Why are we humans so obsessed with social hierarchies?
Until that morning, not too long ago, it had been some time since the social pecking order had pecked me back into place. It’s not that I was unaware of the hierarchy. In fact, as a person of color in the United States, I would argue that it would be difficult not to be aware of the invisible lines that keep everyone in their place. But sometimes, one forgets.
I had arrived at the Manhattan luxury tower to do a job for a resident. As usual for “the help,” I was ushered to the building’s service entrance, where I was to take the freight elevator to the apartment’s back door. At the service entrance, the building manager informed me that the freight elevator was, ironically, out of service.
Well, there’s nothing for it but to come back on a different day. At least, that’s how the good-natured manager saw it. Problem solved. Have a nice day.
“But wait,” I asked, forgetting my place. “Since I only have a backpack, could I not use the passenger elevator instead?”
What followed were fifteen minutes of increasingly frustrating phone calls between myself, various building staff, and, finally, my client’s representative. After all that, I ended right back where I had started, with the manager telling me again—a bit less good-naturedly this time—that a ride in the perfectly functioning passenger elevator was simply out of the question for me.
On the interminable ride back to the office, I could not help but replay the matter in my mind, hoping to find some shred of logic in what transpired. Instead, the old vexing questions resurfaced. Why are we humans so obsessed with social hierarchies? What drives us to uphold these stories and totems of superiority to the point of absurdity, like having separate entrances for “the help” or a flimsy piece of hanging fabric to separate first class from coach on airplanes?
In her 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson jumps into the deep end to get some answers. Fueled by her propulsive prose and evident passion for the subject, the book reads like the work of a haunted individual. It’s as if during her time documenting the depredations of racism in previous works like The Warmth of Other Suns, she caught a glimpse of a more insidious evil at work behind it all—something older, maybe even ancient.
Early in the book, Wilkerson recounts an incident during Martin Luther King’s visit to India in 1959. At an event for families of “untouchables”—the lowest rung in India’s millennia-old caste system, Dr. King was introduced as a “fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” Though initially put off by the remark, over time, Dr. King realized it was a piercing insight. “Every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable,” he wrote later.
According to Wilkerson, caste is the ghost in the machine of civilization. It is the ancient evil behind American racism and other systems of oppression—the “infrastructure of our divisions,” as she puts it.
The Chase
Once she caught caste’s scent, she set about tracking it. Drawing on meticulous research, interviews, and her experience as an African-American woman in the United States, Wilkerson, like a modern-day Ahab, chased her quarry through time and space and round perdition’s flames.
Wilkerson defines caste as a “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.”
She found evidence of caste at an East Texas lynching party in 1921 and then again at a 1934 meeting of Nazi bureaucrats weighing options for isolating Jewish people from Aryans. Caste was there again during a tense conversation between a Dalit (untouchable) scholar and an upper-caste colleague at a recent conference in Delhi. She caught sight of caste in the violent political convulsions that followed the unprecedented election of a black man as president of the United States. She even found her quarry waiting for her in the basement of her own house when a white man wearing a MAGA cap came to fix her boiler.
Wilkerson defines caste as a “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.” Looking through the lens of caste, she uncovers a common thread connecting such seemingly disparate human value ranking systems as the ancient, religious-based caste system of India, the eugenics-obsessed Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and what she calls “the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”
She identifies eight characteristics, or “pillars,” of caste shared by these systems, such as reliance on divine will or natural order to justify the ranking of human beings. Other pillars include control of marriage and mating (endogamy), the definition of occupational hierarchies, and—most importantly—providing a means of policing the boundaries of these divisions to make sure everyone stays where they belong. The use of terror and cruelty to keep people in their place is also an alarmingly common trait of caste systems.
Know Your Place
Awareness of one’s place in the system is the telltale sign that you are in the presence of caste. When old-timers reminisce fondly about the days when everyone “knew their place,” that is the language of caste. When an accomplished American presidential candidate is dismissed as a “DEI hire” simply because she’s a woman (or worse, a non-white woman), that’s caste talking. In 2012, it was caste that led George Zimmerman to conclude that young Trayvon Martin, based on his dark skin and choice of clothing apparel, had no business in Zimmerman’s Florida neighborhood. And it was caste that resulted in the young man’s death after Zimmerman decided to put him in his place.
Caste is a belief system that gives meaning to life—a religion. And like any religion, it is one that adherents will go to great lengths to uphold.
