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Isabel Wilkerson Talks About ‘Caste’

Wilkerson describes the ideas about race in america that fuel her new book, and david hill discusses “the vapors.”.

Hosted by Pamela Paul

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Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” is one of the year’s most highly anticipated books, coming a decade after her widely acclaimed account of the Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” On this week’s podcast, Wilkerson discusses the book’s thesis, which is that the racial order in America is best understood as a system of caste.

“It does its work invisibly, really, it’s often unseen,” Wilkerson says of caste. “I often describe it as the bones and race is the skin. And then class, for example, is the accents and the education and the clothing and the other accouterments that we can add to ourselves to adjust ourselves — the things that we have control over. I often say that caste is so fixed that if you can act your way out of it, then it’s class; but if you cannot act your way out of it, then it’s caste.”

David Hill visits the podcast to talk about his new book, “The Vapors,” which recounts the heyday of Hot Springs, Ark., as a gambling-fueled resort town. Hill, who grew up there, tells the story through the lives of three characters, including his grandmother.

“For a long time it was a major resort in America because for many years, people would come there to take baths in the hot mineral springs,” Hill says. “But what I write about in the book, and what Hot Springs really became notorious for, was being the largest illegal gambling operation in America, from the years about 1927 till 1967. When I say that, I mean it was Las Vegas before Las Vegas was Las Vegas.”

Also on this week’s episode, Dwight Garner, a book critic at The Times, asks questions of the podcast’s host, Pamela Paul, editor of the Book Review.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Jewish Journal

Connect. inform. inspire., isabel wilkerson’s new book ‘caste’ clings to the past.

• By Gil Troy
• Published September 10, 2020

In March 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign nearly imploded when reporters revealed that his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., regularly blasted the United States as irredeemably racist. “[The United States] government lied about their belief that all men were created equal,” Wright preached. “The truth is they believed that all white men were created equal.” So, “No, no, no, not God bless America,” Wright concluded: “God damn America.”

Reeling, repudiating his pastor, Obama embraced the U.S. and the American ideal. “The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society,” Obama said, after acknowledging the ugliness of slavery and the lingering bigotry still haunting Black people, “it’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country … is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation.”

Twelve years later, Wright seems to have won. Anyone echoing Obama’s optimism and faith in America now risks being labeled Trumpian — by those who don’t consider that a compliment. The party line pronounces the American experiment dead on arrival. They assume America is incorrigible, doomed by the crimes of slavery and the ongoing curse of “systemic racism.”

The latest boost to Wright’s wrongheaded reading of America comes from talented reporter Isabel Wilkerson. A glowing New York Times review pronounced her new book, “ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents ,” “an extraordinary document … an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.” Offering the highest pop culture compliment a book can get — and the greatest of sales boosts — Oprah Winfrey enthusiastically included “Caste” in her book club.

Wilkerson’s book has many merits. However, if a work offering such a pessimistic reading of U.S. history is “the keynote” for our times, we are in serious trouble.

A lyrical writer, Wilkerson has an extraordinary ability to make dense material accessible and to bring alive scenes, feelings and ideas. It’s hard not to read her book without the occasional lump in your throat or tear in your eye as she describes the evils of slavery and the ongoing wounds of racism. Consider this story from 1944, when a 16-year-old Black girl in Ohio entered an essay contest that asked: “What to do with Hitler after the War?” Wilkerson’s devastating punchline: She won “with a single sentence: ‘Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.’ ”

In addition to adding poignant examples that advance the ongoing reckoning about race in America — including some of her most humiliating moments at the hands of piggish, thoughtless whites — Wilkerson ambitiously tries shifting the conversation from “race” to “caste.” Exploring what she claims are the two other caste systems that “have stood out” in human history, in India and Nazi Germany, she identifies eight “pillars” traditionally used in constructing castes.  

In addition to adding poignant examples that advance the ongoing reckoning about race in America — including some of her most humiliating moments at the hands of piggish, thoughtless whites — Wilkerson ambitiously tries shifting the conversation from “race” to “caste.”

Caste systems are propped up by claims that discrimination is natural, even divinely sanctioned; that the condition is heritable; that you must marry within your caste; that the “higher” castes are pure, the lower orders polluted; and that certain menial jobs are most suited to the oppressed, who then are dehumanized, terrorized and made to feel inferior.

