The Costs of Caste Theme Analysis

All of global society, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste suggests, pays a price for a caste system (a social hierarchy that ranks people based on fixed, arbitrary categories) that rewards few while punishing many. The book suggests that the United States in particular suffers because of its allegiance to a rigid caste system, resulting in an inaccurate understanding of their country’s history and unequal access to things like healthcare and education. By pointing out how societies around the world are hindered by their devotion to caste, the book suggests that members of the dominant castes will often act and vote against their own interests—no matter the cost—if it means upholding the caste system that gives them a sense of worth, power, and dominance.

The general welfare of caste-based societies always suffers, because people in dominant castes don’t want people in subordinate castes to have privileges that those in dominant castes want reserved exclusively for them. One of the costs of caste is that societies centered around caste systems often have false understandings of their own histories. And what’s worse, a nation that won’t look back on its past is fundamentally incapable of recognizing what’s happening in its present. The U.S., which downplays the impact of slavery on its present social atmosphere, has very little understanding of how its own caste system has influenced it over the years. A country that can’t even see the costs of caste, then, cannot understand how caste is hampering its progress. Another cost of caste is the loss of potential. By dehumanizing, stigmatizing, and ostracizing the subordinate castes, countries actively hamper their own growth. Albert Einstein—widely considered to be one of the greatest scientists who ever lived—was a member of the subordinate (or even subhuman) caste in Nazi Germany’s caste system because he was Jewish. By referring to Einstein as an example, the book implies that many brilliant minds may have been suppressed by caste. In this way, the world’s collective progress may have already been stymied by caste in unknowable ways.

One of the most damaging costs of caste can be seen in the U.S.’s healthcare and education systems. Though the U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it lags behind other developed countries on several fronts. The U.S. does not provide its citizens with any form of free or low-cost healthcare coverage, and many people who need affordable healthcare or government benefits aren’t able to access that aid. The U.S. also has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, the highest rate of public mass shootings, and the highest infant mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. Moreover, American students’ test scores compare poorly to those in other developed nations, and the U.S. ranks only 18th in global happiness. All of these problems disproportionately impact the subordinate class, which is comprised of Black Americans—so remedying them would mean that the U.S. would have to invest in the health, success, and well-being of its subordinate caste. But the book suggests that the country would rather let all of its citizens suffer than treat them all equally, because to do so would be to afford equality to the subordinate caste. Furthermore, scientists have tried to understand the psychological and physiological costs of casteism. New research shows that the psychological trauma of living in the subordinate caste is linked to high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. It can also result in shortened and weathered DNA strands (which shortens lifespan) as well as high blood pressure, diabetes, and other diseases. These health problems disproportionately affect Black people (the subordinate caste) in the U.S.—and yet they’re often blamed on the subordinate caste, rather than the dominant caste’s poor treatment of the subordinate caste.

The book posits that even when all of these societal costs are considered, the dominant caste will continue to see them as necessary or inevitable because of their own desire to cling to power. The dominant castes’ power comes from the historical precedent of that power—caste is an often irrational (yet still powerful) enclosed loop. By keeping the subordinate castes down, the dominant castes are able to sustain their claims to superiority. In the U.S., especially, the creation of healthcare and education initiatives, stronger social programs, and even reparations for slavery (repaying descendants of enslaved people) would require the dominant caste to relinquish some of its power in order to invest in the prosperity of the subordinate caste. Wilkerson terms this phenomenon “dominant group status threat,” and she suggests that when a dominant group’s status is perceived to be under threat, an attempt to restore that power through any means necessary is inevitable. Even though these initiatives would improve U.S. society as a whole, preserving the caste system is, to the dominant caste, seemingly worth the costs that they, too, incur. The challenge of contemporary times, the book posits, is finding a way to “see through the […] layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have.” In the process, humanity may yet be able to honestly weigh the costs of caste against its ever-diminishing benefits to a small subset of global society.