By Isabel Wilkerson
Random House—2020, 2023
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
When I attended public schools, my teachers asked me to stand up every day, place my hand over my heart, and pledge allegiance to the flag. Included in that pledge were the words that this country representes "liberty and justice for all."
Then, there were the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that argued how the word "equality" is supposed to represent something in this country. Based on these facts, my teachers argued that the United States is an exceptional nation that has the greatest democracy in the world.
Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste—The Origins of Our Discontents gives us a different view of this country. She argues that our reality is made up of dominant and subordinate castes. She compares what she calls the caste system here to the caste system of India and the vicious anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany.
Wilkerson's book has a similar theme as Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow—Mass incarceration in the age of color blindness, and the book The 1619 Project edited by Nicole Hanna Jones. These three books present the evidence of how discrimination against Black people has been a constant throughout the history of this country.
For me, there are positive and negative aspects to Wilkerson's book. She is an excellent writer and presents evidence to support her point of view that is thoroughly documented. She also gives recollections from her personal experience that corroborate her conclusion. Unlike other contemporary books about the history of racist discrimination, her book gives parallels to the caste system in India and the Nazi organized Holocaust.
The basic problem with Wilkerson's book is that she all but ignores the fact that the capitalist political-economic system dominates the world. With capitalism there is the capitalist class that owns the means of production. Then, there is the working class that produces all the goods and services we need and want.
While capitalists, as well as their supporters in the government, argue that they support everyone's interests, the reality tells another story. Because capitalists produce no useful commodities, they are motivated to maximize profits from the production of all commodities. Therefore, the interests of capitalists and workers are antagonistic in spite of all arguments to the contrary.
Wilkerson argues that people who are a part of the working class have the potential to escape that class and become professionals or small business owners. However, Black people who escape the working class continue to be Black and continue to be exposed to discrimination. While this is true, the facts are that the working class was created to serve the interests of capitalists. As long as capitalism exists, there will be a working class.
Another problem with the book Caste is that Wilkerson skims over the root causes of why there was a caste system in India, as well as why there was and is racist discrimination here. In order to understand the causes for these systems we first need to see how and why feudalism is different from capitalism.
The primary classes of feudalism are the royal families, the religious clerics, the craft guilds, and the peasantry. In this system, religious clerics have real power. Many settlers came to this part of the world from England to escape religious intolerance. When the U.S. Constitution argued for freedom of religion, this was a truly revolutionary statement.
So, Indian religious clerics designed the caste system to adopt to the reality of feudalism in India. The Brahmin caste was the most prestigious. The Dalit caste otherwise known as the untouchables, was the subordinate caste. Although the Indian government officially abolished the caste system, the traditions of the past continue.
The United States was born in a revolution against feudalism and colonialism. The colonists replaced the rule of a royal family with the rule of an elected government. There were and are three branches of the federal government that operate in a supposed system of checks and balances.
However, those three branches of government have consistently supported the interests of the affluent. The President isn't elected by popular vote, but by the electoral college. The members of the Supreme Court are appointed. Initially members of the Senate were appointed by state governments. The Congress is the only branch of government that was directly voted for by citizens.
The central leader of the Russian Revolution was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who wrote a pamphlet titled State and Revolution. In that pamphlet Lenin argued that the state was invented to serve capitalist interests as a "special instrument of repression."
We see this in the very first actions of the United States government. This government continued the genocidal war against Native Americans. They continued the institution of chattel slavery. They used armed force to suppress both the Shay's and Whisky rebellions.
However, this new ruling power wasn't about enriching royal families. Capitalists used international trade to profit from the sale of commodities.
So, the systematic discrimination against Black people was always about the exploitation of their labor. Racist attitudes weren't about maintaining a caste system, but about generating profits to the owners of capital. While there were clear similarities between racist discrimination and caste rule, those systems operated under different driving forces.
The very idea of race originated with capitalism to rationalize the theft of Black people and their labor. As Wilkerson and many other authors have pointed out, there is absolutely no scientific basis for separating people in racial groups. All human being have basically the same genetic makeup. There was a need for people to toil under unimaginably brutal conditions. This explains why the ruling powers promoted the absurd idea that Black people were less than human.
However, the slave system had its own dynamics. Slave owners wanted an agriculturally dominated nation where slave labor was the norm. Northern industrialists wanted to develop industry with workers who are paid a wage. Workers and small farmers also preferred wage labor and free farmers to chattel slavery. These contradictions sparked the Civil War.
After the Union forces defeated the army fighting for slavery, there was a period of reconstruction. In that brief period, there were the beginnings of democracy where Black people would begin to gain real equal rights. However, as we have seen, the idea of equal rights were never a real priority for the United States government.
So, the federal government abandoned reconstruction and effectively gave power to terrorist gangs like the Ku Klux Klan. Those gangs overthrew the reconstruction governments by force. Then, all branches of the federal government actively supported the flagrant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Black people were effectively stripped of their citizenship rights with the system of Jim Crow segregation.
After 350,000 Union soldiers died in the Civil War, we can ask the question: Why did officials in all three branches of government agree to reimpose many of the aspects of slavery with Jim Crow segregation? The clear answer is that capitalists needed people to do to worst jobs at the lowest pay in order to gouge out profits. This was and continues to be the driving force of institutionalized racist discrimination.
