Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  In 2018, the owner of a Pennsylvania golf club ordered black women club members to leave and called the police on them after white golfers complained that they were not moving fast enough. The women described themselves as experienced players aware of the game’s protocols and said they had paced themselves according to the groups behind and in front of them. They said they noted that the men behind them were on break and were not ready to tee up. After arriving on the scene, the police determined that no charges were warranted. But the women said the confrontation had put them on edge, and they left to avoid further humiliation.

  My work has required me to spend many, many hours in settings where I am often the only person of my ethnicity and gender, most often on planes. A flight attendant once commented on the miles I log year in and year out, “You fly more than we do.” Because I fly so often, I frequently have cause to be seated in first or business class, which can turn me into a living, breathing social experiment without wanting to be. The things that have happened to me are far from the most grievous a person might suffer when traveling in a domain that can bring out the worst in most anyone. But some have stood out as a commentary on caste in action and can be demoralizing in the unexpected moment of intrusion.

  For a flight out of Denver, I happened to be one of the first to board the plane, along with others in the front cabin. I could see the lead flight attendant greeting passengers at the boarding door. He was a man in his late twenties or early thirties, short blondish hair, and behind him was a second flight attendant, her brunette hair in a French twist.

  The tendinitis in my wrist had been flaring up, and, as I stepped onto the plane with a splint on my forearm, I looked over to the lead flight attendant for help with my carry-on.

  “Sir,” I said, “I’m having a problem with my wrist, and I wondered if you would help me get my bag in the bin.”

  He looked past me to the men behind me at the boarding door, the kind of men who would come to mind when you think of first class. He waved me along as if I were holding up the line, though no one was moving at the moment. He seemed insulted even to have been asked, as if I was not aware of how the boarding process worked.

  “There are two flight attendants in the back,” he said. “They can help you when you get back there.”

  With those curt instructions, it was as if he had pulled me out of a lineup, singled me out from the other business travelers as the one who, on sight, did not belong, the one trespassing and now seeking special treatment to which I was not entitled. Marginalized people have a hard enough time moving about in a world built for others. Now it was as if I were taking up space that belonged to its rightful passengers. It came as a shock to me, perhaps because this clipped dismissal came from a man whose generation would not be expected to hold such retrograde assumptions. Somehow the air had turned confrontational. I had asked for something he did not believe I deserved.

  “But I’m in first,” I said.

  That seemed only to make things worse. He had been caught in his moment of stereotyping and in front of others. He had disregarded all information inputs to the contrary, that I was boarding early, that luggage tags dangling from the bag I was seeking help with proclaimed that I had reached the highest possible level of loyalty to his airline. He could only have come to the conclusion he made on the basis of one thing alone: what I looked like.

  He tried to recover from the faux pas of an openly dismissive caste assumption, for what is caste if not where one belongs in a hierarchy? He had to find a way to retain his own caste position, now that a flight attendant under him in the airline’s hierarchy had heard him speak so brusquely to a passenger, wherever she happened to be seated.

  “Well, leave it here, and we’ll have to see what to do with it,” he said, sighing as if it were a bass violin instead of a rolling bag.

  The woman flight attendant who stood there during the exchange stepped forward and tried to set things right, cover for him, her superior.

  “Here,” she said, “let me help you with it. What seat are you in?”

  She walked me to the seat and helped me hoist the bag into the bin. I thanked her for her kindness.

  It was uncomfortable the rest of the flight. He was the only attendant in that cabin, and each time he passed through the aisle, the tension rose. I could feel the edge of it. He had been outed, and he punished me with a curt hostility until we landed.

  * * *

  ——

  It was a late-night flight from Portland, Oregon, to the East Coast. I had just boarded, and the flight attendant and I were looking for space to fit my roller bag into the haphazardly filled overhead compartments. Every time the flight attendant and I touched a bag to turn it on its side or to move it to the next bin, someone said, “No, you can’t touch that one, that’s my bag.”

  The man in the aisle seat behind me had two carry-ons overhead, taking up more space than allowed. I was anxious to get seated and out of this uncomfortable testing of wills. I offered to let him put his bag under my seat so that it would not take up space in front of him, anything to get the bag stored and get on our way.

  “I’d be glad to do it,” I told him and the flight attendant.

  He let out a heavy breath.

  “I put my bag where I wanted it. I don’t want it under another seat.”

  He took the bag from the flight attendant and shoved it under his own seat. He then began complaining to the man in the window seat beside him, a man, like him, from the dominant caste, seated directly behind me.

  “That’s what happens when they let just anybody in first class,” the owner of the bag said to the man next to him, loud enough for anyone around us to hear. “They should know better how to treat paying customers. I paid for my first-class ticket, and this is how they treat you.”

