Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Wilkerson turns to another particularity of American life, the lack of universal healthcare that is free at point of service, to illustrate the inhumanity of caste. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Leon Lederman, was forced to auction off his Nobel Prize to pay for his end-of-life care. Wilkerson argues that in countries where people “value their shared commonality” (353), school systems are more functional, medical costs are lower, and overall quality of life and personal happiness is higher. Americans have “the highest rates of gun deaths in the developed world” along with the highest rates of incarcerated people (354). American life expectancy is the lowest in the developed world, and its maternal mortality rate is three times that of Sweden’s, likely due to the abysmal care received by Black and Indigenous parents. Americans also report lower rates of happiness than others.

These longstanding social problems came to a head with the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, as America “deluded itself into believing that American exceptionalism would somehow grant it immunity from the sorrow of other countries” (356). Caste came into play almost immediately, as Asian Americans were blamed for the disease’s Chinese origins, and others found themselves unable to protect themselves from the virus due to their work. Wilkerson calls such jobs:

[…] the caste-like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy—grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact—that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place (357).

Wilkerson notes that global observers were horrified by these trends. She declares, “the pandemic forced the nation to open its eyes to what it might not have wanted to see but needed to see, while forcing humanity to contemplate its impotence against the laws of nature” (357).