Caste Book Summary - Caste Book explained in key points

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Caste summary

Name: Caste
Rating: 4.5 (234 reviews)
Author: Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson

The Origins of Our Discontents

4.5 (234 ratings)

25 mins

Topics

Black History Anthropology Race

Table of Contents

Caste
Summary of 9 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 9

What’s in it for me? Discover how deep the roots of inequality go in America.

For some of us, it may seem crazy that we’re still fighting tooth and nail to push the message of Black Lives Matter. It’s been over fifty years since the civil rights movement in the US, but there are still so many signs that America is far from achieving equality. What’s going on? Why is lasting change so hard to come by?

While there’s been a lot of talk about systemic racism, what if we could look at American history in a way that not only explained how the system was created, but also why it’s been so hard to get rid of? This is exactly what happens when we look at things through the lens of casteism. Racism is one thing, but getting people to let go of generations of social hierarchy is something else.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

the eight pillars of the caste system;
the similarities between Jim Crow laws and Nazi laws; and
how the US could learn from modern-day Germany.

The longer structural problems persist, the harder they are to fix.

Imagine you’ve inherited an old house. You give it a new roof and a new coat of paint, but you soon notice that something’s wrong with the ceiling. At first, it’s just a small spot where the plaster is cracking. Maybe it’s nothing important, you think. But then it grows worse.

When a specialist shows up, you’re given the diagnosis: stress cracks in the foundation are causing the walls and ceilings to bend and warp.

It’s fair to say that these problems aren’t your fault. You didn’t build the house. You may not even know the person who did. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t your responsibility. It’s your house now. And until it’s fixed, it’s a hazard that puts everyone in danger.

The key message here is: The longer structural problems persist, the harder they are to fix.

America is over three hundred years old. And these days, the stress fractures are readily apparent – drastic income gaps, ongoing police violence, and a pandemic that threw the problem of health care access into stark relief.

To answer such questions as how we got here and why the symptoms of systemic racism have been so resistant to change, we need to look at things from the perspective of caste. Caste is a system of social hierarchy in which people enjoy varying degrees of superiority or are subject to subjugation based on the caste to which they belong.

When you hear the word “caste,” you may think of India first. This makes sense, since India’s caste system is thousands of years old. But American society also meets the criteria for a caste system, and the author isn’t the only one to have noticed this. Many writers and other bright minds have suggested that America has indeed been living under a caste system since day one.

Removing a society’s caste system is difficult, to say the least. India has attempted to pass legislation to reduce discrimination. But the Dalit people, who make up the lowest caste, and are regarded as “Untouchables,” continue to be subjected to acts of violence and treated as outcasts in their own country.

In America, African-Americans were long ago relegated to the lowest caste. When a group of people has spent hundreds of years in such a position, change is hard to come by – especially when the dominant caste of white Americans have repeatedly fought to maintain a status quo within the system.

Looking at caste alongside race and slavery can help explain the depth of America’s discontent.

The concepts of caste and class are often mixed together. But class is something a person can transcend through marriage, money, employment, or other avenues. Generally speaking, though, there is little hope of escaping the caste into which you’re born.

Casteism is also different from racism, though there are some important commonalities. It may come as a surprise, but the whole idea of “race” is a relatively new development, whereas caste has been around for millennia. However, in the US, the caste system has been built around ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.

The American caste system has proven to be resistant to change.

Consider this: There is surviving documentation from 1619 that accounts for one of the first ships to deliver slaves to a British colony in America. And given the fact that the Civil War ended in 1865, that means African-Americans were considered property for 246 years, and have been considered free people for less than 160 years.

So, for those 246 years, a caste system was in place that positioned African-Americans as the most subordinate caste. During this time, other people migrated to America. Some, like Italian and Irish people, were also discriminated against and placed in subordinate castes.

A caste system requires a set of foundational pillars.

Children are extremely adept at picking up on social cues. If they see that their parents treat someone differently, they can carry that information with them for the rest of their lives. This is how caste systems continue to thrive from one generation to the next. These rules aren’t necessarily spoken aloud, but they get passed down nonetheless.

To really understand how a caste system operates, let’s look at the pillars that keep it propped up.

The pillars of caste include an obsession with pollution and a process of dehumanization.

Let’s move on to the fourth pillar of a caste system: Purity versus Pollution.

White supremacists have often talked about the need to keep bloodlines pure. Under the Nazi regime, Jewish people were forbidden to set foot on a beach, let alone go in water that might touch a pure Aryan German.

The final pillars include terror and inherent inferiority.

Stigmatization often goes hand-in-hand with dehumanization. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were heavily stigmatized. They were blamed for Germany’s loss in World War I as well as for the economic turmoil that followed. In the US, African-Americans have often been blamed for many of the country’s ills, from economic troubles to the crime rate.

In these cases, the humans within these groups lose their individual identities. Instead, they are lumped together, with everyone sharing the same traits. Only those in the dominant castes have the benefit of individuality.

In the second half of the twentieth century, people in the castes above African-Americans began to feel threatened by a changing society.

In 1941, sharecroppers in the South were still being whipped whenever those in the higher castes deemed it necessary. In 1948, a tenant farmer in Mississippi was brutally beaten because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill. This is the kind of act that those in the highest castes saw as a step too far.

Some things have changed since the forties. Segregation, in terms of Jim Crow laws in the South, has ended. Civil rights legislation has been passed. But caste, in many ways, still exists.

Monuments and memorials can help support or dismantle the caste.

It’s easy to look at an old photograph of the massive crowds of Germans who cheered Adolf Hitler and feel certain that you wouldn’t have been one of those people. But the truth is, all human beings can be made to feel insecure and rendered susceptible to propaganda. Falling into place within the social hierarchy comes quite naturally to all of us. It takes great courage to stand apart from the majority.

What often goes overlooked is that, when it came time for Nazi leaders to write new laws, they turned to America. From racial segregation and punishment, to rules about what certain people are allowed to wear, Nazi leaders borrowed from existing US laws.

We can support those who break the barriers, and we can chip away at the pillars.

What happens when the structural problems of the old house go ignored, generation after generation? You end up with the kind of heightened tensions that are fueling the protests and extremist politics we see in America today.

Things like the COVID-19 pandemic have shown how the effects of the millennia-old caste system are still wreaking havoc. People in the dominant castes have benefitted from health-care coverage offered through their jobs, while those in the subordinate castes have been forced to toil in “essential” jobs that often don’t provide health-care plans at all. The statistics from the pandemic have shown that the pandemic is disproportionately deadlier to marginalized communities.

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What is Caste about?

Caste (2020) takes a revealing look at the caste system that continues to exist in American society, and its disturbing similarities to caste systems in India and WWII-era Germany. It explains how the attitudes of the dominant castes have become ingrained, on conscious and subconscious levels, through generations of subjugation. You’ll find out what it takes to maintain a caste system as well as what can be done to break free from it.

Best quote from Caste

No one was white before he/she came to America, James Baldwin once said.

—Isabel Wilkerson

Who should read Caste?

People interested in American politics
History buffs
Those curious about how inequality can persist in a society

About the Author

Isabel Wilkerson is a writer and journalist whose work for the New York Times won her a Pulitzer Prize. She has also been a professor of journalism at Emory University, Princeton University, and Boston College. Her previous work includes the award-winning book The Warmth of Other Suns.

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