Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson recalls attending a New Year’s party in 2016 and meeting up with a friend, noted journalist Gwen Ifill, host of PBS NewsHour and a “long-standing clear-eyed Washington sage” (322). Wilkerson found herself compelled to whisper as she asked about Ifill’s thoughts on the upcoming presidential election, fearful of offending any insiders or members of the Clinton campaign. She confessed to Ifill that she believed the likely Republican nominee Donald Trump could win, and Ifill agreed with her. They agreed it came down to 2042, the date at which it was predicted White people would become a demographic minority. Ifill died shortly after the election, and Wilkerson laments that “that prophetic conversation was the last I would have with her” (323).

Wilkerson argues that many people “were blindsided by the outcome because they had not figured into their calculation the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics” (324). She argues that pundits who considered voting for Trump counterproductive ignored that Americans were willing to risk Trump’s instability to “preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America” (324). She cites many scholars who argue that White voters had a strong sense of their racial identity and who would preserve their privileges; they voted for this system as the primary source of their interests rather than policies that might improve their daily lives. White voters of all genders and class positions “went with the aspect of themselves that grants them the most power and status in the hierarchy” (327-328), as White women did when 53% of them chose Trump over Clinton.

Wilkerson argues that this preference for Whiteness explains the behavior of both political parties— Republicans do everything they can to appeal to White evangelicals, while African American voters are “devalued” by Democrats despite being a core and consistent voting bloc for the party. Democrats continue “pining for the die-hard voters of their opponents” rather than pursue those more likely to vote for them if their interests and needs can be met (329). Evangelical theology has become its own predictor of support for the GOP and its agenda of defending the caste system.

Wilkerson notes that “Trump fared well against Clinton with all categories of white voters” (331), and lower-income White voters were more likely to vote for Clinton, despite media narratives suggesting the contrary. Wilkerson cites a political scientist who explains this as “dominant group status threat” (332)—specifically, White voters turning to those who would protect them and eradicate the legacy of a president who increased their anxieties. Wilkerson closes with an anecdote about two White men on a flight from Atlanta to Chicago who celebrated the results, criticizing both Obama and Clinton and seeing the outcome as proof America “finally got it right” (332).

In 2017, the presence of statues memorializing Confederate generals became a pressing political issue in many American cities. Wilkerson recalls visiting Charlottesville, Virginia, as the city’s leaders debated what to do with a prominent statue of Robert E. Lee. The statue debates animated neo-Nazis and conservatives, who could see “how much they and their histories had in common even if ordinary Americans did not” (333). The former group marched on the city that summer, including a torchlight procession through the University of Virginia campus in which they chanted Nazi slogans. The next day, a counter-protester named Heather Heyer was killed, and the city began its battle to keep the Lee statue covered. Wilkerson recalls her own visit to the city and that the covering “brought more attention to the general, and to the monuments to the Confederacy, not less” (334).

The Confederacy was explicitly founded on White supremacy and the perpetual enslavement of Black people. While it was defeated militarily, it enjoyed resounding victories through nostalgic portrayals of the South in popular culture, especially in films like Gone With the Wind. Wilkerson reminds the reader that the end of slavery did not meaningfully erode the caste system—slaveowners were paid compensation for their economic losses, rather than enslaved people receiving reparations for their generations of suffering. She argues that Confederate statues were meant as a form of “psychic trolling” to diminish resistance to segregation. Reconstruction’s end and “the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come (336).

In 2017, there were over 200 memorials to Lee in the United States, and many streets, highways, and schools also bear his name. Lee saw slavery as a “necessary evil” and brutally beat enslaved people who escaped from his captivity. In addition to facing no moral judgment for his complicity in slavery, Lee also faced “few penalties associated with treason” (338), as Lincoln’s successor pardoned many former confederates. General toleration of former Confederates became such an increasingly common cultural practice that abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke out against it. He declared, “‘there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget” (338). Lee later became president of an institution of higher learning that came to bear his name, Washington and Lee University, which granted him “social standing and a worshipful legacy” (338). Wilkerson notes that given the increasing prominence Lee occupied nationally in the decades after his death, “an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other” (339).

Wilkerson recalls similar controversy around statues in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2017. Men in “face masks and bullet proof vests” undertook a secret mission not of military conquest but of Confederate monument removal (339). In the aftermath of the 2015 White supremacist murders at Mother Emmanuel AME, South Carolina eventually removed its Confederate Flag from the State Capitol. The Mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, saw these events and decided it was time for his city to stop memorializing Confederate president Jefferson Davis or General Lee. There was some support for the gesture, but the contractors who agreed to do the work were threatened, as were receptionists in city government. Wilkerson notes, “it could be seen as karma that the only construction crew willing to risk their lives to remove the Confederate statues was African-American” (341). The efforts succeeded despite drone surveillance and sabotage efforts. Other states took a radically different tack: Alabama made it illegal to remove any statue that had been up for more than two decades, effectively protecting all of its White supremacist monuments.

To demonstrate alternate approaches to evils of the past, Wilkerson recalls her visits to Germany. She describes the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with 2,711 massive stones standing in rows. Berlin is full of “stumbling stones” that date the lives and deaths of citizens who last lived there before being deported to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. Germany has deliberately chosen to only provide memorials to “the victims of its aggressions and to the courageous people who resisted the men who inflicted atrocities on human beings” (345). Display of Nazi symbols is banned, and even the death penalty is considered too much of a risk given the nation’s past mistakes. Germany conducted trials and collected reparations, while former Confederates retained their social positions and continued to politically dominate the American South.

Wilkerson notes that these monuments are an unavoidable part of everyday life in Berlin: One train station from which many victims left features the names of concentration camps on a massive sign. The Nazi past is taught comprehensively in schools. Wilkerson notes that this is not always uncontested, but while Germans may ask about the tactics employed, “what seems not in contention is the necessity of remembering” (348). One friend of Wilkerson’s who specializes in historical tours and research reports that younger generations acknowledge that while they are not personally responsible, they have a role to remain “guardians of the truth” (349).