Wilkerson prefers talking about caste instead of race for two reasons. First, she wonders, “What does racist mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit it? … The fixation with smoking out individual racists or sexists can seem a losing battle in which we fool ourselves into thinking we are rooting out injustice by forcing an admission that (a) is not likely to come, (b) keeps the focus on a single individual rather than the system that created that individual, and (c) gives cover for those who, by aiming at others, can present themselves as noble and bias-free for having pointed the finger first, all of which keeps the hierarchy intact.”

By contrast, caste is invisible, insidious, like the “wordless usher in a darkened theater” steering you to inferior seats or the “stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation” of what looks like the “beautiful home” you inherited.

Here, then, is the real issue — and the real bias distorting the book. Wilkerson, like so many today, freezes the United States in its racism, calling the American caste system “the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” She views these race-conscious, anti-Black handcuffs as mostly unchanging.  

Wilkerson comes down unequivocally on one side of the longstanding historical — and existential — debate over whether slavery made racism America’s most crippling yet curable disease, or, as she believes, its chronic condition, with occasional flare-ups that cause even more pain than the usual anguish. “Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people,” she writes. “It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.” Wilkerson agrees with sociologist Stephen Steinberg that slavery wasn’t just a torn thread in “an otherwise perfect cloth. It would be closer to say that slavery provided the fabric out of which the cloth was made.”

Wilkerson, like so many today, freezes the United States in its racism.

Similarly, Wilkerson puts post-Civil War racism front and center. This reorientation rewrites the history of many phenomena, including immigration. Instead of the “uprooted” from the Old World coming to the New World and finding salvation by becoming American, it becomes a story of Europeans coming to the New World and becoming white — on the backs of Black people. “Hostility toward the lowest caste” — Black people — “became part of the initiation rite into citizenship in America. Thus, people who had descended from Africans became the unifying foil in solidifying the caste system, the bar against which all others could measure themselves approvingly.” Again, she boosts her claim by quoting an academic, in this case Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, who wrote: “It was their whiteness, not any kind of New World magnanimity, that opened the Golden Door.”

In a telling exchange bringing this new nihilism up to date, Wilkerson asked author Taylor Branch after the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, “With everything going on, where do you think we are now? Are you still thinking 1950s? I’m thinking 1880s.”

Without sugar-coating the problems of today or being insensitive to the persistent suffering of so many Blacks at the hands of subtle, polite, covered-up racists, to see 2020 as 1880 takes work. It helps if you only tell personal stories of encountering racists without ever recounting your triumphs, from landing a job at The New York Times to winning the Pulitzer Prize to writing an award-winning, instant classic of a first book in 2010, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” It helps if you only read Barack Obama’s presidency and Donald Trump’s election through the lens of “caste” — really, race — essentially treating every criticism of Obama as anti-Black and every vote for Trump as pro-white. It helps if you see the United States as a “harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations,” thanks to “our caste system.” And it really helps if you cleverly clump together the American, Indian and Nazi caste systems — while avoiding any discussion of caste in Africa.

  Wilkerson sees her focus on caste as an X-ray, illuminating the invisible, unchanging dimensions of American life.

Comparing American racism to the Nazi’s genocidal Aryanism is particularly outrageous. Wilkerson props up that proposition in three misleading ways. First, she usually writes about “America” or “The United States,” then references specific laws or incidents from Southern states, especially Mississippi. It’s true; we Northerners sometimes minimize racism as a Southern problem — that’s too self-serving. But America is not the South, and the North certainly isn’t the South. The North defeated the South and never established a Jim Crow segregationist regime. Over the decades, the North didn’t become very Southernized, but the South did become quite Northernized — for the better.

Second, and most misleading, is a lack of proportion. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews in six years, murdering two to three thousand Jews an hour when Auschwitz was running at its peak. According to the NAACP, from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 lynchings, with 72.7% of the victims — 3,446 people — being Black. That was horrific enough. Yet Wilkerson compares the public hangings and other abuses the Nazis imposed on Jews to “lynchings, preceded by mutilation,” as simply “a feature of the southern landscape.” She ignores the numbers, likely because real data would prove the comparison absurd.

Finally, neither India nor Nazi Germany struggled with the kind of guilt, hypocrisy and paradox that vexed most Americans. True, some wondered how “cultured” Germans could act so brutally. But that confusion didn’t compare to the anguished, centuries-old American struggle over slavery and now racism. That embarrassment is part of this peculiarly American striving to perfect our union.

