From Himal Southasian
Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book fails to unpack caste, but hints at potential for new solidarities.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 496 pp.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is an ambitious text. It attempts to upgrade the categorical status of caste from its historic roots in a Southasian context to that of a universal framework for understanding social hierarchy and inequality worldwide. Wilkerson argues that caste constitutes the “underlying grammar” that shapes not just race, but gender, ethnicity, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age and religion. She outlines the architecture of this global caste system through eight pillars that draw sustenance from religious justification, inheritance through birth, restrictions on marriage, notions of purity or pollution, the preservation of occupational hierarchies, targeted dehumanisation, enforcement through terror and violence, and the stereotyping of biological superiority and inferiority. While the term “caste” has typically been used to describe social hierarchies on the Subcontinent, Wilkerson expands its use analogically to include the operation of race in the United States and Nazi Germany. The author argues that caste continues to stoke racial tensions in the US, where the election of the nation’s first Black President Barack Obama in 2008 was followed by White upper-caste backlash that ended with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Unfortunately, in making such a claim, Wilkerson abandons offering a nuanced treatment of caste in favour of focusing on racial inequality in the United States.
The history of caste in Southasia, certainly older than that of race around the world, and subject to thousands of years of commentary and practice, does not receive the treatment it deserves. There is little information on the various manifestations of caste in Southasia as it finds expression in histories of jati (an endogamous unit defined by occupation, ritual status, and access to resources and power), migration, religion, gender, politics, capital and class. While the enslaved formed a minority in North America, Dalits (who were then considered untouchable, positioned outside the caste system and confined to occupations such as tanning, scavenging, and handling the dead) and Shudras (occupying the ‘lowest’ tier of castes and serving as cultivators, barbers, and oil-pressers) together constituted the majority in India. This majority continues to experience marginalisation in terms of access to resources, rights and dignity. The ‘graded hierarchy’ of the caste system has been thrust among them too, with each caste claiming its superiority over the one below it in the fight for the ‘leftovers’. The reader is left uninformed about the role of land and labour in the creation of these social hierarchies, or the long-term trauma arising out of the intergenerational violence experienced at the hands of White and high caste supremacies. The reader is also left wondering about the diverse ways in which race and caste were institutionalised in law, society, politics and culture, and how Wilkerson’s argument about race and caste relate to the experiences of, for instance, Native Americans in the United States.
Bernardo A. Michael is a professor of history at Messiah University in the United States, specialising in modern South Asia. Anil Varghese is editor-in-chief of Forward Press, a Delhi-based bilingual publisher focused on anti-caste thought.
More content from this blog
- Marital Politics in Post-Assad Syria: The Emerging Role of Syria’s New First Lady, by Danielle Demers – 24 October 2025
- The Labor Movement Is in a Fight for Its Existence Against a Neofascist Threat, by Bill Fletcher, Jr. – 21 August 2025
- An Anthology of Critical Assessments of Left Responses to 7 October – 16 February 2024
- How Superman Explains the New Anti-Judaism, by Josh Yunis – 2 April 2025
- Being Muslim in China. Interview with Rian Thum and Darren Byler – 25 March 2026