Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  In the more than half century since that prophecy of 1964, no Democrat running for president has ever won a majority of the white vote. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to win the presidency with a majority of the white electorate. Since that time, the Democrat who came closest, who attracted the largest percentage of white voters—at 48 percent—was fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976. Only three Democrats have made it to the Oval Office since the Johnson and the civil rights era—Carter, Obama, and Bill Clinton, who won with 39 percent of the white vote in 1992 and 44 percent in 1996.

  With whites pulling away from the Democrats and accustomed to prevailing in presidential elections through their sheer numbers, the outcome of the 2008 election was seen not merely as the defeat of John McCain, but perhaps a defeat of the historic ruling majority itself, “a challenge to the absoluteness of whites’ dominance,” wrote the political scientist Ashley Jardina of Duke University, who specializes in the behavior of the white electorate.

  Combined with census projections of an end of the white majority by 2042, Obama’s victory signaled that the dominant caste could undergo a not altogether certain but still unthinkable wane in power over the destiny of the United States and over the future of themselves and their children, and their sovereign place in the world. “The symbolism of Obama’s election was a profound loss to whites’ status,” Jardina wrote.

  This was something that no one in the dominant caste, or any other group in the country, for that matter, had ever had to contemplate. It meant that people who had always been first now had to consider the potential loss of their centrality. For many, “the ability of a black person to supplant the racial caste system,” wrote the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was “the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted.”

  That sense of fear and loss, however remote, “brought to the fore, for many whites,” Jardina wrote, “a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group,” a sense of needing to band together to protect their place in the hierarchy.

  The caste system sprang into action against this threat to the preexisting order. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, on the eve of the midterm elections in 2010, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

  * * *

  ——

  The opposition party would not succeed in denying him a second term but would obstruct virtually every proposal he made and force him to resort to executive orders to accomplish his aims. Within nine months of his inauguration, the president was addressing a joint session of Congress on his healthcare plan when a heckler interrupted an ordinarily staid affair of pomp and ritual by yelling, “You lie!” The outburst came from a Republican congressman from South Carolina, Joe Wilson. It was considered so out of order that the House of Representatives passed a resolution of disapproval against Wilson, and Sen. John McCain, the Republican who lost to Obama in 2008, declared that there was “no place for it in that setting or any other.”

  In early 2012, Air Force One landed just outside Phoenix for a presidential visit to a manufacturing plant in Arizona, a routine stop at the start of an election year in which the president would be seeking a second term. There on the tarmac to greet the president was Jan Brewer, the state’s Republican governor. The encounter quickly turned tense for such a moment of formality. As the wind rustled the tarmac, the governor, blond and slight of build, handed the president an envelope, and soon she was looking stern and agitated at him. She jabbed her finger at the leader of the free world, inches from his nose, her mouth in mid-yell, like a principal scolding a child facing detention. In the photograph of their encounter, the president appears calm and stoic, if slightly bemused, which had been his usual demeanor, as she sticks her finger in his face, as if to be saying, “And another thing…” In some countries, and with previous presidents, this might be seen as an act of aggression, a threat to a nation’s head of state, a display of profound disrespect, were it to happen at all.

  The photograph would become one of the defining images of the opposition and resentment President Obama faced in office. The difference in the accomplishments of these two people would not have been apparent from the optics of who was chastising whom. While the president was a graduate of Columbia and of Harvard Law School and had made a methodical march from state senator to U.S. senator to the Oval Office, the woman with the temerity to point her finger in his face had a two-year certificate as a radiology technician, and had risen to the governor’s mansion by accident of succession, after having been secretary of state. She was now a governor, one out of fifty, compared to the U.S. president, the highest office in the land and the most powerful in the world.

  But Gov. Brewer was from the dominant caste, her birth-ascribed status seen as inherently above his, and she did not shrink from a gesture that had the look of putting a man from the subordinate caste in his place, no matter his station. The disagreement on the tarmac had presumably arisen over a passage in a book she had written, in which she described a meeting the two of them had had some time before, a depiction that he considered inaccurate. In it, she had complained that he “thought he could lecture me, and I would learn at his knee.” The envelope she handed him was an invitation to see the Arizona border with Mexico, given that they had differing views on border security.

  Afterward, Governor Brewer denied what everyone could see. “I was not hostile,” she told reporters. “I was trying to be very, very gracious.” She went as far as to say that it was, in fact, she who felt unsafe. “I felt a little bit threatened, if you will, in the attitude that he had,” she said, even though the exchange had been in full view of cameras and Secret Service and elected officials, and despite the fact that it was she, after all, who was wagging her finger in his face, not the other way around.