Some analytical tools serve as mirrors, reflecting reality. Some are flashlights, highlighting particular phenomena, or prisms, singling out specific rays. Wilkerson sees her focus on caste as an X-ray, illuminating the invisible, unchanging dimensions of American life. Unfortunately, in her book — and in the broader debate today — her approach functions more like a strobe light, commanding attention but ultimately blinding us to the truth.

America isn’t a static “four-hundred-year-old social order”; it’s a dynamic, ever-striving, ever-improving democracy.

You can still fight racism while acknowledging all the progress that has been made; in fact, progress is the best guarantee of more progress. So, the fact that so many Americans resist the label “racist” is laudable — not a cover. We should rejoice that the United States today is not the Virginia of 1619 when the first slave ship arrived, the slave-owning society of 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, or the Jim Crow South of 1950. Both the changes and the increasingly marginalized nature of the worst of America suggest that Obama was right: America isn’t a static “four-hundred-year-old social order”; it’s a dynamic, ever-striving, ever-improving democracy.

Alas, that optimism has been shaken, badly and broadly — but not universally.

In a bizarre twist that proves the world is round, the nihilism of the anti-racist “Social Justice Warrior Woke Left” oddly overlaps with the nihilism of the Trumpean “Make America Great Again” crowd. Both view U.S. history in simplistic, stick-figure terms. Both see the world as “dog eat dog,” “us versus them” and “zero sum,” with one group’s gain being the other group’s loss.

What’s most disturbing about this bleak, Europeanized, Hobbesian rejection of New World reformism and optimistic, integrative E Pluribus Unumism is that it’s self-defeating. Wilkerson ends by calling for “radical empathy,” meaning “putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.” It’s hard to cultivate “radical empathy” or any hope for change when you tell people they are incurably racist and pronounce our racial predicament unchanging.

The message of U.S. history, the lessons Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Barack and Michelle Obama, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson taught, is that America changes by appealing to the best of Americans, to the aspirational America, to the hope for hope, not the assumption that we’re hopeless.

I’d rather lead the race to stop judging people by race than believe the die is cast because we’ll always be cast in castes.

Gil Troy , a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University, is the author of “The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland — Then, Now, Tomorrow.”

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Caste Offers a New Word for Injustice in America, Not a New Way of Thinking

What is caste?

“Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . Caste is like the bones of an old house, “the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.” It is also like “our bones,” literal bones, the structural integrity of our innards kept mostly invisible without X-ray. Caste is like a detailed medical history. “Caste is a disease.” It is a sluggish poison, “an intravenous drip to the mind,” shoring up an “immune system” that is also vulnerable to its “toxins.” It is cellular, “molecular,” “neurological,” “cardiovascular.” Like subduction-zone activity below the Earth’s surface, caste is “the unseen stirrings of the human heart.” Caste is not, however, about “feelings or morality” (though it does “live on in hearts and habits”). Caste is drama, “a stage of epic proportions” with unremovable costumes and an uncorpseable script. Caste is onstage, “a performance,” and caste is, also, somehow, “the wordless usher in a darkened theater.” It is a magic “spell.” A corporation. A Sith Lord. A high-rise building with a flooded basement. Like in The Matrix , “an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species.” It is a ladder; we exist on its rungs. “Caste is structure,” whatever that means precisely.

What caste is not is “the R-word” — that is, race or racism. It is not reducible to race — nor gender, nor class. This Wilkerson realized during research for her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns , an intensely investigated, intimate narrative of manifold migration in 20th-century America. The Warmth of Other Suns , widely praised and an instant New York Times best seller, went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, among other accolades. Working on that book and learning about the Jim Crow underpinnings of what’s often flatly called “the Great Migration,” Wilkerson “discovered … that I was not writing about geography and relocation, but about the American caste system.” Her subjects sought asylum from something much more “insidious” than the age-old Negro question (“How does it feel to be a problem?” W.E.B. Du Bois writes in the well-trodden first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk ). Black Southerners — sharecroppers, domestics, and above all ex-slaves and their children — were escaping a “legal caste system” borne of enslavement, mutated into Jim Crow during the calamitous transition from slavery to freedom deferred. “For this book,” the Pulitzer Prize winner writes, “I wanted to understand the origins and evolution of classifying and elevating one group of people over another.” For that purpose, “racism,” she concluded, “was insufficient.” And as she’s adapted her language, taking on the terms of caste — “the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society” — she beckons readers to do so, too. In that sense Caste is a ride-along, like all persuading histories. “Some of this may sound like a foreign language,” she warns. Foreign isn’t quite the word for it, or not the one I would use. Perhaps messy is, though.

