Book Review: Caste

A couple of days ago I finished a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s a really excellent book reflecting on the institution of racism and how it actually is a caste system very similar to caste systems of India and Nazi Germany. Before I read the book I only knew about caste from learning about India in my world geography and history classes. But Caste showed me that the caste system wasn’t just limited to India, but also exists in other countries.

The book opens up with something that happened in the Siberian tundra the same year that the U.S. faced an unprecedented election, as well as the political divisiveness that came with it. A strain of anthrax had killed a lot of the reindeer in the tundra during the 1940s and people buried their carcasses under the ice, thinking it would solve the problem and the anthrax would never return. But then in 2016, a massive heat wave hit the tundra and then that heat hit the permafrost and released all that anthrax, making many people in the community sick. At first I didn’t know what to expect when Wilkerson gave this story at the beginning, but then she draws a parallel between the heat from the anthrax outbreak to the heat of the 2016 U.S. election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, where there was a lot of political divisiveness in the country.

This parallel really stuck with me because in Buddhism, we talk about the interconnectedness of all life and how nothing exists in isolation. As much as I focused on the 2016 election, I didn’t pay much attention to what other parts of the world were dealing with, so the anthrax outbreak in Siberia I didn’t know anything about until I read this book. It showed me that no part of the world exists by itself and each event is connected to another. When I thought about this, I also thought back to this movie I watched a long time ago called Babel. Even though it takes place in four different parts of the globe (Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the U.S.) the people in each of these different countries have stories that overlap with one another and they are each connected to each other in seemingly unexpected ways. Just like Babel, the anthrax outbreak in Siberia may have seemed to me at first to not have anything to do with the book, but then Wilkerson compares the heat of the Siberian tundra and the heat of the election and the divisive political rhetoric and I came to find that those two events in 2016 were in fact deeply connected with one another.

In Buddhism we also talk about karma. At first, my surface understanding of karma was “what goes around comes around” or that karma was the same thing as payback. But I found the Nichiren Buddhist concept of karma to be a little deeper than that. Karma from this viewpoint consists of the causes we make through words, actions and thoughts in past lifetimes, and the effects of these causes we make in our past don’t manifest as effects until certain conditions are met, and until then the effects remain latent. The anthrax never really left the tundra; it had been in the ice since 1941 and had killed several reindeer, and decades later, the heatwave hit and the pathogen spores from the anthrax got into the land and infected a lot of reindeer that grazed on the land, and consequently, infected the herders. As Wilkerson explains, “the anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface.” (Wilkerson, p.4)

I feel that caste has been like the anthrax because it never goes away. According to Wilkerson, a caste system is a social construct with arbitrary divisions to give certain groups a sense of superiority over other groups. Wilkerson uses three examples of caste systems to illustrate how caste has operated throughout history and how these deeply embedded caste systems continue to impact 21st century society. The caste systems she discusses and draws connections between are the caste system in the U.S., the caste system in India and the caste system in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Like I said I lacked an adequate understanding of caste before reading this book, and even when I took classes on slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S., I had always just called it racism and thought caste was a separate thing having to do more with what socioeconomic class certain people belonged to.

But Wilkerson illustrates that although the U.S., Nazi Germany and India had some differences in their approach to caste, there were also a lot of similarities. She attends a conference one time with several scholars from India, and meets some people from the Dalit, or untouchables, caste, and others from the Brahmin caste. She observes in her interactions some of the behaviors of the caste system, like when a member of the Brahmin caste interrupted Wilkerson’s one on one conversation with a member of the Dalit caste and started giving orders to the Dalit caste member even though everyone at the conference held some kind of scholarly reputation. It didn’t matter at that moment because at the end of the day, the Brahmin caste member felt she had a right to treat the Dalit caste member like that just by virtue of being born into a higher rank than the Dalit was. Wilkerson, being a Black woman in the U.S., empathizes with the Dalit person and finds common ground between her and his experiences in the respective caste systems.

One thing I do have to let you know about the book though: many of the depictions of acts of harm and injustice done to members of a lower caste rank are quite disturbing. Wilkerson describes lynchings of African-Americans in the 19th and 20th century in the most descriptive way possible, and even after taking many Afro-American Studies classes where I had to read every day about the inhuman subjugation of Black people, I still had to collect myself emotionally and spiritually many times while reading this book. There are also disturbing depictions of injustice done to Jewish people in Nazi Germany and injustice done to the Dalits in India. However, this book reminded me through these deeply disturbing depictions of torture and a lack of respect for people’s lives that studying history is essential to creating a more just, more peaceful society because history shows us what went wrong and gives us an opportunity in the present to learn from that history so that it doesn’t get repeated. This book actually gave the phrase “history repeats itself” a whole new meaning because the injustices that kept happening in these caste systems still happens today. We can see it in many events that happened over the past few years: the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the Charleston AME Church shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the list goes on. Namely we have seen the caste system repeat itself at the worst possible degree with the murders of Black men, women, youth and trans people over the past summer in 2020. While history has shown that police brutality of Black people isn’t anything new and has been going on for years, in 2020 we were also dealing with a public health crisis that impacted everyone to some degree, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities.

To be honest I’m still processing the book, so this review isn’t as comprehensive as I wished it would be. But something made me think; so I was really glad that the book club I’m part of assigned this book, and then I thought about how impactful this book was for me, and so I wondered, are police departments assigning this book in their trainings? Are workplaces with unconscious bias training assigning Caste as mandatory reading? If not, they should because this book also forced me to reexamine some of my own biases and preconceived ideas about race and caste. I only put out there that police departments should assign this book as mandatory reading during academy training because last summer TV show host John Oliver had an episode on U.S. police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In one part of the episode he shows a clip from a police training seminar in Ohio, and in the clip the police officer tells the trainees that the whole point of their training is to condition themselves to kill another human being. Obviously I won’t go into anymore detail because even remembering that clip gave me goosebumps, but that clip stuck in my mind and after reading Caste, I think reading it would help address the racial bias in many police killings.

I’m not saying reading Caste would be enough to change the entire system of racism and police brutality overnight. I’m just saying that police might want to read up on the history of caste because police brutality has existed in many different forms throughout history, even dating back to slavery because slavery was a way of controlling black people’s bodies and depriving them of freedom. Reading about this history might give officers a broader understanding of how unnecessary force has been used in the past and why different training methods are necessary. If they read about how the caste system in the U.S. has operated for centuries, they would gain a deeper understanding of how racial bias has shaped police departments and how police have interacted with communities of color in the past and the implications of these past interactions in the present. I found in doing my thesis on environmental justice that in order to gain a broader understanding of the environmentalism that was more inclusive of people of color, I had to go back to the history of the environmentalism movement and the very important role that Black and Indigenous communities have played in this movement for years even when history textbooks rarely gave them credit for their contributions in the environmental movement. Studying history was freeing for me because up until then, I didn’t know about settler colonialism, Jane Addams or Hazel Johnson. Reading about Indigenous people’s centuries-old struggle for environmental justice especially was eye-opening because I hadn’t studied about it before, so it showed me how colonialism has severely impacted Indigenous communities’ culture, education, and access to resources. When police departments (hopefully there are some who are) read a book like Caste, they are already taking a crucial step in addressing racial bias because Caste will challenge any assumptions they may have had about race.

I’m still processing the book myself but hopefully I can write about it another time. Although after reading it, I understand more why it’s been the #1 New York Times Bestseller; it’s truly a book like no other.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Isabel Wilkerson. 2020. 476 pp.