Caste Major Figures

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, the author, is a major figure in the narrative portions of Caste. She describes the writing of Caste as a response to her own past experiences as a journalist and researcher. Writing about the Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson says, led her to see parallels between the racial divide in the United States and other social hierarchies abroad. Caste is in part a narrative of Wilkerson’s own evolving career as an author.

In several chapters, Wilkerson shares stories from her own research into caste systems around the world, including her travels to India, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Her research brings her into contact with members of both upper and lower castes in Indian society and with historians of the Nazi era in Germany. Their stories often serve to illustrate the broader points that Wilkerson makes about caste—such as its tendency to harm and constrain even those at the top of the caste hierarchy.

Wilkerson also offers examples from her own experience of caste as a Black woman in the United States. She tells, for instance, of times when she was ignored or second-guessed during her work as a New York Times reporter because she did not “look like” a journalist for a leading American newspaper. Wilkerson repeatedly emphasizes, though, that these episodes are just examples of a much broader phenomenon and that naming and shaming individual offenders will not solve the deeper problem of caste.

Bhimrao Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) was an Indian social reformer and political leader who championed the rights of the Dalits, the Indian caste formerly known as the Untouchables. Himself a Dalit, Ambedkar traveled to the United States to attend Columbia University and pursued further studies in London. When he returned, he wrote and spoke on the need for caste reform, culminating in the 1936 book Annihilation of Caste. He also worked with civil rights leaders across castes, including Mahatma Gandhi, to ensure that Indians from lower castes would have a voice in government. When India achieved independence in 1947, Ambedkar was a leading coauthor of the new national constitution.

Wilkerson acknowledges that many in the United States will have little prior familiarity with the history of the Indian caste system. Thus, they may not be familiar with Ambedkar and his accomplishments. At one point, seeking to explain Ambedkar’s significance, she describes him as “the Martin Luther King of India.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was an American civil rights leader and Baptist minister. Educated at Morehouse College (BA, 1948), Crozer Theological Seminary (BD, 1951), and Boston University (PhD, 1955), King became the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He articulated the goals of the civil rights movement in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and gave his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in 1963. In the years that followed, King worked with elected officials, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, to develop and pass laws that would end segregation, protect voting rights, and promote housing equality. He was assassinated the evening of April 4, 1968, on the eve of a planned march in support of striking sanitation workers.

Robert E. Lee

Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) was a Virginian military officer best known as the commander of the Confederate States Army during the Civil War (1861–1865). A graduate of the United States Military Academy, he served in the Army Corps of Engineers and later returned to the USMA as its superintendent. President Abraham Lincoln sought Lee as a potential commander of the Union Army at the outset of the war, but Lee chose to join with the secessionists as a general of the Confederacy. His efforts to press the war into Northern territory ultimately stalled at Gettysburg in 1863, and dwindling supplies and morale spelled the decline of the Confederate States Army over the subsequent two years.

Lee, a slaveholder who fought to preserve the institution of slavery, appears in Caste mostly as a symbol of how caste ideology has persisted in the United States. Many places in the American South, including schools, are named after Lee, and renaming initiatives have often been controversial. Wilkerson describes the costly and dangerous efforts undertaken to remove monuments to Lee from public places in the American South.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was the Führer, or leader, of Germany during the Nazi era (1933–1945). He officially assumed the role of chancellor in 1933, but by then he had spent more than a decade building support for the National Socialist (Nazi) party. Playing on widespread resentment and insecurity following Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Nazis promoted the creation of a racial hierarchy with “Aryans” at the top and Jews at the bottom. Pointing to the economic success of some Jewish Germans, Hitler made them the scapegoat for Germany’s failures during and after that war. This provided a pretext for the genocidal campaign known as the Holocaust. Ultimately, Germany’s defeat in World War II brought an end to the Nazi reign of terror: when he realized the war was unwinnable, Hitler took his own life in April 1945.

In Caste, Wilkerson does not spend much time on the personal role of Hitler. Instead, her emphasis is on the ways in which German society encouraged and allowed the rapid formation of a caste system during the Nazi era. She points out that Hitler’s actions would not have been possible without the direct support of many people and the passive acceptance of many more.