“Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson (Book Note)
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| Isabel Wilkerson |
While some commentators on Caste whom I read in the media thought that Wilkerson’s use of the
terminology of caste was quite original, it wasn’t to me. In my 1995 book, Human Rights and the Search for Community, I
wrote “In modern Western society
distinctions of caste have been rendered unclear and disreputable by the
ideologies of equality and individual autonomy. Nevertheless, stratificatory
practices based on unacknowledged notions of honor and shame persist” (p. 135).
I then went on to argue that to be either Black or female was to be considered shameful.
I drew heavily on Orlando Patterson’s 1982 book, Slavery and Social Death, in attempting this analysis; he spoke of
timocracy, honor-based social gradations which accorded more honor to whites
than Blacks.
While perhaps three people read my book, many thousands
more have read Wilkerson’s, and rightly so. She has a way with words,
referring, for example, to Southern agricultural plantations as forced labor
camps (p. 47), to enslaved Africans as hostages (p. 43), and to lynching as
ritual killings (p. 41). She also tells us that the image of the plump black
Mammie, as portrayed by Hattie McDaniel in the 1939 movie, Gone with the Wind, was a fiction. Most if not all enslaved African
women would have been very thin, because they were all malnourished, a
deliberate choice of their owners (p. 138).
In India, Wilkerson tells us, some upper-caste teachers
refuse to grade the papers of Dalit students, because they would actually have
to touch the same paper as the students. A Dalit immigrant to the US tells Wilkerson
of an upper-caste female office-worker who refused to pour her own water from a
jug sitting near her desk, rather walking down the hall to get a Dalit to pour
it for her (p. 176). In sociological terms, this is status anxiety.
Status anxiety is also the reason that police often
stop and arrest Black people in fancy cars. Members of the lowest caste—in the
US, Nazi Germany, and India—are “not permitted to bear the symbols of success and
status reserved for the upper caste” (p. 160). The boundaries of caste must be
very carefully monitored (p.216). So we can’t acknowledge, for example, that in
Boston in 1721, the dominant caste minister, Cotton Mather, got the idea of
inoculation for smallpox from an African slave named Onesimus (p. 231).
Wilkerson
intersperses her text with anecdotes from her own life as a member of the
subordinate (African American) caste. She recounts an instance where she is in
a restaurant with a member of the dominant (white) caste and the waiter ostentatiously
ignores them, serving an entire meal to a table of dominant-caste people before
he gets around to even giving them their bread. Her dominant-caste friend
eventually stands up and accuses the waiter of racism in a loud voice that
everyone in the restaurant can hear: Wilkerson herself would never have done
such a thing (pp. 265-69).
Turning
to contemporary politics, Wilkerson argues that to understand the 2016
election, we must understand that lower-class whites are willing to sacrifice
their short-term economic welfare to preserve their long-term caste status (p.
324).
Wilkerson includes two interesting sections on Nazism
in Caste. In her chapter on monuments
and memorials, she points out that Germany is not infested with statues of
Hitler and his cronies, as the US South is infested with statues of Robert E.
Lee and his cronies. Presumably, there were such statues in Germany until the
end of WWII, but they were taken down.
Wilkerson also discusses the archived minutes of a
meeting in 1934 at which senior Nazis discussed a report on US racial laws that
they hoped to use in drafting their own racial laws. One senior Nazi is
horrified by the “one drop” rule in some US states, by which one drop of “Negro”
blood is enough to render you a permanent member of the subordinate caste.
Another Nazi wants to know if people can’t have the benefit of the doubt if
they are half-Jewish and half “Aryan,” and be allowed to enjoy some Aryan
privilege. Such would have been impossible for a person of mixed racial
background in the US South, indeed even now anywhere in the US.
This book is well worth reading: very insightful,
making one (at least me) think again about things one thinks one has known for many
decades.
