Caste

The TL;DR: Caste is an excellent overview of the US's unspoken but everpresent caste system. It's written in an engaging and accessible style, but is rigourously researched. I would recommend it as an introductory text on the subject.

Caste is an excellent and apt framework for viewing the United States' many problems with equity and equality, but one that many likely haven't thought to apply to this country, believing it to be something only seen in other, older societies, like India, or in the case of Nazi Germany. But Wilkinson makes an excellent case for why caste (in addition to race or class) is a superior lens through which to view, and thereby to understand, the US. This is an excellent book for those who believe the United States to be a meritocracy that has transcended the “bad old days”, and who aren't yet wise to the very deliberate steps taken in the US to prevent Black Americans from exercising self-determination as a community/communities or achieving self-actualization as individuals.

While I would unreservedly recommend the book (especially to American readers who aren't Black themselves, and most especially to white Americans), there are a few aspects of it that weaken this recommendation slightly. The first is Wilkinson's implicit privileging of social class: Goodreads user Lois addresses this more substantially in their review, but Wilkinson's treatment of socioeconomic class both within and between different ethnic groups is sparse to say the least, and throughout the book, her focus on professional and educational accomplishments within the American and European higher education system seems to imply that these accomplishments confer more inherent worth to those people who achieve them than to those who don't or can't.

The second issue is with the treatment of Jews. While I understand that the book is first and foremost about the experience of Black people in the United States (and I take no issue with that receiving the book's primary attention), I feel within my rights as a Jewish reader to critique this aspect of the book, because Wilkinson uses Jews as a case study. More specifically, Wilkinson uses the Nazi regime and the Holocaust as a rhetorical tool, in the same way that she uses the Indian Hindu caste system as a comparator. While the experience of European Jewry during the Holocaust is a logical comparison (though I am a bit tired of the worst episode in my people's history being used as a rhetorical prop), Wilkinson's treatment elides, for the most part, the fact that Jews had already been part of an extant European caste system for hundreds of years, most notably as part of the feudal system, where an aristocratic caste ruled over the peasant or serf caste. Having been displaced from their ancestral homeland and being outside of the Church's governing structure, Jews were outside of this system, and were not allowed to own land or even to rent and farm others' land. They were subject to higher taxes than ordinary peasants, and were barred from virtually all guilds and trade associations. They were therefore forced to perform the role of moneylender and/or tax collector - this in particular was a missed opportunity for an example during Wilkinson's otherwise excellent discussion of one of the pillars of caste (occupational hierarchy).

Wilkinson's treatment of Jews only in the context of subjugation and genocide in Nazi Europe, and not their experience in the US, was a secondary missed opportunity. Many Jews have white skin and therefore are generally afforded white privilege in the US, something American Jews are increasingly aware of and grappling with. However, Jews were not always “allowed” to be white in the US, and generally their whiteness has been conditional. Eric K. Ward, a scholar of white supremacy, has written an excellent article on this subject, Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism, in which he explains that Jews have unwittingly served as white supremacy's buffer group. (For whatever it may be worth, Ward is not Jewish, and he is Black.) Jews occupy a particularly interesting place in the US's racial hierarchy, because they comprise not a race but an ethnoreligious group that is itself composed of several ethnic subgroups, some of which are generally (though not universally) afforded white privilege and some of which rarely, if ever, are seen as white. However, a full discussion of that issue is far beyond the scope of this book and therefore I didn't expect Wilkinson to delve into it. But a paragraph's worth clearly stating the fact that antisemitism neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, that it is far from limited to Europe (see also the lynching of Leo Frank as one example), and that antisemitic hate crimes are not isolated events in the US but are themselves systemic, would have been welcome and would not have detracted from the book's message.

Finally, Wilkinson's apparent readiness to believe that Germany has truly reckoned with its genocide of Jews and Roma/Sinti people comes across as naive. While the official position of the German state may be one of contrition and reconciliation, the reality on the ground for German Jews (yes, they still exist) is rather different. A 2019 article on the subject from the New York Times provides a good illustration of the tenuous position in which Jews of German nationality today find themselves.

All this said, I think this is a great book and Wilkinson has done many readers a service in writing it. If you read this entire review, thank you for taking the time to do so and I hope it has been useful.

This is a well organized exploration of its topic, but even as someone who has only read a little bit about the history of racism and oppression in America, this book was still full of stories I have already heard (the schoolteacher's experiment of segregating her class by eye colour, Albert Einstein's allyship with the black community, etc).

Still though, this is obviously an important issue and the main thesis of the book is interesting: Racism is a byproduct of the caste system, not the other way around. The upper caste stays ahead of others by discrediting them, and discrediting people individually is difficult, so the easiest thing to do is to discredit an entire group based on a visible difference.