Is Anyone Free When Caste Is Sovereign?
Oprah Told Everyone to Read Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste," So I Read It. You Should Too. Don't Mess with Oprah.
The seemingly-defunct reactionary nationalist America First Caucus dedicated a significant portion of their founding platform to the concept of sovereignty. In a republic, sovereignty resides with the people, but the question is who counts among the people? In an America First nation, the people are those who affirm “a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and thus sovereignty does not reside in people as such, but rather, it is white supremacy itself which is sovereign.
This phenomenon of restricted sovereignty and externalized peoples within a nominal republic cannot be reduced to the desires of conscious white nationalists. This problem is a general phenomenon, so how does it translate to our day-to-day lives? We lack a language to describe this contradiction, and it is in this dilemma that Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents finds us.
Caste is an examination of caste generally, with an emphasis on the common protocols underlying Jewish extermination in Nazi Germany, Dalit subordination in India, and African-American oppression in the United States. As the subtitle suggests, Caste digs at the “Origins of Our Discontents” -- the emotion-laden dimension of social oppression which suffocates both interpersonally and internally. The book reveals that the restriction of who counts among the people is made real through the social rituals and protocols we live out daily.
My aim here is to identify some of what makes this book such a powerful -- if also frustrating -- read. Ultimately, I want to explore what the concept of caste offers emancipatory politics going forward. Caste may not provide solid answers, but it does ask the right questions.
What Does Caste Do?
Wilkerson offers us the concept caste, the great illuminator, to shift our language away from racism and blame. For Wilkerson, racism “has been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice… It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group… a perspective few would ever own up to.” Caste on the other hand “is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”
Moreover, caste is “powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn groove of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order.” There is something compulsive about caste, which the constant conflation of racism with character so often prevents us from seeing. By focusing on protocols and rituals, Wilkerson unmasks the deeper logics underlying horrors often too painful to recognize.
One of the great insights of Wilkerson’s book is that caste harms both up and down the system, as “the toxins upstream eventually make their way downstream.” No matter how advantageous leveraging the caste system may be, it is merely a false security. For example, the basic protocols of the caste system enable rituals of scapegoating to circumvent justice, thus making “for a less safe society, allowing the guilty to shift blame and often to go free.” Let’s take a familiar historical situation beyond the scope of the text, and apply the caste framework to see this principle in action.
Many of us know the story of Emmitt Till, the 14 year-old boy brutally murdered in 1955 on the word of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who made a false sexual assault allegation against the boy. Bryant’s husband killed Till. Decades later, when Bryant confessed to her courthouse lies against Till, she also revealed that she too had been victimized by her husband’s violence. This would be an entirely unsurprising development, as a man who kills a child would likely have no qualms with beating a woman.
Perhaps Bryant was lying yet again to assuage her own guilt after many decades. It’s hard to know with any certainty. Caste is so insidious because the protocols and rituals lock into place and compel social compliance whether an accuser is truthful or not. The essence of this tragedy isn’t in Carolyn Bryant’s bad character — though that is relevant — because it was the social protocols of caste which killed Till. Solely fixating on Bryant’s character ensures we miss the complex array of forces that could bring one person to lie, another to kill, and an entire social order committed to excusing and even supporting such barbarous cruelty.
This morbid arrangement was cohered through a scapegoating protocol which could “unify the favored castes to be seen as free of blemish as long as there is a visible disfavored group to absorb their sins.” Maybe this time Carolyn Bryant was telling the truth, that her husband was the true perpetrator of her abuse, and Till was merely scapegoated to absorb the husband’s sins. As Wilkerson puts it, “lynchings served as a form of ritual human sacrifice,” yet the harm is never contained to the body of the lynched. The caste rituals invoked by the false accusation obscured Bryant’s actual abuse, allowing it to remain unresolved and looming over her life. This is the complex social prison of caste which Wilkerson's book begins to unlock.
Purity Versus Pollution
In a 60 page tour de force Wilkerson describes eight pillars of caste. Some pillars are more illuminating than others, but collectively this 60 page blitz forms the core of her project. The pillars “Occupational Hierarchy”, “Dehumanization and Stigma”, and “Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control” are particularly helpful explorations of caste dynamics. One pillar stands above all others in terms of clarity and usefulness: “Purity versus Pollution.” If you only read one section of the book, this should be the one.
