## Metadata - Author: [[Isabel Wilkerson]] - Full Title: Caste - Category: #books ## Highlights - Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. ([Location 533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=533)) - Caste is not a term often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the term for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.” ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=628)) - In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in America, An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realization that the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society was not race, but caste, that perhaps it was the only term that addresses what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value. ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=637)) - The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.” ([Location 643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=643)) - The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia colony in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=717)) - Thus, throughout this book you will see many references to the American South, the birthplace of this caste system. The South is where the majority of the subordinate caste was consigned to live for most of the country’s history and for that reason is where the caste system was formalized and most brutally enforced. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=724)) - The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners and for an economy from which they drew no benefit, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil. ([Location 902](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=902)) - Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement. Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations. ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=908)) - It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States would be an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111. ([Location 944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=944)) - Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. ([Location 1284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=1284)) - As soon as he was sworn in as chancellor, the Nazis unfurled their swastikas, a Sanskrit symbol linking them to their Aryan “roots,” and began to close in on the Jews. They stoked ancient resentments that dated back to the Middle Ages but that rose again when the Jews were made the scapegoats for Germany’s loss and humiliation at the end of World War I. Seen as dominant in banking and finance, Jews were blamed for the insufficient financial support of the war effort, although historians now widely acknowledge that Germany lost on the battlefield and not solely for lack of funds. ([Location 1476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=1476)) - It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether separate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years, wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the subordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position. ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FLWDQG&location=1748))