Caste, American style

Book review of Caste: The lies that Divide Us

Barack Obama was the first person of colour to win the US presidency in 2008, much to the jubilation of the whole world. But his successor, subject of more loathing than admiration, refused earlier this week to denounce White supremacist groups in the billingsgate that passed for the first presidential debate. This refusal came in the wake of events in Minneapolis, Rochester, Atlanta, Kenosha, among other American cities, involving the use of disproportionate police force against black people resulting in death or grievous injury, all through the spring and summer of 2020. Were we premature in celebrating that transformative moment 12 years ago as the beginning of a post-racial America?

Isabel Wilkerson, who won the National Book Critics award for her earlier book, The Warmth of Other Suns, definitely thinks so in her new book. She argues persuasively that some 400 years after the first slaves from Africa landed on its soil, America still rigidly observes a caste system. American society assigns a dominant or subordinate role to people at birth that preordains what they are entitled to. A bloody Civil War leading to the abolition of slavery in 1865 and a steady political struggle resulting in the removal of all vestiges of restriction on persons of colour in the wake of the civil rights legislations of the mid-1960s have but altered the situation mostly on the surface.

Wilkerson makes a careful distinction between caste and race. She says, quite convincingly, “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States.”

Wilkerson’s earlier book traced the journey of hundreds of people from the largely segregated southern United States to the relatively open north between 1915 and 1970. She built their profiles through careful research and personal interviews. She follows a somewhat similar approach in Caste. She builds her case step by step, narrating numerous instances of exclusion, injustice, discrimination and even cruelty, from the most brutal years in the slavery era to their very subtle and nuanced variations in the 21st century. She covers events across all walks of life and geographies, from the egregious to the subtle. She talks of how she herself was at the receiving end on many occasions, even as she made it clear that she was on assignment as the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, which her interlocutors often found hard to believe. This fits in with this reviewer’s conviction that the severe opposition Obama faced in getting Congress to approve his legislative agenda was primarily due to not-so subtle racism, a view that found few takers among my American friends, but one that Wilkerson endorses. The principal agenda of the current occupant of the White House can be simply summarised as undoing whatever President Obama had done.

Caste: The lies that Divide Us
Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher: Allen Lane/Penguin
Pages: xiv + 476   Price: Rs 999

 

Wilkerson is not the first one to use the caste system to describe the divisions in American society. Many scholars have done so over the last 100 years and she acknowledges their contributions. She singles out the pioneering work of Allison Davis, a Harvard anthropologist who had to hide his light under a bushel, being the Black leader of a multiracial team conducting field research in Natchez, Mississippi, the heart of the segregated Deep South in the 1930s. Caste draws from two other societies that have practised their own rigid systems of discrimination, India and the Third Reich Germany. The book refers to the apartheid regimes of Southern Africa but does not include them in detailed analysis, because those countries were protecting the interests of ruling minorities against the indigenous majority. In the US, India and Germany, the caste system became the most powerful tool in the hands of the dominant majority to keep the subordinate castes in their assigned places by denying education, opportunities and at times, even their very humanity.

This is perhaps a somewhat less forceful part of Wilkerson’s otherwise extremely cogent thesis. She has certainly read a number of standard references and travelled to both the countries, to meet and interview people, mostly scholars and writers, not ordinary citizens. The German anti-Semitism of the Hitler era is long over and modern, post-war Germany has been at great pains to make redress, although not always successfully. Wilkerson tries gamely, but does not quite succeed in catching the many manifestations of caste as the defining factor of Indian society. She does not, for example, consider the very significant role of caste in electoral politics and the nature of caste-based vote banks, which give a few Dalit leaders substantial power, not always used for the betterment of their constituents.

But these are quibbles. One must always bear in mind that Wilkerson is writing primarily for an American audience and she does a superb job of putting across her point of view. She has written a fine polemic, in the best sense of the term, much like Frantz Fanon and Noam Chomsky or our own Jyotiba Phule. Dwight Garner, The New York Times book critic, said “Caste deepens our tragic sense of American history.” This reviewer could not agree more.