By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, Isabel Wilkerson’s new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history.
Mustering old and new historical scholarship, sometimes to shattering effect, “Caste” brings out how systematically, through the centuries, Black lives were destroyed “under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath.” In considering the present, though, she often focusses on questions of dignity.
Indeed, reading Wilkerson’s chapter on Allison Davis, one could forget that “Deep South” pointedly billed itself as “a study of caste and class.” She leaves out the fact that Davis and his co-authors were fascinated by the ways in which the two gradients could complicate each other—the ways in which solidarities of class sometimes trumped those of color.
Some Dalit communities had benefitted disproportionately from the quotas for government jobs that Ambedkar fought to write into the Constitution. Over time, a small Dalit élite, known as “the creamy layer,” emerged. The B.J.P. recruited Dalits who were beneath that layer and resentful of it, promising them economic advancement.
Whites, Wilkerson anticipates, will rush to co-opt insecure mid-caste nonwhites—ethnic groups who have profited from affirmative-action programs that Blacks fought for. She chillingly envisages Latinos, Asians, and other citizens of color entering the voting booth and making an “autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station,” privileging features of their identity that align them with the dominant caste over features they share with other voters of color.
This resort to moral psychology—a self-oriented Gandhian move of the kind that infuriated Ambedkar—seems a retreat from her larger argument that white supremacy should be seen as systemic, not personal. Perhaps, boxed in by her caste model, she is seeking hope by reaching outside it. But, if the caste model can feel unnuanced and overly deterministic, the turn toward empathy can feel detached from history in another way.
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