  The encounter put the governor in the spotlight for the moment, and she used it to raise money for her political action committee, according to news reports at the time, and to fire up her base. She told potential donors that the message she was really giving the president that day was: “You have ONE more year.”

  * * *

  ——

  An entire machinery had moved into place upon the arrival of the first head of state from the subordinate caste. A new party of right-wing detractors arose in his wake, the Tea Party, vowing to “take our country back.” A separate movement of skeptics, who would come to be known as birthers, challenged the legitimacy of his citizenship and required him to produce an original birth certificate that they still chose to disbelieve. His opponents called him the “food stamp” president and depicted the president and the First Lady as simians. At opposition rallies, people brandished guns and bore signs calling for “Death to Obama.”

  In response to his election, Republicans began changing election laws, making it harder to vote. They did so even more vigorously after the Supreme Court overturned a section of the Voting Rights Act, removing federal election oversight that the states, each with a history of obstructing the minority vote, said was no longer needed.

  Between 2014 and 2016, states deleted almost 16 million people from voter registration lists, purges that accelerated in the last years of the Obama administration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. States enacted new voter ID laws even as they created more barriers to obtaining this newly required ID. Together, these actions had the cumulative effect of reducing voter participation of marginalized people and immigrants, both of whom were seen as more likely to vote Democrat. “A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws,” wrote the commentator Jonathan Chait, “if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.”

  Contrary to the wistful predictions of post-racial harmony, the number of hate groups in the United States surged from 602 to more than 1,000 between 2000 and 2010,
the middle of Obama’s first term in office, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. A 2012 study found that anti-black attitudes and racial stereotyping rose, rather than fell, as some might have hoped, in Obama’s first term. The percentage of Americans who expressed explicit anti-black attitudes ticked upward from 48 percent in 2008 to 51 percent in 2012, but the percentage expressing implicit bias rose from 49 percent to 56 percent. The study found that higher percentages of white respondents now saw African-Americans as violent, irresponsible, and, most especially, lazy, after his victory, despite, or perhaps because of, the studiously wholesome black family in the White House headed by two Ivy League–educated parents.

  With rising resentments, it would not be surprising that attacks on African-Americans might not only not have abated but would worsen under the unprecedented reversal of the social hierarchy. By the second term of the administration, in 2015, police were killing unarmed African-Americans at five times the rate of white Americans. It was a trend that would make police killings a leading cause of death for young African-American men and boys, these deaths occurring at a rate of 1 in 1,000 young black men and boys.

  Early on, Obama had taken symbolic steps to bridge the racial divide. He held a “beer summit” with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the officer who had arrested Gates as he tried to enter his home near Harvard, having called the summit after the uproar over his comments that the police had “acted stupidly” in arresting the Harvard professor. When Trayvon Martin was killed, Obama observed that if he had had a son, the son would have looked like Trayvon. But the caste system rose up and his approval ratings fell after even these benign gestures. The opposition party stood firm against many of his ambitions and nominees, shutting down the government time and again, refusing to confirm or even consider his Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

  The caste system had handcuffed the president as it had handcuffed the African-Americans facedown on the pavement in the videos that had become part of the landscape. It was as if the caste system were reminding everyone of their place, and the subordinate caste, in particular, that no matter how the cast of the play was reshuffled, the hierarchy would remain as it always had been.

  In a paradox of caste, many whites seemed to have known this, studies show, seemed to have trusted on some unconscious level that the caste system would hold the first black president, and the subordinate caste with which he had come to be associated, in check. As deeply as some people resented a black man presiding in the Oval Office, “most whites in the United States were not overwhelmingly concerned,” Jardina writes, “that Obama would favor blacks over their own group.”

  Thus, within the parameters in which he was forced to maneuver, he made more headway with race-neutral goals. In so doing, he managed to reshape the country’s healthcare system and lead on such issues as climate change, clean energy, gay marriage, sentencing reform, and investigations into police brutality that other administrations might have ignored altogether, while guiding the country out of recession.

  But accomplishments from those considered to have stepped out of their place often only breed more resentment, in this case inciting the tremors of discontent among those feeling eclipsed by his very existence.

  “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying,” James Baldwin once wrote, “because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.”

  Which is why Obama’s presidency and his high approval ratings “masked an undercurrent of anxiety about our changing nation,” according to Jardina. “It hid a swell of resistance to multiculturalism, and a growing backlash to immigration.”

