No Mere Slogans - On Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste - The Origins of Our Discontents" - Los Angeles Review of Books

9/3/2020 No Mere Slogans: On Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” - Los Angeles Review of Books
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No Mere Slogans: On Isabel

Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins
of Our Discontents”
By Yogita Goyal
ab v g f d
SEPTEMBER 1, 2020
IN THE SPRING of 1944, a 16-year-old A ican

American girl won a student essay contest in
Columbus, Ohio. The question was: “What to do with
Hitler a er the war?” Her winning response: “Put
him in a Black skin and let him live the rest of his
life in America.”
Such charged moments punctuate Isabel Wilkerson’s

ambitious and unwieldy book about race, Caste: The
Origins of Our Discontents. Its very title announces her
iconoclasm. For Wilkerson, the United States needs to
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understand its aught and violent history by moving

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away om the vocabulary of race. But if this sounds
like the tired demand for color blindness or post-
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racialism, rest assured, because Wilkerson wants us to
think of the nation as operating according to the
invisible but rigid rules of a caste system, indeed, a
long-standing, all-encompassing in astructure of
hereditary ranking and hierarchy that divides us into
upper and lower castes.
In the example above, accordingly, we must learn to

see the teenage girl (for whom living in a “Black skin”
in America was the worst punishment she could BUY THIS BOOK
imagine) as an instance of a subordinate caste
experiencing caste-based discrimination. Wilkerson
POLITICS HISTORY
met the author, who said white people accepted her
CULTURAL STUDIES
as long as she stayed in “the container” they have
built for her.
Immediately following this encounter, Wilkerson

describes her own experience of being reduced to a
container with the wrong label as an A ican
American journalist. When she arrives at an exclusive
boutique on Michigan Avenue to interview the
manager for a piece she’s writing as a national
correspondent for The New York Times about Chicago’s
Magni cent Mile, the manager refuses to believe that
Wilkerson is the journalist he’s been waiting for. He
rudely demands for her identi cation before nally
asking her to leave. For Wilkerson, “his caste notions RECOMMENDED
of who should be doing what in society” help explain
The Work of Analogy: On
this instance of discrimination rather than the ready
Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste:
label of racism. The Origins of Our
Discontents”
By Anupama Rao
What does caste enable that race obscures? Why has
the vocabulary of race come to seem so exhausted Brokering Suitability: On
even in a moment when the nation faces resurgent "Indian Matchmaking"
By Rijuta Mehta
white supremacy and a vibrant protest movement
centering Black lives? Wilkerson skates over the Going Global: The
Literature That Slavery
Makes
inadequacy of race language perhaps too quickly, but By Crystal Parikh

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one might glean two core reasons for her belief. Hindutva and the Academy:
A Conversation with Divya
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Dwivedi
The rst is that race names only that which is visible,
By Krithika Varagur
the “skin,” while caste forces us to fathom the
“bones,” the invisible in astructure that determines No Strangers Here
one’s place and rank. Second, racism has come to be By Yogita Goyal
identi ed with overt prejudice, expressed in the form What King Learned from
of derogatory language or hurtful slurs, allowing Gandhi
By Priyanka Kumar
people to disavow their own unexamined behavior by
claiming that they don’t have a racist bone in their
body or that their best iend is Black.
There is no “litmus test” for racism, Wilkerson

observes, hoping to shi the conversation away om
the racist individual toward the system that gave
birth to them. She explains that it was her research
for her previous Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The
Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great
Migration, that led to an exploration of the existence
of an American caste system. She opens the rst
chapter of Caste with the 2016 election, orienting
those readers who responded to that shocking event
with statements like “This is not America” or “I don’t
recognize my country.”
Caste is thus written to educate those readers who are

unfamiliar with the deep-rooted realities of racism in
American history, and not for the scholar or pedant.
Assessing the book by the measure of historical
scholarship or political theory will inevitably
ustrate, given its hybrid genre, combining
anecdotes, published studies, interviews, and
Wilkerson’s own theses on “the eight pillars of caste”
including endogamy, heritability, occupational
hierarchy, dehumanization and stigma, cruelty and
terror, and ideologies of inherent inferiority
naturalized by religious doctrines. The loose structure
of the book eschews both chronology and sequence,
gathering examples and ideas rather than proving a
thesis systematically. As a history, it has too many