“The fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it,” as Wilkerson observes, has given rise to “extreme measures” taken by a dominant caste to “protect its sanctity.” Mere proximity, such as “touching or drawing near to anything that has been touched” by a subordinated caste member, would trigger rituals of purification” to purge the pollution.
The use of the word ritual here is instructive, as caste is something compulsive and performative which socially binds people to act. The compulsive weight of caste helps to explain how otherwise well-meaning people could become vicious enforcers of dehumanization. Everyone has a choice, but if caste were easy to reject then it’d be long gone by now. Rituals of purification are often the underlying rationality of dominant caste acts of terror, as well as the manifestly bizarre fixations on touch, sex, blood, and water which color our common image of Jim Crow.
Wilkerson observes the puritanical dynamic across her case studies. She writes, “In Germany, the Nazis banned Jewish residents from stepping onto the beaches at the Jews’ own summer homes, as at Wannsee, a resort suburb of Berlin, and at public pools in the Reich.” She quotes an Indiana white woman who remarked that white swimmers violently rejected integrated pools because they “didn’t want to be polluted by… blackness.” In addition to numerous harrowing stories of mob violence in protection of purity at the pool, Wilkerson describes an absurd moment after a 1960’s “black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and then emerging to towel off.” The pool was immediately drained and refilled with fresh water. That’s ridiculous, but understanding caste purification reveals the visceral rationality that gave rise to such violently bizarre antics. Someone tell Bill Burr.
Purification rituals are always available and easily triggered, Wilkerson concludes, as they had been “for white women in the Jim Crow South, where husbands and lovers knew that a black man could be blamed for anything that befell a white woman if the dominant caste chose to accuse him.” Lynching is not defined by ropes or even murder. Lynching is a purification ritual. A brief anecdote in a chapter titled “On the Early Lines of Caste” is instructive. Wilkerson writes, “a black man had been lynched in the county next to Natchez, under accusation of raping a white woman that even many local whites did not believe.” This was “a region where a black person was lynched every four days for some breach, large or small” of caste protocols.
It didn’t matter that the black man committed no crime. Touch itself -- whether real or fabricated -- was the basis of violation. Wilkerson’s observation that even many of the local whites didn’t believe that the rape occurred is crucial. Caste persuades its adherents to set aside all other thought in order to perform the requisite rituals — no matter how vile. The lynching was compelled not by criminal culpability, but by the necessity of caste purification.
Wilkerson’s exploration of purification rituals has massive ramifications for struggles for liberation, as it demonstrates that caste rule is often the enforcer of social order. Not everyone is incorporated into the people, and as such, citizenship is determined by caste position. The contradiction of sovereignty residing beyond the living members of a society is not a new phenomenon. This was the problem of monarchy. Yet, a Constitution which does not incorporate its living constituents is merely a monarchy without a crown. What is the rule of law when caste reigns supreme? All governance, from the republic to criminal law, are subordinated to caste. Therefore, any strategy to address liberation — and criminal justice particularly — must describe and overcome the underlying caste protocols which socially bind us.
Where Do We Go?
Caste has an optimistic spirit which sets liberation as its ambition. A single fundamental idea kept me tethered to the text, best captured the book’s final sentence: “A world without caste would set everyone free." Reading the book — particularly the eight pillars of caste — had an emancipatory impact on me that was both emotionally cathartic and politically clarifying. As the church folk would say, “I think I can run on and see what the end goin’ be.” That’s an exceedingly rare gift, and a condition I believe more than a few people experienced when reading Caste.
The wider implications of Wilkerson’s switch from racism to caste are profound, as she is pushing us to redirect our focus from individual blame and to the social protocols which condition and compel oppressive outcomes. By taking up these terms, we can move past shame. It’s a bit like the classic scene in Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams consoles Matt Damon by repeating “It’s not your fault” until Damon bursts into tears. As cliche as it may appear at first glance, the observation that the problem of oppression resides beyond questions of fault is the first major liberating realization one may glean from Wilkerson’s book.
What becomes possible when we stop looking for someone to blame or shame? If the problem is social, then so too is the responsibility. We all have to get free. Throughout the book, Wilkerson goes to great lengths to speak to the quasi-compulsive nature of caste protocols, which are binding on both the targets and purveyors of caste oppression. She even goes on to describe the ways in which clinging to exploitative privilege ultimately dooms those at the top of the caste system. Therefore, the purpose of political struggle cannot be petty interest-group brokerage, as matters of oppression and exploitation -- or caste in this particular case -- are not special interests, but instead go to the viability of the whole of society. We live in one world.