[ The recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s widely acclaimed
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents returns to caste to explain U.S.
racial hierarchy when wealth polarization, racial strife, and white
supremacist revanchism are again on the rise.] [[link removed]]


PORTSIDE CULTURE

CASTE DOES NOT EXPLAIN RACE  
[[link removed]]

 

Charisse Burden-Stelly
December 15, 2020
Boston Review
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_ The recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s widely acclaimed
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents returns to caste to explain U.S.
racial hierarchy when wealth polarization, racial strife, and white
supremacist revanchism are again on the rise. _

History.com,

 

In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States,
anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that
antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching
and race riots. At this auspicious moment, Lincoln University
historical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox published his 624-page tour
de force, _Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social
Dynamics_ (1948). Cox’s book put class struggle, racial violence,
and relentless political-class competition at the founding of the
capitalist world-system in 1492, though it argued that these
constitutive features had existed in nascent form since much earlier.
Cox contended that economic exploitation was at the root of U.S.
racial hierarchy. In particular, it was responsible for structuring
relations among the white ruling class, the white masses, and Black
people as a racialized class of workers.

Caste : The Origins of Our Discontents
[[link removed]]

By Isabel Wilkerson

Penguin Random House; 496 pages

August 4, 2020

Hardcover:  $32.00

ISBN-10 : 0593230256

ISBN-13 : 978-0593230251

Penguin Random House

The publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s widely acclaimed
book_ _returns to caste to explain U.S. racial hierarchy at a moment
when wealth polarization, racial strife, and white supremacist
revanchism are again on the rise.

Cox’s book refuted the “caste school” of race relations. For
nearly a decade_, _Cox had challenged scholars who compared U.S. race
relations to the caste system in India—caste being a
religious-social structure that preceded the rise of capitalism. In a
1942 article, “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations,” Cox
noted that, despite their claims to originality, researchers such as
W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, and John Dollard were simply
recapitulating a caste hypothesis that had been “quite popular” in
the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cox did not speculate
why—in the context of the Great Depression, ascending fascism, and
increased racial violence—the caste hypothesis had been “made
fashionable” again. However, he noted that the resurgence of caste
as a model for explaining the racial order in the United States
separated race relations from class politics just when a racialized
struggle over resources was intensifying.

Academia and popular media largely ignored _Caste, Class, and Race_,
and it soon fell out of print. At the time, U.S. discussions about
race were dominated by Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 _An American Dilemma:
The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy_, an influential book that
argued that caste defined the situation of the “American Negro.”
According to Cox, Myrdal adopted the caste theory of race relations
based on the assumption that Southern slavery, and thus all race
relations emanating _from_ Southern slavery, constituted a caste
system.

The recent publication of Isabel Wilkerson’s widely
acclaimed _Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents _returns to caste
to explain U.S. racial hierarchy at a moment when wealth polarization,
racial strife, and white supremacist revanchism are again on the rise.
To be sure, there is a reason why caste has an enduring appeal as a
framework to explain the organization of U.S. society. It offers a
convenient explanation for the ongoing violence and discrimination
against racialized peoples while avoiding biological conceptions of
“race,” which, we are often reminded, is a “social construct.”
Caste can be readily employed as shorthand for all forms of subjection
emanating from systems of caste, class, and racism—regardless of
history, context, geography, and form. Scholars who construe the
United States as a caste system emphasize tradition, custom, attitude,
and feeling as the sources of social intolerance, sidestepping issues
such as capitalist exploitation and class-based antagonism. Following
this logic, a social change in how we relate to one another is more
feasible than overhauling a global political economy rooted in the
hierarchical ordering of humanity.

One example of such an analysis can be found in Davis’s _Deep
South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class _(1941),
which offered an understanding of ostensibly rigid modes of social
ordering that went beyond class difference. The book showed that the
Jim Crow economic order flowed from brutal social relations codified
by racism, not the other way around. This position animates
Wilkerson’s text and illuminates why she urgently wants to explain
the “retur[n] to an old order” that occurred during Donald J.
Trump’s presidency. “America has an unseen skeleton, a caste
system that [is] central to its operation,” she asserts. “Caste is
the infrastructure of our divisions . . . [and] the subconscious code
of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old
social order.”

In her book, Wilkerson rejects Cox’s work and dismisses _Caste,
Class, and Race_ in three paragraphs as a “cantankerous
critique,” a “contrarian view,” and “baffling misguided”
about the oppressive nature of the caste system in India. Their
disagreements, particularly their different readings of the literature
on caste, reveal the stakes of how we analyze U.S. race relations
today and the solutions that we offer in return.

