The Eight Pillars of Caste
Caste
Isabelle Wilkerson explains caste as “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.”
Caste requires certain principles (pillars, as Wilkerson calls them) to be embedded in a people’s culture and subconscious for it to be a driving force in how they navigate society.
Wilkerson has identified eight of these pillars through her examination of the parallels, overlaps, and commonalities of caste hierarchies in America, India, and Nazi Germany.
Of these pillars, Wilkerson writes “it did not matter as much whether the assumptions were true, as most were not. It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelties which they had grown accustomed, inequalities that they took to be the laws of nature.”
Just as when I read Wilkerson’s writings, I doubt you will identify even one pillar mentioned here that you don’t recognise as present today. Our modern nations are, after all, built on foundations of segregation, slavery and oppression.
To me this serves as a warning, these eight pillars have no place in a free, equal, and rights-based society. If you come across them in any part of your life – I hope you’re ready to do your part in the work to dismantle them.
Pillars of Caste
Divine Will and Laws of Nature
Heritability
Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating
Purity versus Pollution
Occupational Hierarchy
Dehumanisation and Stigma
Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control
Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
Everything I’ve written of here is found in Wilkerson’s book ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent. This here is merely my reflecting, musing, and emphasising of her brilliant research and writing. If you want to read more, I strongly recommend purchasing this book. These pillars are part three of a seven part, life changing experience that is reading Wilkerson’s book.
Any non-attributed/linked quote here is directly from Wilkerson’s book.
1 - Divine Will and Laws of Nature
Pillar one is personal for many – anyone who grew up around a fundamental religious belief likely understands how sacred texts can be used to push people towards all sorts of discriminatory views. Wilkerson briefly highlights two of these texts, and how they were used to form the basis of a hierarchy of some select people over others.
There is the ancient Hindu text of India, in which great men approached the all-knowing Manu, asking “Please Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes as well as of those born in between.”
There was also the sacred text of much of the Western World, the Biblical Old Testament – in which the story of Noah’s drunken shame resulted in him cursing his grandchild, the son of Ham, “Curses be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will be he to his brothers!”
The story from the Hindu text saw the division of people into a system of caste that included the Shudra (the servant), the Vaishya (the merchant and trader), the Kshatriya (the warrior, protector and ruler), and the Brahmin (the philosopher, sage and priest). Added later was the Varnas, seen as so low they were outside of caste … the Untouchables.
The story of Noah’s curse on Canaan, well it was believed for millennia that Noah’s grandchildren spread throughout the earth in different directions - in the Middle Ages some biblical interpreters “described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin.” The Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English all leaned on this one biblical passage as their God-ordained right to kidnap and enslave millions. A divine right that was maintained through the modern system of slavery and caste embraced by the United States.
Wilkerson closes her thoughts on the pillar of Divine Will and Laws of Nature by stating “These tenets, as interpreted by those who put themselves on high, would become the divine and spiritual foundation for the belief in a human pyramid willed by God, a Great Chain of Being, that the founders would further sculpt into the centuries to follow, as circumstances required.”
The interpretation of religious text to support pre-existing or hoped for beliefs and worldviews – that’s something I know well, having spent many years (and all my developing ones) involved in Evangelical Christianity.
The truth is, these interpretations of scripture have shaped our world, with consequences right through to today, right through to the very lives you and I are living. Dismantling this pillar is not a matter of censoring religious beliefs, but rather a willingness to encourage genuine and ongoing theological development and refinement. Critical too is the separation of church and state as a foundational principle of democracy.
Section 116 of the Constitution of Australia establishes this – “The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.”
2 - Heritability
"To work, each caste society relied on clear lines of demarcation in which everyone was ascribed a rank at birth, and a role to perform, as if each person were a molecule in a self-perpetuating organism."
Unlike class, the concept of caste is not one that a person could work their way out of through grit and determination.
As an example, Wilkerson describes the decree of the Virginia General Assembly in 1662, where they broke from English tradition and said of those born in the colony, "all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother."
Changing the status of children from the father to the mother's lineage resulted in the black womb being seen by slave owners as a "profit centre" through which generations of enslaved people were born. It served to create "a bipolar hierarchy of whites and nonwhites" that became the hallmark of colonial America.
The pillar of heritability is designed to make caste a permanent fixture, generation after generation.
Wilkerson closes her text on this pillar with this quote from LeBron James:
"No matter how great you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do, if you are an African-American man or African-American woman, you will always be that."
I love how Article one of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights firmly counters this pillar when it tells us that:
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
Repeating, recalling, reinforcing, and enlivening this article is how we can all ensure this pillar is not present in our societies.
3 - Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating.
The restriction of marriage to people within the same caste is a practice called endogamy. It played a critical role in maintaining caste systems in ancient India, colonial America, and Nazi Germany.
Wilkerson explains that endogamy “enforces caste boundaries by forbidding marriage outside of one’s group and going so far as to prohibit sexual relations, or even the appearance of romantic interest, across caste lines.”
