Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson turns back to the American past to discuss a brave pair of researchers in the early study of caste. In 1933, two Black anthropologists went to Mississippi, where lynchings were common, knowing that their work would risk their lives. The researchers had fled Hitler’s Germany and reached high status in academia: Allison Davis “was a young anthropologist with two degrees from Harvard University and a wealth of experience abroad, but, once in Mississippi, he could not in any way act like it” (246). Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, were joined by two dominant caste researchers, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, and together they would “embed themselves in a closed and isolated southern town from both sides of the caste divide” (246).

The team’s advisor, anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, went to Natchez, Mississippi, in advance to tell a town officials “that the researchers would be collecting data to compare it with a town in the North” (247). Allison Davis’s role as team leader was concealed—his cover research project was a study of the local church. Class was also a barrier, one that Mary Gardiner traversed by getting a “position as a government caseworker in a New Deal program, which allowed her to meet poorer whites and visit their homes” (247). Davis recruited a fifth researcher to live as a field worker, as he and his wife had assumed a more privileged position and resided with a Black doctor. Personal relationships were inherently dangerous and could not be displayed: “The two women found that they could not be seen together in public at all, had to conceal how well they knew each other, the caste system disallowing that kind of camaraderie between women of different castes” (249). Allison Davis had to present himself as Burleigh Gardner’s subordinate, and meetings between the two men were subject to local law enforcement surveillance.

Their study was voluminous and detailed, resulting in the 538-page work Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. In it, they described the intricate social rituals that maintained caste. The Davises themselves found their work delayed by economic hardship, as research funding was scarce and both had to take on teaching to support themselves. The work took eight years to publish, not appearing until 1941. By then, other, White anthropologists with more resources had conducted their own studies and published them, so that Deep South was “overshadowed.” Their conclusions were also not necessarily well received by other Black academics, who had some “fear that invoking the fixed and formal, millennia long caste system of India could forestall the hard earned gains they had managed to achieve” (253). Wilkerson contextualizes this, explaining that in the 1930s no one imagined the gains of the civil rights movement or the presidency of Barack Obama. Wilkerson argues that this “resistance to Davis’s work inadvertently proved the very theories Davis had devoted his life to exposing” (254).

One Caribbean-born scholar, Oliver Cromwell Cox, argued that “the caste system in India was singular because it was considered stable and unquestioned” (255). Wilkerson casts doubt on this view, as it diminishes the deliberate struggles and resistance of Dalits, and she notes that noted sociologist Gunnar Myrdal also went on to describe Jim Crow as a caste system. He did so in a seminal 1944 work, American Dilemma. As for Allison Davis, he went on to receive a PhD from and then teach at the University of Chicago. Liberation and civil rights activists such as Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr. Went on to read his work, though Wilkerson notes that his contributions were “nearly lost to history” (256). 

Wilkerson describes the baseball prowess of Negro Leagues pitcher LeRoy “Satchel” Paige, who pitched fastballs as rapidly as 103 miles per hour, and whose teammates let him practice by knocking cigarettes out of their mouths, so confident they were in his skills. By the time baseball was integrated and Jackie Robinson had signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, “Satchel Paige was already forty and considered too old for the game” (258). Two years later, the Cleveland Indians were in a race for a championship and Paige got his chance, “helping Cleveland make it to the playoffs and ultimately to the World Series, just as the team owner had hoped” (259). Paige pitched again in the World Series and made his last appearance at 59, still outperforming much younger players. Wilkerson comments, “Under the spell of caste, the majors, like society itself, were willing to forego their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate” (260).