By: Alex Eubanks, Nonfiction Reviewer
“In debating ‘how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,’ wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, ‘they began by asking how the Americans did it.’”
Let me make it easy for you. The debate in which historian Whitman is referring to occurred at Berlin in June 1934. Jim Crow Laws in America ended in 1965. I’m not a big numbers person, but even I can realize that the coinciding timelines aren’t a fluke. As the Nazis—unequivocally the most hated group in history—sat around a table and deliberated how they would enforce domination and subjugation, the other side of the world had already figured it out.
But, that can’t possibly be true, can it? Americans can’t be the same as Nazis- it goes against everything we’ve been told. When I initially learned about the Holocaust in school, it was explained how terrible it was to separate people on arbitrary boundaries such as Jewish and Aryan. How could America claim that the Holocaust was so terrible if they were doing essentially the same thing under different labels?
I wonder if, as American soldiers stormed the concentration camps, they felt a sense of deja-vu to slavery that had only ended only eighty years before.
Isabel Wilkerson confronts this hypocrisy in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Caste, and not race, she explains, is the reasoning behind every societal problem. She defines caste as, “any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category.” She uses three main examples for her deconstruction of caste: India, America, and Germany. Under this umbrella, India’s varnas (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shundra, and Dalites), Nazi Germany’s Aryan and Jewish, and America’s Black and White fall under the same definition. Isabel Wilkerson’s argument is simple: like university students who use ChatGPT to write their entire paper for ENGL 1101, every society on earth plagiarizes from each other.
Wilkerson documents what she calls “ The Pillars of Caste,” the eight universal signs that a society will use to justify its subjection of the subordinated caste. The first pillar is “Divine Will and the Laws of Nature,” which state how the dominant caste uses either the will of their god or false science to justify hierarchy. Think “Candyman” in Django. The second pillar is heritability; the idea of believing that the subordinated caste inherits their societal position from their parents and cannot be changed from birth to death. The subsequent pillars, endogamy, purity vs. pollution, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization and stigma, terror and cruelty as enforcement, and inherent superiority and inferiority are the combined factors that are seen throughout all cultures to undermine people based on false categories.
Throughout this breakdown, it was interesting to see how Wilkerson so expertly connected cultures that we have determined previously to be so different from America. In both India and America, castes are separated on the basis of determining the subordinated caste as “dirty.” In both America and Nazi Germany, laws were passed that prohibited the marriage between the subordinated caste and the dominant caste, such as with Jewish people and Aryans or White and Black people. When considering laws based on descendants and blood percentages, Germany looked to America’s fraction system. Germany used America’s grandfather voting laws and the “one-drop rule” as a basis of consideration for their own race law, even though they eventually admitted that it was too much. As stated in the novel by James Q. Whitman, “While the Nazis praised ‘the American commitment to legislating racial purity,…The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.’” For those unaware of how heinous America’s institutionalized racism was, several states in the 1800s had the “one-drop rule,” which instituted that if you had any African ancestors, you were considered black, and therefore, were legally allowed to be subjected to racist practices.
Nazi Germany later copied America’s homework, and even in some cases pulled back from policies even they deemed to be too harsh. If you ever need evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with America, think back to the fact that the Nazis once thought our caste rules were too extreme.
Wilkerson explains caste best when she is able to connect these gaps and demonstrate the hollowness of it all. In one adept example, Wilkerson details a writing prompt set up in 1944 America where students are asked to consider what should happen to Hitler after the war: “A sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler,” Wilkerson writes, “She won the student essay contest with a single sentence. ‘Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.’”
For someone who thinks themselves to be of the dominant caste, the worst punishment is deigning them to suffer under the system they have created.
We have been purposefully told for generations that these cultures have no fundamental similarities, but the truth reveals that every society adapts these “Pillars of Caste” to create artificial boundaries that inevitably produce suffering. These purposeful choices concerning arbitrary separations assure that a group, which has no more right to happiness than any other, has an advantage that they don’t deserve and should have never had. Wilkerson’s genius comes out when the audience is able to understand that there is nothing that really divides us in the first place, and that these pillars deserve to be reduced to rubble.
As someone who grew up in the deep south of Georgia, reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is like my personal homework. Everyday, I work to rewrite the deep indoctrination of racism that I learned from my surroundings. Reading this book made me remember that my paternal grandma grew up during Jim Crow and passed those perceptions onto her son, who then attempted to pass them onto me. Racism and caste is alive and well, as much as people try to forget our history to resist self-actualization.
As a soon-to-be teacher, I know more than the average person how knowledge can be wielded as a weapon against discrimination and misinformation. Lack of empathy is one of the main weapons wielded by the dominant caste to reinforce boundaries, and it is often a teacher’s goal to use education as a tool on how to be better people. As an English teacher in particular, one of the most important lessons I hope to teach my students is how to be a conscious reader. Being a conscious reader is built upon the concept of constantly thinking critically, questioning the reality built around a text, and determining its truthfulness. When applying that concept to the information this book teaches, the best I can hope for is that they have the knowledge to practice self reflection and to question the hierarchy of caste around them. It is my responsibility as an educator to learn from books like Caste on how I can resist implicit racism and bias, not only in myself but in my students. In this way, we can not only be conscious readers but empathetic people.
I understand that reading Caste is a hard text, and the level of difficulty in processing it can vary depending on your position in the power structure caste has created. What I can say with certainty is that this is an essential text at breaking down the barriers between race, gender, sexuality, religion, or any other thing that divides us. Our societies are deeply unoriginal and contain patterns that should be examined. We plagiarize. I recommend this book so that you can identify the repetitive signs present in society and potentially imagine a world without caste.