Copyright © 2020 by Isabel Wilkerson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Wilkerson, Isabel, author.
Title: Caste : the origins of our discontents / Isabel Wilkerson.
Description: New York : Random House, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020012794 (print) | LCCN 2020012795 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593230251 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593230268 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Caste—United States. | Social stratification—United States. | Ethnicity—United States. | Power (Social sciences)—United States. | United States—Race relations.
Classification: LCC HT725.U6 W55 2020 (print) | LCC HT725.U6 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/122—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012794
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012795
Ebook ISBN 9780593230268
Title-page art by Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover photograph: Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
ep_prh_5.5.0_140167162_c0_r8
Because even if I should speak,
no one would believe me.
And they would not believe me precisely because
they would know that what I said was true.
— J AMES B ALDWIN
If the majority knew of the root of this evil,
then the road to its cure would not be long.
— A LBERT E INSTEIN
There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to theFührer .
If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide.
Looking back from our vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fatefully, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it.
His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.
He had joined the Nazi Party himself years before. By now though, he knew firsthand that the Nazis were feeding Germans lies about Jews, the outcastes of his era, that, even this early in the Reich, the Nazis had caused terror, heartache, and disruption. He knew that Jews were anything but Untermenschen, that they were German citizens, human as anyone else. He was an Aryan in love with a Jewish woman, but the recently enacted Nuremberg Laws had made their relationship illegal. They were forbidden to marry or to have sexual relations, either of which amounted to what the Nazis called “racial infamy.”
His personal experience and close connection to the scapegoated caste allowed him to see past the lies and stereotypes so readily embraced by susceptible members—the majority, sadly—of the dominant caste. Though Aryan himself, his openness to the humanity of the people who had been deemed beneath him gave him a stake in their well-being, their fates tied to his. He could see what his countrymen chose not to see.
In a totalitarian regime such as that of the Third Reich, it was an act of bravery to stand firm against an ocean. We would all want to believe that we would have been him. We might feel certain that, were we Aryan citizens under the Third Reich, we surely would have seen through it, would have risen above it like him, been that person resisting authoritarianism and brutality in the face of mass hysteria.
We would like to believe that we would have taken the more difficult path of standing up against injustice in defense of the outcaste. But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion and even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?