Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

A simple proposition, really - what if American socio-economic life was best explained through a lens of caste?

For me, that word immediately brings to mind the millenias-long system of social hierarchy in the Indian subcontinent. Isabel Wilkerson, in her sophomore book, uses both the Indian system and that of Nazi Germany to illustrate how race in America functions as a self-preserving system of restrictive social order. Wilkerson argues that Black Americans, much like India’s Dalit and the Jews in Germany, are an “untouchable” class.

While reading this book I was frequently reminded of Rousseau’s claim that citizens “consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others” (from the Discourse on Inequality). This quote has always been a bit opaque to me, since levels of enslavement and oppression aren’t exactly clear. But as I write this, it it Election Day 2020, and I think that voting behavior can explain quite a bit when paired with Wilkerson’s discussion of caste.

Democrats frequently engage in hand-wringing about why poor white Americans vote Republican when it is, for all economic reasons, against their self-interest. Why indeed? Maybe, on a conscious or unconscious level, poor white voters are voting not in preservation of their economic privilege, but their racial privilege. The fear of being supplanted, overtaken on the hierarchy, by Blacks, has always stoked the fears of poor whites in America, since the earliest days of free Blacks and white indentured servants.

The American caste system, as Wilkerson envisions it, starts at the top with white men and women, then progresses through Asian men and women, Latinx men and women, and ends with Black men and women. Myriad subdivisions proliferate, with any deviation from the socially proscribed norms being shunned near the bottom of the hierarchy.

Although the American caste system is largely racial in its predication, Wilkerson is careful to make a clear distinction between racism and caste-ism. Racism, a somewhat more limited word, refers to actions or policies that create inequity based on racial difference. A true caste system creates functionally unbreakable social tranches, dictating that fundamentally different rules be followed by their respective members.

This, I think, is the most important lesson of Wilkerson’s book. Caste does exist in America, profoundly, and the evidence appears every day, both in large ways like voter purges and police shootings, but in mundane ways, as well. It’s why, as a member of the dominant caste, I never had to have “the talk” with my parents. And why I had a good credit score the moment I opened my first credit card. These are not just “white privilege,” they are a socially-constructed step ladder that helps to enforce the caste system. If I don’t use these advantages to work towards eliminating these inequities, then I am guilty, as Rousseau describes, not just of enslaving others, but of myself being enslaved by the very caste system that I am perpetuating.

Recently, I have been thinking quite a bit about my father’s father, Michael Burtzos, who moved from Greece to the United States in 1950 or 51. After surviving both World War II and the Greek Civil War, my grandfather came to America to start a new life. He came to a country where he was instantly a member of the dominant caste. My father became an attorney; my brother and I have five college degrees between us. In three generations, the Burtzoses have lived a pretty good slice of the American Dream, whatever that means. And I’m grateful for that. But I’m also, increasingly aware just how much influence the American caste system has to do with that.