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Summary
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
Author Isabel Wilkerson writes about a famous black-and-white photograph taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, at the height of Hitler’s Third Reich. In the picture, there’s a lone man in a sea of shipyard workers who is refusing to perform the heil, or Nazi salute. The man is now believed to have been named August Landmesser—a former member of the Nazi Party who rejected the Party’s campaign of terror after he fell in love with a Jewish woman, a member of the subordinate caste in the Nazis’ regime. As someone connected to the scapegoated caste, Landmesser could see past the lies that the dominant caste—the Aryans—embraced.
Here, Wilkerson begins her book about caste systems around the world by focusing on a lone conscientious objector to the cruelties of caste. August Landmesser isn’t a major historical figure—he was just an average man, and a member of the dominant caste at that. By calling attention to an average dominant-caste person’s resistance to the caste system in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson illustrates what needs to happen on a global scale in order for modern-day caste systems to be dismantled.
Themes
Though everyone, Wilkerson writes, wants to believe that they would be like Landmesser and stand against the tide of evil, resisting an “ocean” is not so easy. Unless people are ready and willing to face scorn and exclusion, Wilkerson argues, it is not possible for everyone to exhibit Landmesser’s bravery. She asks her readers what it would take for someone living in today’s era to be like Landmesser.
In this passage, Wilkerson implies that all of humanity is currently facing the conundrum Landmesser faced: the question of whether relinquishing the power his caste position gave him was worth it for the greater good. It is up to members of the dominant and middle castes to resist the allure of caste—which is as powerful as the sea—and stand up for those in subordinate castes who are being stigmatized and dehumanized.
Themes