  In November 2012, on the day after the first black president won reelection to a second term, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, went on the air and lamented to his listeners. “I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered,” Limbaugh said. “I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.”

  That same day, a troubled sixty-four-year-old man in South Florida took the most extreme action imaginable. In the time leading up to the election, according to police, Henry Hamilton, owner of a tanning salon in Key West, told friends, “If Barack gets reelected, I’m not going to be around.” He kept his word. His body was found in his condominium a day and a half after the returns came in. Two prescription bottles sat empty in his dining room. Beside him was a handwritten note demanding that he not be revived and cursing the newly reelected president.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Turning Point and the Resurgence of Caste

  In the final breaths of 2015, an influential gathering of political insiders in Washington were seeing in the New Year. It was the eve of an election season that was considered of great significance before it had even begun. I felt out of my orbit whenever I was in official Washington, and so I gravitated toward Gwen Ifill, whom I had known for years and had not seen in some time. Back during our days at The New York Times, I had been a narrative writer focused on everyday people rather than the halls of power as she had been, the intuitive empath to her political savant.

  I went straight up to her.

  “So,” I began, “what are you thinking?”

  The first seconds of 2016 were approaching, and she knew exactly what I meant. I hesitated to proffer my own opinion at first. Gwen was the beloved co-host of the NewsHour on PBS. She was a long-standing, clear-eyed Washington sage whom I, along with millions of others, admired for her brilliance and sixth sense, for how she had taken to the sharky waters of the capital as if born to it, always rising above it somehow. She was an embed in a political ecosystem that I had little patience for. I didn’t know if what I was feeling compelled to say would sound wildly off base or preposterous to someone as steeped in establishment Washington as she was.

  For some reason, I felt the need to whisper. This was supposed to be a party, after all, champagne pouring all around us, a celebration to ring in 2016. There were people from the current administration and perhaps people in the Democratic front-runner’s campaign, for all I knew, or, in any case, certainly people supporting the front-runner and expecting a continuing through line of the forward-thinking perspectives carried forth by what would soon be the outgoing administration. So I leaned in and lowered my voice.

  “People are not paying attention,” I said. “I believe he could win.”

  I didn’t say his name, and I didn’t have to. It was still early, the primaries had yet to begin. But momentum had been building for the celebrity billionaire from the time he announced his candidacy the previous June from the escalator of his tower in Manhattan, accusing Mexicans of bringing crime, drugs, and rape across the border and vowing to build a wall. Most journalists and media outlets were not taking him seriously, so I wondered what Gwen thought.

  “No question,” she said. “Of course. He could absolutely win.”

  I was not a political animal by any measure, but what I did know was the caste system, so I went on.

  “I think it’s all about 2042,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said, her face firm and resolute.

  Her response, forthright and assured, was as unsettling as it was affirming of my own instincts, because if she, with her impeccable radar, was thinking this, then it was very likely to be true. We exchanged knowing glances of acceptance of the otherwise inconceivable, as if it were already settled, whether the rest of the country realized it or not, because it was bigger than him, had always been bigger than him, and now all that was left to do was to watch it play out.

  Gwen lived just long enough to see her predictions come true and tragically passed away the week after the election. This was a loss to the country at the precise time that it could have benefited from her even-tempered analysis. That prophetic conversation was the last I would have with her, and it now seems all the more powerful in the years that followed.

  * * *

&nbs
p; ——

  Spring 2016, and into the summer, the election was virtually all that anyone could talk about. One banner headline after another, one time-honored norm shattered after another—a presidential candidate who blew off a major debate in the primaries, a presidential candidate caught on tape boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, a presidential candidate mocking a disabled reporter, arms and hands flailing, face jerking as might a middle schooler’s, a presidential candidate deriding the grieving parents of an American war hero who happened to be Muslim. A presidential candidate demeaning an American war hero, John McCain, because he had been captured. The latest breaking news report would be announced before we had even absorbed the last one, a new lexicon forming before our eyes.

  “Surely you don’t think he has a chance of winning?” a French intellectual asked me when I happened to be in Paris months before the election. “Well, yes, he could,” I told her. “He’s on the ballot. He could very well win.”

  “America would never do that,” she said, dismissively.

  * * *

  ——

  Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy. Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe that a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics.

  The liberal take was that working-class whites have been voting against their interests in supporting right-wing oligarchs, but that theory diminishes the agency and caste-oriented principles of the people. Many voters, in fact, made an assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most—the benefits they had grown accustomed to as members of the historically ruling caste in America.