Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  Another father, an immigrant from West Africa, had to find a way to push past his sorrow to break the news to his little boy that he could no longer be a child, that he could not jump and dart and shriek like the other children. He would have to tell his son that it was too dangerous. They were in America now.

  The father in Oakland was a respected professor at a local college. In fact, African-American history was his field. He would figure it out when the time came. That moment was weighing on him, but that day was not today. The father looked back at his son and told him he needed to go ahead and eat his vegetables first, like Daddy said, and then he could drink his juice. The little boy scrunched his face and shook his head and began to cry.

  A woman at a nearby booth had been listening to their exchange. She was an older, grayish-blond woman from the dominant caste. She scooted from her booth and walked over to the table where the father and son were sitting. The father could see the shadow of her form moving toward them. The woman stopped and stood over them. She leaned toward the little boy and told him: “You drink your juice if you want to. It’s okay to drink your juice.”

  The woman did not address or acknowledge the father. She focused her attention on the little boy as she stood there. The father was beside himself. A perfect stranger had gotten up, disregarded a parent, and told a child to disobey the parent right in the parent’s face.

  The woman had crossed so many boundaries it was hard to process. Something had made her feel entitled enough to enter into the private space of people she did not know and veto a father’s decision regarding his own son. This was Oakland, bright blue home of Huey and Tupac, where such phrases as gender nonconformity and micro-aggressions are part of everyday language. The woman would not have gotten up if she didn’t perceive she had a right to. Had she done this to other parents? Would she have breezed past a white father, ignored him to tell his son to do precisely what the father had just told him not to?

  The father held up his hand like a traffic officer signaling a car to stop.

  “Ma’am, you need to go sit down,” the father said. “Don’t come to my table. I don’t know you.”

  The woman looked stunned at the rejection but turned around and went back to her booth. The father had a hard time enjoying his own food after that. He would remember this moment long afterward.

  The United States has a centuries-old history of people in the upper caste controlling and overriding the rightful role of lower-caste parents and their children, the most extreme of which was selling off children from their parents, even infants who had yet to be weaned from their mothers, as with fillies or pups rather than human beings. “One of them,” remarked an enslaver, “was worth two hundred dollars…the moment it drew breath.” This routine facet of slavery prevailed in our country for a quarter millennium, children and parents denied the most elemental of human bonds.

  Even when children were permitted to remain with their parents, caste protocols undermined their authority and punished them if they tried to protect their own children. A mother in Louisiana was administered twenty-five lashes for “countermanding an order” given her son by the white mistress who owned them. Several of the most gruesome whippings and tortures were administered on enslaved men who intervened in cases of violence against their wives or children at the hands of an enslaver or overseer.

  Thus enslaved parents could offer their children little “shelter or security from the frightening creatures” that lorded over them, historian Kenneth M. Stampp wrote. Nor could they protect themselves. But if the upper caste did not see the evil in this, the lowest-caste children could see it. Once, when an overseer tied a woman up and whipped her in front of her children, “the frightened children pelted the overseer with stones,” Stampp wrote, “and one of them ran up and bit him in the leg,” as they cried for him to let her go. The caste system may have treated them as cattle or machinery, but the children responded instantly as the human beings the dominant caste refused to see.

  It was only in the mid-twentieth century, with the protections arising from the civil rights era, that black parents had legal and political recourse to shield their children from abuse, or to call into account harm done to their children at the hands of the state. But the essential contours of the hierarchy remained intact, the modes of expression having mutated with the times.

  Modern-day caste protocols are less often about overt attacks or conscious hostility and can be dispiritingly hard to fight. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. It’s a form of status hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit. It is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

  * * *

  ——

  Every day across America, wherever two or more are gathered, caste can infect the most ordinary of interchanges, catching us off guard, disrupting and confusing and potentially causing mayhem for anyone in the hierarchy.

  These are scenes of caste in action:

  The doorbell rang at the home of an accountant from the dominant caste in a wealthy suburb of a midwestern city. The accountant and his family had only recently moved into the neighborhood. Through the glass sidelights of his front door, he could see a woman, an African-American woman, there on his landing.

  He knew exactly what this meant. The dry cleaner in town offered its customers pickup and drop-off, so he went to get the clothes that needed cleaning and then opened the door to hand the armload of tousled clothes to the woman waiting out front.

  The woman stepped back. “Oh, I’m not the dry cleaner,” the woman said. “I’m your next-door neighbor. I came over to introduce myself and welcome you to the neighborhood.”

