Caste and race continually bleed into each other Wilkerson defines a racist as someone who harms, mocks or institutionalises inferiority on the basis of race. The signal of rank in the American hierarchy is caste’s “faithful servant”, race.
Wilkerson’s is essentially a two-tier caste system – dominant or white and subordinate or non-white. Caste in India is a fraught and ugly thing, degrading everything in its path. Dalits are considered so low that they stand outside the varnas.
Caste is a complex system of infinite hierarchy in Indian society, it divides humans according to varnas, or classes – Brahmins, or priests warriors traders and labourers. In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished.īR Ambedkar, the Indian social reformer who fought the scourge of caste all his life, called it “graded inequality”. It was while working on her sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she was studying a deeply ingrained caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed, dating back to colonial Virginia.
The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice. And this is precisely how caste works, according to Isabel Wilkerson: it elevates and empowers members of a “dominant caste” at the perpetual expense of a “subordinate caste”. It doesn’t remember him as the enslaver of 161 people or as a man who went horseback riding with reins carved from the flesh of indigenous Americans. History has been kind to Jackson it remembers him as Old Hickory, a nation-builder who drove America’s westward expansion and honours him by placing his image on the $20 bill. It was Jackson who oversaw the infamous “Trail of Tears”, the forced migration on which more than 20% of the Cherokee people perished. A s US president in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a feverish advocate of “Indian removal”, the banishing of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and relocation on desolate reservations.
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