This achieves several outcomes - it:
closes off legal family connections across caste lines,
blocks the development of empathy,
blocks the chance of a sense of shared destiny, and
maintains the idea that the dominant class sees others as a threat to be kept in check.
It was in 1691 that Virginia became the first American colony to outlaw marriage between black and white individuals, a law replicated and expanded on across America over the following three centuries.
Fast forward to the year 2000, when as the last state in America to do so, the Supreme Court in Alabama repealed that state’s endogamy laws. It did so in opposition to 40 percent of the electorate who had voted to keep the marriage ban as Alabama law.
Forty percent of the Alabama electorate in the year 2000 were in favour of maintaining a law that prohibited the marriage of people based on the colour of their skin.
So don’t go thinking that the racial caste system is over in the USA…
Wilkerson writes that it was “the caste system, through the practice of endogamy – essentially state regulation of people’s romantic choices over the course of centuries – that created and reinforced “races,” by permitting only those with similar physical traits to legally mate.”
The power of the state to control marriage and relationships to maintain hierarchy amongst the population is such a deeply invasive pillar. It recognises that the fundamental human act of forming a relationship, of loving another person, is perhaps the most threatening action against segregation and caste hierarchy that one can take. This is reflected by just how deeply embedded this pillar is across caste-based societies. In 1958, polling found that 94 percent of white Americans did not approve of marriage between people of different races. A position upheld by centuries of brutal violence and lynching when relationships did develop across caste lines.
How might we oppose this pillar? Quite simply, allow love to be love. If it’s safe, respectful, and consensual – what right does the state, or even, what right does any of us as a third party, have to control a romantic relationship?
Article 16 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has something to say about this: “Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.”
4 - Purity versus Pollution
It is perhaps easiest to demonstrate this pillar with some of the examples Wilkerson provides. Examples of the measures taken by a dominant caste to “protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.”
India
Lower-caste people remaining between 12 to 96 steps from a dominant-caste person while walking in public.
Lower-caste people wearing bells to alert and warn of their presence in public.
Lower-caste people wiping their footprints away as they walked, or laying on the floor when passed by a dominant-caste person to ensure their shadow does not fall on them.
United States of America
Black and white children studying from separate textbooks, which could not be stored tougher lest they (the books that is) touch each other.
Black and white children having to drink from separate water fountains.
Separate bedsheets for white and black prisoners.
Keeping the corpse of a black person who had died separate from the corpses of white people.
Separate Bibles in southern courtrooms, so that black and white hands did not touch the same one.
Wilkerson goes on to explain the common use of water to separate people, “African-Americans were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools, both north and south, lest they pollute them just as Dalits were forbidden from the waters of the Brahmins, and Jews from Aryan waters in the Third Reich.”
While European colonial barbarity always created a hierarchy with Europeans on top, Wilkerson explains how “the United States alone created a system based on racial absolutism, the idea that a single drop of African blood, or varying percentages of Asian or Native American blood, could taint the purity of someone who might otherwise be presumed to be European.”
Wilkerson explains how this ‘hierarchy of trace amounts’ was most strongly defined in law throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, and Virginia. Louisiana being where it wasn’t until 1983 that the law that defined ‘negro’ – “one-thirty-second Negro blood” – was repelled. Nineteen-eighty-three, the same year the US sent the first American woman into space, Sally Ride.
Wilkerson then writes of how the “race to get under the white tent” ensued throughout the American middle-caste (read ‘caste’, not ‘class’) and further pushed African-Americans outside of the social contract, just as happened to Dalits in the Indian caste system.
‘Purity versus Pollution’ is a powerful pillar. Its essence is countered by article Two of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which reads: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
5 - Occupational Hierarchy
Here are the words of US Senator James Henry Hammond, in 1858:
“In all social systems, there must a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life … that is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skills. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have … it constitutes the very mud-sill of society.”
“Our slaves are black, or another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves.”
It is an accepted fact that the United States of America is a nation built through slavery, and the pillar of occupational hierarchy maintained the structures that allowed for the segregation of occupation to continue well past the Civil War.
These structures were even more elaborately woven through the Indian caste system, where the subcaste that a person was born into established whether they would work as a priest in a temple, a cleaner of human waste, and everything in between. Writing of caste in India, philosopher Celestin Bougle identified “six merchant castes, three of scribes, forty of peasants, twenty-four of journey-men, nine of shepherds and hunters, fourteen of fishermen and sailors, twelve of various kinds of artisans, carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths and potters, thirteen of weavers, thirteen of distillers, eleven of house servants.”
The caste-based occupational hierarchy was much more direct in America. The year 1890 saw 85 percent of black men and 96 percent of black women employed in either agriculture, domestic or personal service.
Diversity, equity and inclusivity initiatives are grounded in this historical fact. In the reality that by limiting occupational status, and creating hierarchy through employment structures, the dominant caste created a ceiling on how far those in the oppressed class could progress in society – while also benefiting greatly from their labour, including when it was forced. DEI acknowledges that even our current systems of education and employment are attached to this global history, and accepts that proactive steps are needed to ensure this pillar is dismantled and its legacy undone.
