What Covid knew all along

Culture wars keep caste systems intact

In 2020, former NY Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book tells a compelling story: the root of our social divisions can be found in the invented hierarchical structure of castes, not, as we often assume in America, race.

Race, Wilkerson writes, is only another manifestation of caste. While certainly an important topic in America, Wilkerson shows—by investigating the longstanding caste system in India, the social divisions in Nazi Germany, and America’s founding and expansion through chattel slavery—that caste is a universal phenomenon.

Wilkerson has spent her career digging into untold stories. She was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for her reporting on midwestern floods in 1993. She spent 15 years researching and writing her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, about the decades-long migration of African Americans from the south to the north and west. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (among others) after its publication in 2010.

A decade later, Caste was published to similar acclaim. In 2023, Ava DuVernay created a gorgeous and powerful adaption, “Origin.” Only after seeing her film did I finally buy the book. The only thing I could think while reading was “why did it take me so long?”

Color is a fact…

We swim in an ocean of race in America. Everything seems based on skin color and heritage. Yet as Wilkerson points out, before the colonization of this land, caste divisions were along tribal, regional, and familial lines—not skin color. That idea was introduced by American colonialists, and has since persisted across the world.

For Americans, the idea seems counterintuitive. Yet it makes sense. The Dalits, for example, weren’t separated by skin color. True, Dalits tend to be darker, but that’s not a definitive rule. You’re more likely to discover social division in India through last names and occupations. 

As Wilkerson frames it, “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.” She continues,

It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.

The word race, she writes, likely came from the Spanish word raza, which originally referred to a “caste or quality of authentic horses.” Wilkerson quotes Montagu, who wrote, “The idea of race was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste.”

More bluntly:

Color is a fact. Race is a social construct.

While Caste was eye-opening, I’ve previously experienced the reality described. I’ve visited Morocco four times on reporting trips. There’s a stark division between city-dwelling Arabs and Berbers, who live in villages and mountains. Spending time in medinas and deep in those mountains, there’s no discernible skin color difference.

This isn’t how “race” operates in America, but indeed, such division has been in place around the world for millennia. Only Americans think their take is unique. As historian Nell Irvin Painter writes, “Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.”

Of course, race is an issue because American colonizers made it one. Only by studying history—including race’s precursor and inspiration, caste—will we find ways of ending such divisions. Yet today, the right pretends we’re post-racial, as if generations of precedent don’t influence the nation’s many systems that favor certain groups over others. Those who scream loudest about critical race theory and DEI trainings are often those who want to retain that power for themselves—or, as we’ll get to, their useful idiots.

Because, as Wilkerson writes, even people who don’t benefit from caste structures support it. Let’s look at how that happens.