[section separator]

In a book that combines memoir, travelogue, anecdotal evidence,
historical vignettes, and a cacophony of similes and metaphors,
Wilkerson presents the United States as a caste system made up of an
upper, middle, and lower caste. The upper caste is the white majority
(equated to the Indian Brahmin upper caste), the lower caste is the
Black minority (equated to Indian Dalits), and the middle caste is
comprised of undifferentiated “Hispanics” and Asians, striving to
make it into the upper caste. In Wilkerson’s view, a caste system is
“an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human
value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the
presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and
often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract
but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the
dominant caste whose forebears designed it.” Thus, race is merely
the tool of—or “shorthand” for—a more deeply embedded
“invisible guide.” In her definition, race amounts to little more
than the ascription of value to physical traits. This value judgement
is dictated by the group that has accrued social benefits such as
respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, and
consideration.

In Wilkerson's definition, race amounts to little more than the
ascription of value to physical traits. But despite the distinction
Wilkerson draws between caste and race, she employs them
interchangeably throughout the text. 

Despite the distinction Wilkerson draws between caste and race, she
employs them interchangeably—and virtually
indistinguishably—throughout the text. In so doing she reproduces
one of the key errors Cox attributed to the caste school: “in the
process of defining Negro caste we have defined Negro race, and the
final accomplishment is a substitution of words only.”

Wilkerson claims that the caste system is about power, not “feelings
or morality.” However, insofar as the book draws on her own
experiences as a Black professional in the United States, it suggests
that perception, judgement, and assumptions sustain structural
inequality. This is because, for her, the stereotypes and messaging
that uphold caste derive from “automatic, unconscious, reflexive
response[s] to expectations.” For example, in her discussion of
scapegoating, Wilkerson presents the _perception _of Black poverty
as a more significant problem than Black poverty itself. “Little
more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor,” she
argues, “and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in
America, at 27 percent.” However, when the news portrays poor
people, Black families account for 59 percent of those depicted. This,
she contends, “shape[s] popular sentiment” and makes
“_black _[a] synonym for _poor._” Wilkerson does not discuss why
a disproportionately high number of Black Americans are impoverished
or what reproduces this inequality. The chapter title “The Heart Is
the Last Frontier” sums up Wilkerson’s view: self-reinforcing
attitudes and behaviors sustain caste. Thus, social change only
requires shifting the behaviors and attitudes of those positioned as
superior. Radical change must then flow from “dominant caste”
individuals who recognize the plight of the “subordinate caste”
and choose to reject the system. Cox, on the other hand, posits that
any effort to change the racial order of the United States must attack
the racially hierarchical political economy, not perceptions and
attitudes.

Wilkerson’s reasoning allows her to position Nazi Germany, India,
and the United States as comparable caste systems, claiming that each
society’s perceptions of and attitudes toward those at the bottom
maintained its respective social hierarchies.

Wilkerson focuses on Nazi fixation with purity of blood in determining
who was Aryan. Chapters such as “The Euphoria of Hate” and “The
German Girl with the Dark, Wavy Hair” give the impression that
negative perception was as important to upholding the Nazi “caste
system” as was the extermination of Jews and other undesirable
populations. These chapters are perhaps the least rigorous and
compelling sections of the book, neglecting responsible historical
analysis. As Sunil Khilnani
[[link removed]] notes,
“the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish
people, not just to subordinate them.”

Wilkerson’s analysis of caste in India is similarly superficial
insofar as she treats the Indian caste system as essentially unchanged
over some 4,000 years. She neglects to mention, for example, that
British colonial rule used existing caste distinctions as instruments
of colonial domination, much as it had in Africa, to impose a more
rigid social structure. Ignoring these historical dynamics, she
describes caste’s function in India today through her own
observations: “I could see that the upper-caste people took
positions of authority, were forthright, at ease with being in charge,
correcting and talking over lower-case people,” she explains. “On
the other hand,” she continues, “the Dalits, as if trained not to
bring attention to themselves, sat in the shadows, on the periphery. .
. . asking few questions, daring not, it seemed, to intrude upon an
upper-caste domain or conversation.” These descriptions draw on
secondary sources, alongside anecdotal evidence and personal
observations gathered during a brief trip she took to give a talk
there. Indeed, she confesses: “I spoke none of the Indian languages,
knew nothing of the _jatis_, and was in no position to query anyone
as to the section of village from which they came.”

