A year ago, when former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, a white woman, was sentenced for the murder of Botham Jean, a Black man whom she shot to death as he was watching TV and eating ice cream in his apartment, the victim’s brother, Brandt Jean, testified that he forgave her, said he loved her and was allowed by the judge to embrace her. As the murderer wept in his arms, and the bailiff, a Black woman, stroked Guyger’s blonde hair, many grateful Americans saw a reconciliation of the nation’s disastrous history with race. But not all did.
In her new and important book “Caste,” Isabel Wilkerson, a former New York Times reporter, writes, “Had the inverse occurred and a Black man taken the life of a white woman under similar circumstances, it is inconceivable the murder sentence would have been 10 years or the felon been hugged and his hair stroked, nor would it remotely be expected. Many observers in the dominant caste were comforted by the bailiff’s gesture, which they saw as an act of loving, maternal compassion. Many in the subordinate caste saw it as a demeaning fetishization of a dominant-caste woman who was being extended comfort and leniency that are denied (Black people), who are treated more harshly in an age of mass incarceration and in (U.S.) society overall.”
When the judge, too, “also a woman from the subordinate caste,” hugged Guyger, Wilkerson writes, it “seemed not so far removed from the comfort Black maids extended to the disconsolate white children in their care as they wiped away their tears over the centuries.”
This is, Wilkerson says, the Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims identify with their captors, deeply driven by survival. She might well have added that those white children, reassured, grew up to reinforce the same caste system that left the Black woman with no choice but to be a maid – if she was not a slave.
Wilkerson’s timely thesis is that it is caste, rather than race per se, that is “the infrastructure of our divisions,” “the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining ... a 400-year-old social order” that has kept Black Americans subordinated. While racism is almost uniquely an American invention, she examines caste in America alongside the enduring caste system of India, and the caste system of Nazi Germany, examining how the Nazis explicitly modeled their laws – to render Jews first stateless, then murdered – on all-American Jim Crow.
This is Wilkerson’s second book. Her first, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” was a nonfiction treatment of the internal migration of Black Americans in the 20th century and is indispensable. “Caste” will be as well, if only because it asks Americans of good faith and any caste, but especially the dominant caste, to use this tool, along with race and class, to better understand why they have built such a continuously and dangerously unequal society.
Socialists will say that at root, capitalism has made this mess, a contention that can neither be proved nor disproved other than to say caste exists apart from class, as witness the harsh treatment meted out to middle-class Black people – think of innumerable traffic stops – without regard to their class. The police officer in this hypothetical could be Black as well, yet she is employed, in Wilkerson’s view, to enforce caste difference.
So much of American history has been manipulated to make the unspeakable palatable, the popular historian Jon Meacham recently observed. Wilkerson speaks the truths of American chattel slavery and how it engendered a caste system that keeps exploding. You will know if she succeeds by how much she makes you wince.
