Caste

by

Isabel Wilkerson

Caste: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Each day, Wilkerson writes, “the curtain rises” on a huge stage, and a play that has been “running for centuries” begins anew. Each actor wears a costume assigned at birth and performs a role they never chose—one they inherited from those that have come before them. Everyone in the cast knows who the lead is, who the sidekicks are, and who is working hard backstage. Cast members become associated with their characters and absorb how they’ve been typecast to the point that they become the roles assigned to them. Everyone is playing a part—and veering away from the script has serious consequences. No one in the modern-day U.S., Wilkerson argues, is really themselves; everyone is just a “player on a stage,” an actor in a drama that began long ago. 
Here, the book introduces a new metaphor: the concept of society as a stage play, and the people who live in that society as actors playing roles and reading from scripts. This metaphor draws out the compulsory nature of caste, highlighting how even if one doesn’t want to play a certain role, there’s not necessarily a choice about whether or not to walk across the stage. In order to challenge these prescribed roles, people must reckon with the full history of what has brought them to this point in the “drama” of their society.
Themes
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Quotes
Before the United States of America was even formed, a caste system was born in the colonies. Initially, one’s religion—not skin color—defined their place in society. So, Africans and indigenous people were seen as belonging to the lowest rung of society because they were not Christian, not because they weren’t white. But more and more Africans began converting to Christianity in the years following their arrival in the new world in 1619. As a result, colonists were threatened by the “full participation” in society of people who were supposed to be the laborers that would extract wealth from the soil of the new world.
This passage shows how arbitrary the modern-day, race-based caste system in the U.S. is. White European settlers wanted to be able to dehumanize a group of people who could be easily identified so that they could transform them into an enslaved workforce—the basis for that exclusion and dehumanization didn’t matter.
Themes
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The struggling colonies desperately needed manpower to cultivate tobacco, sugarcane, rice, and cotton—crops that many Africans were already familiar with. African laborers could be identified easily because of the color of their skin, whereas English or Irish laborers who escaped bondage could easily hide out and blend in due to their white skin. So, they were quickly seen as the logical replacement for the source of labor that many white Europeans didn’t want to provide.
By dehumanizing and othering an entire group of people, white Europeans created a myth about their own supremacy that would become woven into the fabric of the nation they were forming.
Themes
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Many modern-day Americans would like to see slavery as a “sad, dark chapter” in the nation’s history. But slavery was, in fact, the basis of the social and economic structure that persists in the U.S. to this day. For a quarter of a millennium, Wilkerson writes, slavery defined America—and in many ways, it still does. Slavery was a part of everyday life in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century—and even though some people decried it as a horror and an abomination, it was legal and sanctioned by the state and by a complex “web of enforcers.”
Contemporary narratives about slavery often minimize the influence that these decisions made in the 1600s have on the modern-day U.S.—perhaps to obscure the ongoing, daily effects of caste. But the reality is that slavery defined the U.S. for so long that the country’s social, political, and economic structures are still built around it in many ways. Even though slavery has been abolished, the myths, lies, and cruelties it created have become ingrained in American culture.
Themes
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Get the entire Caste LitChart as a printable PDF.
Caste PDF
Under American slavery, human beings were transformed into currency. Because Black people were considered subhuman (and incapable of feeling pain or injury), they were tortured in uniquely horrific ways—and any enslaved person who tried to defend themselves was subjected to even more violence. Enslaved people were forced to work for upwards of 15 hours a day until 1740, when their workdays were capped at 15 hours during the summer months and 14 during the winter months. Extracting the most profit possible from each enslaved body was the only goal slaveholders had. And yet no one in the South—or anywhere else in the fledgling country—was willing to admit that “they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture,” writes historian Edward Baptist.
The “torture” of enslaved African Americans was necessary to keep the economy running at the pace the settlers wanted it to—and so their dehumanizing treatment worsened as time went on. By treating enslaved people like they were subhuman, slaveholders were able to reinforce the narrative that they actually were inferior. Others in U.S. society internalized this and accepted it as fact for centuries.
Themes
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The goal of slavery was to tilt the balance of power so profoundly that the degradation of the subordinate caste became normalized—and even righteous. Plantations were, in reality, forced labor camps—and the genteel, upstanding men and women who ran them were torturers. It took war, the deaths of nearly a million soldiers, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to bring slavery to its knees. But even then, the dominant caste was not done inflicting its wrath upon the subordinate one.
Once these messages of subordinate and dominant castes of people had become entrenched in U.S. society, the abolition of slavery wasn’t enough to get them out. Dominant-caste people had grown too used to the convenience of their unchecked power.
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After slavery was abolished, the dominant caste turned to a “labyrinth” of laws and the pseudoscience of eugenics in order to keep the subordinate caste at the bottom of society. Already, the dominant caste had, through their paternalistic control of enslaved people and their refusal to pay or educate them, created a group of people whose every action could be criminalized.
Even after enslaved people were freed, members of the dominant caste came up with new ways to continue dehumanizing and stigmatizing members of the subordinate caste. U.S. society was trapped in a paradox: it now centered around the false, arbitrary ideas that the powerful planted in order to remain in power.
Themes
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As new immigrants began arriving in the U.S. from Europe, they walked into a bipolar caste system in which whiteness reigned supreme. Each new European who arrived was suddenly classified as white—a designation that only existed in opposition to Blackness. But becoming white meant that these new immigrants were forced to participate in the subordination of the lowest caste and become oppressors themselves.
This passage illustrates that a caste system demands all who participate in it to play by its rules. Whiteness wasn’t a concept in much of Europe at this time—but when these new immigrants arrived in the U.S., they had to learn to strive toward whiteness and, in the process, dehumanize and terrorize the subordinate caste (Black people).
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Because members of the subordinate caste were forced to repress everything about themselves—their emotions, their talents, their bonds with one another—the members of the dominant caste could live under the delusion that they were innately different from and superior to the very people whom they controlled. This hierarchy was handed down from generation to generation, and today, Americans continue to inherit “distorted” perspectives of one another. Caste is the blueprint for their social, economic, and psychological interactions at every level of society.
Again, this passage illustrates how caste was able to sustain itself in the U.S. through a series of paradoxes and self-fulfilling prophecies. The dominant caste placed heavy restrictions on what the subordinate caste was and was not allowed to do—and soon began claiming that the things the subordinate caste was prohibited from doing were things that they were inherently unable to do. Because other members of society never saw these traumatized, oppressed members of the subordinate caste do certain things, they assumed that people in the subordinate caste were fundamentally different from those in the dominant caste. This “distortion” continues to define race relations in the U.S.
Themes
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Wilkerson reflects on a talk she gave in London, England many years ago. A Nigerian-born playwright approached her after her lecture and stated that there were “no black people in Africa.” The woman went on to elaborate: Africans define themselves based on their historic tribes and ethnic groups, such as Igbo and Yoruba and Ndebele. “They are not black. They are just themselves,” the playwright said, and it is only upon arriving in America that Africans “become black.” This statement fueled Wilkerson’s belief that caste deprives people of their most essential selves, slotting them into roles they never asked to play.
Just as there were no “white” people in Europe, this passage offers a perspective from a Nigerian woman who asserts that there are no “black” people in Africa. This illustrates the fact that both race and caste are social constructs (rather than biological categories) created to lock people into certain “roles” for the benefit of those at the top.
Themes
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