“Caste –
the Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020
This book
is a small step forward from the simple-minded analyses of ‘race’ carried out
by U.S.
liberals and conservatives, the media and educational institutions to this day. Wilkerson realizes that ‘race’ is a reactionary
social construct, not a biologic fact, citing scientists like Ashley Montagu in
the 1950s. Among humans, it does not
exist, as we are 99.9% the same. Yet everyone
blathers on about race in the plural, inspired by government categories derived
from Jim Crow.
Wilkerson
knows there is no such thing as ‘white’ or ‘black’ people, just various shades
of melanin – of brown, beige and pink skin.
She knows that skin color and certain small physical markers are
products of geography and nothing else. She makes fun of the odd qualification of
‘Caucasian.’ What does exist is the
politicization of these terms. Wilkerson
understands that there is a difference between active institutional racism and
personal bigotry or prejudice. She calls
the former caste.
INDIA and the U.S.
Wilkerson’s
touchstone on the subject of caste is the religious caste system in India,
which MLK once visited to better understand Gandhi. At one point, MLK was introduced in India as an
American ‘untouchable,’ which surprised him but then made sense. Wilkerson herself upholds Dalit ‘untouchable’
B.R. Ambedkar as the MLK of India. Wilkerson does not note that Gandhi, a Hindu,
was a supporter of the Indian caste system in his battles with Ambedkar. Gandhi’s father was from the Modh Baniya
caste – a merchant caste – and Gandhi became a lawyer. Indian castes themselves are buried in hundreds
of years of Hindu varna
hierarchies, originating out of slave and medieval economies, not capitalism.
Wilkerson
considers India, the brief
existence of fascist Nazi Germany
and the U.S.
to be the only sources of a caste understanding. All three examples actually come from different economic sources. She ignores apartheid South Africa, the treatment of indigenous Americans or Palestinians and the existence of mistreated color, ethnic or religious strata
all over the world. Wilkerson is casual
in her approach, relying on anecdotes and psychology, not statistics or social
science. The style is stories and
journalism, not sociology. She mentions earlier works written in the
1930s: “Deep South: A Social
Anthropological Study of Caste and Class” and “Caste and Class in a
Southern Town.” But notice their
titles as opposed to hers - class is included. One of the
authors of the first treatise, Allison Davis, was probably a Marxist who
criticized the black bourgeoisie in a famous 1929 essay, “The Negro Deserts
His People.” A favorite of liberals and Wilkerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, is still ignored in his opposition to capitalism as the source of caste oppression.
For
Marxists I do not think the concept of a color caste in the U.S. raises problems
if you rename ‘race’ to ‘caste.’ It exists
between the obvious flaws of simple-minded identity politics and class. Caste has attributes of class if the concept
is applied properly. The Indian caste
system denotes roles in a religious and social hierarchy and sometimes geographic
origins. It is also supposed to
determine your economic job. Given
there are many castes and sub-castes and many jobs in India, the concept divides the
working classes and farmers by Hindu religious boundaries. Even Indian Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and Christians
are affected by it. This archaic caste
system objectively props up the virulent Indian class system, now dominated by enriched Hindutva mega-capitalists.
Wilkerson’s
concept of U.S.
caste on the other hand is simple, deceptive and somewhat artificial, stretched across
various ethnic identities. She assigns Latinos
and Asians to a ‘middle’ caste, while exiling indigenous native Americans from
the caste system altogether. Her
conception is a mostly ‘black’ centric concept, bi-polar to ‘whites.’ This reflects a theoretical weakness in the
book, a blinkered tunnel vision that continues throughout. It is one of several crucial weaknesses in her
theory.
 |
| Someone Got There First |
CASTE
is ECONOMIC
Wilkerson
accepts caste as an economic category, as job-related. Her examples include assumptions that all 'black' people must be waiters or clerks, or cannot be NYT reporters, as she once
was. Slavery and Jim Crow legally prohibited
darker skinned persons from having businesses or more skilled jobs. Agricultural, servant and physical or ‘menial’
labor was almost all that was allowed or possible, even as people moved north
to escape Jim Crow. Wilkerson’s examples
of job restrictions become fewer and fewer as she approaches the present, as most are from Jim Crow. Dark-skinned people who succeed in a job
‘outside of their caste’ like herself she cleverly calls "miscast." Those numbers of ‘miscasts’ are not
infinitesimal or accidental anymore.
U.S. color castes are not impermeable
categories, as we can easily find exceptions, including Ms. Wilkerson herself, a professor. Or the unemployed Scots-Irish miner in Appalachia suffering from black lung high on
opioids. I stereotype because it
reveals the weakness of caste as an all-encompassing view. Class is a bedrock economic reality that encompasses
concepts of caste and ‘race.’ Class is
sometimes permeable but it still cuts across every caste, every ethnicity,
every nation, every identity, every single society. Class is present in all capitalist societies,
even when there are no castes present. In the U.S. the permeability of class has become less and less, even in comparison to Europe.
A visit
to a typical U.S.
restaurant will let you see a color caste and class system in action. Light skinned women up front as waitresses and
hostesses, Latino cooks in the kitchen, dark-skinned or Latino dishwashers and
bussers in back … and an alabaster owner counting profits in the office. The first groups are all exploited by the
last, though the waitresses might get the best tips. This is how caste and class intertwine but
ultimately capital dominates. Profit is
the actual motivation, not history, meanness, stupidity or theology.
