Review

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, a meticulous history of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson has produced another masterfully researched study of race in America through the lens of caste, drawing parallels with Indian society and likening black Americans to the untouchable Dalits of the subcontinent. Dominance and subservience are the opposite poles of such a bipolar world, leading Wilkerson to observe that, "When a hierarchy is built around the needs of the group into which one happens to have been born, it can distort the perceptions of one's place in the world. It can create the illusion that one is innately superior to others if only because it has been reinforced so often that it becomes accepted as subconscious truth." The cradle of this hierarchy in America was slavery, in which black people were literally the possessions of white people, the awful reality of which has never been understood or accepted by whites. For the Africans who were brought unwillingly to the United States, race had never existed. As a Nigerian playwright tells Wilkerson, "You know, there are no black people in Africa. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are just themselves. They don't become black until they go to America or the U.K. It is then they become black." Indeed, as the anthropologist Ashley Montague observed, "The idea of race was... the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste." And over time - "a quarter millennium" as Wilkerson frequently puts it, starting in the early 17th Century - the twin notions of race-based superiority and inferiority become ingrained in people's minds until they emerge as a self-fulfilling prophecy: blacks are porters, not conductors or engineers; blacks aren't smart enough to play quarterback; put the black kids in shop class, not geometry, and so on. As Wilkerson sees it, "Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else's definition of who they are and who they should be." Sentient citizens should recognize this and commit to shedding the idea of superiority based on race, color, or caste. It's not about white fragility or guilt but rather about accepting the facts as they are, like this one: "People who happened to be born male and of European ancestry competed only against themselves. For most of American history, the country was closed off from the talents of the bulk of its people of all colors, genders, and nationalities" - a proposition that seems inarguable. This book is not strident; it is not a polemic. It is solid reporting that tells the story of more than 350 years of racial oppression and subjugation in the United States. It is often uncomfortable because the facts themselves are uncomfortable, but it is generally free of moralizing. Wilkerson does allow herself a preachy moment or two, but it's hard to disagree when she does. "When an accident of birth aligns with what is most valued in a caste system, whether being able-bodied, white, male or other traits in which we had no say, it gives the lottery winners a moral duty to develop empathy for those who must endure the indignities they themselves have been spared." Caste is a sobering reminder of how little we know, how dimly we understand, and how much we have to learn.

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