It is these perfunctory observations of the Indian caste system that
ground Wilkerson’s comparison to the “caste” system she sees in
the United States. Throughout the text, she uses the work of radical
Dalit scholar B. R. Ambedkar—dubbed “the MLK of India”—to
justify her comparison of Black Americans and Indian Dalits. In an
undelivered speech published in 1936, _Annihilation of
Caste, _Ambedkar argued that the Hindu religion sustained a
distinctive caste system in India. Brahminism was the primary
organizing principle of Indian society; religion was inextricable from
laws, rules, regulations, and customs. He explained that the division
of labor, and the “hierarchy in which the divisions of laborers are
graded one above the other” was based on the Hindu “dogma of
predestination.” Individual preferences and considerations do not
dictate occupations; rather, occupations are viewed as “callings”
based on one’s heredity and standing in the caste hierarchy.

Wilkerson employs perfunctory observations of the Indian caste system
to ground a comparison to the “caste” system she sees in the
United States.

The system, Ambedkar contended, does not prescribe racial divisions
but rather a social organization of society that is “a notion . . .
a state of mind.” Accordingly, he believed that the destruction of
caste required an ideational change. He suggested that the caste
system had hindered the lower classes of Hindus from engaging in
sustained protest, writing that they “[became] reconciled to eternal
servitude, which they accepted as their inescapable fate.” Thus, he
believed it was necessary to “kill the Brahminism [to] help to kill
Caste, which [was] nothing but Brahminism incarnate.”

With little regard for the important historical, cultural, and
religious contingencies that led Ambedkar to this conclusion,
Wilkerson seizes on his suggestion that social revolution and
intellectual regeneration are precursors to meaningful political and
economic change in India. And, by ignoring Ambedkar’s interest in
the origins of caste, Wilkerson misapplies his analyses to the United
States. This is the source of her disagreement with Cox.

[section separator]

Wilkerson dismisses Cox on his wrongheaded contention that, in India,
“one caste does not dominate the other.” Yet she misrepresents his
larger position. Cox was not observing the complete absence of
lower-caste resistance in India’s caste system—“ancient,
provincial, culturally oriented, hierarchical in structure, status
conscious, nonconflictive, nonpathological, occupationally limited,
lacking in aspiration and progressiveness, hypergamous, endogamous,
and static”—but rather something distinct from a system of
interracial antagonisms rooted in the imperatives of capital. He wrote
that African Americans never saw the social and material arrangements
originating in slavery and Jim Crow as normative; they constantly
fought back. By contrast, in India the protracted struggle around
caste did not occur until the late colonial and postcolonial era.

Cox observed that India's caste system was something distinct from the
U.S. system of interracial antagonisms rooted in the imperatives of
capital.

History is on Cox’s side; race relations in the United States
have _always_ been contested and unstable. The staggering number of
slave rebellions, urban uprisings, and racial insurgencies that pepper
U.S. history attest to this ongoing racial antagonism. So too, he
argued, do the “irregularity of interracial practices and
discrimination,” and the constant “attacks on the color line” by
Blacks as well as whites “who disregard rule favored by the ruling
class.”

The reality that racism in the United States is rooted in exploitation
and has thus continually met resistance complicates Wilkerson’s
thesis that U.S. race relations constitute a caste system.
In _Precolonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political
and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa, from Antiquity to the
Formation of Modern States_ (1987), the Senegalese historian and
anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop explained that social revolutions did
not take place in precolonial Black African caste societies for
several reasons. First, advantages and disadvantages, “deprivations
of rights and compensations,” in these caste systems balanced out.
For example, while lower caste laborers had a lower social status,
they were not deprived of the fruits of their labor and were permitted
to amass wealth. Second, the conception of honor in these caste
systems dictated that the superior caste could not exploit the lower
castes without “losing face” in the eyes of others; on the
contrary, the former was expected to assist the latter materially in
exchange for “social precedence.” Finally, the caste system was
relatively stable due to “the hereditary transmission of social
occupations, which corresponded, in a certain measure, to a monopoly
disguised by a religious prohibition in order to eliminate
professional competition.” Inheriting a trade, consequently, took on
religious significance. In other words, in precolonial Africa, unlike
in India, the division of labor precipitated religious
rationalization, not the other way around.

