How America’s ‘Caste System’ Impacts You

The deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol in January continues to send reverberations around the country as federal authorities arrest men and women involved in the insurrection, many of whom professed white supremacist associations — confirming in stark terms the unresolved racial tensions that have defined America for generations.

“This is our country’s karmic moment of truth,” says bestselling author, Isabel Wilkerson.

Wilkerson spoke recently about the attack during a webinar featuring her latest book, Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents, which explores America’s similarities to caste systems in India and Germany during the Nazi regime.

“We are witnessing the unheeded voices of Black and Brown people, of marginalized people, the unheeded voices of Black women in particular who have been sounding the alarm for decades, the silenced Cassandras of our era who saw this coming,” she added. “We are witnessing the ongoing consequences of our racial caste system and its response to threats to its existence or more specifically those who have been trained to believe that dominance is their birthright, desperate to protect it at all costs.”

Wilkerson is a former reporter for The New York Times where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her work. In 2009 later she wrote her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration. Dr. Robert Smith, professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, remembers Wilkerson from her days as a student at Howard University where he also taught, and says she occasionally interviewed him for her Times articles.

Smith has read Caste and agrees with Wilkerson’s comparison of American racism and the caste systems in India and Nazi Germany.

“The notion of caste is there is no way out. It is immutable…that you can’t really alter it,” explains Smith. “No matter what one’s status as a Black person in America, with both white and other minorities, skin color suggests a subordinate place for you.”

He says “she did a very good job of demonstrating its enduring nature in America today.” Both Smith and Wilkerson are troubled by the deep divisions in the country and the resulting violence.

“That’s my great fear for the future of America, that it’s to the extent that when we as a society attempt to address the problem of racial caste, it will elicit that kind of violent response,” he says. “Trump supporters correctly think that they are losing status as white people in America to Blacks and colored people, and they’re losing their sense of what’s important to them in terms of social issues like abortion and gay marriage. And in the end, I think the country is going to continue in that progressive direction, and so if you lose at the ballot box as projections are that they will, that is, the persons who resist these kinds of social changes, then some of them will resort to violence.”

Smith is also writing a book expected to be released this fall entitled, When Character Is Absent: The Multiple Character Deficits Of Donald Trump, which will examine the former President’s “total absence of character no matter how we measure it.”

As Wilkerson shares her insights about America’s latest effort to reconcile racial tensions, she along with scores of authors and historians traces the present turmoil to the past.

“No one was held to account for the 246 years of slavery, again, that 12 generations of enslaved. How many greats do you have to add to the word grandparent to begin to imagine how slavery lasted on this soil. Because no one was held to account, no one was held to account for the 246 years of slavery nor for the rupture of cessation and Civil War. Instead, there are monuments to these people, monuments to these men. Because we have not addressed, much less reconciled this history, we saw a Confederate flag in the United States Capitol. We saw a rioter in 2021 deliver a Confederate flag farther than Robert E. Lee himself. That is a stunning thing to recognize that’s happened in our time.”