Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

For people of the subordinate caste, the system is maintained through terror and violence that the dominant caste merely has to witness with no objections to ensure that the system continues. Both Nazis and White Americans relied heavily on physical beatings, including, in the American case, “as many as four hundred lashes, torture that amounted to murder” (151). Escaped slaves were subjected to especially cruel tortures when recaptured, including branding and castration. Violence may have been impractical from an economic perspective, but it was central to the “regular maintenance of an unnatural institution” (153). Torture continued after emancipation, with, “a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century” (155).

Dehumanization also set up some members of the subordinate caste in authority over their fellows to incentivize their cooperation. Wilkerson notes, “In Nazi labor camps, it was the kapo, the head Jew in each hut of captives […] In the American South, it was the slave driver, the head Negro, who served this role” (156). Jews were forced to dispose of the bodies of the dead in crematoria, and Black men were forced to hold down their fellow captives to be beaten. One day in the mid-18th century, a visiting minister noted that a Black man had been “flogged to the brink of death” merely for contradicting his owner about whether corn rows that were straighter produced more (157). White people visiting the Jim Crow South noticed the social deference they were given by Black people and told by locals that this was a requirement. 

Wilkerson describes a movie still from the 1930s that depicts White actress Mary Pickford and Black actress Louise Beavers: Pickford’s “golden hair and porcelain, air-brushed skin pops against the purposely unadorned darkness of the black woman” (159). Beavers was frequently forced to wear padding so she appeared larger than the White actors she appeared with, and she was forced to speak clichéd dialogue in roles as a servant or enslaved person. These norms of popular culture remind us that for caste to function “it must be understood in every interaction that one group was superior and inherently deserving of the best in a given society and that those who were deemed lowest were deserving of their plight” (160).

Caste in India and the United States relied on strict dress codes for those designated as subordinate. Germans attacked Jews for wearing fur. African-American people’s very survival has depended on the “performance of that submission” no matter how incompetent or morally inferior a White person with power of them might have been (162). Tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South were expected to show deference. Black bus passengers had to pay their fares, then exit to allow White people on, risking the bus driving off without them. To underscore the extent of dehumanization, Wilkerson points out that a Black high school student won an essay contest in 1944 for suggesting a fitting punishment for Hitler would be life as an American Black person.