  The two men commiserated the whole flight, having found common cause and united by a shared resentment. It was a night flight, and I was exhausted from a long day of lectures. I needed to sleep. I let down the seat back. What did I do that for?

  The man in the window seat behind me, who had been grousing about the unfairness of it all with the man whose bag had been moved, let out a howl.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” he yelled. “I’m trying to work here! Look what you’ve done. I’ve got my laptop out and you’ve shoved it into me!”

  He slammed the back of my seat and pounded the tray forward, jostling me as he continued to hit from behind.

  “I had no control over the seatback,” I told him, looking back. “I’m just trying to get some rest.” I looked over at the white man next to me, who had seen all of this, who would have felt the shudder of my seat being pushed from behind. He would not return a glance, isolating me further.

  The men behind me continued to talk about the intrusions into first class. The air was thick with venom and made it impossible to sleep. I got up to tell the flight attendant to see if she might be able to help.

  “I am desperately tired, and I need to sleep,” I told her. “The man behind me is shoving my seat and making it impossible to get rest. Is there anything you could do? Could you explain the rules to him to defuse the situation?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know if it would help,” she said. “Why don’t you stay up here the rest of the flight?”

  “I need to rest,” I told her. “I can’t sleep standing up here, and besides, I have a seat, and I should be able to sit in it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s up to you if you want to stay up here or go back.”

  I went back and sat up straight, across the length of the country. The caste system had put me in my place.

  * * *

  ——

  I had been up since before five in the morning for the flight out of Idaho Falls. The original flight was canceled, the second one delayed, and now, finally, I was
on the last leg of the journey, the connecting flight out of Salt Lake City that would not get me in until ten-thirty P.M. I was in seat 2D, a window in first, the only passenger in that cabin who was African-American.

  The lead attendant was a black man, small in frame, cheerful, and efficient.

  “What are you having, my friend?” he asked the male passengers as he chatted them up.

  “And you?” he said, terse and impatient, when he got to me.

  Upon landing, the mad shuffle began for everyone’s respective bag in the overhead compartments. Passengers crowded into the aisle, and I was standing behind a man who looked to be in his thirties, his light hair in a buzz cut. He asked a woman next to him if she needed help with her bag. He pulled it down for her, and she thanked him.

  Then he began to reach for his own bag. It was in the compartment above and behind me. He did not speak nor gesture in my direction. Instead, he reached back and up and over me, wordlessly leaned farther and farther, his body at a backward angle against mine, pinning me under his torso and leaving me no escape because of the wall of passengers packed behind me.

  I was in disbelief, forced to arch my body back, as he rammed himself harder against me, heavy and sweaty, shifting his feet now, shoving his thick arm across my face and against the side of my neck to unloosen the bag from the compartment. He thrust his full weight, his entire frame, into mine, his back muscles crushing my breasts, his buttocks protruding into my pelvis, violating my body in full view of other passengers, and no one was saying or doing a thing.

  “Hey, I can’t go back any further!” I told him in a plea for help, loud enough for everyone around me to hear.

  He said nothing, as if I were not there, as if nobody were there, as if the laws of physics or privacy did not apply. I tried to hold my head away from his shoulder blades so that I could breathe. It was taking the ground crew forever to open the boarding door. I looked around for whoever would recognize the horror of a complete stranger forcing himself onto you. I looked over to the two young women who were inches away and who could see what he was doing. I gave them a look of distress and shock at the man’s aggression. I was needing empathy. They were standing so close, they could share a sense of womanly outrage at what was happening. But their faces were blank. They looked into space, returned no glance.

  A silence of complicity had overtaken the entire first-class cabin, and I was alone in a packed compartment. Not one of these passengers would have lost their job or a promotion, lost money or privilege, had they stood up that day. Very likely they would never see these other passengers again in their lives, and stepping up would have had no material consequences. But that day, with so very little at stake to themselves, they chose caste solidarity over principle, tribe over empathy.

  The boarding door finally opened. The passengers filed out. And the man finally eased his behind off of me. The black flight attendant, who had seen all of it, had not come to my aid nor spoken up, though he was the flight attendant in charge.

  As I approached the door, he looked up at me, sheepish and shamefaced.

  “I’m really sorry,” he said.

  “Thanks, I know,” I said, shaking my head.

  He hadn’t intervened. He, too, seemed powerless. He couldn’t likely have taken the risk. This was an upper-caste man assaulting a lower-caste woman, and the lead attendant was lower caste himself. The lead attendant very likely had no idea what the man’s position might be, what power and influence he might have had. Why should he stick his neck out for me and get on the bad side of heaven knows who? The man had bullied me, out in the open, with witnesses all around who pretended not to see. The lead attendant likely felt it would do him no good to get involved. In a caste system, things work more smoothly when everyone stays in their place, and that is what he did.

