America's Caste System

Caste The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson Allen Lane 476 pages

- Rajmohan Gandhi

Termed an “instant American classic” by The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson’s thorny book is not the first to use “caste” to probe America’s racial ills. A European word popularised in India by the Portuguese, “caste” has often featured in explanations of “race”, including in American Dilemma, a reputed 1944 book by Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish author better known in India for his 1968 study, Asian Drama.

Connoting a pyramid, hierarchy, ranking and, above all, domination over the bottom layer, “caste” elicits American realities better, in Wilkerson’s view, than “race”. In her words, “Race is the frontman of caste.” While “caste is fixed and rigid, race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition”.

African-Americans in the US, as also Asian and Latino immigrants, varying from one another in hue and bloodline, have received distinct places in the American caste system. Wilkerson recalls an unnamed Japanese novelist’s century-old comment: “It was a single apostrophe that stood between rejection and citizenship for a Japanese Ohara versus an Irish O’Hara.”