Caste: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

The greatest threat to a caste system is the success of the lower castes—the idea that members of the bottommost caste will achieve success. In World War I, Black American soldiers fought with the French—but when the French Army treated the Black soldiers as they would treat white soldiers, with respect and dignity, the American military command clarified that the French Army should treat the Black soldiers as inferior. Even when two Black soldiers died bravely in the line of duty and were nominated for Medals of Honor, the American government refused to grant them the awards posthumously. 

In 1946, after the end of World War II, a Black sergeant who had fought in the Pacific theater asked a Greyhound bus driver if he could step off the bus to relieve himself at a pit stop. The driver called the authorities, who arrested the sergeant at the next stop and beat him with a club, permanently blinding him. The courts brought the case before the then-president, Harry S. Truman, who demanded a federal investigation—but during the trial, it emerged that the sergeant had used the word “yes” instead of the phrase “yes, sir” while dealing with the police at the bus stop. The police chief went free.

In the early 1900s, as Black Americans began achieving success across the nation due to the initiatives of Reconstruction, a wave of anti-Black violence swept the nation. Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street was leveled and burned, its citizens massacred; Black business owners were lynched so that white business owners could take over their properties. Any subordinate-caste person who was seen as “forgetting [their] place in the hierarchy in the white world [they] lived in” was swiftly, inhumanely punished. 

When a smallpox epidemic hit Boston in 1721, people quickly began dying. Cotton Mather, a minister and scientist, owned an African man named Onesimus, who told him about a procedure he’d undergone in his homeland, Africa, to protect him from the very same illness. By inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person, people in West Africa knew, they could lessen the impact of the sickness on their community. Mather tried to persuade others to take up the method, but many found it repulsive. Nevertheless, some scientists and physicians tried the method and were able to save many lives. But Onesimus is not credited with creating our modern-day inoculation practices—in fact, he never even won freedom for his contribution to the world.

Throughout the 20th century, the white establishment actively tried to handicap Black communities and keep Black people from learning, achieving, or rising through society’s tiers. Just as the Nazis sought to exclude Jewish people from any position in which they might match or even outshine Aryans, white Americans purposefully underfunded and even sabotaged Black schools and businesses.

Throughout the 20th century, the culture worked to keep the subordinate caste in their place—and even in the 21st century, U.S. society continues to disregard the achievements and successes of the lower caste.