MixedEntropy... the type of book that is bound to be polarizing ... While race mediates these interactions, they cannot be so easily reduced to concrete hierarchies of caste ... It is always dangerous to ascribe labels to historical actors that they themselves never used to describe themselves. The result is often that our modern lenses distort historical specificity. Yet this is precisely what Wilkerson does by equating Black and lowest caste, white and upper caste and lumping everyone else in the middle. Wilkerson replaces race with an idea that does not consider context or the particularities of how race is variously used to marginalize and uplift certain populations in the interests of the economic elite and structures of white supremacy ... This imprecision points to the other major drawback of Wilkerson’s idea of \'caste:\' its failure to understand the ways that race intersects with many other social categories of privilege and oppression, not in the least class, gender, and sexuality ... By replacing race with racial determinism, and racial determinism with \'caste,\' Wilkerson does little to explain the ways race is experienced, created, and maintained in the United States. Instead, Caste offers an overly simplified explanation of shifting racial divisions that are consistently being challenged, redefined, and reasserted. It is only by considering the ways race follows and diverts the trajectories of power that we may begin to challenge these relationships. Imagining the racial hierarchy as rigid and inflexible only obscures the insidious power of race as an intersectional marker of who succeeds, who is restricted, who is promoted, who is imprisoned, who lives and who dies ... Wilkerson presents an intriguing idea that falls short of reimagining hierarchy in the way she intends. But that is not to say that there is nothing useful to be drawn from Caste ... To restrict our focus solely to race without the nuance of its intersectional and contextually dependent expressions, however, is to miss the particular ways that power operates through a number of deterministic categories that affect the ways individuals in America are evaluated, categorized, and acted upon in a racial state.