Wilkerson
is aware of elites in the dominant caste and economic exploitation of those lower down through slavery and afterwards. Yet she doesn’t
consider present versions of slavery as relevant to her theory. Right now debt slavery and non-chattel labor imprisonment
are at record levels. Imprisoned Thai shrimp
fisherman locked on their boats and Mexican tomato workers in walled farms; young
Indian boys staining leather for their father’s debts; body parts taken from
poverty-stricken proletarians; caged children picking chocolate beans in Ivory Coast; captured miners in the Congo; imprisoned
Indonesian housemaids in Saudi Arabia; Romanian girls sold to London brothels.
It is all part of an international system of profit
off of labor and bodies, an imperial ‘side gig’ that is illegal, but like the
drug trade, gun smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion and crime itself, are part of the
overall capitalist economy. It is not chattel slavery - it is the modern equivalent. Profit makes the law.
FAMILIARITY
Much of
this book is very familiar. She locates
the origins of caste in colonialism. She
outlines slavery, descriptions of lynching and miscegenation laws. She writes about the Jim Crow ‘one drop’ and
1/64th rules and Nazi adoption of Jim Crow law applied to German Jews. She has a chapter on the false science of eugenics,
which dominated social sciences in the early 1900s. Obama as a ‘black’ president; Charlottesville and the
Confederate flag issue; personal slights; a few mentions of cop violence but not
many; the Trump victory.
Where
she gets into quicksand is her description of so-called "middle castes." She notes historical attempts by Asians,
Indians, native Americans or Latinos to be considered ‘white’ in the legal
sense, just as Italians or Irish became ‘white.’ However that ignores the fact that Mexicans and
native Americans, many Arabs, Africans and Asians are specifically oppressed. They are not middle castes. They don’t have
the long oppressive history of slavery behind them, but they do have "that skin
thing." Some middle-class Asians might
be the best candidates for middle-caste, but it is because of their class
standing as professionals or business people. The poverty-stricken and
proletarian Hmong in St. Paul, Minnesota or Somalis in Minneapolis are in no way middle caste. The term reflects Wilkerson
echo of the liberal fantasy term middle class for everyone who is between Bill
Gates and those on welfare.
 |
| Professor Wilkerson |
BLACK
BOURGEOISIE
Wilkerson
never uses the term capitalism and avoids the term class except in
one paragraph in which she addresses it, admitting that some low-caste
members can "make it" but are still subject to a caste problems. She gives examples of wealthy or prominent
African-Americans who were treated like low-level nobodies by cops or business
owners, or talked down to at meetings by clueless 'whites'.
What she does not do is talk about the existing "black bourgeoisie" and explain how their existence disrupts her caste paradigm. Nor does she deal with the vast ‘white’ proletariat,
which also disrupts her view. She admits the upper caste has elites and so
does the lower - but goes no further. Here
be monsters!
According
to Forbes there were only 7 African-American billionaires in the U.S. in 2020,
“from finance to technology to entertainment.”
In 2021, Nubia notes the top 10 ‘black’ wealthy were: Vista
Equity Partners owner Robert Smith; a businessman, David Steward; Oprah
Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, P-Diddy; another business owner, Sheila Johnson;
Dr. Dre, Rihanna, and Tyler Perry. This
small number of super-wealthy concentrated in entertainment reflects a growing
wealth gap between the castes, but it does not eliminate class in the ‘black’
community. The ‘black’ upper
class is estimated to be 1% of the overall population. Making over $200K a year qualifies a person
to be in the upper middle class (UMC) according to some estimates. In 2016 Brookings reported that 7% of
the UMC was African American, 9% Hispanic-American, 11% Asian-American, the
rest European-American. Asians had the smallest proportion of the overall population so Brookings notes that Asians have more
members in the UMC than ‘whites.’ This
further undermines Wilkerson’s version of caste.
Like
many middle-class liberals, Wilkerson assumes in her text that all ‘white
working class’ people are bigots or racists, relishing their higher caste
standing and all endorsing Trump. This
is factual nonsense, unsupported by statistics.
Blue-collar proletarians have more in common across any caste than those
who are in the upper middle class of their own caste. Integrated workplaces, political
organizations and unions show this best.
DISAPPEARING
CLASS
Ultimately
the effect of Wilkerson’s book is to disappear class as part of a broad propaganda
effort by the bourgeois academy, corporate media and the political system. She has no plan to overcome caste and ignores
any perspective of emancipation from class, caste or institutional racism. Her solution is: “an intervention of humanitarian impulses.”(!)
She herself has been a top NYT reporter, a prominent journalism professor
and a celebrated non-fiction writer for an earlier book on the Great Migration. Caste itself got a pat on the back from Oprah
and the NYT. She’s a ‘somebody’
writing for nobodies. Is she an
Ambedkar? Not even. A hard answer to Wilkerson’s version of this
theory are the efforts of Marxists, now and in the past. Here is Black Agenda Report’s look at
her book: BAR
on Caste
Prior
blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: “Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar); “Slavery
by Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “One Night in Miami,” “Arundhati
Roy,” “White Tiger,” “Toward Race Reductionism,” “Mistaken Identity,” “Blood
and Earth,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slave States,” “Prison Strike” “White
Trash” “Chavs” or words like ‘racism,’ ‘caste’ or slavery.
And I
bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
February
15, 2021
