Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  But this universal impulse may not always be caused by rank envy. A group already under siege may feel that “the team just cannot afford losing any member,” wrote Sudipta Sarangi, an Indian specialist in organizational management. “If a certain member of the group starts climbing up—by doing better in life—the sheer fear of that individual’s exit pushes everyone to pull him down.”

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  Success in the American caste system requires some level of skill at decoding the preexisting order and responding to its dictates. The caste system instructs us all as to whose lives and opinions should bear the most weight and take precedence in most any encounter. One of its teachers is the criminal justice system, which descends from the criminal codes of the slavery era.

  There, we learn, for instance, that it is the race of the victim, rather than just the perpetrator, that is “the greatest predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States,” the acclaimed legal justice advocate Bryan Stevenson observed, citing a study on death penalty cases. “Offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These studies were replicated in every other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place.”

  The lesson teaches everyone, for instance, whose lives are considered expendable and whose are sacrosanct. It forces everyone to tithe to whatever degree to the supremacy of the ruling caste in order to flourish. Upon entry to the American caste system, immigrants learn to distance themselves from those in the basement, lest they land there themselves.

  Though it was the protest movements of the subordinated caste that helped open the door to nonwhite immigrants in 1965, immigrants of color, like immigrants throughout American history, face the dilemma of adhering to the unwritten rules of caste. They face the painful dilemma of either rejecting the lowest caste of indigenous African-Americans or making common cause with those who fought so that they could enter the country to begin with.

  But caste inverts the path to acceptance in America for people of African descent. Immigrants from Europe in the previous century were often quick to shed their names and drop the accents and folkways of the old country. They played down their ethnicity to gain admission to the dominant caste. Black immigrants discover that because they look like the people consigned to the lowest caste, the caste system rewards them for doing the opposite of the Europeans. “While white immigrants stand to gain status by becoming ‘Americans,’ ” wrote the sociologist Philip Kasinitz, “by assimilating into the higher status group—black immigrants may actually lose social status if they lose their cultural distinctiveness.”

  Many recent African immigrants are better educated, better traveled than many Americans, may be fluent in multiple languages, and do not wish to be demoted to the lowest caste in their adopted homeland. The caste system encourages black immigrants to do everything they can to build distance between themselves and the subordinated caste they might be taken for. Like everyone else, they are exposed to the corrosive stereotypes of African-Americans and may work to make sure that people know that they are not of that group but are Jamaican or Grenadian or Ghanaian.

  A Caribbean immigrant told Kasinitz: “Since I have been here, I have always recognized that this is a racist country, and I have made every effort not to lose my accent.”

  It is a clever, self-perpetuating tool of the caste system to keep those at the bottom divided in a manufactured fight to avoid last place. This has led to occasional friction between people descended from Africans who arrived in America at different points in our history. Some immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, like their predecessors from other parts of the world, may show a wariness of African-Americans, warn their children not to “act like African-Americans” or not to bring one home to date or marry. In so doing, they may fall into the trap of trying to prove, not that the stereotype is false, but that they do not fit the lie.

  Up and down the hierarchy, Ambedkar noted, “each caste takes its pride and its consolation in the fact that in the scale of castes it is above some other caste.”

  Try as it may to entice newcomers to take sides in upholding the hierarchy, the caste system fails to reach some people. Some children of immigrants from the Caribbean, people like Eric Holder, Colin Powell, Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, and Stokely Carmichael, among many others, have shared in the common plight of those in the lowest caste, become advocates for justice, and transcended these divisions for the greater good.

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  Caste helps explain the otherwise illogical phenomenon of African-Americans or women or other marginalized people who manage to rise to authority only to reject or diminish their own. Caught in a system that grants them little true power or authority, they may bend to the will of caste and put down their own if they wish to rise or to be accepted or merely to survive in the hierarchy. They learn that they may not be held accountable because of the low status of those they betray or neglect.

  Many cases of mistreatment of people in the lowest caste occur at the hands of those of their same caste, as in the case of Freddie Gray, who died of spinal injuries at the hands of police officers in Baltimore. Gray was handcuffed in the back of a police van but not secured with safety belts, according to court testimony. The van swerved and curved, knocking Gray around the cargo area, handcuffed and unable to keep himself from crashing into the interior walls of the van. Three of the officers involved were black, including the driver of the van. This combination of factors allowed society to explain away Gray’s death as surely having nothing to do with race, when in fact it was likely caste at work. All of these officers were either acquitted or had their charges dropped.

  It is in keeping with caste protocols that, of the few officers who have been prosecuted for police brutality in recent high-profile cases, a notable number of them were men of color—a Japanese-American officer in Oklahoma, a Chinese-American officer in New York City, and a Muslim-American officer in Minneapolis. These are cases in which men of color pay the price for what upper-caste men often have gotten away with.

