Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson describes a parenting dilemma facing a young father in Oakland, enjoying a meal out with his young son. He decided not to meet the child’s demands for juice, knowing that this would not meet his food needs. Just as important, however, was a deeper lesson he would have to teach at many ages: “One day, he would no longer be an adorable little toddler but would be a black teenager or grown man, and respecting authority, following the rules, could mean his very life” (208). Wilkerson describes the dilemmas Black parents face about when and how to teach their children these cruel rules of caste—whether to tell them early and often or wait for a particular setback. They are always reminded of the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, killed because he held a toy gun when a police officer arrived.

The father in Oakland was a history professor, and he focused, for the moment, on the present, telling his son to eat food first and juice later. An older woman from the dominant caste came up and told the child to ignore his father’s directives and drink the juice. The father found himself taken aback and angry, wondering, “The woman would not have gotten up if she didn’t perceive she had a right to. Had she done this to other parents?” (210). Though the man was able to tell the woman to go back to her table and stop intervening, she was participating in a much older caste tradition than she realized. Enslaved people had no rights to their own children and faced terrible punishments if they defended them from cruel owners. Black children would rush to defend their parents, confident in their own humanity even as it was denied them.

Caste has persisted even as Black parents now have more parental rights, and Wilkerson describes its contemporary operation starkly:

It’s a form of status hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit […] but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie (212).

Wilkerson then describes “scenes of caste” in ordinary life (213), such as a Black woman introducing herself to a new neighbor and discovering he thinks she is from a laundry service. In Chicago, a college professor is “taken for a delivery boy in his own building” and questioned as to why he is opening mail in the elevator (213). In another case, a White engineer finds himself defending one of his project managers because a contractor refused to believe a Black person had any authority over the work.

Wilkerson notes that this has become even more visible since 2016, through incidents of “the surveillance of black citizens by white strangers” which often result in notoriety, viral videos, and apologies from relevant organizations (215). People have been blocked from their own homes, evicted from dorm lounges at Yale University for sleeping, and in one near-tragedy in Georgia, a Black babysitter was followed by a White woman as he drove with his two White charges. Their explanation of what he was doing with them may have saved his life, as eventually he was followed by a patrol car.

Wilkerson calls these events “intrusions” but notes that they have lasting effects. She describes her own experience in an airport in Michigan, discovering she is being followed by two White people. Eventually, they demand to know why she is walking quickly through the airport with minimal luggage, unswayed by her assertion she is a journalist, recently arrived in Chicago for a brief trip to Detroit. They eventually identify themselves as DEA agents and follow her onto the shuttle bus to the rental car terminal. She discovers she is the only African American person aboard and recalls, “It was a psychic assault to sit there, accused and condemned, not just by the agents but by everyone on the bus who looked with contempt and disdain, seeing me as not like them, when I was exactly like them” (221). She “decided to be conspicuously what I was” and got out her reporter’s notebook, turning to writing her observations of the agents to steady herself (221). She recalls feeling dimly vindicated that now her tormentors felt “the sting of inspection” (222).

To her surprise, they end the encounter and let her exit the shuttle bus, but for her it does not end there. She finds herself unable to remember how to exit for the interstate, suddenly full of the emotions she could not afford to feel under official scrutiny. Wilkerson calls this “the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition” (223). 

Wilkerson notes that while it may seem surprising, the greatest instability in caste systems is caused by success despite it: “Achievement by marginalized people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash” (224). This occurred in 1918 in France, as American soldiers were disconcerted and enraged by French allies supporting and being friendly with Black troops. Wilkerson notes, “they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself” (225). Two Black officers, Pvt. Burton Holmes and Eddie Sowers, were each nominated for the Medal of Honor in the conflict, but the recommendations were ignored and buried, “lest the living begin to think themselves equal, get uppity, out of their place, and threaten the myths that the upper caste kept telling itself and the world” (226).

This boundary was reinforced more violently in 1946, as a soldier returning home to North Carolina from Georgia asked a bus driver to stop so he could relieve himself. He did not ask politely enough for the driver’s satisfaction, so the police were called in South Carolina, and he was blinded in the ensuing altercation and jailed. The NAACP and the federal government tried to intervene, but local authorities relied only on White testimony from the individuals involved in the attack. It came out that the veteran had “said ‘yes’ instead of ‘yes, sir’ to the police chief during the arrest. This, combined with the elevated position his uniform conveyed, was seen as reason enough for punishment in the caste system” (228).

These kinds of atrocities occurred on a larger scale in the 1920s, as more Black people returned home from military service and moved north. There were “a wave of anti-black pogroms in more than a dozen American cities, from East St. Louis to Chicago to Baltimore” (229) and the decimation of Tulsa’s Black business sector, known as “Black Wall Street” (228). In the 1890s, a prosperous grocery owner in Tulsa was lynched along with two of his employees after one of his clerks broke up a fight between Black and White children. The owner, Thomas Moss, was a friend of Ida B. Wells, and his death was “what set her on her lifelong mission to awaken the country to the terror of lynching” (230). Wilkerson notes that most of the stories in this chapter occurred because Black people stepped out of their assigned social roles and triggered anxiety in the dominant caste.

Enforced debasement also extended to any acknowledgment of intellectual and social contributions, especially of enslaved people. In 1721, an enslaved man named Onesimus told the man who held him captive, Cotton Mather, about a practice that would prevent small pox infection: “People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person” (231). Mather tried it in his own household, and it became common practice in Massachusetts in subsequent decades. Onesimus remained in bondage until he purchased partial freedom, which Wilkerson cites as proof that Onesimus “does not appear to have reaped the rewards for a role that was beyond his station” (232).

Wilkerson then describes how the caste system made only one major exception to Jim Crow rules for who could ride in the White designated section of buses. Black domestic workers who had White children with them could ride in the White section to prevent the children from encountering those below them in the hierarchy. Jim Crow placed other limits on Black advancement, as white school administrators deliberately hired the worst candidates they could find to teach in segregated schools, a practice that “all but ensured black failure by preempting success” (233). The mass media continues to perpetuate ideas of permanent inferiority, as a 2017 study found that “African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two-thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news” (234). The news similarly stresses “white on black crime’ while this is only ten percent of such crimes overall, and disregards positive trends, like declining rates of unplanned pregnancy in Black and Latina communities (235).

De-segregation in the South, Wilkerson notes, merely shifted the terms on which dominant caste Americans defended their status. White Southerners closed pools and schools rather than integrate them. Decades after segregation formally ended, a pool in McKinney, Texas, became another site of caste enactment. The police were called in response to a pool party, and a young dominant-caste police officer physically subdued a young Black girl, tackling her to the ground. Wilkerson concludes, “Within days, the officer resigned, but the incident demonstrated the depth of assumptions about who belongs where in a caste society” (237).