Book Review - Caste - The Wall Street Journal

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‘Caste’ Review: The High Cost of Feeling Superior
Is social ranking color-coded in America? Do ‘deplorables’ belong to the same caste as the woke coastal elite?

Book Review by Tunku Varadarajan - Executive Editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Aug. 28, 2020



Forest Whitaker is physically conspicuous and, most people would say, famous. In “Caste,” Isabel Wilkerson narrates how the Oscar-winning actor, “a distinguished, middle-aged, African-American man,” walked into a gourmet deli in Manhattan in 2013 for a quick bite to eat. The place was crowded, so “he turned to leave without making a purchase, as many customers might.” An employee thought his behavior suspicious, blocked him at the door and frisked him in full public view.

Readers would agree that Mr. Whitaker was the target of racism. Yet Ms. Wilkerson offers the episode—one of many examples of “degradation” in her book, including some directed at her, a black woman—as proof of the oppressive existence in America of “caste,” a social order that (in her opinion) subsumes race. Over nearly 400 pages, she seeks to persuade us that it is caste, more than race, that is America’s primordial flaw. In her telling, Mr. Whitaker was singled out for humiliation—much as a Dalit might be demeaned in India—because he belonged to America’s lowest caste.

Dalit, or “downtrodden,” is the word now used in India to describe those formerly known as “untouchable.” Ms. Wilkerson writes of an incident—said by the historian Sunil Khilnani to be “almost certainly apocryphal” in a recent essay in the New Yorker—that supposedly occurred during Martin Luther King’s visit to India in 1959. At a school in Kerala attended by pariah children, the principal introduced King as “a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” In that moment, Ms. Wilkerson tells us, King “realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India.”

Ms. Wilkerson—whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” tackled the Great Migration of blacks out of the American South—argues that “the American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia colony in the summer of 1619.” This led the colony, she says, to “refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not,” with the English and Irish indentured servants securing greater privileges than the Africans (who remained slaves until 1865). Europeans were “fused into a new identity, that of being categorized as white,” says Ms. Wilkerson. She invokes the late Berkeley historian Kenneth M. Stampp—author of “The Peculiar Institution” (1956), an account of slavery in the antebellum South—who called this assigning of race a “caste system.”

Ms. Wilkerson sows confusion in the reader’s mind, however, by declaring that “caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive” and by using the words almost interchangeably throughout her book. “In the American caste system,” she writes, “the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance.” Race, she continues, “is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.”

And what, exactly, is caste? To Ms. Wilkerson, it is “a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry.”

You would be right to ask how a caste system—so defined—is really that different from a race-based one in the American context. And your fear that Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis—while always elegantly expressed—may rest in part on semantic foundations is borne out by her assertion that she uses “language that may be more commonly associated with people in other cultures, to suggest a new way of understanding our hierarchy.”

The other cultures are India, which offers the classical template of a caste system; and, more controversially, Hitler’s Germany, whose Nazi ideology she insists on classifying as caste-based—in spite of the Nazi regime’s genocidal pursuit of racial purity.

Ms. Wilkerson sets up her system of caste by shuffling words around and offering what seems at times to be little more than a taxonomical reworking of the language of hierarchy. She tells us that she uses the term dominant caste “instead of, or in addition to,” white and subordinate caste instead of African-American. Yet she never offers a convincing argument for why American history and society are better examined through the lens of caste than of race.

Instead, Ms. Wilkerson seeks to make her case for caste by the repeated assertion that it is a case worth making. When she does seek to explain caste—elaborating on its characteristics and consequences—she often resorts to rhetorical statements that are stirring but not always illuminating. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” she tells us. “It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” It is apparent, in any case, that she is writing for those who wouldn’t challenge her assumptions. Oprah Winfrey has said that “this might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club.”

Ms. Wilkerson scarcely acknowledges that modern America has made vast strides to address racism, and her swatting down of Donald Trump as “a cocksure champion for the dominant caste, a mouthpiece for their anxieties,” lays bare her own politics. She interprets the 2016 presidential election as a “remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America,” ignoring the characterization of (white) Trump voters as “deplorables” by (the white) Hillary Clinton. The contradictions in her analysis are apparent: How can the “deplorables” belong to the same caste as the woke coastal elite? Wasn’t their cultural disparagement by Mrs. Clinton an expression, precisely, of her feeling that they belonged to a different (and inferior) caste?

Many readers will be disappointed that Ms. Wilkerson doesn’t focus more on the role that caste plays within races. She touches on, but doesn’t explore in real depth, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy in the first three centuries after 1619 and scarcely addresses the (color-coded) caste system that once prevailed among black Americans. She makes no reference to the writings of E. Digby Baltzell, whose book “The Protestant Establishment” (1964) still has much to teach us about “Aristocracy and Caste in America” (to quote its subtitle).

Ms. Wilkerson also makes notably little use of “class” as a social category. It is the “fixed nature” of caste, she writes, that distinguishes it from class, “a term to which it is often compared.” She goes on to add that “if you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.” Caste, by contrast, is immutable, says Ms. Wilkerson, even as she fails to convince us that it is any more immutable—in America, at least—than race. And for all the present protests and turbulence, race is less dispositive of a person’s future in this country than at any time since 1619. Ms. Wilkerson, I fear, does not give America its due.