Caste Prologue, Part One, & Part Two Summary & Analysis

“The Man in the Crowd” (Prologue)
Part One: Toxins in the Permafrost and Heat Rising All Around
Part Two: The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson focuses on what it takes to build, maintain, and perpetuate a caste system. Wilkerson asserts that her priority in defining caste is to wake readers up to the reality of its power, particularly in the United States, and in so doing, begin to dismantle it. The book begins with “The Man in the Crowd,” which gives a description of a 1936 photograph in which a crowd of Germans salutes Adolf Hitler. In the photograph, just one man refuses to participate. This short prologue deftly sets up three of the fundamental structural elements of Caste. It introduces Nazi Germany as one of the book’s primary examples of caste, establishes brief historical anecdotes as a central narrative technique, and, with its final pair of rhetorical questions, seeks to spur readers into action against systemic power imbalances. At the end of the prologue, Wilkerson asks the reader to consider what it would take to be someone who, like the brave man in the photograph, stands up against injustice—in the past and now. In doing so, Wilkerson both invites the reader to insert themselves into the text, and positions historical events side by side with the present.

Read about how Isabel Wilkerson skillfully weaves in anecdotes and metaphors to convey her arguments.

Together, Part One and Part Two lay the broad historical and rhetorical foundation for the more detailed analysis of caste and specific caste systems that will be covered later in the book. In Chapter 2, in a metaphor she extends throughout the text, Wilkerson compares America to an old house whose new owners must continually reckon with the damage done to it over time. Just as someone who purchases an old house is not to blame for a leaky roof or damaged foundation, neither are today’s Americans to blame for creating the country’s caste system. However, both the new homeowner and Americans of today, Wilkerson says, are responsible for repairing the damage they have inherited. Wilkerson then explains that she will be comparing and contrasting three caste systems from human history: India’s caste system, which is most commonly associated with the word caste, along with two hierarchical societies that aren’t commonly considered caste systems: Nazi Germany and the United States. Wilkerson recognizes that many readers will instinctively resist the notion that the United States is a caste system, a hierarchical social structure that forms the foundation of certain societies. She argues that this is because racial discrimination in post-Jim Crow America is often seen as an individual issue rather than a systemic one. Wilkerson’s argument turns this limited definition on its head, and she positions American racial discrimination as just one historical manifestation of caste.

To drive home her argument, Wilkerson explores the difference between caste and race. She defines a caste system as a “fixed and embedded ranking of human value” that pervades all aspects of society and is inescapable to anyone born within its ranking system. Race, in contrast, is the arbitrary and immutable characteristic that serves as the marker of caste ranking in the United States. Defining race and caste as separate and distinct concepts, Wilkerson argues, is necessary for filling a major logical gap for many Americans. For example, when Wilkerson discusses the 2016 presidential election in Chapter 1, she recounts the disbelief and bafflement of progressives who couldn’t understand why so many working-class white voters had “voted against their own interests” in backing Donald Trump. Because both candidates were white, simple racism directed at the candidates can’t explain this behavior, but, Wilkerson argues, caste can. While race and caste are inextricably tied together in the United States, it is caste, in Wilkerson’s view, that is responsible for cataclysmic patterns of behavior that continue to harm Black Americans.

Wilkerson’s chief means of demonstrating that racial discrimination in the United States results from a race-based caste system is to invoke the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany as points of comparison. To begin connecting these three societies separated by time and geography, Wilkerson writes in Chapter 3 of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s experiences in India, where he observed the commonalities between African Americans and India’s lowest ranked people, the Dalits (formerly called “Untouchables”). Like King, both academic and activist W.E.B. Du Bois and Dalit intellectual and anti-caste activist Bhimrao Ambedkar drew connections between the conditions of the Dalits and Black Americans. Wilkerson also presents quotations from numerous scholars both in favor of and against racialized caste in United States. Taken together, this positions Wilkerson as the latest in a long line of observers who have explicitly argued that the United States is a caste system. To further articulate the similarities, in Chapters 7-8, Wilkerson gives brief histories of the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, drawing explicit parallels with the United States.

Read about Caste author Isabel Wilkerson’s background.

To delineate the difference between race and caste, Wilkerson argues that America’s definition of race is a purely social construct. Chapters 4-6 give a historical and social explanation for the racial categories in America that people within the United States typically take for granted as natural and innate. Wilkerson argues that race, as Americans understand it today, actually evolved slowly over time as a way of drawing a solid line between people who were designated for lifelong enslavement and people who were designated their masters. In the 1600s, instead of using skin color to determine who would be marked for slavery, the self-determined masters originally used religion, says Wilkerson. However, Africans could and did convert to Christianity, which posed a risk to the logic that, Wilkerson asserts, sought to keep them permanently enslaved. To sustain their supply of free human labor, European colonists needed a characteristic by which to define their subordinates that couldn’t be changed or hidden, Wilkerson argues, and skin color fulfilled this requirement. As further support for this mainstay of her argument, Wilkerson cites multiple geneticists, anthropologists, and historians who have found that race has no basis in science.

Read about Main Idea #1 in Caste: Race is the visual marker of caste in the United States.

Next section Part Three