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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 dehumanization of a subordinate caste is a fight against truth—yet it is necessary in order to manufacture a caste hierarchy in any given society. The dehumanization of a group is a long process, but it is one of the most effective methods of programming a society against the subordinate caste of choice.
By dehumanizing a group of people, the members of a dominant caste can do whatever they want to that group. By claiming that a certain group isn’t capable of certain feelings, emotions, thoughts, or actions, that group is effectively thought of as existing entirely outside of human society.
Themes
The dehumanization of Jewish people in Nazi Germany and Black people in the U.S. was calculated and methodical. For instance, upon arriving at death camps like Auschwitz, European Jews were forced to abandon their possessions, had their heads shaved, and were given identical uniforms to wear. This made it easier for the SS officers in charge of policing and exterminating them to see them as a faceless, homogenous mass. The same thing was done to Africans arriving in the U.S. to be sold into slavery—they were stripped of their given names and past identities and displayed naked at auction blocks. And in India, members of the Dalit caste were assigned surnames connected to the menial work they performed, so that their degraded social position preceded them.
All of these methods of dehumanization were carefully calculated and meticulously implemented by the dominant caste in order to justify the abuse, torture, and murder of the subordinate caste. By taking away a person’s name, defining features, personal possessions, and connections to others, they appear to be stripped of everything that makes someone human and feeling. This excuses the unconscionable actions toward them that the dominant caste takes to demonstrate their own power.
Themes
Dalits, Jews, and enslaved Black people were punished for any display of human emotion or any attempt to push back against the forced starvation and deprivation visited upon them by their oppressors. Jewish prisoners were forced to work in the bakeries of the concentration camps, but they were punished or killed for stealing bread. Dalits and Black people, too, were whipped, lynched, or beaten to death if they stole small bits of food or other necessities.
The unusually harsh punishments leveled against members of the subordinate cate were meant to further dehumanize them. Once a person or a group of people has had their humanity stripped away, they can be treated terribly with impunity. This cycle serves to perpetuate caste by suggesting that only those belonging to upper castes are fully human, and thus fully deserving of the privileges of power.
Themes
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Jews and African Americans alike were experimented on during their imprisonment in concentration camps and on plantations. Because they had been so thoroughly dehumanized, it was easier for their torturers (and ordinary upper-caste citizens) to turn a blind eye to their profound, horrific suffering. By desensitizing members of the dominant caste to violence against the subordinate caste, the dominant caste ensured its youngest members would perpetuate its supremacy as they grew older.
This is yet another way that caste sustains itself. When a person grows up in a certain society and sees that certain members of that society don’t count as human, they learn to treat others of the same caste that way as well. Thus, caste effectively breeds people who will automatically do the work of keeping it alive on their own, simply due to having observed and internalized how caste functions.
Themes
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