Caste Part Six, Part Seven, & Epilogue Summary & Analysis

Part Six: Backlash
Part Seven: Awakening
Epilogue: A World Without Caste

In the final sections of the book, Wilkerson argues for resistance to caste, awareness of caste, and movement beyond caste. In Chapter 25: A Change in the Script, she returns to American electoral politics, which she first addressed in Chapter 1 as a driving factor in her own research into caste. This time, she looks back to 2008, when America elected its first Black president, Barack Obama. Though many Americans anticipated that Obama’s election would be a positive turning point in the history of race relations in the United States, Wilkerson argues that it triggered intense backlash in people of the dominant caste. White Americans, she says, mobilized against Obama, forming hundreds of new hate groups as well as political and social movements designed to obstruct and delegitimize him. Wilkerson notes that Republican politicians changed election laws to delete millions of people from voter registration lists, primarily in states where ethnic minorities had recently begun voting in larger numbers. Wilkerson attributes this backlash to dominant group status threat, as defined in Chapter 11. The election of a Black president was such an extreme challenge to caste hierarchy, Wilkerson argues, that members of the dominant caste had to violently undermine it or risk losing their superior status.

Wilkerson drills down into events following Obama’s election and presidency in the rest of Part Six: Backlash, beginning in Chapter 26: Turning Point and the Resurgence of Caste with the election of Donald Trump. Though numerous observers believed that Trump’s policies threatened decreased stability for working-class white Americans in the short term, Wilkerson argues that this demographic, which voted for Trump at a higher rate than any other group, was not in fact voting against its own interests. In the aftermath of Obama’s presidency, the dominant caste’s primary interest, she says, was maintaining its own superior caste status, which Trump made clear was his priority as well.

Read an explanation of an important quote about how caste effects voting.

Chapter 29: The Price We Pay for a Caste System examines the results of caste-based voting and policymaking, particularly in America in the years since 2016. Wilkerson enumerates areas where the United States lags behind other developed nations, including healthcare coverage, aid to the underprivileged, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, and student test scores, all of which, she argues, stems directly from a caste system that values competition and individualism over empathy. In Wilkerson’s view, America’s race-based caste system is to blame for the country’s disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which resulted in an extremely high death toll.

Throughout Caste, Wilkerson gestures toward what would be necessary to dismantle America’s caste system, but in Part Seven: Awakening, she articulates a more explicit call to action for members of the dominant caste to break free of the roles and assumptions assigned them. Chapter 30: Shedding the Sacred Thread tells the story of a member of India’s highest caste, the Brahmin, whose encounters with Dalits over the course of his life revealed the artifice of India’s caste divisions. To irreversibly renounce his caste status, the Brahmin removes the sacred thread, a physical symbol of his status, from around his neck. Wilkerson follows this with two anecdotes from her own life that similarly illustrate renunciation of caste privileges. The first involves a family friend from the dominant caste who becomes righteously outraged when she sees Wilkerson being mistreated at a restaurant because of her race. The second involves a dominant caste plumber who is reluctant to help Wilkerson find the cause of her flooded basement until she shares with him that her mother recently died, and they bond over their experiences of loss. Together, these stories demonstrate the vital role that awareness and empathy play in awakening people to the illogical nature of caste as a first step in working to overcome it.

Read about Main Idea #2: Most of the responsibility for dismantling caste lies with the dominant caste as a main idea.

Finally, in Epilogue: A World Without Caste, Wilkerson imagines a future in which all humans refuse to be bound, or to bind others to, the hierarchical logic of caste. Her final historical example is Albert Einstein, who came to America from Germany in 1932, one month before Hitler was appointed chancellor. Once in the United States, Einstein was so disgusted with the treatment of African Americans that he became a civil rights activist, speaking out against segregation and racial prejudice from his position in the dominant caste. Just as Einstein rejected the presumption of his own racial superiority that America’s caste system thrust upon him, Wilkerson calls on her readers to choose not to adhere to the expectations of caste, whatever rank they occupy. She argues that much of the responsibility to fix the problems caused by caste rests in the hands of those who have historically benefited from it. Radical empathy, which Wilkerson defines as humbly listening to and learning from the experiences of others without trying to imagine one’s own response under similar circumstances, is an essential step in this process. Wilkerson argues that it is only through radical empathy across caste lines that people can see the humanity which caste systems seek to erase.

Read an explanation of a key quote from the epilogue.