Part 4: The Tentacles of Caste Summary

Part 4 begins with a brief description of the “Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes” social experiment, in which a group of white Iowa schoolchildren were indoctrinated into caste prejudice based on eye color. Wilkerson recounts how quickly students with the “dominant” eye color came to see themselves as superior and how quickly those with the “subordinate” eye color fell into line and saw themselves as inferior.

In Chapter 10, Wilkerson pivots to her experiences at a 2017 London conference on caste. She tells how she found a kindred spirit in a geologist named Tushar, who was born into the warrior-soldier caste, the Kshatriyas, but rejected caste thinking from a young age. Asked about her own place in the American caste system, she offers that she is an “American Dalit,” a member of the lowest caste—and “living proof that caste is artificial.”

Chapter 11 examines the concept of “status threat,” the psychological toll exacted when a dominant group feels that its dominant status is no longer secure. Wilkerson relates status threat to the rise in mortality among middle-aged white Americans due to “deaths of despair”—suicides, overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease. She describes the widespread anxiety of status threat and gives examples of people who quite literally preferred death to a society with more equal health care access.

The main topic of Chapter 12 is the scapegoat, which in the Hebrew Scriptures was an actual goat that carried the sins of the people into the wilderness. Wilkerson remarks on the usefulness of scapegoats for allowing dominant castes to feel that they are in control. If a specific group can be blamed for misfortune—defeat in war, say, or economic failure—then the dominant caste can avoid worrying about the structural causes of that misfortune. Wilkerson illustrates the ways in which scapegoating can hamper such society-wide systems as criminal justice and health care, preventing real criminals from being apprehended and true public health threats from being addressed.

Chapter 13 proposes another lens for inspecting caste: that of alpha wolves and underdogs. Recounting her own attempts to manage the behavior of her West Highland terrier, Wilkerson muses about the effectiveness of social hierarchies in wolf packs. She argues that one cost of caste is that it forces unqualified people into leadership (“alpha”) roles while preventing natural leaders from fully utilizing their talents.

In Chapter 14, Wilkerson takes up the ways in which caste “intrudes” on Black Americans in their day-to-day lives. She offers several examples of the “surveillance of black citizens by white strangers,” including a personal episode in which she was scrutinized by DEA agents while visiting Detroit for journalistic work. Wilkerson presents the killing of Tamir Rice in 2014 as an example of the deadly consequences that such intrusions can have.

Chapter 15 proposes that “lower-caste success” is a threat to the entire caste system and, for this reason, is often met with “violent backlash.” Wilkerson cites examples of such backlash in the treatment of Black troops during World War I and in the persecution of successful Black business owners throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The upper caste’s need for a “bottom rung” in society is so great, Wilkerson says, that innovations from lower-caste individuals are rejected even when they would save lives.

Caste prejudices can also create conflict within subordinate castes, as Wilkerson shows in Chapter 16. Citing the vernacular term “crabs in a barrel,” Wilkerson describes the ways in which—and the reasons for which—individuals in the lowest castes sometimes hinder the rise of their peers. They may gain favors or privileges from the dominant caste for this behavior, or they may fear losing members of an already struggling “team.” This same dynamic, Wilkerson notes, makes immigrants of color anxious to preserve their cultural distinctiveness, to avoid being conflated with nonimmigrant Black people.

Chapter 17 summarizes some of the early academic studies of caste in the United States, including a landmark project by a team of four anthropologists—two Black and two white—to study caste dynamics up close in a small Mississippi town. Wilkerson describes the great lengths to which the team, headed by Allison Davis, went to disguise their purpose, hide their collaboration, and blend in with rural Southern society in the interwar period. The Davis team’s work, published in 1941 as Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, was one of several works in the 1930s and 1940s to analyze the American caste system.

With Chapter 18, Wilkerson briefly shifts from academia to the world of sports, bringing Part 4 to a close. She tells of the struggles faced by Leroy “Satchel” Paige, arguably the greatest baseball pitcher of his era, to win recognition outside “the devalued world of the Negro Leagues.” Segregation in baseball ended, and Paige’s career in the major leagues officially began, only in the 1940s, when Paige was well past his prime. As the “oldest rookie in baseball,” Paige nonetheless pitched for the Cleveland Indians (later renamed the Cleveland Guardians) during a World Series–winning season. Wilkerson asks readers to consider, as baseball historians have, how much more Paige could have done had he been permitted to play in the major leagues all along.

Part 4: The Tentacles of Caste Analysis

The longest of Caste’s seven major sections, Part 4 describes several different ways in which caste maintains its grip on societies once it is established. The “tentacles of caste” are not cleanly enumerated like the pillars of caste in Part 3. However, they can be broadly divided into effects on the subordinate caste, on the dominant caste, and on those caught in the middle.

The violence perpetrated against subordinate-caste individuals who “step out of line” is well-documented, and Wilkerson gives numerous examples of caste-based mob violence (including lynching), police brutality, and vigilante killings throughout the book. A major focus in Part 4, however, is the psychological effect of continued suppression and subordination. Beginning with the famous eye-color experiment, Wilkerson shows how those treated as inferior come to think of themselves as inferior.

Dominant-caste individuals, meanwhile, come to rely on an unearned sense of superiority and suffer anxiety—sometimes with serious physical symptoms—when they perceive their status as being under threat. They must either ignore information that would deflate the fiction of caste or confront the unpleasant truth that their position in society is not due entirely to merit. Middle-class individuals are induced to distance themselves from the lower caste and emulate the upper caste, defining themselves in relation to existing power structures and not on their own terms. Society-wide, caste also hinders the provision of justice, health care, and other social goods by promoting stereotype-based assumptions instead of fact-based reasoning.