The Invisible Man
In the year 1952 Ralph Ellison published his groundbreaking novel, The Invisible Man. Ellison's main character was rejected in his many efforts to live a somewhat normal life. Responding to those rejections this Black character viewed himself as "invisible" to the mainstream world.
Today, while institutionalized racist discrimination continues, Black people are no longer invisible. The primary reasons for this were the mass movements that demanded fundamental change. These included the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the hundreds of rebellions that erupted in towns and cities all over the country. Elizabeth Hinton reported on the history of these rebellions in her book America on Fire.
All these movements created a change in consciousness to the point where a majority of the population voted for Barrack Obama to become President. So, we can ask the question: If there has been a change in consciousness with respect to race relations, why does institutionalized discrimination continue?
The fundamental problem with Wilkerson's book Caste is that she ignores the idea of class. She is not alone in this. When we look at the news stories emanating from the mainstream news media, it would appear that the working class doesn't even exist. For them, we are invisible.
We might consider that literally everything we need and want is produced by working people all over the world. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the homes we live in, and the cars we ride in are all produced by the working class.
When we need medical assistance, we try to see a doctor. That doctor wouldn't be able to function without the support of entire staffs of housekeepers, laundry and dietary workers. Yet many people, including the press and government officials, view these essential workers as invisible. As we know, a disproportionate number of people who have these jobs are African American.
The fifty year decline in the economy of the United States
At the end of the Second World War the United States became the superpower of the world. The economies of the other major capitalist powers had been destroyed in the war. As a result, about 60% of the commodities in the world were manufactured in the United States. This financial upturn lasted up until the 1970's.
Today, about 50% of the commodities in the world are manufactured in Asia. This shift in production, as well as the ruthless drive for automation, caused the elimination of tens of millions of manufacturing jobs here.
Yet politicians argue that they somehow create jobs. Yes, there were many new jobs added to the economy since the 1970's. However, most of those jobs have fewer benefits and effectively less pay than the manufacturing jobs of the past.
One of the effects of this profound change has been a dramatic increase in inequality. The section of the working class that has been hit hardest by this deteriorating standard of living has been the least affluent 20% of the population. Black people are disproportionately represented in this part of the working class.
Isabel Wilkerson, as well as many others, argue that there can be profound inequality contained in a system they feel is democratic. This idea goes back to the revolution of the thirteen colonies that established the nation called the United States of America.
Before the revolution, affluent people like Benjamin Franklyn were second class citizens. The inherited class of gentleman held power.
With the revolution, there was upward mobility for anyone who could organize profitable enterprises. The priority of the government was to serve this affluent class, while pretending to serve the interests of everyone.
Within this system workers won various rights over the years. However, because the government always supported capitalist interests, they resisted the demands of labor, as well as equal rights for women, Black people, Native Americans, and people who are gay.
So, when Wilkerson and many others argue that we might be loosing our so-called democracy because of President Donald Trump, we might ask the question: When was there ever a genuine democracy in the United States?
The seemingly invisible people consist of the working class of the world
Presidents Barrack Obama and Donald Trump both support policies to deport millions of people from this country. Why in the world would a working person support the idea of deporting a coworker? Just as Black people had the worst jobs here, today many of those jobs are being done by immigrant workers.
The facts are that capitalists see the world as their nation. When President Trump recently travelled to China, some of the most powerful CEO's travelled with him. They didn't do this to improve the standard of living for working people here. No, they went to China in an attempt to profit off of the labor of our sister and brother Chinese workers.
In fact, capitalists profit from the labor of workers all over the world. They use the immigration laws in a similar way as politicians used the Jim Crow laws to intimidate Black people from demanding higher wages.
Capitalists also support wars in order to dominate capitalists in other nations. President Trump ordered the military to kidnap Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro. Then he ordered the military to go to war against the nation of Iran. These actions were about controling the flow of oil in the world. These actions were ultimately wars against the international working class. So, while the working class experiences the unimaginable horrors of war, capitalists use war to gouge out obscene amounts of money.
Empathy and solidarity
Isabel Wilkerson argues that the way to escape what she calls the caste system is through empathy. There is some truth in this statement. For the working class to advance, we need to be aware of the history and continued discrimination against Black people.
There is absolutely no way the working class can advance unless we work to do away with all forms of discrimination. Wilkerson's work as well as books written by many others give us a clear view of the vicious discriminatory history of this country.
However, when we look at all the successful movements of the past, we see that they all had something in common. Those movements went beyond awareness of the injustices of this country. People came together in acts of solidarity. They began to understand that the only way for working people to make meaningful change is by organizing mass movements.
Another weakness of Wilkerson's book is that she neglected to link the discriminatory policies and attitudes of this country to the decades long atrocities committed against Palestinians. Today millions of people are organizing all over the world to end the unimaginable genocide organized by the Israeli government.
Clearly we do not know what will happen in the future. However, when we look at the past, we see how mass movements have the potential to make significant change. As the capitalist system continues to fall apart, I believe the working class of the world has the potential to rebuild the world on new foundations.
