Caste: Chapter 24 Summary & Analysis

Wilkerson tells the story of a young man who emigrated from Nigeria to the United States at 17 to attend college. He was shocked and disgusted by how he was treated—he was “seen as black before anything else.” He noticed that people were shocked when he spoke English; that women clutched their purses when they passed him on the street; that he was followed through stores; that he struggled to get and keep jobs. At just 54 years old, after a lifetime of living in the States, he was diagnosed with high blood pressure and early signs of diabetes. Sub-Saharan Africans do not have high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, or heart disease—but African Americans have the highest rates of those conditions out of all the ethnic groups in the U.S.

Caste, Wilkerson suggests, is quite literally killing people. The constant fear and trepidation associated with moving through dominant-caste spaces as a subordinate-caste person has been directly linked to higher blood pressure and levels of cortisol, the hormone generated by stress.

The telomere lengths—or lengths of the repeating sequences of double-stranded DNA at the end of a chromosome—of African Americans versus those of white people has also been the subject of study and discourse. Weathering is the measure of premature aging of the cells, which results in shorter telomeres and shortens a person’s lifespan. Unsurprisingly, the kinds of hypertension and stress experienced disproportionately by members of the lower castes significantly shorten the length of their telomeres. The average white American is likely to live five years longer than the average Black American. The heightened vigilance that African Americans must adopt as they move through their own communities—as well as spaces traditionally reserved for the upper caste—amount to a kind of “tax” on their bodies that can, quite literally, condemn them to premature deaths.