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gaps; as a memoir, it reveals no discernible structure
of a life lived over time; as a polemic, it relies far too
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much on sentimental appeal.
I confess being unable to know what to do with a

chapter that outlines canine hierarchy (alpha males,
underdogs, and lone wolves) and concludes that
“humans could learn a lot om canines” about
“natural alphas.” Similarly confounding is an odd
interlude ( ction, perhaps, or ethnography?) of an
upper-caste Indian man jettisoning his symbol of
caste identity, the sacred thread, and feeling that he is
born again. Despite such unusual choices, most
powerful in Caste are the vivid anecdotes of personal
harm — the cumulative evidence for the lived
experience of discrimination om slavery to
segregation and into the era of civil rights and
beyond.
For Wilkerson, a caste system is an arbitrary and

punitive ranking of human value that de nes inferior
and superior groups and sets them apart on the basis
of ancestry. She focuses on three caste systems but
only gives sustained attention to the “race-based caste
pyramid in the United States.” The other two — Nazi
Germany and India — it in and out of view, the
latter more than the former, but still indistinct, as if
visible only through a fog. India embodies the ancient
system of caste, Nazi Germany accelerates it, and the
United States has been disavowing its existence since
1619.
The book touches on some of the most familiar

moments of the race-caste analogy — such as Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1959 trip to India, where he
is welcomed with rapturous applause and comes to
see himself as a kind of “untouchable”; the work of a
group of Southern anthropologists in the 1930s and
1940s about the relations among race, class, and caste;
and the brief correspondence between Bhimrao Ramji

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Ambedkar and W. E. B. Du Bois, both intellectual
pioneers of Dalit and A ican American experiences
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of exploitation. But such histories aren’t the book’s
central focus. Most of all, turning to caste a ords
Wilkerson access to an experiential, a ective register
through which she collates moments that capture the
persistence of discrimination. She explains her
reasons for writing the book: “[M]oving about the
world as a living, breathing caste experiment myself, I
wanted to understand the hierarchies that I and many
millions of others have had to navigate.”
And such a personal focus serves as the anchor for

the entire book (somewhat similar to Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen) as Wilkerson highlights the injury
caused by unexpected behaviors, especially in such
rare ed or elite spaces as the rst-class cabin of an
airplane, a chic restaurant where the waiter ignores
her, the boutique on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue
which refuses to accept her presence. The desire for
recognition throbs throughout Caste: recognize my
pain, Wilkerson urges, and that of millions of others
like me. In fact, the book ends with two vignettes of
hope: the rst involves a white family iend who
learns that the waiter’s behavior toward them
requires her to speak up, and the second where an
un iendly plumber in the basement of Wilkerson’s
old house nally so ens when she appeals to his
humanity by asking about his mother.
That Wilkerson presents these ordinary encounters as

“radicalization” or “awakening” — rejoicing that “the
heart is the last ontier” — indicates the limits of her
political imagination where the agency of the
subordinated is superseded by the appeal to the
sentiments of the dominant castes. Such limits are
particularly evident because her sustained insistence
on the potency and pervasiveness of the entrenched
caste system demands solutions other than banal
realizations of privilege or of common humanity.

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Moreover, as Wilkerson educates herself on the
persistence of caste in India, she also seems to miss
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the full vibrancy of Dalit politics, culture, and history,
insisting instead that she has developed a kind of
caste-radar: “I began to be able to tell who was high-
born and who was low-born among the Indian
people.” She clari es that such knowledge comes not
om a literacy about surnames, family occupations,
or linguistic backgrounds (which serve as usual
markers of caste identity), but simply om observing
how people behave. Her insistence on the personal
encounter, and on lived experience, thus shapes her
understanding of both race and caste.
Instead of statistics, Caste accumulates metaphors.

America is an old house that needs repair. A play has
been running for centuries, and the cast of the play
has grown accustomed to its assigned roles. Humans
are trapped in the matrix, programmed to live out
their drone-like existence. Caste is the unseen
skeleton of America, and so, “[l]ooking at caste is like
holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.” Caste is
the DNA of the United States. It is also “the wordless
usher in a darkened theater” and a “powerful Sith
Lord.” Caste is like alcoholism or cancer, buried deep
within, ready to emerge at any moment, a “disease” to
which “none of us is immune.” The history of racist
violence is like a pathogen buried in the perma ost:
just as heat can reactivate anthrax, “human pathogens
of hatred and tribalism” lurk just beneath the surface.
Where “[r]ace is what we can see,” caste is the
“underlying grammar” of our mother tongue. In this
way, race is the “visible agent of the unseen force of
caste.” Where “[r]ace is uid and super cial,” “caste is
xed and rigid.”
Because the meanings of race and caste shi so o en,

both remain somewhat blurry. So when Wilkerson
outlines her schema — where white equals the upper
caste, Asians and Latinos make up middle castes, and