  The woman was the fashionable wife of a prominent cardiologist, exceedingly upper class, yet labeled subordinate caste on sight, still, to someone who had just moved next door to her. They would both have to recover from that one.

  * * *

  •

  A college professor in Chicago had just returned from a bike ride and picked up his mail in the lobby of his apartment building off Michigan Avenue. He was African-American, in his thirties, patrician of face, still in his helmet and cycling gear. He stepped onto the elevator en route to his floor and, barely noticing the other man on the elevator with him, began going through his mail. He saw something of interest and unsealed one of his envelopes.

  The other man was horrified.

  “You’re supposed to be delivering the mail, not opening it.”

  This seemed to have come out of nowhere, and the college professor looked up and saw that the other man was white, but didn’t fully register the accusation, was just going about his day, and gave an honest reply.

  “Oh, I want to see what’s inside,” the professor said.

  The other man looked even more stricken now, shaking his head in disgust, mistakenly believing he was witnessing a crime in progress.

  The professor got off on his floor and only later did it occur to him that he had been taken for a delivery boy in his own building, an assumption so ludicrous he hadn’t bothered to consider it in the moment, which left the dominant-caste man convinced that he had just seen a black messenger brazenly break open an “actual” resident’s mail in full view of another resident. This is the self-perpetuating mischief of caste.

  * * *

  •
<
br />   The phone kept ringing at the civil engineer’s desk. He had deadlines to meet and projects bearing down on him. But, over and over, the phone broke his concentration and wasted his limited time. The engineer was from the dominant caste, and so, too, was the man pestering him. On the face of it, the intrusion would seem to have nothing to do with caste. Here was a white contractor calling a white engineer for answers about a project under way.

  The engineer was a supervisor with a general idea of the project, but the project was not his. It belonged to another engineer on the team, as the contractor well knew, one who happened to be African-American and a woman.

  The white contractor had been told to go to her with any questions he had. But the contractor had ignored her, ignored protocol, and had gone to the dominant-caste engineer instead. The white engineer answered the contractor’s questions at first, to be polite and move things along. But the phone kept ringing, and it was disrupting his own work, and it was hindering the project in question.

  The black engineer could hear this unfold in front of her from her cubicle next to the white engineer’s. From her desk, she could hear it every time his phone rang, while hers sat mute and silent. She could hear the white engineer’s impatient replies to questions that both of them knew should have come to her.

  The white engineer grew agitated with disbelief. When the contractor called the next time, the white engineer let him have it. “I indicated to you from the beginning that you need to talk to D. about day-to-day matters,” the white engineer said. “If you have a problem with that, we’ll have to find another contractor for the job.”

  The minute the white engineer hung up, the black engineer’s phone rang.

  On an ordinary workday, the caste system had pulled a dominant-caste man into its undertow. It had drained him of time and disrupted the operation. He found himself in an unexpected fight against an invisible foe, forced to take a stand for his colleague and against, perhaps unbeknownst to him on a conscious level, the caste system itself.

  * * *

  ——

  If there is anything that distinguishes caste, however, it is, first, the policing of roles expected of people based on what they look like, and, second, the monitoring of boundaries—the disregard for the boundaries of subordinate castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominant caste, to keep the hierarchy in place.

  After the 2016 election, the surveillance of black citizens by white strangers became so common a feature of American life that these episodes have inspired memes of their own, videos gone viral, followed by apologies from management or an announcement of company-wide diversity training. People in the dominant caste have been caught on video inserting themselves into the everyday lives of black people they do not know and calling the police on them as they wait for a friend at a Starbucks in Philadelphia or try to enter their own condo building in St. Louis. It is a distant echo of an earlier time when anyone in the dominant caste was deputized, obligated even, to apprehend any black person during the era of slavery.

  With the resurgence of caste after the 2016 election, people in the dominant caste have been recorded calling the police on ordinary black citizens under a wide range of ordinary circumstances, with videos cropping up almost daily at one point:

  In New Haven, Connecticut, a woman called campus police on a graduate student at Yale University who had fallen asleep while studying in the common area of her dormitory. Officers demanded her identification even after she unlocked the door to her dorm room. “You’re in a Yale building,” an officer said, “and we need to make sure that you belong here.”

  In Milwaukee, a woman called the police on a corrections officer whose key fob had malfunctioned as he tried to open his own car door. A man called the police on a software engineer who was waiting for a friend outside a condo building in San Francisco. As the white man briefed the authorities from his cellphone, the man’s little boy, uncomfortable with his father’s actions, begged him to hang up and let it go.

