity or brilliance they had has been lost for all time.”
“The structure of caste is maintained by the people within it, up and down the hierarchy, and thus the solutions must account for both the structure that holds inequality in place, and the individuals who keep it running.”
A new afterword in the reprinting of the 2022 edition feels like a mandate to act individually and collectively. Wilkerson reminds us of Abraham Lincoln’s words: “Public sentiment is everything.”
Her closing prayer includes “That we free ourselves of the mythologies that we have been weaned on and have been programmed to accept as primordial fact.” That knowing will help us to adopt “a stronger, all-encompassing, reconstituted version of ourselves as a society, and to prove to ourselves and to the world that the divisions we have inherited do not have to be our destiny. ... The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have.”
In the end, “A caste system spares no one.”
Compelling, persuasive, and unsettling, "Caste" ought to be required reading for every American and an impetus for us to do better.
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