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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
The townspeople who lived outside of the death camp at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, watched their town become covered in ash, a result of human remains being burned at the camp’s crematorium. Even though the town was “covered in evil,” they ignored the fact that they lived just beyond the walls of an extermination camp. Not all of the villagers were Nazis—but they had ingested the lie that some people were inherently less than human. So, they turned a blind eye to the suffering of the Jews, the Sinti, homosexuals, and any other enemies of the Reich.
This passage shows that even when a place is “covered in evil,” completely saturated by the destructive forces of caste, people still may not be aware of what’s going on around them. Alternatively, people living in a society whose caste system benefits them might not want to see what’s going on around them—by admitting that their power came from the subjugation of others, they’d have to acknowledge the immorality of that power.
Themes
Meanwhile, on the Main Street of a Southern American town, many townspeople contended with the annoyance of a huge old tree at the center of town. The tree was an eyesore and an impediment to traffic—but it was the local lynching tree, so it could not be cut down. It had to serve as a reminder to the members of the subordinate caste that there were consequences for attempting to escape their station.
Here, the book illustrates how another society relied so heavily on its unspoken (but brutally enforced) caste hierarchy that it was willing to endure a constant reminder of death and violence if it meant keeping the dominant caste (white people) in power. This is one of the costs of caste: everyone in a society suffers on some level, even the dominant caste, in the attempt to keep the lines of power clearly drawn.
Themes
In the fall of 1921, in the East Texas village of Leesburg, 500 people gathered to watch 19-year-old Wylie McNeely, a Black teenager, be burned alive. Before they burned him, the leaders of the lynching drew straws to see who would get to keep which “souvenir” from McNeely’s body after his flesh had burned away. Lynchings were an American phenomenon—“part carnival, part torture chamber”—that hundreds and sometimes thousands came to see from far and wide. Photographers created postcards of the lynchings—and by 1908, the lynching postcard trade was so widespread (and so vile) that the postcards were banned from being sent in the mail. But instead of stopping the production or purchase of these postcards, people simply hid them in envelopes.
Many people question how the Nazis were able to get away with their large-scale atrocities—while at the same time completely ignoring that the U.S. turned its own atrocities into a form of entertainment for its dominant-caste citizens. By holding this part of American history up to the light, the book shows how caste normalizes and even celebrates extreme forms of violence and cruelty against members of the subordinate caste.
Themes
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In September of 1919, Omaha newspapers advertised an upcoming lynching that would take place downtown. Fifteen thousand people gathered to watch the spectacle—Will Brown, a Black packinghouse worker, was arrested because a local white woman claimed that a Black man had molested her while she was out on the town. There was no trial or investigation for Brown—instead, a mob set ablaze the courthouse where Brown was being detained, tortured him, shot him, burned him alive, then dragged his body through the streets. Pieces of the rope were later sold as souvenirs.
The subordinate caste in the U.S. was, like the subordinate caste in Nazi Germany, seen as so subhuman that their torture and murder was a kind of sport. The cruelty of caste is the point of caste: by reminding those at the bottom of society that those at the top consider them playthings, caste keeps itself alive over the course of centuries or millennia.
Themes
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