  A woman walking her dog stood and blocked a marketing consultant from getting into his own condo building in St. Louis. She demanded that he show proof that he lived there before she would step aside. When he walked past her, she followed him into the elevator and onto his floor to see if he in fact lived there. In the video that the man took as a precaution, she can be seen tracking him all the way to his apartment, checking whether he was a resident even after he unlocked his door to go inside.

  And a woman began to stalk a black man in Georgia when she saw him out with two white children. From her car, the woman trailed Corey Lewis, their babysitter, as he drove from a Walmart to a gas station and to his home after he did not permit the woman, a complete stranger, to talk with the children alone to see if they were all right. Lewis, a youth pastor who runs an after-school program, started recording the situation on his cellphone. In it, the children can be seen calm and unfazed, buckled in their seatbelts in the back of his car.

  His voice is strained and disbelieving. “This lady is following me,” he says in the video, “all because I got two kids in the back seat that do not look like me.”

  The woman called 911 and asked if she should keep following him. She continued to trail him even though she was told not to. By the time Lewis got home, a patrol car had pulled up behind him, an officer heading toward him.

  “Jesus have mercy—what is wrong with this country?” a woman outside of the camera frame cried. The officer told the children, a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, to step out of the car, and Lewis’s voice grew tense. The outcome of this police encounter and his very safety depended on what those children said, and he asked them to please tell the officer who he was.

  “Please,” he said to them.

  Satisfied that Lewis was, in fact, their babysitter and that the children were okay, the officer, just to be safe, called the parents, who were out at dinner.

  “It just knocked us out of our chair,” the children’s father, David Parker, told The New York Times.

  Afterward, a reporter asked one of the children, ten-year-old Addison, what she would tell the woman who followed them that day. Her father told the Times her response: “I would just ask her to, next time, try to see us as three people rather than three skin colors, because we might’ve been Mr. Lewis’s adopted children.”

  * * *

  ——

  These intrusions of caste would seem to harm the targets more than anyone. Given the widely publicized attacks and shootings of black citizens at the hands of police, most Americans know by now that calling the police on a black person can carry life-and-death consequences. Frivolous calls squander public resources and distract police from actual, serious crime to the detriment of us all.

  Beyond that, when any citizen is disrupted in the midst of everyday life and responsibilities, it is, in fact, a societal disruption, a tear in the daily workings of human interaction. These people are part of the American economy, and when they are interrupted, schools and business and institutions suffer an invisible loss in output as their workers get blindsided from their tasks.

  These intrusions serve to reinforce caste by derailing lower-caste people, subverting their work lives in an already competitive society, imposing additional burdens not borne by their dominant-caste colleagues as they go about their work, as occurred to me in Michigan some years ago.

  I could hear footsteps behind me but paid little attention. This was an airport, and there were footfalls and roller bags all around. I had just landed in Detroit on an early-morning flight from Chicago for interviews I needed to conduct as a national correspondent for The New York Times.

  I’d already lost an hour going from Central to Eastern time, and I was thinking of all I’d have to do in the space of the next eight hours. If the first interview was at ten-thirty, and if it took me forty minutes to get downtown, maybe more since this was rush ho
ur, I needed to get straight to the rental car to make this work.

  Any delays in the day’s interviews and I might not make the flight back to Chicago that evening. I thought to myself that I’d worry about that later and just get to the Avis bus as soon as I could. I thought about how it always seems that the shuttle you’re looking for is the one that has just pulled off, and no matter what company you’ve booked, the one you need is always the last to show up.

  I was walking fast, because I always walk fast, and I was heading to the sliding-glass doors in the direction of the shuttle stop when I heard them. The footsteps were closer and faster and heading toward me. Why would anybody be heading toward me? It was a man and a woman. It happened to be a white man and a white woman, the woman’s light brown hair swinging just above her shoulders as she ran. They had a parka-and-corduroy look about them, and both were out of breath as they reached me.

  “We need to talk to you,” they said, walking alongside me.

  I could see the shuttle bus lane through the sliding-glass doors, and buses pulling up, and was not fully registering whatever it was they were saying.

  “Why are you in Detroit? What are you here for?”

  “I’m on business. I’m here for work.”

  I was thinking that I did not have time for whatever travel survey they were conducting. And now I could see that Avis was on schedule. The shuttle bus was pulling to the curb. People were queuing up to board.

  “I have to catch my shuttle bus,” I told them as I walked out of the terminal doors.

  “Where are you coming from?” they asked, one on each side of me now.

  “I just flew in from Chicago,” I said, nearing the clot of people in suits and overcoats boarding the shuttle bus.

  “Is that where you live?”

  “Why are you asking me this? I need to get on the bus.”