Previous
Chapter 15
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
By using the analogy of a high-rise building, Wilkerson suggests that caste places the dominant caste in the penthouse. It places everyone else in descending order on the floors beneath them, consigning the subordinate caste to the basement. But caste also creates an illusion that the basement is “flooding”—in other words, that their only competition is one another. This creates a situation in which the lower castes reject and “stratify” their own, because “no one wants to be in last place.”
Caste systems thrive on social division and envy. By pitting members of the subordinate caste who struggle to rise above their station against one another, caste essentially forces a society’s most vulnerable citizens to harm one another and to participate in the very system that has put them in such a position.
Themes
The modern-day criminal justice system—which descends from the criminal codes of slavery and Jim Crow—is perhaps the most potent example of how the caste system teaches people which lives are valued, and which are not. Immigration is yet another arena in which the lines of caste and the value of a life become clear. Immigrants from Asian, South American, Caribbean, and African nations are taught that they must find a way to differentiate themselves from the subordinate caste in America.
This passage shows how caste continues to divide modern-day Americans based on race and class. Caste sustains itself by forcing people to participate in the system and to subordinate those at the bottom just to get by.
Themes
Caste also helps explain why members of the subordinate caste who rise to positions of power or authority often subjugate their own. Three of the officers involved in Freddie Gray’s 2015 death were Black. These stories, Wilkerson suggests, make sense when viewed through the lens of a caste system and its cruel demands.
Everyone living in a caste system—even subordinate-caste members—are taught to do the dominant caste’s bidding. Caste sustains itself by forcing the people it’s made most vulnerable to exploit and harm one another in the pursuit of more power and agency over their lives.
Themes