Diop further argued that Aryans gave divine character to property such
that, in the Indian caste system, large portions of the population
would be excluded from society and from right of ownership. “It was
through its concern with ownership of material goods,” he held,
“that the Aryan spirit of genius impressed its mold on the caste
system.” Moreover, while there was a cultural basis for caste in
Africa and ownership relations undergirding the caste system in India,
neither of these caste societies were based on racial or ethnic
separation. Similar to Cox, Diop illuminated that caste must be
understood in its historical and contextual specificity, and that a
caste system is not necessarily exploitative. For this reason,
classifying the United States—a society in which exploitation and
antagonism are essential and endemic—as a caste system is
obfuscating rather than illuminating.

Diop illuminated that caste must be understood in its historical and
contextual specificity, and that a caste system is not necessarily
exploitative.

While capitalism and colonialism arose within a much longer history of
caste in India, this was not the case in the United States. The rise
of the capitalist global order occurred contemporaneously with racial
ordering in the United States, with narrations of racism shifting
alongside changes in the political economy. Just as caste—in India
and elsewhere—cannot be reduced to exploitation, neither can the
social relations of racial capitalism in the United States be
characterized by caste, despite similar forms of oppression.

The origins, historicity, and context of ascriptive hierarchy matter.
Understanding them offers the key to dismantling the system. Wilkerson
is perhaps correct that changing attitudes and social practices could
eradicate the Indian caste system, which originated in the belief in
predestination before the rise of capitalism. But this approach does
not easily transfer to the United States, where racial oppression is
sutured to capitalist exploitation and structures every aspect of the
lives of Black Americans. 

[section separator]

In his 1962 book, _Capitalism and American Leadership, _Cox argued
that economic exploitation came before beliefs about specific groups
of people. He wrote:

Since any conception of a people as being capitalistically exploitable
tends to breed universal contempt for them, it seems manifest that the
very spirit of the system must subside if respect for backward peoples
is to be assured.

Those that benefit the most from capitalism will utilize any method
that allows them to continue to exploit labor from those in lower
classes. This includes racial prejudice. Cox believed U.S. race
relations were more fundamentally labor relations, despite the
mainstream misunderstanding of racism as psychological.

Cox believed U.S. race relations were more fundamentally labor
relations, despite the mainstream misunderstanding of racism as
psychological.

For this reason, Cox contended that Cold War anticommunism worked to
preserve the capitalist-rooted racial order, especially in the charge
that the demand for equal rights for Black Americans was communist
activity. This was the context for the caste school’s decision to
evade a critique of capitalism. It also helps to explain the
marginalization of Cox’s book in the late ’40s. In the postwar
era, texts sympathetic to socialism were generally marginalized. Those
who did engage the book tended to dismiss the text as too polemical,
deterministic, and unscientific.

Cox was not alone in positioning modern race relations within the
larger system of capitalist exploitation. His work belongs to more
than a century of scholarship and advocacy that made the same case—a
significant body of literature conspicuously absent from
Wilkerson’s _Caste_. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The
African Roots of War” (1915) examines the imperialist rivalry for
African resources. The struggle to the death for African resources and
labor had begun to “pay dividends” centuries earlier through the
enslavement of African peoples, the subsequent conflation of color and
inferiority, and the reduction of what was routinely referred to as
the “Dark Continent” to a space of backwardness ideally suited for
pillage. In “Toward a Brighter Dawn”
[[link removed]] (1936),
Louise Thompson Patterson held that Black women were subjected to
“triple exploitation” as workers, women, and Blacks. This was most
manifest in their relegation to domestic labor, their confinement in
laundries and tobacco factories with horrible working conditions,
their experience of discrimination in relief and relief work, and in
their reduction to “Bronx Slave Markets” where they had to auction
off their labor for “pennies on the dollar” during the great
depression. The political economy of Black women’s suffering was
inextricable from both the drive to war and the rise of fascism; all
emanated from the social relations of racial capitalist imperialism.

Cox’s assessment was also corroborated by the 1946 United Nations
petition, _An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human
Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the
United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for
Redress__. _Wilkerson briefly discusses letters exchanged between
Ambedkar and Du Bois about the petition, highlighting that the
scholars connected the plight of Dalits and African Americans and
expressed reciprocal sympathy for the other group’s unique
oppression. But her narrative lacks any substantive engagement
with _An Appeal to the World_, which underscored that economic
domination, disenfranchisement, and failure of the federal government
to enforce African Americans’ equal protection under the law were
the linchpins of Black suffering in the United States. Given the
failures of the U.S. government, Black Americans turned to the U.N.
for relief. Thus, the exchange between Ambedkar and Du Bois was as
much about strategies for redress as it was about the common plight of
Dalits and African Americans.

