MixedForeign PolicyWilkerson patiently peels each carefully matted layer of racial hierarchy to lay bare the history of oppression that people such as myself, a Dalit, have inherited from our ancestors. And in some 400 pages, she obliterates decades of New Delhi’s diplomatic attempts to prevent caste from getting the global notoriety it has always deserved ... Yet Wilkerson, like many before her, unequivocally centers her work on the United States, with caste as a larger framework—a structure of gradation to explain how race represents the skin atop the bones of the fixed, immovable ranking that is known as caste. In doing so, Wilkerson gives us a language uniquely tailored for our times ... The brilliance of Wilkerson’s book lies in her painstaking research, her clear understanding of the different executions of caste, and her ability to draw a single direct thread that goes from the enslavement of African natives, captured and brought to Virginia in 1619, to nearly every form of inequity inflicted on Black folk—public lynchings, segregation, legal slavery under Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, underrepresentation, voter disenfranchisement, suppression, killings by police, medical mistreatment, and constant microaggressions. She deftly and neatly reveals how systemic coding and learned cultural assumptions of white superiority—along with the unconscious biases—are often responsible for upholding the racial hierarchy of caste ... As she unbraids each knot of the United States’ complex racial caste system, however, the absence of a critique of the capitalist forces that define the American social order is glaring ... Making a case for radical empathy, Wilkerson asserts—somewhat tidily and with a mild case of moral grandstanding—that our prejudices are systemic yet our awakening can only be individual. But if that is so, then it’s difficult to imagine how structural power and privilege might spontaneously topple in the wake of the personal recognition of inequality. But this seemingly naive and even simplistic belief in our humanity might possibly be the single most subversive statement in Wilkerson’s laborious undertaking ... Wilkerson’s definition of caste makes one expect that her book would underline the ongoing horrors of the caste system in India and within Indian communities in the United States and elsewhere. Reading Caste, however, it would be hard to know that ... Wilkerson gives little space to the inequities that affect Dalits today, some of which are more brutal and dehumanizing than even before India’s independence ... But even as the most sensitive analyst, Wilkerson appears to give in to the idea of American exceptionalism and centers Western narratives while failing to dig into the continued brutalization of Dalits who largely reside in India—in the global south. Despite her humanist and internationalist approach to bring all three systems of caste on par with each other, the original Indian version, as Wilkerson calls it, suffers the most in the service of the greater rationalization and possibly in favor of a largely American audience ... Wilkerson forces readers to confront the implications of a skewed racial hierarchy. Yet for me, a Dalit reader often marginalized and restricted to the bottom of an even more lopsided global order, it often feels like being left out of my own history.
