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Chapter 20
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 one point during World War II, most every Jewish citizen had disappeared from German life, hidden away in concentration and death camps. Without a scapegoat caste, Germans became fixated on ranking one another, trying to determine how pure, how Aryan, their friends and neighbors were. Wilkerson relays an anecdote about a young German girl with dark, thick, wavy hair—her most striking physical attribute raised suspicions that she was of Middle Eastern (or even Jewish) blood.
This chapter gives a real-world example of the narcissism that the book introduced in the previous chapter. Narcissism doesn’t just lead to euphoria and an inflated self-image—it can also lead to an obsession with any imperfection, and the constant, debilitating fear of being removed from the dominant caste against one’s will.
Themes
The comments people made about the girl frightened her, and she began measuring her facial features in a mirror. She had pictures taken of herself with measuring tapes held up to her face, and her family began looking into their genealogy but could find no trace of foreign blood. Decades later, when the girl’s granddaughter found the picture of her grandmother measuring her face, she finally understood the paranoia that even the dominant caste faces as they struggle to uphold their superiority.
This dominant-caste narcissism creates an environment of extreme instability and paranoia. This, of course, means that dominant-caste people who perceive any threat to their power and supremacy react violently and erratically in order to stave off such threats.
Themes
