‘Caste’ Review: The High Cost of Feeling Superior

Is social ranking color-coded in America? Do ‘deplorables’ belong to the same caste as the woke coastal elite?

Tunku Varadarajan reviews "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson. Excerpt:

"she never offers a convincing argument for why American history and society are better examined through the lens of caste than of race.

Instead, Ms. Wilkerson seeks to make her case for caste by the repeated assertion that it is a case worth making. When she does seek to explain caste—elaborating on its characteristics and consequences—she often resorts to rhetorical statements that are stirring but not always illuminating. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” she tells us. “It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” It is apparent, in any case, that she is writing for those who wouldn’t challenge her assumptions. Oprah Winfrey has said that “this might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club.”

Ms. Wilkerson scarcely acknowledges that modern America has made vast strides to address racism, and her swatting down of Donald Trump as “a cocksure champion for the dominant caste, a mouthpiece for their anxieties,” lays bare her own politics. She interprets the 2016 presidential election as a “remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America,” ignoring the characterization of (white) Trump voters as “deplorables” by (the white) Hillary Clinton. The contradictions in her analysis are apparent: How can the “deplorables” belong to the same caste as the woke coastal elite? Wasn’t their cultural disparagement by Mrs. Clinton an expression, precisely, of her feeling that they belonged to a different (and inferior) caste?

Many readers will be disappointed that Ms. Wilkerson doesn’t focus more on the role that caste plays within races. She touches on, but doesn’t explore in real depth, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy in the first three centuries after 1619 and scarcely addresses the (color-coded) caste system that once prevailed among black Americans. She makes no reference to the writings of E. Digby Baltzell, whose book “The Protestant Establishment” (1964) still has much to teach us about “Aristocracy and Caste in America” (to quote its subtitle).

Ms. Wilkerson also makes notably little use of “class” as a social category. It is the “fixed nature” of caste, she writes, that distinguishes it from class, “a term to which it is often compared.” She goes on to add that “if you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste.” Caste, by contrast, is immutable, says Ms. Wilkerson, even as she fails to convince us that it is any more immutable—in America, at least—than race. And for all the present protests and turbulence, race is less dispositive of a person’s future in this country than at any time since 1619. Ms. Wilkerson, I fear, does not give America its due."