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Part Three: The Eight Pillars of Caste

Part Three: The Eight Pillars of Caste draws from the book’s three central examples to delve deeper into the nuances of caste, as well as to present by way of comparison more concrete evidence for the existence of such a system in America. In Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature, Wilkerson explains the religious justification in Hinduism for the four ranked castes that rule over the subordinate Dalits. She follows with a parallel description of a passage in the Old Testament that she argues Europeans, including America’s founders, have historically used to justify subjugating people with darker skin.

Pillar Number Two: Heritability concerns the inherited nature of caste, which is passed down endlessly from generation to generation. Both of these pillars work together to imbue a person’s caste rank with inevitability, either by widespread belief in divine will or by the ordinary process of human reproduction. Wilkerson asserts that, together, the first two pillars leave no room for subjects of a caste system to escape their assigned rank.

Pillar Number Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating details the steps each caste-based society has historically taken to enforce endogamy, or the forbidding of marriage across caste lines, and why this practice is so important to maintaining caste structure. Wilkerson asserts that limiting marriage and procreation to members of the same caste not only restricts the emotional bonds that can be formed between people across caste lines but also serves to reinforce the traits that caste relies upon to operate. Hearkening back to Chapters 4-6, in which Wilkerson maps the emergence of race as a social construct, here she argues that separating people by caste can actually create race by perpetuating the genetic traits that signal a person’s caste rank.

With Pillar Number Four: Purity versus Pollution, Wilkerson takes extra care to outline the specificities of the rules regarding purity of rank and the belief that those of lower strata can pollute higher caste people. She pays particular attention to the castes’ fixation on the ”sanctity of water,” which has played a central role in preserving the supposed purity of the dominant castes and dehumanizing the subordinate castes. For example, Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed access to the water in front of their own beach houses, and African Americans in the Jim Crow South were prohibited from entering whites-only public pools. Wilkerson argues that both of these restrictions were established to prevent the dominant castes from touching “contaminated” water.

In Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill, Wilkerson returns to the persistent metaphor of a house to illustrate why castes need a subordinate category of people who perform less desirable but necessary occupations in a society. She quotes James Henry Hammond, a United States senator from South Carolina who, in 1858, compared Black slaves to the mudsill, or foundation, of a house because of their perceived suitability for performing the menial tasks that allowed society to function. By comparison, India’s caste system contains thousands of subcastes called jatis, each of which is associated with a different occupation. Wilkerson notes that this means the subjects of Indian castes are assigned a more diverse variety of jobs than African Americans, who have spent the majority of America’s history relegated to performing either domestic service or manual labor. She goes on to connect the eventual prominence of African Americans in the entertainment and sports industries to the tradition of Black slaves being forced to sing and dance for their enslavers, a degradation tactic that Nazi soldiers also used against their Jewish prisoners.

In Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma and Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control, Wilkerson delineates two different attitudinal aspects of caste. She focuses on dehumanization not of individuals, but of groups, which serves to dehumanize every individual within a group by turning them into an undifferentiated mass. To illustrate this, Wilkerson cites how both the Nazis and slaveholders in the American South stripped their captors of their names, belongings, and culture. Wilkerson argues that this helped the dominant castes see the Jews in the concentration camps or the enslaved Africans as objects rather than humans deserving compassion.

With Pillar Seven, Wilkerson asserts that caste systems use terror and cruelty as tools to further distance the dominant caste from their subordinates, numbing their ability to empathize with them as fellow humans. By rewarding members of the dominant caste for committing acts of hatred and violence against the subordinate caste, the system reinforces the hierarchy, discourages dominant caste members from questioning their place in it, and continues the project of dehumanization, Wilkerson says. Later, Wilkerson will assert that empathy across caste lines is the only way to begin to dismantle a caste system, since it is the elimination of empathy that creates and maintains caste divisions.

Read about an important quote from Part Three about dehumanization and caste.

The final pillar of caste, detailed in Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority, dictates that subjects of a caste system must never appear to step out of their assigned roles and must always act in ways that affirm the assumptions underlying their rank. Wilkerson describes several historical examples of African Americans being forced to hide their strengths and individuality to avoid the wrath of members of the dominant caste. This, Wilkerson argues, served to protect the white worldview, which hinged on perceiving Black people as inherently inferior to them in every possible way. Fittingly, Wilkerson begins this chapter with a description of Louise Beavers, a Black actress from the Jim Crow era whose only option in Hollywood was to play characters based on Black stereotypes. Like the broken dialect Beavers had to learn for her film roles, Wilkerson argues that caste is a performance that requires people to shoehorn themselves and others into the roles the hierarchy has assigned them.

Read an important quote about how caste influences the role one is forced to play in society.

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