In Caste the anecdotal sits uneasily alongside information from secondary sources. Wilkerson draws on the work of anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s who used the word ‘caste’ to describe the racialised hierarchies of the Deep South, those states most dependent on a plantation economy and enslaved labour before the Civil War. The caste system associated with enslavement, they argued, was resurrected by Jim Crow laws after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and policed through arbitrary violence, terror and the spectacle of lynching. She doesn’t examine similar policies and practices instituted beyond the US, though they governed the lives of migrants from the Caribbean who laboured on the Panama Canal and elsewhere.
Wilkerson is intent on portraying the protracted power of caste oppression as an invisible rot within American society. Although racism might be its everyday expression, it is only by recognising the ‘subconscious code’ of caste that we can start on the path to its eradication. At times her analogies struggle under the burden of this responsibility: our appearance is the ‘visible cue’ to caste, while race is a ‘visible decoy’; caste is the bones, race the skin; we are trained in the language of race but caste is the grammar that structures the language; the United States is a house, caste its supporting framework, the architecture of human hierarchy, and so on. In this analysis race and caste are not synonymous: race is the visible agent of the unseen force that is caste. But Wilkerson also creates exceptions. A surfeit of anecdotes about highly accomplished, well-educated and wealthy black people who are unable to escape the draconian effects of caste discrimination stand in contrast to her references to black migrants working to distance themselves from the caste system by adopting strategies such as speaking ‘with British diction’ to make sure people know they are Jamaican or Grenadian or Ghanaian.
Where the NMAAHC celebrates the establishment of a black middle class as a pinnacle of the national success story, Wilkerson is concerned for the plight of those (among whom she places herself) who have excelled in their professions but nonetheless suffer from the prejudice and hostility inherent in the caste system. Health inequities between white people and people of colour in the US are stark, but her focus is not those who are currently dying of Covid-19 at three times the rate of the white population: the black, indigenous and Latinx populations who are overrepresented in the carceral system; who rely on underfunded, understaffed schools and hospitals; who live in the poorest neighbourhoods; have the highest exposure to environmental pollution and toxins; and who experience food insecurity on a regular basis. Rather, she chooses to write about those black people whose higher socioeconomic status and privilege offer them no protection against the stress and heart disease associated with high levels of discrimination. The studies on which Wilkerson draws claim that ‘the caste system takes years off the lives of subordinate-caste people who find themselves in contention with it’: these people are highly educated, ‘compete in fields where they are not expected to be’ and ‘experience a lower life expectancy as a result’.