After World War Two the pathbreaking petition, _We Charge Genocide:
The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of
the United States Government Against the Negro People_, filed with the
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide in 1951, even further established the ties between
capitalist exploitation and racial antagonism. For example, the
petition exposed that the United States had derived 4 billion dollars
of “superprofits” from systematic exploitation of African
Americans. Such superprofit was the “substantial motive” to commit
genocide against African Americans. Worse still, the “seven and a
half billion dollars of booty from abroad” brought the superprofits
wrested from oppressed people to 11.5 billion dollars a year.

In keeping with the argumentation of Du Bois, Thompson Patterson, and
the two UN petitions, Walter Rodney’s groundbreaking work _How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa_ (1972) argued that “the simple fact
is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out
with a notion of superiority, and when the color and other physical
traits of those people were quite different it was inevitable that the
prejudice should take a racist form.” Taking inspiration from
Rodney, Manning Marable explained in _How Capitalism Underdeveloped
Black America _(1983) that the material conditions of Black people
were a direct result of the racially hierarchical economic history of
the United States. Black Americans were, and continue to be, victims
of both economic and racist exploitation; as such “the U.S. is not
just a capitalist state, but with South Africa, is
a _racist/capitalist state._” Making an adjacent argument about the
conjuncture of racialism and economic organization, Cedric Robinson
popularized the term “racial capitalism” in _Black Marxism: The
Making of the Black Radical Tradition, _published that same
year_. _Meanwhile, as Peter James Hudson explains,
[[link removed]] Black
South Africans were examining “the political economy of white
supremacy in South Africa.”

_Caste_’s dismissal of any analysis of racial capitalism, and
descriptive assessment of “caste,” offers a decontextualized,
ahistorical, and inaccurate description of racial antagonism, caste,
and class.

In 1998 the Black Radical Congress
[[link removed]] was
founded to combat capitalism and its “structural incapacity” to
ensure the basic human needs of Black people worldwide; its
superexploitation of Southern workers; its state terrorism against,
and mass incarceration of, Black people; and its refusal to allow
Black and oppressed people self-determination. Most recently, in two
works—_The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery,
White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the
Caribbean_ (2018) and _The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of
Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the
Long Sixteenth Century_ (2020)_—_Gerald Horne has shown that from
about the sixteenth century onward, racial hierarchy and white
supremacy became the ideological glue allowing disparate European
nations and peoples to justify confiscating resources, land, and labor
from those on the darker side of the color-line. He saw this as a kind
of militarized identity politics. Wilkerson’s book ignores this
scholarship.

_Caste_’s dismissal of any analysis of racial capitalism, and
descriptive assessment of “caste” instead, offers a
decontextualized, ahistorical, and inaccurate description of racial
antagonism, caste, and class. Wilkerson’s emphasis on caste makes no
mention, let alone critique, of capitalism; the word does not appear
once in the text.

As Anthony Monteiro notes in his review
[[link removed]],
“Wilkerson argues that race discourse and research must move from
race to caste, from material relations of race and class oppression
and exploitation to beliefs, values and ideas.” There is “no
discussion or even recognition of political economy, that is, the
modes of production, the ways people make livings and the
contradictions therein.” This neglect is exacerbated by
Wilkerson’s reliance on cherrypicked anecdotes and historical
vignettes that confuse structure, experience, ideology, and sentiment,
leaving readers with a jumbled conflation of the political, economic,
and social.

[section separator]

In Wilkerson’s book, oppression and exploitation are understood
through indignities that starkly remind the Black elite of their
Blackness. The class perspective offered throughout _Caste—_shown
through anecdotes such as being slighted in the first-class cabin of a
flight, facing mistreatment from white workers who are beneath
Wilkerson in terms of class but above her based on “caste,” and
living in an affluent neighborhood but not being treated with the
dignity afforded her white neighbors—is particularly ironic given
Wilkerson’s failure to account for how class structures race
relations in the United States.

Wilkerson suggests that Black poor and working-class populations
suffer less than Black elites because their isolation from the upper
echelons of society shields them from discrimination at the hands of
whites.