  This phenomenon runs across levels of marginalization. The supervisor of the officers at the chokehold death of Eric Garner was a black woman. The people hardest on women employees can sometimes be women supervisors under pressure from and vying for the approval of male bosses in a male-dominated hierarchy in which fewer women are allowed to rise. Each of these cases presents a complicated story that presumably dismisses race or sex as a factor, but one that makes perfect sense, and maybe only makes sense, when seen through the lens of a caste system.

  The enforcers of caste come in every color, creed, and gender. One does not have to be in the dominant caste to do its bidding. In fact, the most potent instrument of the caste system is a sentinel at every rung, whose identity forswears any accusation of discrimination and helps keep the caste system humming.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On the Early Front Lines of Caste

  In the fall of 1933, a distinguished black couple, newly returned from their studies in Europe, headed south from Virginia in the direction of Nashville and then, with both dread and anticipation, passed a symbolic iron curtain into the heart of Jim Crow Mississippi. They were anthropologists embarking on a perilous two-year study of the social hierarchy of the South. They were entering hostile and alien territory where they would have to learn to sublimate their upright bearing and submit to the humiliations of the social order, knowing that any slipup could cost them their lives.

  They could not reveal the true nature of their mission at their final destination of Natchez, Mississippi. They would have to watch their every step in a world that preferred to keep its feudal conventions to itself and to keep people who looked like them in their place. They were driving headlong into a region where a black person was lynched every four days for some breach, large or smal
l, of those conventions. They would soon discover that, just weeks before their arrival, a black man had been lynched in the county next to Natchez, under accusation of raping a white woman that even many local whites did not believe.

  Allison Davis was an impeccably tailored academic with the sculpted, square-jawed face of a film star, and his wife, Elizabeth, was a model of refinement. But their path had been a twisting obstacle course. Just the previous spring, they had cut short their advanced studies at the University of Berlin and fled Germany when Hitler took power. They had seen the Nazis burn books and jail teachers, and this gave him new insight into the nature of hate, and combined with the burdens he bore in his own country, further inspired him to examine injustice.

  Davis was a young anthropologist with two degrees from Harvard University and a wealth of experience abroad, but, once in Mississippi, he could not in any way act like it. He would have to conceal his inner self to survive. The couple had chosen to make the personal sacrifice for the greater good of documenting the structure of human division, a mission that would practically render them undercover agents. Urbane and bespectacled though he was, he decided it best to keep a gun in the car to protect himself and his wife if it came to it.

  In Natchez, they would be joining the other half of their team, a white couple named Burleigh and Mary Gardner, two other Harvard anthropologists, who, in keeping with the plan, had preceded the Davises to Mississippi. The mission was quietly revolutionary. Together, they would embed themselves in a closed and isolated southern town from both sides of the caste divide. Coming from the North, neither couple could fully know what they were getting themselves into. This was in the depths of the Jim Crow caste system, and they would find their every move dictated by the very phenomenon that they were studying.

  This would be among the first studies of its kind and a groundbreaking experiment in interracial scholarship. They would have to plan every detail of their interaction with the local people and come up with plausible reasons for the four of them to be together in this alien landscape. Given the dangers, they would not be able to tell the local people the full intention of their project—that they were seeking to infiltrate the white and black worlds to accurately render how caste, class, and race operated in the region.

  The two couples were to report back to a senior professor who was overseeing the project from Cambridge. The pioneering anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner anticipated the dangers the team would face and went to Natchez himself ahead of the two couples to scout out the area and to prepare the town for their arrival.

  Warner met with the mayor and law enforcement officials and with editors of the local newspaper before leaving the team on its own. He told town officials that they had chosen Natchez to represent a typical southern town and that the researchers would be collecting data to compare it with a town in the North. This was not altogether untrue. Warner had completed research on social stratification in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and could find the comparison useful.

  The officials in Natchez were delighted to share the history of their town with the white husband-and-wife team. But it was harder for the team to come up with a credible reason for African-American scholars to come into town doing research.

  They made the decision to tell the locals that the black researchers were there to study the black church, a safe enough subject for the town fathers to accept. As a measure of how far ahead of society the researchers were and of the proficiency of Allison Davis, it was he, the black anthropologist, who was chosen to lead the team on the ground in Natchez. They were two different castes studying caste in the belly of the caste system.

