Next

Bhimrao Ambedkar

Wilkerson calls Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) the “father of the anti-caste movement in India,” and applies his thinking on caste to her analysis of the American caste system. Born in India into the Untouchables, the lowest class of people in the country’s Hindu caste system, Ambedkar’s activism led him to introduce the word Dalit, meaning “broken person,” as a replacement for Untouchable, and help draft a new Indian constitution. Wilkerson mentions Ambedkar repeatedly throughout Caste, largely to show parallels between Indian Dalit activism and American civil rights activism. For example, during his life, Ambedkar connected directly to the American civil rights movement, sharing ideas with U.S. activist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1946. Wilkerson also uses Ambedkar’s work to refute those who claim that, unlike Black Americans who resist their oppression, subjects of caste in India meekly accept their diminished social status. This argument, which the life and work of Ambedkar easily disproves, has been a common way for American scholars to dismiss the similarities between America’s racial hierarchy and India’s caste system. 

In the course of her research for Caste, Wilkerson found common ground with Indian scholars of caste like Ambedkar. Wilkerson once received a bust of Ambedkar as thanks for speaking at a conference on the subject. She describes this gift as an “initiation,” underscoring Ambedkar’s additional significance for her as a personal touchpoint with her colleagues in India, particularly Dalits. When hurriedly pressed to describe Ambedkar to a Black TSA agent who was inspecting the bust during a routine security check, Wilkerson spontaneously calls Ambedkar “the Martin Luther King of India.” This description further emphasizes Ambedkar’s importance for Wilkerson. He’s emblematic not just of the similarities between caste dynamics in different societies, but of the need to building bridges between societies to fight against caste-based oppression. 

Allison Davis

William Boyd Allison Davis (1902-1983) was an African-American anthropologist who led a team researching social hierarchy in the 1930s American South under Jim Crow, ultimately publishing a book called Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class in 1941. Though he faced unique barriers and dangers in the course of his work, he was also able to gain singular insight thanks to his ability to study racial division in the South both with academic remove and from a firsthand perspective. In Chapter 17 of Caste, Wilkerson discusses Davis’s work at length. Davis and his team, which was comprised of both dominant and subordinate caste members, struggled even to meet with one another, as fraternizing across caste lines was met with suspicion and even violence. Davis’s story reinforces many of the ideas that Wilkerson has introduced elsewhere in the text while also itself being a case study on the effects of caste in America.

In the course of presenting Davis’s work, Wilkerson argues that America’s caste system has impeded the people who have tried to study it. As she asserts throughout Caste, awareness of caste is essential to fixing its inequities. Thus, to stifle research that could help create such awareness is another way of strengthening caste, she says, particularly when the researchers themselves come from the subordinate caste. In Davis’s case, his years of risky on-the-ground research did not prevent him from being overshadowed by academics from the dominant caste. White researchers often spent a fraction of the time studying the Jim Crow South as Davis, yet faced fewer barriers to publication and received more positive attention for their findings. Davis’s story in Caste both sheds light on his long-suppressed ideas and establishes Wilkerson within a long tradition of subordinate caste research into caste itself. It also adds yet more evidence to Wilkerson’s claims both about the existence of an American caste system and about its wide-ranging impact.

Barack Obama

Elected in 2008 and serving for two terms, Barack Obama (b. 1961) was the 44th president of the United States and its first Black president. Wilkerson discusses Obama’s presidency at length in Chapter 25, arguing that it was one of the primary underlying catalysts for the caste-driven backlash that resulted in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. First, Wilkerson asserts that Obama’s election was only possible because of circumstances that mitigated his subordinate caste status. Wilkerson describes Obama as the perfect storm of a person for whom caste would make an exception, citing his Harvard education, picture-perfect family, constitutional expertise, captivating stage presence, and masterfully orchestrated campaign, among other factors. Perhaps most crucially, Obama has a white mother and a Kenyan father. This means he does not descend from people who were enslaved on American soil and therefore does not directly serve as an uncomfortable reminder to America’s dominant caste of its history of oppressing people who look like him. However, even under these ideal circumstances, Wilkerson says, the majority of the dominant caste did not vote for Obama and met his election with an extreme response to their dominant group status threat.

Though many Americans hailed Obama’s presidency as proof that the country had overcome racism, Wilkerson asserts that his historic election was met with an extreme backlash against both Obama and the subordinate caste as a whole. Coupled with census projections, also from 2008, that America would no longer be a majority-white country by 2042, Obama’s election was a concrete demonstration of the subordinate caste’s potential to overtake the dominant caste, Wilkerson argues. She says that, as a result, dominant caste Americans fought tooth and nail to maintain the power they feared they were on the cusp of losing. The ferocity of the backlash against Obama’s presidency, which included an increase in racial violence and formation of new hate groups, as well as the creation of a new right-wing political party and Republican Congressional leaders’ single-minded dedication to obstructing Obama’s ability to govern, matched the urgency of the dominant caste’s need to reassert its power, says Wilkerson. In this way, by embodying the most dramatic deviation from caste rules in United States history, Obama is the perfect case study for Wilkerson’s examination of how a caste system violently resists granting any measure of success to its subordinate castes.

Next section Key Terms

Take a Study Break