Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In all the caste systems Wilkerson highlights, “Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes” (115). In India, this involved extreme physical distance between the castes in public. In the United States, segregation extended to cemeteries and Bibles in courtrooms. A Black railroad worker who was injured in an accident in the 1930s was not even taken to a hospital.

This discourse of purity was especially strong around water and access to swimming pools. White-led race riots erupted in Chicago in 1918 when a young Black man died after he swam too close to the White section of a public beach (118). In subsequent decades, efforts to integrate pools in many cities across the country were met with violence. In 1951, a little boy in Youngstown wanted to swim at a pool to celebrate a Little League championship victory with his teammates; he was admitted only to sit on a raft pushed by a White lifeguard, continually exhorting him “just don’t touch the water” (120).

The United States also created a system of “racial absolutism […] the idea that a single drop of African blood, or varying percentages of Asian or Native American blood, could taint the purity of someone who might otherwise be presumed to be European” (121). South Africa used an opposite system because its white minority was smaller—it kept power by “granting honorary whiteness” (121). Who belonged to the privileged caste was always in flux and redefined— in the country’s earlier decades, immigrants outside Western Europe were suspect, and immigration laws were passed to restrict Chinese immigration. By 1910, immigration from countries outside of favored European regions was restricted. Sometimes Italians were treated as nonwhites; Wilkerson notes an attempt to prohibit Italians from voting and a mass lynching (123). A Black man who married an Italian woman was even cleared of miscegenation charges.

Some racial definitions attempted mathematical precision, defining nonwhite status in various fractional terms, some of which required as little as 1/64 Black ancestry. Other statutes discussed “traceable amounts” of Blackness, meant to ensure the caste system’s “smooth functioning.” The bipolar caste structure also created pressures for immigrants from non-African nations to establish their own Whiteness, and the Supreme Court ruled that as non-Caucasians, neither Japanese nor Indian people were White. Some of these people lost naturalized citizenship, and one man committed suicide after he lost his business and was unable to return to India after he lost his passport. These distinctions were a form of system maintenance rather than logic. Segregation in both India and the United States extended to sacred spaces: Black Mormons could not enter temples, and Wilkerson says that churches are still not integrated: “To this day, Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America” (128). 

Returning to her earlier use of house metaphors, Wilkerson describes the lowest part of a house’s foundation, the mudsill. Similarly, “In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon” (131). A South Carolina senator named James Henry Hammond used this analogy to justify slavery before the Civil War. Hammond raped the enslaved women he owned and committed incest with his own nieces, none of which obstructed his Senate career. In a speech on slavery, “he identified the economic purpose of a hierarchy […] to ensure that the tasks necessary for a society to function get handled whether or not people wish to do them, in this case, by being born to the disfavored sill plate” (132). Indian caste also designated economic status, including who was responsible for waste disposal. African Americans found that their caste meant they were “relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition” (132). The Jim Crow legal system in many states explicitly forbade African Americans from engaging in skilled labor. Custom and prejudice meant the same was often true in the North, where unions blocked African American from certain trades. 

Wilkerson notes, “The historic association between menial labor and blackness served to further entrap black people in a circle of subservience in the American mind” (135). Even as some occupations diversified, Black people were kept out of managerial positions over Whites. The only realm open to them beyond domestic or agricultural labor was entertainment, “in keeping with caste notions of their performing for the pleasure of the dominant caste” (136), and forced performance of happiness was part of preserving White illusions about slavery as a humane and functional system. This role, too, has ongoing resonance: “in a 2020 ranking of the richest African-Americans, seventeen of the top twenty—from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan—made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports” (137).

These entertainment functions were seldom used to challenge Whiteness; when the Black boxer Jack Johnson was victorious over James Jeffries, riots broke out. Entertainment also relied on caricatures of blackness and use of blackface. Cultural depictions that did not challenge White supremacy were rewarded, as when Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her portrayal of “Mammy, a solicitous and obesely desexed counterpoint to Scarlett O’Hara, the feminine ideal, in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind” (138). These portrayals dismissed that most enslaved people were thin due to insufficient nutrition. The demand for entertainment during slavery could also have fatal consequences, as they did for one enslaved person who refused to deny Jesus to allow the White man who held him in bondage to win a bet with another slave owner. Nazis also demanded entertainment of concentration camp owners. Wilkerson asserts, “Every act, every gesture, was calculated for the purpose of reminding the subordinate caste, in these otherwise unrelated caste systems, of the dominant caste’s total reign over their very being” (140).