Wilkerson’s elitism is conveyed through her outrage when Arizona
Governor Jan Brewer, with a “two-year certificate as a radiology
technician [who] had risen to the governor’s mansion by accident of
succession,” publicly berates then-President Barack Obama, “a
graduate of Columbia and of Harvard Law School [who] had made a
methodical march from state senator to U.S. senator to the Oval
Office.” Likewise, in focusing on the “health penalty” suffered
by privileged African Americans and the lower life expectancy for
ambitious and affluent “lower caste” persons, Wilkerson positions
the Black elite—as opposed to the masses of poor and working-class
Black people—as not only the true victims of “caste,” but also
the subjects that best reveal its workings. Wilkerson suggests that
Black and other minority poor and working-class populations suffer
less than Black elites because their isolation from the upper echelons
of society shields them from discrimination at the hands of whites,
who penalize “successful” Black people for defying the “roles
assigned them in the hierarchy.” While noting that Black elites
suffer hypertension and stress, Wilkerson seems oblivious to the
catastrophic “health penalty” of those poor communities—for
example, Louisiana’s “cancer alley”
[[link removed]]—that
owe to environmental racism, housing discrimination, and occupational
hazard.

For Wilkerson, the “thievery of caste” most brutally affects the
upwardly mobile, when it “steal[s] the time and psychic resources of
the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition.”
She effectively positions her poor experiences on first class flights,
a slight by a waiter at a restaurant, and having her _New York
Times _credentials questioned as a comparable type of violence to
lynching, police brutality, and even the breakup of enslaved families.

Despite its best intentions, _Caste _offers few tools to help
contend with the threat of fascism that has reappeared during Donald
Trump’s presidency, the rise of white nationalism as an acceptable
form of politics, the strengthening of the police state, and the
government’s neglect and criminalization of the Black poor and
working classes. The book offers little insight into the persistent
domestic rebellions throughout the United States—the demands to end
police murder and occupation, to serve justice for victims of state
violence, and to defund the police. It doesn’t help explain why, for
example, COVID-19 infections and deaths have affected this country
unequally, with Black and poor Americans most ravaged by the virus and
the economic fallout of the lockdowns.  

Instead, _Caste _recapitulates the representational function of the
Black elite, whereby their political and social agenda stands in for
the Black community as a whole. It calls for the eradication of
meanness, daily affronts, and disregard that undermine merit and
hamper the best Black people from achieving their dreams as the key
step toward a society beyond race and caste. Here, Cox’s critique of
Myrdal resonates: “[Myrdal writes] ‘Negro strategy would build on
an illusion if it set all its hope on a blitzkrieg directed toward a
‘basic’ factor.’” The latter comports with Wilkerson’s
desire for empathy, acceptance, and meritocracy as the generalizable
solution for the structural and material violence of modern U.S.
racial capitalism.

The book's celebration in the mainstream media is cause for concern
because it reflects the continued priority of elite preferences over
the realities, needs, and struggles of ordinary people.

_Caste _neither illuminates nor speaks to the origins, exigencies, or
urgency of our time. Its celebration in the mainstream media is cause
for concern because it reflects the continued priority of elite
preferences over the realities, needs, and struggles of ordinary
people. It is akin to books such as Robin DiAngelo’s _White
Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About
Race_—books that emphasize white peoples’ emotions and behaviors
as the source of inequality, thereby circumventing fundamental issues
such as resource allocation, labor exploitation, and economic
dispossession. This re-centering of dominant voices and desires comes
at the expense of those whose marginalization is, quite literally, a
matter of life and death. If, as Wilkerson and DiAngelo suggest, the
eradication of exploitation and oppression in the United States is
contingent upon the dominant white “caste” demonstrating more
empathy, abandoning their privilege, and adopting a better attitude,
then the suffering of the overwhelming majority will undoubtedly
continue unabated. As Frederick Douglass enjoined
[[link removed]] in
1857, “who would be free, themselves must strike the blow. . . . If
there is no struggle there is no progress.”

_[Charisse Burden-Stelly is the 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in the Race
and Capitalism Project at the University of Chicago, and an Assistant
Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton
College. A scholar of critical Black Studies, political theory,
political economy, and intellectual history, Burden-Stelly is the
co-author, with Gerald Horne, of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American
History. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Black
Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of
Capitalism in the United States and is also the co-editor, with Jodi
Dean, of the forthcoming volume Triple Jeopardy and World
Revolution: Three Decades of Political Writing by Black Women
Communists. Her published work appears in journals including Small
Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy,
International Journal of Africana Studies, and the CLR James
Journal.]_

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