Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Indian social activist Bhimrao Ambedkar, whom Wilkerson calls “the Martin Luther King of India” (32), was born in India in 1897 and into India’s subordinate Dalit caste. Ambedkar left India for New York in 1913. He studied social science at Columbia University, enrolled in a doctoral program at the London School of Economics, and also studied law. Upon return to India, he began a civil rights struggle against the caste system, including the rights of Dalits to access drinking water. He became a Buddhist partly out of distaste for Hinduism as a bulwark of the caste system. After India became independent from Great Britain, Ambedkar helped draft the country’s first constitution, which pushed for greater equity and the formal abolition of caste discrimination. He also served in India’s parliament. He died of complications from diabetes in 1956. His contributions to Indian society are widely recognized: Many statues bear his name, and his likeness has been commemorated on official postage stamps. As Wilkerson notes, Ambedkar recognized similarities between caste in India and racism in the United States, and he corresponded with W.E.B. DuBois. 

A Black scholar and activist, DuBois devoted his life to what he called the “race problem” in the United States. He studied at Fisk University and then went on to study philosophy at Harvard with elite academics who belonged to the White dominant caste, including George Santayana and William James. He became the first Black person to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard in 1895, studying history. His influential early work The Souls of Black Folk considers questions of African American identity and the role of intellectual elites in creating a Black mass politics dedicated to liberation. He argued with Booker T. Washington that racial progress could not be brought about simply through Black self-sufficiency and argued that eradication of prejudice was just as important. He worked as the editor for the NAACP’s publication The Crisis from 1910-1934. He had a lifelong interest in solidarity among all African peoples and participated in multiple conferences of the Pan-Africanist movement. By the 1930s he was more interested in Marxist thought, most evident in his work while at Atlanta University from 1934-1944, and he broke with the NAACP in 1948. He moved to Ghana in 1961 and died there just before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 27, 1963. 

Born in Austria in 1889, Hitler was an aspiring artist who moved to Vienna in 1907. He failed to achieve his artistic aspirations and spent much of his youth underemployed and homeless. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He became an ardent anti-Semite and pan-German nationalist, joining the Nazi party in 1919 and becoming its leader in 1921. Hitler’s Nazi party gained ground throughout the 1920s and 1930s, especially as Germany’s economic situation worsened and his message of national renewal and blaming of Jews for the nation’s ills found a wider audience. Nazi ideology rested on the supremacy of the Aryan race, those of Nordic and Germanic ancestry, and the inferiority of Jews and Slavs and their threat to Germany’s existence.

His party never achieved a majority, but he was installed as Chancellor in 1933 because German conservatives considered him a useful tool for forming a government. He quickly established anti-Semitism as a matter of law and policy, stripping Jews of citizenship, property rights, and the ability to marry “Aryans.” His political platform also rested on territorial expansion and conquest, which led him to launch the Second World War. Inextricable from this goal was genocidal removal of all Jews from Europe, along with other populations his ideology considered subhuman, such as Slavic peoples, LGBTQ+ people, Sinti and Roma, and political opponents, especially communists. The Nazis took inspiration from America’s race-based laws and Hitler personally admired the genocide of Native Americans and the American practice of lynching. Hitler committed suicide in April 1945 just before the Red Army conquered Berlin. 

Born in Hawaii in 1961, Barack Obama attended Columbia University and worked as a community organizer before attending Harvard Law School. He taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago and became an Illinois State Senator in 1997, serving until 2004. He ran for US Senate and served until his election as president in November of 2008. Obama’s father is Kenyan, and his mother was White. Wilkerson cites his multiracial heritage and personal biography as factors that may have eased White anxieties about electing him president; supporting him did not require overt and sustained reconciliation with slavery or segregation. As president, Obama faced sustained attacks on his legitimacy from political opponents, including accusations that he was not born in the United States and that his presidency was illegitimate. Many political pundits and scholars have interpreted the election of Donald Trump as a repudiation of Obama’s multiracial vision for the United States and his more progressive policies. 

Born in 1946 into inherited wealth from his father, Donald Trump became a real estate developer in New York City after attending the University of Pennsylvania. He has weighed in on political controversies throughout his adult life, and he called for the death penalty for five teenagers—four Black, one Latinx—accused of rape in 1989 in the controversy known as the Central Park Five. He became a leader in the right-wing movement calling on Barack Obama to prove his American citizenship after achieving some measure of fame for his status as a reality TV star on The Apprentice. He ran for the Republican nomination for president on an explicitly nationalist and xenophobic platform that openly appealed to White Americans’ anxieties about race and the possibility of demographic change. Trump has also overseen the much-criticized response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. For Wilkerson, Trump’s election victory was the result of many White Americans’ wish to maintain their primacy of caste, even at the expense of their own well-being.