Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson notes that in caste systems, all images and discussions of the social ideal center on the dominant caste, including our conceptions of “intellect” and “beauty” (268). The dominant caste is always visible in popular culture and presented as moral and hardworking. This lack of representation is obvious to those outside this protection, but Wilkerson notes “It would be the rare outliers who would go out of their way to experience the world from the perspective of those considered below them, or even to think about them one way or the other” (268). She notes the dynamic seen in narcissistic families, where “model minorities” can assume the role of favored children and Native people are often ignored, while the rest serve as the “scapegoat.” White people take their caste position as “‘solace in a stressful world’ as they know there is always a floor to the caste system they can never occupy” (268-269).

Some psychoanalysts and social scientists have extended the concept of narcissism—extreme self-focus and self-centeredness—to entire social groups. They internalize inflated ideas of their own perfection, but such an individual may also live with “the fear that he cannot live up to the constructed ideals of his own perfection” (269). They use this idea to explain the violence of fascism, as individuals who have fully internalized this belief in their own superiority will use any means to preserve their dominance and protect their group from outsiders. Wilkerson frequently cites social theorist Erich Fromm, a German Jew who fled the Third Reich for Switzerland. Fromm noted that both poor White people and working-class Germans clung to their racial identities as proof of their superiority, despite their material circumstances. They also relied on a “narcissistic leader” with whom they could identify and whom they believed protected and represented their interests.

Wilkerson notes that these narcissistic traits show up in everyday life, including the tendency to deny shared social experiences across caste. In her own life, she found a co-worker was entirely unwilling to accept that they had shared experiences managing the needs of elderly family members, despite the fact that she had recently informed this White man of her struggles caring for her own mother. She also finds that these dynamics become legible to her when she is in a group of Indian people, through body language, accent, and sometimes skin tone. She explains, “Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself” (273). She witnesses Brahmin people speaking over Dalit scholars about their research and expertise and compares it to “mansplaining and whitesplaining” she has observed in the US (275). One Brahmin scholar interrupted a conversation between Wilkerson and a Dalit woman, not even noticing what she had just done in disrupting a social encounter to exert her own status.

White Americans retain their obsession with caste as they quiz each other about their national origins, and they may still engage in eugenics-inspired frameworks about which areas of Europe are most desirable. Wilkerson recalls meeting a woman named Catherine who answered that her name was written with the “English spelling,” a constructed concept that nevertheless had a racial referent. Wilkerson recounts three women at a dinner party subconsciously competing about whose family had immigrated from Germany earlier. A woman with reddish hair took pains to establish herself as “Nordic,” a term directly from the eugenics era that was meant to evoke superiority. It still features in the rhetoric of the current president, who considers such people more desirable immigrants, just as the nativist politicians of the 1920s did when they clarified who would be exempt from stricter immigration quotas (277). 

Wilkerson describes a new social dynamic that emerged in Germany during World War II. As Jews disappeared from public life and into concentration camps, the remaining population “had only themselves to regard and to distinguish, and they scanned the population for someone else to be better than” (279). A German girl in a village near Hanover found herself a target of speculation because she had dark curly hair, and neighbors speculated about possible southern European or “Persian origins,” or, “more ominously […] any Jewish blood” (279). The girl obsessively photographed and measured her own face to see if it corresponded to a less prestigious racial type. To protect themselves further, her family consulted a genealogist. Wilkerson describes how the girl’s family later found the photographs of her efforts to measure her face, describing them as proof that: “Even the favored ones were diminished and driven to fear in the shadow of supposed perfection” (280).