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Chapter 18
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
At a Berlin museum, looping footage of Saturday, July 6, 1940 plays constantly. The footage shows Hitler returning to Berlin after the Germans seized Paris, with a deafening parade of citizens packed together to cheer him on. Wilkerson recalls watching the footage on a trip to Germany and feeling sickened by it—she could not believe that Germans knowingly cheered the extermination of their neighbors and the destruction of neighboring countries. But the dehumanizing pattern of caste explains why Jews, African Americans, and Dalits were all considered so lowly and irrelevant that their deaths did not matter.
In this passage, Wilkerson examines how caste solidarity and alignment against a perceived enemy or threat can lead people to excuse terrible evils. The cruelty inflicted on the subordinate castes in the U.S., India, and Nazi Germany didn’t rankle the members of the dominant castes in those societies—in fact, it united them and inspired a bizarre collective “euphoria.” And this euphoria continued to sustain the dominant caste’s desire to remain in power.
Themes
Even though modern-day people like to imagine that they never would have attended such a rally or cheered on such horrors, the reality is that such blind accordance with terror has happened time and time again throughout history. Evil doesn’t just lie in one person—the enemy, Wilkerson suggests, “lurk[s] in humanity itself.”
The book suggests that oftentimes, those in the dominant caste are swept away by the power that the caste system affords them. Recognizing that fact is essential to dismantling caste around the world.
Themes