I love what Article 23 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights has to say in response to this pillar:
“Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
6 - Dehumanisation and Stigma
“A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as unreasonable.”
Wilkerson notes that this dehumanisation is a monumental task, as it wages a “war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do some on its own.”
That is why caste systems seek to stigmatise whole people groups, tainting them as the ‘other’ that is responsible for social ills, for being born polluted or wrong in some way, and as the reason for broad societal failures. Once a society accepts the stigmatisation put upon the lower caste, the dehumanisation process is merely a sequence of incremental steps. Nazi Germany’s murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million others during the Holocaust is surely the most horrific modern example of the last of these stages. Wilkerson reminds us that the foundation for these horrors is the process of dehumanisation, which is needed before any of those atrocities could be conducted.
These acts of dehumanisation included:
being stripped of belongings
having heads shaved
replacing names with numbers, or other non-human identifiers
being forced to perform inhumane amounts of work, without payment
being fed just enough to sustain the human metabolism (or at times less)
being forced to wear cloth and rags for clothing
being subjected to medical experimentation, and
suffering violence for the joy and entertainment of those from a higher caste.
This is just a short list of some of the shared experiences of Jews, African-Americans, and Dalits, as other humans found in themselves, and in the systems of caste they built, the willingness and means to dehumanise others. Dehuminisation and stigma is a critical pillar in maintaining a system of hierarchy of people.
A simple step everyone can take to ensure this pillar is never built again is to use human-centred language in their workplaces and private lives.
‘Person experiencing homelessness’ rather than ‘homeless person’ or ‘beggar’.
‘People with a disability’ rather than ‘disabled people or even just ‘the disabled’.
‘Person with a substance use disorder’ rather than ‘addict’ or ‘user’.
It’s not revolutionary, but it acknowledges humanity – which is the exact opposite of what this pillar seeks to do.
7 - Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control
“Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe, African-Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who had been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them, and had incentive to try and prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against the fellow humans.”
Mutilation.
Torture.
Lynching.
Wilkerson writes of a range of sobering, shocking and often inconceivable forms of violence used by the dominant caste to remind the subordinate caste of the power held over them.
I won’t repeat them here, but they involve the most reprehensible acts that humans can do to other humans, and they were endorsed by, performed by, and required by the state to maintain caste systems.
To help enforce this terror and cruelty, the dominant case would create a hierarchy amongst the oppressed, allowing them to better maintain their systems of control. Nazi labour camps would require a head Jew to get their fellow captives up by 5 am and maintain discipline and routine, in exchange for meagre privileges. Slave owners in the American South would choose an enslaved person as the ‘slave driver’, requiring them to set the pace of work, watch over others, and hand out discipline as needed. Black men were forced by the dominant caste in the American South to assist with whipping other black men or to do the whipping themselves. In Nazi Germany, SS guards forced Jews to partake in the gruesome events of putting prisoners into ovens or collecting the remains of people who had died the previous night. After hanging a black man on a lynching tree, those responsible in the American South would often require the family of the victim to take down what was left of the body from the lynching tree.
Terror and cruelty are strong psychological and physical tools for the enforcement of caste, but much of their strength comes from the willingness of the majority of the dominant caste to, in their complicity, simply do nothing.
The dismantling of this pillar is simple.
Don’t be a bystander to oppression.
Do something.
And hello Article five of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
8 - Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
This last of eight pillars is perhaps the most necessary for the survival of any caste system, while also relying on the the previous seven pillars for survival.
It is the idea that one group deems themselves superior to another group, simply because they believe it to be so.
It is the inability to entertain the possibility of questioning such a judgement, even in the face of substantial and at times immensely clear evidence. The ability for those from the dominant caste to tell themselves something as seemingly absurd as “Everyone in a particular group, regardless of intellect, morality, ethics, or humaneness, was automatically accorded control over everyone in another group, regardless of their gifts.”
With the support of the first seven, this pillar of inherent superiority versus inherent inferiority – one that seemingly fails to stand on its own – enables the dominant caste to enact what is, in theory, an absurd idea. The idea that one person is inherently of more value than another person. To believe this, without question, allows for actions such as the beating of a black man in 1948 when he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill. Or the whipping of an enslaved person for not acting cheerfully “at all times, and under all circumstances,” for pointing their finger a someone or something, for turning their face to look at someone, or for neglecting to move out of the way of a white person. It is what allows humans to perform, and support, actions such as the mass extermination of millions of Jews, and millions of others, in gas chambers and ovens. It drives all the horrors that people can do, and have done, to each other under the hierarchy of caste, and it is a pillar that resists all efforts to dismantle it alone.
It can only be dismantled through the hard work of pulling down and keeping down the first seven pillars of caste.
A task that is presented to all humanity, every day, for the rest of our individual and collective existence. It would be foolish to think that any, or all, of these pillars could not be rebuilt – stronger even than in the examples Wilkerson has provided here.