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A ican Americans are consigned to the lowest castes
— questions immediately arise about the e cacy of
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such distinctions today. Even if the history of Jim
Crow resonates with the segregation mandated by
caste (anti-miscegenation laws and bans on inter-caste
marriage, or a rmative action in the United States
and reservations and quota systems in India), how
does today’s uneven world (where di erences of
ethnicity, class, gender, religion, ideology, age, and
sexuality have agmented older ideas of a singular
Blackness) comprise a caste system?
That Wilkerson concedes that Native Americans

should be referred to as “[o]riginal, conquered, or
indigenous peoples” and “women of any race, or
minorities of any kind” as marginalized people
already points to the exclusions and attening at
work. While the speci c legacy of slavery and
segregation, as well as the magnitude of ongoing anti-
Blackness, demands attention, any book that claims to
pinpoint “the origins of our discontents,” and provide
a road map for the future must engage with changing
and internally complex racial formations. Is a
Burmese refugee middle caste while Beyoncé or an
A ican American CEO occupies a lower caste? The
child caged on our Southern border? The Latinos in
my city dying of COVID-19 in large numbers?
The vocabulary a orded by caste, unin ected by

di erential access to power, allows Wilkerson to
claim that “caste trumps class” but misses a true
measure of the modalities in which discrimination is
lived and how racial taxonomies change over time.
Why return us to a binary of Black and white albeit
renamed lower and upper caste, undi erentiated by
class, gender, citizenship status, disability? Who is
satis ed by such simplicity, crudeness, even?
Governor Jan Brewer jabbing her nger in President
Obama’s face draws outrage as a dominant caste
member “putting a man om the subordinate caste in

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his place, no matter his station.” But Wilkerson
makes no mention of how caste works when
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President Obama drinks a glass of water in Flint,
Michigan, presides over punitive deportation policies,
or expands extrajudicial killings and drone-bombings
across the world.
The extended metaphor of America as an old house

that Wilkerson returns to time and again captures
these contradictions. For Wilkerson, “[a]n old house is
its own kind of devotional.” Which is why she insists
that “we in the developed world are like homeowners
who inherited a house on a piece of land that is
beautiful on the outside” but conceals deep ruptures
within. As a gure for belonging, home ownership
surely conjures up questions of access and wealth. It
also raises the question of Native American
sovereignty and unceded, occupied territory.
Bourgeois concerns with home improvement
rendered in the lovingly detailed language of care of
welts in the ceiling sit uneasily with the urgency of
our historical conjuncture, just as so many are faced
with evictions, not to mention a longer history of
punitive state policies against the homeless and
displaced, the loss of Black homes in the last
economic recession, the long history of redlining and
unfair housing policies, and further back, the deeper
loss of home that came with the capture and torture
of Atlantic slavery.
For those convinced that racism in the United States

isn’t a big problem today, the book should be an eye-
opener. For those of us who already know these
histories (for example, that the Nazis consulted
American racial laws to develop their own eugenic
agenda), Caste may serve instead as an invitation to
dig deeper than Wilkerson herself chooses to and to
understand more fully the exact coordinates of the
race-caste analogy, both di erence and similarity. In
challenging American exceptionalism by placing

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domestic racial formations within and against other
times and places, Wilkerson admirably draws
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attention to the realities of global connectedness. But
transnational comparison should ideally go a step
further, in order to re ame the unexamined truisms
of each site and illuminate something we would not
otherwise see. We may thus recall that the very
de nitions of race and caste in recent history
developed in tandem — the colonial construction of
caste was itself shaped by European racial discourse,
as the end of the 19th century saw various e orts at
hierarchical classi cation of people into races in the
West and castes in India. It is therefore no
coincidence that the etymology of caste om the
Portuguese casta draws on European ideas of descent.
Early e orts to ght caste prejudice in India drew on
abolitionist strategies and likened caste oppression to
slavery. Correspondingly, in the antebellum United
States, abolitionists used the idiom of caste to
describe slavery, drawing on missionary accounts of
India to nd in the language of caste a useful
avoidance of race as biology, as well as a way to claim
the biological unity of the species. Du Bois,
Ambedkar, and Gandhi all debated the status and
relation of A ican Americans and Dalits. And the
“caste school of race relations” in the 1930s and 1940s
construed the connections with class and capitalism.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s adaptation of Gandhian
satyagraha or truth force and nonviolent civil
disobedience in the 1950s, and the revolutionary
politics of the Dalit Panthers of the 1970s further
reveals the radical convergence of such analogies in
the service of a political platform of liberation. And at
the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related
Intolerance in Durban, India, Israel, and the United
States joined hands to refuse consideration of caste
discrimination, Zionism, and reparations for slavery
and colonialism. These conjoined histories demand
further study, not least because our futures are likely

