Part 5: The Consequences of Caste Summary

Part 5 opens with a narrative description (Chapter 19) of a film showing a celebration in Berlin after the Nazis captured Paris. Wilkerson describes the details of this black-and-white film and notes how happy, even ecstatic, the people lining the streets seem to be. The footage, she says, reveals the “uncomfortable truth” that evil can easily overcome ordinary people in the midst of their “insecurities and resentments.”

In Chapter 20, Wilkerson explains how caste systems can create a kind of collective narcissism in the dominant caste, who appear front and center in all types of media and cultural productions. This narcissism, she suggests, is so potent because people feel more secure in their group identities (e.g., “white” or “Aryan”) than they do as individuals. An obsession with national origins, along with historical attempts to exclude Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants from whiteness, is a symptom of this kind of narcissism in the United States.

The extremely brief Chapter 21 is a cautionary tale of what can happen when members of a dominant caste run out of obvious inferiors to persecute. Wilkerson tells of a girl with dark, wavy hair who, long after most Jewish Germans had been sent to the camps, was viewed with suspicion in her village because of her physical appearance. Only by conducting genealogical research could her family prove to the neighbors that they were “Aryan” enough to belong.

Chapter 22 hearkens back to an earlier discussion of the psychological toll of caste prejudice. Wilkerson likens the behavior of some subordinate-caste individuals to Stockholm syndrome, the tendency of hostages to bond with and identify with their captors. She points to the demand that Black victims of crimes, such as the family of a man wrongfully slain in Dallas in 2019, forgive the perpetrators. This demand, she says, clouds people’s judgment while making members of the dominant caste feel better about themselves. More generally, Wilkerson observes, members of subordinate castes have had to adapt to dominant-caste expectations—to be meek and unobtrusive as well as forgiving—simply to survive.

In Chapter 23, Wilkerson brings together several experiences—including her own—of caste conflict on public transportation and in public accommodations. She then turns to air travel, “a domain that can bring out the worst in most anyone,” and describes the ways in which lower-caste passengers are overlooked by flight attendants, assumed not to belong in first class, or jostled by security staff for refusing to give up their seats. These incidents, Wilkerson says, are “more than personal insults and unfortunate misunderstandings”: they are demeaning and abusive.

Chapter 24 explores the physiological toll of caste oppression, as evidenced by the fact that people with similar genetics have markedly different health outcomes depending on where they live. Sub-Saharan Africans, for example, are not predisposed to cardiovascular disease or diabetes, but “African-Americans have the highest rates of those conditions of all ethnic groups in the United States.” These effects have been connected to the experience of discrimination through a series of studies, and a marker of cellular aging—the length of the telomere—has been found to correlate with exposure to stereotyping and stigma.

Part 5: The Cosequences of Caste Analysis

Together, Parts 3, 4, and 5 form the center of Wilkerson’s narrative. Part 3 shows how caste systems are organized and defended, and Part 4 explains some reasons that they are so pervasive once established. In Part 5, the emphasis is on effects.

Wilkerson continues to provide examples of the physical violence and psychological harms inherent in caste, concerns large enough that they reoccur throughout the book. Part 5 also introduces a medical dimension to the analysis: caste systems are quite literally bad for people’s health and longevity. This is true for those who live under caste prejudice—and bear the brunt of its life-shortening, health-worsening effects on their physiology. It is also true for those who defend their place at the top of the caste pyramid and who perceive interactions with people from other castes as necessarily confrontational and stressful. Thus, the health toll of caste is another example of a broad pattern described in Caste: those in the lowest castes suffer most, but nobody escapes totally unscathed.

Another “consequence of caste” developed in Part 5 is the distortion of justice that occurs when members of dominant castes demand forgiveness for offenses against lower-caste individuals. This, Wilkerson points out, cheapens the ideals of justice and forgiveness that should be equally applied to all. Coerced or expected forgiveness makes what could be a voluntary act of graciousness into a command performance for the benefit of the favored caste.