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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Caste, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Caste, Race, and Social Division in the U.S.
Caste as a Global Problem
How Caste Sustains Itself
The Costs of Caste
Summary
Analysis
In the late spring of 1934, a committee of Nazi bureaucrats met to draft the Nuremberg Laws—a legal framework for the Aryan nation they hoped to create. In order to do so, the Nazis turned to the caste system in the United States, determined to glean what they could from its strictness in guarding its “ruling white citizenry” and its longevity. The Nazis wanted to quickly, efficiently institute plans for racial separation and purity, and they turned to the U.S. for a blueprint. The Nazis coined the term Untermensch, or subhuman, to refer to those they would place in the subordinate caste: its Jewish citizens, along with several other minority groups.
By communicating a fact that readers may not be aware of—that the Nazis used the U.S.’s caste system as inspiration for their own—the book illustrates the undeniability and severity of the U.S.’s casteism. This passage also suggests that caste is a global problem because the brutality of one caste system may inspire another that is equally—or even more—brutal.
Themes
Hitler had long studied the U.S. from afar—and he believed it was a successful nation because of its “Aryan stock.” He admired how the U.S. had decimated its indigenous population, and the country subjugated its subordinate caste through lynchings. Hitler knew that Americans were perpetuating “mass death,” yet he idolized their “robust innocence” in the face of heinous crimes.
Hitler rose to power as an “outside agitator,” and by the time he and his party secured control of the country, there was little anyone belonging to the old guard could do. The Nazis set to scapegoating Jewish people—who were seen as dominant in banking and finance in the first decades of the 20th century in Germany—for the loss of World War I. By convincing ordinary Germans that Jewish people didn’t deserve the wealth they’d come to possess, the Nazis began a campaign of mockery and intimidation against the caste they’d decided would be subordinate. After turning to U.S. race laws for guidance as to how to separate German Jews from other German citizens, many Nazi officials believed the U.S.’s segregation laws were too extreme.
Hitler, and those who held roles in his Nazi Party and S.S. force, are widely reviled as immoral and murderous historical figures. And yet in this passage, the book asserts that their actions were influenced by laws and procedures that already existed in the U.S.—and that some of the U.S.’s policies on race and caste were too extreme even for the Nazis. By recontextualizing the severity of the U.S.’s caste system, the book illustrates how caste can hide in plain sight in one place, even as its existence inspires atrocities in others.
Themes
The Nazis proceeded with creating legal definitions for Jews and Aryans and preventing intermarriage between the two groups. Some in attendance at the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws suggested making intermarriage punishable by law, as the Americans had; others insisted that doing so would be too harsh. In spite of many in attendance believing that American miscegenation (or “race-mixing”) laws were “primitiv[e],” the Nazis continued debating which measures were too “radical” for their purposes.
This passage introduces the concept of “anti-miscegenation” laws, also referred to as endogamy. By preventing intermarriage and close relationships between the castes, the dominant caste can effectively cut off any means of one caste growing to know, understand, and thus humanize another.
Themes
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By September of 1935, Hitler would announce the Blood Laws—laws that defined what “counted” a person as a Jew. From there, the Nazis continued making their Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor more and more stringent. Yet even the Nazis, who defined a Jew as a person with three or more Jewish grandparents or as a person who had married a Jew, felt that the Americans’ rule about categorizing “an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins” as Black was too extreme.
Once again, the book highlights a caste-based policy in the U.S. that was too extreme for even the Nazis. The book continually points out the severity and intensity of caste organization in the U.S. to highlight how unfathomable it is that so many Americans continue to deny that caste exists in their country. Racism and casteism largely define U.S. history.
Themes
