Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson’s main subject in this chapter is Nazi Germany, specifically a 1934 conference early in Hitler’s rule. At this gathering, Nazi bureaucrats met to “debate the legal framework for an Aryan nation” (78). Their work would be explicitly comparative, with an eye to how “other countries protected racial purity from the taint of the disfavored” (78). The meeting was chaired by Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice, who described the legal system of the United States. Germany was eager to construct its new nation on legal grounds to retain foreign investment, and the meeting participants “knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans” (78).

The German bureaucrats were well aware that Americans also occupied the forefront of the intellectual movement known as eugenics, which posited that genetic and racial differences could be scientifically studied to benefit the dominant race and its survival. Prominent figures like Henry Ford were among its adherents. American eugenicists like Madison Grant were especially focused on restricting immigration. Grant “converted his zeal for Aryan supremacy into helping enact a series of American immigration and marriage restrictions in the 1920s, as the Nazi Party was forming across the Atlantic” (80). Hitler personally admired the genocide of Native Americans and the American practice of lynching. The Nazi bureaucrats considered the United States an example of a racially based legal system that ensured white dominance and explicitly prevented interracial social life and intermarriage (81).

Wilkerson goes back to the immediate past to explain how the bureaucrats arrived in their positions—the Nazi seizure of power. This victory came because conservatives hoped that installing Hitler would buttress their own authority, as Hitler’s party “drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign” (82). Hitler was not an experienced politician and immediately turned to anti-Semitism as a cornerstone of his ideology and governance. He drew especially on the propaganda trope that blamed Jews for Germany’s losses in World War I: “Seen as dominant in banking and finance, Jews were blamed for the insufficient financial support of the war effort, although historians now widely acknowledge that Germany lost on the battlefield and not solely for lack of funds” (82).

The Nazi researchers marveled at the extent of American segregation in all public facilities and including schools. When it came to the question of intermarriage, the meeting’s chair, Gürtner, “sought to downplay the U.S. prototype because he had a hard time believing that Americans actually enforced the laws the Nazis had uncovered” (84). The Nazis noted that the “political construction of race” in different ways in different jurisdictions offered a useful blueprint, but the “moderates” were concerned that any restrictions on “half-Aryans” would disenfranchise people who might otherwise embrace their heritage and rightful social role (86).

By 1936, when Hitler asked that the new laws be unveiled, the legal researchers had found their answer in an “association clause” of some Southern US states. This stated that individuals counted as nonwhite “if they had been married to or had been known to associate with people in the disfavored group, thus defying caste purity” (87). The new laws used a similar metric to identify anyone with two Jewish grandparents as Jewish. It also forbade intermarriage and sexual relationships between Germans and non-Germans and forbade German women of a particular age from doing domestic labor in Jewish homes. Additionally, “Jews were henceforth stripped of citizenship, prohibited from displaying the German flag, denied passports” (87). The parallels between Jim Crow and the US South should not be overstated, however, as “‘the one drop-rule was too harsh for the Nazis” (87).

Wilkerson narrates the scene in the German town of Sachsenhausen, home to a concentration camp its inhabitants were aware of but did little to stop. The ash from the camp crematoria fell on their homes. Though most of them were not committed ideologues, they “followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels” (90), and coped with the ash from the camp as a matter of course. Wilkerson then turns to an American town, home to an enormous tree that was dangerous to oncoming traffic because of its large size. The tree remained, however, as it was designated for lynchings and everyone knew it: “the white townspeople were willing to risk inconvenience, injury, and death, even to themselves, to keep the tree and the subordinate caste in their places” (91).

In East Texas in 1921, a young man named Wylie McNeely was burned alive for the putative offense of having assaulted a White woman. Before he was set alight, the White men cast lots for which parts of his body would make the most prestigious trophy. In 1935 in Florida, a White family took a portrait in front of the body of “Rubin Stacy, […] killed for frightening a white woman. The girl in the front is looking up at the dead black man with […] a smile of excitement on her face as if show ponies had just galloped past her at the circus” (92). Lynchings were entertainment events, with postcards sold to commemorate them—an atrocity even Nazis did not resort to.

Wilkerson closes with a 1919 lynching in Omaha. Will Brown was new to the region and accused of attacking a White couple. In advertising his lynching before trial, the townspeople gave vent to the resentment that “had been building against the influx of black southerners arriving north during the Great Migration” (94). A mass of citizens dragged Brown out of the courthouse and attacked the city’s mayor for trying to stop them. Brown was beaten, hung from a lamppost, and shot, with much of his death photographed and sold on postcards. His body was burned, tied to a police car, and dragged through the streets. The actor Henry Fonda witnessed these horrors as a boy and recalled them all his life. Wilkerson suggests that his career in taking roles where he served as a moral voice may be traced back to these events. In the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, Fonda’s character argues that mob violence harms all of human society.