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3.5 �

In my introductory sociology course in university, my professor stated that within 15 seconds, people always took note of two things about any persons who crossed their path - their gender and their race. People do this to determine their actions. This is the sole lesson I remember from that class, as interesting as it was.

In Caste, Wilkerson wrote about what Americans do with that information. From her earlier work on her Pulitzer-prize winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, she realized that her research was really about a caste system in the US, and one which was based upon inherited physical characteristics.

A caste system is 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...

In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans.

"As a social or human division," wrote the political scientist Andrew Hacker of the use of physical traits to form human categories, "it surpasses all others - even gender - in intensity and subordination."

In this book, Wilkerson explored how caste systems originated and chose to compare the social hierarchies in India (the oldest continual system), the US, and in Nazi Germany. She included the latter because they had been inspired by the Jim Crow legislation in the southern US states.

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

Given my long-term interest in the social sciences, this idea of a caste in US is far from shocking and hardly novel. I already knew that Nazi Germany had adopted the eugenics practice established by 32 US states which forced the sterilization of the mentally ill. I still learned some new things. It was rather shameful just how much inspiration Nazi Germany received as they copied verbatim laws from the US South that they'd use to target people of Jewish belief and ancestry. What's interesting is how differently these two nations have dealt with their ugly histories. Germany acknowledged theirs while many in the US are still in denial.

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,� he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.

Wilkerson also stated that while she wanted to consider everyone affected by this hierarchy in the US, her book would concentrate on those occupying the polar opposites - those of European ancestry who are the primary beneficiaries contrasted against those at the bottom, African-Americans. I learned more about the African-American experience since a Dutch ship, laden with "cargo" destined for the slave trade, docked in the US in the 1600s. It was not easy to listen to this history. But I'm of the belief that even the ugly parts of history need to come to light if there's any hope of improvement. And yet -

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. ...
Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it. ...
The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly.

I believe this is an important topic for Americans to explore, so I'm giving Caste a positive rating. However, Wilkerson wrote with a sledge hammer approach, and I found the content to be repetitive. I don't require three different analogies to be convinced of the same point. I had listened to the audiobook version. While the narrator never overtly sounded angry, I certainly felt Wilkerson's frustration and anger. I dispute neither her anger nor her right to feel it. But I believe that her ire meant that she didn't develop some points as well as she could have. In particular, I felt as though she pitted the African-American experience against the others who weren't of European ancestry, and ignored the atrocities committed against the other "races." African-Americans weren't the only ones who experienced lynching and disenfranchisement in the US. Wilkerson herself had pointed out that this was a long-term strategy that had been used by the dominant caste - to encourage fighting amongst all the ranks lower than them. I've been around enough people of various ancestries to hear Latinx and Asian-Americans voice racist attitudes about African-Americans and vice versa. I've also seen "colorism" within most people groups. Everybody needs to acknowledge and to confront their inherent biases, because I've also seen people work together well and to be friends across the color spectrum. There is hope, small as it might be.