  I was shaking and livid. Once off the plane and out in the terminal, the man who had forced me into a vertical spoon with him, in front of an audience, was walking with a brisk swagger several paces ahead of me. He knew full well what he had done. Cocking his head back at me, he spat out a curt “Sorry,” and kept walking with the entitlement that comes from knowing he could get away with it. There would be no consequences; not one person had stepped to my defense or shown a blink of compassion.

  A host of factors might have made things different. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour that inured some people. Maybe it was just the singular combination of personalities that left me without anyone to stand up to it. Change one or two seats with different people, and there might have been a different outcome.

  One thing seems certain: had an African-American man pressed his body against a white woman the way this man had, it is hard to imagine that no one on board would have intervened, if only to say to him, “I’ll get your bag for you so you can get off of her.” Over the course of American history, black men have died for doing far less to white women than what he did to me that night.

  You might say, Why didn’t you complain to the airline? Why didn’t you tell him off? Those questions belie the situation. This was not the fault of the airline. As for the man who did this, he ignored my protests of his behavior. This happened because good people were silent and let it happen. I was too disgusted to reply as the man swaggered ahead of me. I made my way to the other side of the passenger walkway and continued until he was out of my sight.

  * * *

  ——

  Incursions such as these are more than personal insults and unfortunate misunderstandings. Fighting convention, fighting to be seen and treated for who you truly are, diminishes the human contract, demeans everyone, and worsens the well-being of people on all sides of these caste skirmishes. The most brazen cases lead to violence, a hallmark of a caste system at the breaking point. In 2013, on a flight into Atlanta, a white passenger actually slapped a black baby in the face because the baby was crying due to the change in altitude upon descent. Such an assault would be virtually inconceivable had a baby from the dominant caste been crying, no matter his decibel level.

  In 2017, a Vietnamese-American passenger was dragged off a United Airlines plane in Chicago, suffering injuries to his head and knocking out some of his teeth. The airline had discovered that it had overbooked the flight, and no passenger took the airline up on offers of compensation in exchange for giving up their seats. The airline chose four passengers, at random by computer, to be ejected.

  The first three passengers left the plane without incident, but the Vietnamese-American man, a physician named David Dao, said he had an urgent need to get back to his patients. He said he had paid his fare and should not have to give up his seat. The airline called security to remove him, and he was dragged by his legs in front of stunned passengers. Captured on a video that quickly went viral, the incident drew outrage across the country and in Asia.

  Dao said he was convinced that his ethnicity was a factor in his treatment, that this would not have happened to a white man of his or most any other stature. The ordeal, he said, was more horrifying than when he fled Vietnam. Even three years later, watching the video of his violent removal again, he told ABC News, “I just cried.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Cortisol, Telomeres, and the Lethality of Caste

  A young man emigrated from Nigeria at the age of seventeen to attend college in the United States. His father paid the tuition, and at the end of the first semester, the young man went to pick up the refund at the bursar’s office.

  “You speak very good English,” the clerk told him.

  The Nigerian man excoriated the clerk.

  “Of course I speak good English,” he said. “I speak English better than many Americans. I speak other languages as well. Don’t ever say that again.”

  He discovered that in America he was not seen for his skills or his education. He was seen as black before anything else. It was an identity he was unaccustomed to, that had no m
eaning back home where everyone had similar coloring. Now it seemed to mean everything. The African-Americans were always talking about being profiled and mistreated, and he hadn’t paid it much attention at first. But the longer he was in the United States, the more he shed his accent, as immigrants often do, and the more Americanized he became, the more he began to experience life not as an immigrant, not solely as a Nigerian, but as a black man in a hierarchy that disfavored people who looked like him.

  Women clenched their purses as he approached, shrank from him on the elevator, crossed the street to avoid passing near him. He was followed in stores as if he were a felon, and the authorities questioned him more intensely than he was accustomed to, more intensely than the white men, he noticed. A white driver locked her door when he merely drove up in traffic one day. He went and locked his door, too, to show that he was as concerned for his safety as she was.

  He found himself passed over for promotions as a compliance officer, and despite his seniority and experience, he was laid off, and he wondered, as many people assigned to the subordinate caste cannot help but consider, if race had anything to do with it. Before coming to America, he would have thought it preposterous. Maybe the African-Americans were not working hard enough, were not educated enough. Now, having lived longer in the United States than in Nigeria, he knew better than to dismiss what they said out of hand.

  Once when he pulled into a parking space, an older white woman, whose car he had parked next to, turned and stared, then recoiled backward in her driver’s seat. “I see her,” he told the passenger in the car with him. “I don’t give a shit.”