  In order for the mission to work, the white couple went in first to get established before the black couple showed up. The Gardners rented rooms in an old country mansion as their base of operations and began gaining acceptance in Natchez society. But they had to give more forethought into where the Davises would live. The mansion was isolated, and the Davises would be uncomfortably, perhaps dangerously, conspicuous in that rural setting. Finding housing for them was a challenge in a region where most African-Americans were sharecroppers living in lean-to cabins. The team finally moved the project into the town itself, and the Davises rented rooms from a black doctor, who opened the way to the town’s few black elites.

  The couples soon found themselves embedded in their respective and separate castes, but that restricted them in other ways. The team needed to study the layers within each caste—the elite and the lowly. But the social hierarchy drew such stark lines that even within one caste, fraternizing with those not seen as on one’s level invited scrutiny and potential ostracism. To reach poor white residents—the lower class of the dominant caste—Mary Gardner took a position as a government caseworker in a New Deal program, which allowed her to meet poorer whites and to visit their homes.

  That was not an option available to Elizabeth Davis as the Davises sought to meet with poorer black residents. At the time, few African-American women were permitted to hold those government jobs in Mississippi, and the federal relief that Mary Gardner was in a position to extend to the whites she met was not then being extended to poor blacks in Mississippi.

  So Allison Davis sought to recruit a fifth researcher, St. Clair Drake, a former student of his who, decades later, would become a renowned scholar of mid-twentieth-century life in Chicago. The northern-bred Drake was not keen on spending months or years in the Jim Crow South, where, only a few years before, nine young black men, known as the Scottsboro Boys, had been imprisoned in neighboring Alabama, accused of attacking two white women, who later recanted their stories. Davis convinced him of the transcendent purpose of the mission. “You can’t really smash the system if you don’t understand how it works,” Davis told him.

  Drake agreed to come, and he spent his time with sharecroppers and domestics that the Davises, now seen as part of the sliver of upper-middle-class blacks in Natchez, no longer had readily explainable access to. They were all locked in the roles into which they had been accepted, having to do whatever their subcaste did, or compromise their foothold in their research setting.

  Their lives depended upon obeying the rules they had come to study and proving themselves loyal to the caste to which they were ascribed. Mary Gardner, the white woman researcher, went so far as to climb into a hoop skirt and to serve as hostess at a mansion tour to which she had been invited. It was perilous to step out of character, perilous for the white couple to be seen as too closely aligned with the Davises, with whom, in that world, the dominant caste would have had minimal contact.

  Out in public, they had to remain in character at all times, with the Davises required to show deference to the Gardners and never give the appearance that they were, in fact, friends and colleagues in the trenches. The two women found that they could not be seen together in public at all, had to conceal how well they knew each other, the caste system disallowing that kind of camaraderie between women of different castes. “Their encounters were limited to an occasional chance meeting at the chain grocery store in the center of town,” wrote David A. Varel, Davis’s biographer. “There they exchanged only a polite, restrained greeting.”

  Over time, the white researchers came to see firsthand the barriers that African-Americans faced. Wherever they went, if they were together, there were no guarantees of food or restrooms for the Davises. Every move had to be thought out in advance with consideration of caste protocol. There were times when Gardner, the white researcher, had to request the bathroom key if Davis were to be allowed to use it.

  Davis was the leader of the team, but they could not let the locals know that. They had to keep to their caste performance. It was a revolutionary concept, this idea of an educated black man working with a white man in this way to begin with, a spectacle the likes of which the townspeople would never have seen before.

  They couldn’t pretend that they weren’t working together, but “it wa
s explained to them, and generally understood by others that Allison was working for Burleigh: this was the only acceptable relationship between a white man and a Negro,” Varel wrote.

  Just to meet and discuss their findings required an elaborate choreography. They had no outside office and could not go to each other’s homes without arousing suspicions or causing discomfort. It did not sit well with the caste system for a white person to visit a black person, so Gardner could not visit Davis. It would have been permissible, and in fact, expected, for a subordinate-caste person to go to the dominant-caste person’s location for the convenience of the upper-caste person. But for purposes of morale and dignity, it would have been unacceptable for Davis, as the team leader, to walk through the back door of his colleague’s home. “It was not enough to say that Allison was working for Burleigh; each of them was expected to behave strictly according to his caste role,” Varel wrote.

  So they created a protocol for themselves whenever they needed to meet. One would telephone the other to make an appointment. Davis would arrive at an agreed-upon corner. Gardner would pick him up, and they would drive to a rural back road to go over their work in the car without bringing undue attention to themselves. Even this, they knew, was a breach of the caste system but it was their only option if they were to get their work done.

  Later, Gardner happened to learn that “both the chief of police and the sheriff were informed of each meeting,” Varel wrote. The sheriff and police chief did not intervene, but it was so serious a violation “that the sheriff felt compelled to keep tabs on the two men.”