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connected.
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To fathom such relations, a less blurry portrait of
caste itself must emerge. Caste hierarchies in India
are indeed pervasive and vicious. But they are not
unchanging. While caste was once associated with
underdevelopment, it is now a signi cant force in
modern Indian democratic politics as well as a
vibrantly contested political identity. Despite or
alongside continuing violence — economic, sexual,
land grabs, brutality against inter-caste marriage,
desecration of commemorative sites, Prime Minister
Modi’s right-wing bigotry — there is a rising Dalit
militancy, an e ort to imagine a politics premised on
recognizing historical vulnerability and claiming the
pain of the “ground down” or “broken” body as the
very site of the coming emancipation. India’s
200,000,000 Dalits have been ghting for their rights
on multiple onts — with a boom in Dalit literature,
with considerable electoral clout and voting power,
with a vital public sphere, with a Bhim Army, with
symbolic celebrations like Phule Jayanti and
with Ambedkarite-Marxist alliances.. All these forces
have shown how deeply caste hierarchies are
intertwined with religion, gender, ethnicity, and,
most of all, with class.
In the end, Wilkerson’s choice to de ne caste and

race with partial precision inhibits a fuller
understanding of how inequality and discrimination
acquire new shape and form in the present — as
historical forms of violence persist but also mutate
and magni . To misread the very nature of power
makes e orts to combat it nearly hopeless but also
denies agency to those who fought the battles of the
past and march in the streets today. What struck me
most as I read this book during the pandemic is that
Wilkerson’s ame doesn’t help explain how the
powerful social movements of our COVID-19 era
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-mere-slogans-on-isabel-wilkersons-caste-the-origins-of-our-discontents/?fbclid=IwAR01GI29-b0-cJ77fvA… 10/12
could emerge, or what they mean — led by the

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young; the poor; by women; by queer, trans, and
nonbinary people; by Black and Dalit leaders in both
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India and the United States. Wilkerson engages the
failures of President Trump’s response to the
pandemic, and the misery it has caused, but not the
larger histories of the movements that have led us to
this moment. Two of the world’s largest democracies
have shown the limits of their response to the
pandemic, the e ect of prolonged years of fostering
repressive, xenophobic, and anti-scienti c policies.
But today’s social movements create new capacious
solidarities. Perhaps it is time to reckon with the fact
that hope and change won’t come om “a telegenic
American dream family.”
The protests in Kashmir and Ferguson, Shaheen Bagh

and Portland, the seismic shi s brought about by
Black Lives Matter in our understanding of race,
rebellion, and reconciliation, and the Dalit uprisings
of recent decades are the true measure of the race-
caste analogy. Smash the Brahminical patriarchy.
Defund the police. Abolish ICE. Dismantle the white
savior complex and the savarna or Brahmin savior
complex. These are no mere slogans. They are visions
of justice, and of an alternate future — beacons for us
all.
Yogita Goyal is professor of A ican American Studies and

English at UCLA. Her most recent book is Runaway
Genres: The Global A erlives of Slavery.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-mere-slogans-on-isabel-wilkersons-caste-the-origins-of-our-discontents/?fbclid=IwAR01GI29-b0-cJ77fvA… 11/12

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9/3/2020 No Mere Slogans: On Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” - Los Angeles Review of Books

No Mere Slogans: On Isabel

IN THE SPRING of 1944, a 16-year-old A ican

Such charged moments punctuate Isabel Wilkerson’s

understand its aught and violent history by moving

In the example above, accordingly, we must learn to

Immediately following this encounter, Wilkerson

inadequacy of race language perhaps too quickly, but By Crystal Parikh

There is no “litmus test” for racism, Wilkerson

Caste is thus written to educate those readers who are

thesis systematically. As a history, it has too many

I confess being unable to know what to do with a

For Wilkerson, a caste system is an arbitrary and

The book touches on some of the most familiar

and the brief correspondence between Bhimrao Ramji

And such a personal focus serves as the anchor for

That Wilkerson presents these ordinary encounters as

realizations of privilege or of common humanity.

Instead of statistics, Caste accumulates metaphors.

Because the meanings of race and caste shi so o en,

caste, Asians and Latinos make up middle castes, and

That Wilkerson concedes that Native Americans

The vocabulary a orded by caste, unin ected by

member “putting a man om the subordinate caste in

The extended metaphor of America as an old house

For those convinced that racism in the United States

challenging American exceptionalism by placing

further study, not least because our futures are likely

In the end, Wilkerson’s choice to de ne caste and

could emerge, or what they mean — led by the

The protests in Kashmir and Ferguson, Shaheen Bagh

Yogita Goyal is professor of A ican American Studies and

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