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Throughout Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, the old house in which the author lives symbolizes the “old house” she believes the United States to be. In stating that the U.S. is an old house, Wilkerson calls attention to the deterioration of the country’s “skeleton” (underlying social structure) due to its having been built on the “mudsill,” or foundational stone, of casteism and slavery. Throughout the book, Wilkerson argues that old houses need even more attention than modern ones—and failing to keep up with the house’s maintenance will lead to it crumbling. In several chapters, Wilkerson describes the overwhelming and often uncomfortable maintenance her own house requires. This suggests to her readers that Americans must collectively come together to do maintenance on the “old house”: that is, expose the deep societal flaws in the country’s foundation. The U.S. must root these problems out and replace them with a new underlying structure, otherwise the country will continue to decline into a state of unmanageable disrepair.
The Old House Quotes in Caste
The Caste quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Old House. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. […] When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.
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Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country's X-ray up to the light.
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Pillar Number Five
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When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam hammered into place to anchor the foundation. That piece is called the mudsill, the sill plate that runs along the base of a house and bears the weight of the entire structure above it. The studs and subfloors, the ceilings and windows, the doors and roofing, all the components that make it a house, are built on top of the mudsill. In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon.
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Get the entire Caste LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Old House Symbol Timeline in Caste
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Old House appears in Caste. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter Two: An Old House and an Infrared Light
Author Isabel Wilkerson and her family live in an old house . She recalls a housing inspector using an infrared lens to test a bulging leak...
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Like all old houses , the U.S. has an “unseen skeleton”—a caste system that is as central to its...
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