Another telltale sign of caste is the absurd lengths people will go to enforce it. Take water, for example. Wilkerson devotes an entire section of the book to the ways various caste systems police the use of water to ensure that hierarchy is maintained. For instance, in India, Dalits were not allowed to drink from the same cups as people from the upper castes. In Nazi Germany, Jews were not allowed to step into the beaches of their own summer homes. And, of course, there are all the water rules in Jim Crow America: separate water fountains, segregated pools, etc. One of the most heart-rending stories in the book concerns a young black boy who is “generously” allowed to use a whites-only pool in 1951 Youngstown, Ohio, so long as he stays on an inflatable raft and under no circumstances touch the water lest it become contaminated and unusable to the white patrons.
I used to think the people who upheld Jim Crow laws were simply ignorant. However, as I made my way through the evidence Wilkerson assembled, another possibility presented itself. Perhaps these people knew exactly what they were doing. They were aware of the absurdity of segregated pools. Still, they committed to the bit, risking international ridicule for the sake of the higher principle of caste and the tale of superiority it represents. In this light, caste is more than a selfish or ignorant impulse. Caste is a belief system that gives meaning to life—a religion. And like any religion, it is one that adherents will go to great lengths to uphold. In the service of caste, no action is too absurd—or lethal.
This religious fervor for keeping people in their place is what has allowed caste systems to endure. From the Bronze Age to the Information Age, caste has been a fixture of human civilization. Wilkerson likens it to a virus that resides in the human heart. Like a virus, the zeal for caste alternates between periods of activity and hibernation. It also mutates to adapt to its environment. In Wilkerson’s telling, the United States’ race-based caste system has proven to be a particularly hardy strain in this regard, mutating from the permanent enslavement of Africans predating the country’s founding through the Jim Crow era to the various “take our country back” movements currently en vogue.
A Bigger Boat
How, then, do we combat a foe such as caste? Wilkerson’s evidence points to an adversary larger and more intractable than anticipated. Caste, she concludes, “is so deeply embedded in the human subconscious that even when laws are passed and proclamations made to protect against it, statutes may be no match for its endurance.”
In light of such a daunting task, when the book unexpectedly turns toward the spiritual in its final pages, the sudden change in tone feels like a desperate Hail Mary pass on Wilkerson’s part—an acknowledgment that, like Chief Brody in Jaws, she will need a bigger boat for the job.
To defeat caste, Wilkerson calls on all of us to exercise “radical empathy.” Radical empathy, as she defines it, is a connection to others “from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.” Later, in a less hopeful afterword, her plea for radical empathy becomes a flat-out prayer that we may “transcend the origins of our discontents.”
In my religion… matters of caste and heart change are central. When Jesus of Nazareth began his public ministry, he declared he was ushering in a new kingdom where “the last will be first.”
Given the book’s convincing case for the entrenched nature of caste in the human experience, however, I found this sudden appeal to our better angels a rather frustrating way to end the book. If the need to create social hierarchies of human worth is a feature of the species and not a bug—if it is an urge that comes naturally to us, like the need to eat or procreate—then hoping that, after all this time, people will suddenly choose radical empathy comes across as quixotically optimistic. It also contrasts starkly with the sober realism displayed in the rest of the book. She might as well ask people to stop breathing.
But perhaps I expected too much from what is, essentially, a secular work of social commentary. The book’s last-minute turn to the religious concedes the limits of a materialistic approach to such matters. Secularism has always had difficulty navigating the inner regions of the human heart, especially concerning the evil that men do. However, if there is any hope of defeating caste, that’s where we must go. Appropriately, the book’s final chapter is titled “The Heart Is the Last Frontier.”
And to journey into the tumultuous waters of the heart, we will indeed need a bigger boat that can handle the irrational currents raging within. As Albert Einstein, an avowed agnostic, put it once, “Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.” The religious language in the book’s closing suggests that these questions of what should be in regard to caste have been more suited to explorers across all cultures who are not limited by a purely materialistic understanding of reality: ancient prophets, mystics, gurus, and messiahs.
In my religion, for example, matters of caste and heart change are central. When Jesus of Nazareth began his public ministry, he declared he was ushering in a new kingdom where “the last will be first.” And to be part of this kingdom, he famously said that a person must be “born again,” a supernatural heart transformation in its own right.
Religion has been the source of much suffering in the world. In one of history’s greatest ironies, for example, the religion of “the least of these” has often been conscripted in the service of caste. And yet, as long as the inner regions of the heart where caste resides remain out of reach to secular exploration, it appears that we may still need religion’s help in charting an aspirational course past the origins of our discontents.
When it comes to caste, we are all Lovecraftian protagonists, standing at the edge of reason while staring at a vast landscape of eldritch mysteries. I am grateful to Wilkerson for getting me this far. However, if I am to press ahead, I will need a guide who is more familiar with the inner workings of the human heart. For if caste’s lair lies beyond reason, so too perhaps does the key to its undoing.
