Caste Part Four & Part Five Summary & Analysis

Part Four: The Tentacles of Caste
Part Five: The Consequences of Caste

Part Four and Five lay out Wilkerson’s arguments about how caste systems affect the people living within them, particularly those who occupy the borders of their caste ranking. The wide-ranging impact of caste reaches into unexpected places, Wilkerson says, arguing that a caste system hurts people at every level of its hierarchy, not just those at the bottom. Importantly, both Part Four and Part Five include more personal and historical anecdotes than other sections of Caste. Wilkerson uses this narrative technique to underscore how vital individual experiences are both to defining caste and to dismantling it. Caste, Wilkerson asserts, shapes a society’s larger structures, like politics and healthcare, by dehumanizing the people who comprise its subordinate levels. To resist this, Wilkerson says it’s necessary to rehumanize them, which means telling stories of how caste has affected them individually. Anecdotes range from Wilkerson’s own harrowing experiences of caste discrimination in America, to a woman in Nazi Germany desperate to prove her dark wavy hair doesn’t indicate Jewish ancestry, to a Dalit scholar in America who fears other Indian immigrants whose last names signify India’s upper castes.

The wide-ranging impacts of caste on health feature centrally in Parts Four and Five as well, beginning with Chapter 11: Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung. Citing a 2015 study showing increased death rates among less-educated, middle-aged white Americans for the first time since 1950, Wilkerson argues that caste is the most logical explanation for this trend. While wage stagnation and other macroeconomic issues affect multiple racial and socioeconomic groups, mortality rates only rose among one group, the one that Wilkerson identifies as occupying the most precarious rank of the dominant caste. In her view, the least privileged white Americans are the most insecure among the dominant caste because their caste rank grants them only limited power in a society that has otherwise marginalized them. Wilkerson argues that this caste precarity, which political scientists call “dominant group status threat,” is responsible for the increase in deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide among this single demographic group.

Wilkerson returns to caste’s negative health effects, both on the dominant and subordinate castes, in Chapter 24: Cortisol, Telomeres, and the Lethality of Caste. Here, she examines neuroscientific studies that have shown that shortened telomeres, an indicator of premature aging, appear both in white Americans of lower socioeconomic status and in African Americans of higher socioeconomic status. Like in Chapter 11, Wilkerson attributes this to the unique challenges posed to individuals on the borders of caste. The health of African Americans who step outside caste expectations suffers, as does the health of white Americans whose caste dominance feels at risk. Wilkerson also discusses the negative health effects of cortisol release, an automatic physiological panic-driven reaction, which has been demonstrated in white Americans when they see or interact with people of other ethnicities. Fortunately, Wilkerson adds, the perceived threat level drops as soon as the test subjects in these studies are encouraged to consider the individuality of the people they are interacting with. In the final chapters of Caste, which are concerned with how to disrupt and overturn America’s caste system, Wilkerson argues for the power of viewing others as individuals rather than as part of an undifferentiated group.

Read an important quote about caste and its relation to disease.

Throughout Parts Four and Five, Wilkerson describes how she believes caste warps the perspectives of those who live in caste-based societies. Building on the concept of dominant group status threat, Wilkerson emphasizes caste’s particular intolerance for the success of members of the subordinate caste because of its potential threat to the established hierarchy. She also argues that members of the subordinate caste often marginalize and oppress one another in order to eke out power and avoid being at the absolute bottom of the ranking. Both members of the dominant caste and members of the subordinate caste are trained, Wilkerson asserts, to buy into the superiority of the dominant caste. In exploring these skewed and harmful perspectives, Wilkerson argues that caste changes people’s personalities to make them crueler, less empathetic, and more individualistic. Under a caste system, success is a zero-sum game, and the behaviors that result from this belief feed into and work to perpetuate caste.

In Chapter 17, Wilkerson shares the story of one of her notable scholarly predecessors, Allison Davis, whose work is cited throughout the text. In giving a detailed account of Davis’s anthropological studies of race, class, and caste in the American South under Jim Crow in the 1930s, Wilkerson presents a vital historical anecdote that illustrates how caste stratification has impeded the study of caste itself. As an African American academic, Davis was himself a member of the subordinate caste and completed his research in the South from a disadvantaged and dangerous position. After Davis and his colleagues finished their study, they published their work as Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. However, Wilkerson argues that the work of white academics, who had spent a fraction of the time on their research, faced fewer barriers during the publishing process, received more attention, and faced less criticism after publication. As Wilkerson argues, even the study of caste itself is vulnerable to the destructive workings of the caste hierarchy, which makes the caste system even more difficult to dismantle.