Public conversations about race in America could use some messiness. We could stand to be more awkward amid too much PR. As Wilkerson succinctly identifies, “racism” — and “race” with it — has been so worked over in nomenclature it no longer, if ever it did, pricks the minds of the people who need to be schooled. Though defined sociologically as a compounding entity of bias and power, “racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not.” Wilkerson asks, “What does racist mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit to it?” Where are the teeth when a term like “white supremacy” is denounced by gods of mass culture, the likes of Taylor Swift or Donald Trump? In the wake of such rapid, online-propelled appropriation of the literal terms of radical political and cultural judgment, the language is no longer compelling. Just look at recent debates over the usefulness of the acronym BIPOC — “Black peoples and Indigenous peoples and peoples of color” or, as I prefer it, “Black and Indigenous peoples of color” — which exhibit anxiety over the seamless integration of a new racial term without accompanying enlightenment. While it used to emphasize the people Wilkerson might call “lower castes,” whose experiences in America may be unique from that of other people of color in the nation (“middle castes,” in Wilkerson’s terms), BIPOC has quickly become another means for white people, or the “dominant caste,” to run their racial sentiments on autopilot — extending blanket solidarity to “BIPOC co-workers” in workplaces with no apparent Native employees or, as often happened with the predecessor “POC,” applying the term in lieu of “Black.”

Caste takes precedence because of precedent — Wilkerson prefers the word caste because it is, in a word, ancient. She describes race as a strictly visible phenomenon, “a hologram,” “decoy,” or “front man” with respect to caste. Though the book includes evidence of race acting otherwise — like the 1922 case Takao Ozawa v. United States in which, Wilkerson writes, “the Court held unanimously that white meant not skin color but ‘Caucasian’” — these moments, per the book, only underscore how unqualified racial analysis leaves itself bound to the ambivalent whims of the American racial imagination. By contrast, caste is firm, “fixed and rigid,” so rigid it “shape-shifted to keep the upper caste pure by its own terms.” In the United States, 19th- and early-20th-century European immigrants such as the Irish entered the nation and were called “Negroes turned inside out” (Black people, in turn, were called “smoked Irish”) — not a century later whiteness evolved and enveloped them, folding their descendants and contemporary equivalents into the body politic. The ethnic, religious, and cultural makeup of the upper caste has changed since Plymouth Rock, but the necessity of a bottom caste has not. Despite race’s mutability, the American bottom caste, Wilkerson argues, is and has always been Black — or her preferred designation, “African-American.”

Caste does not abandon racial terms. Wilkerson does not leave us to flounder with the labels she wants incorporated, though at times I wished she would. In a chapter called “The Intrusion of Caste in Everyday Life,” Wilkerson describes an interlude between “a white contractor,” “a white engineer,” and “a Black engineer,” “who happened to be African-American and a woman.” The characters retain these titles just until the very end of the story, which transforms the white engineer into “a dominant-caste man.” Maybe, in keeping with the book’s soft spot for metaphors of pathology (and metaphor in general), this is a spoonful of the old ways to help the new vocab go down. But as I progressed through this big book, saddled with terms I’m to understand are inadequate, I wondered why, a couple hundred pages in, I still wasn’t trusted with the training wheels off. Perhaps the many scenes selected from the primary pages of history, the chilling tales of caste at work, would have read less poignantly without the not-so-classical window dressing of whiteness and Blackness and, more rarely, other forms of racialized otherness. Or maybe Wilkerson acquiesces that the modality of race, perceived by senses in addition to sight, accounts for something caste cannot.

Blackness, for one. The book’s insistence on “African-American” for Black people within the nation’s borders reads old-school at best and, at worse, intensely awkward in contemporary contexts. Consider one endnote that refers to today’s regular police killings of “unarmed African-Americans,” citing the research group, Mapping Police Violence. However, Mapping Police Violence tracks victims who are, among other races, best described as “black.” The 2015 data cited by Wilkerson, for example, includes NYPD’s murder of David Felix, a Haitian man with schizophrenia. For anyone not accustomed to thinking diversely about Blackness, this might sound like the smallest of grievances, and yet it can hardly be unimportant to the book’s urge for more precise terminology. Caste proposes a remedy, yet its national articulation of present-day Black people raises more questions than answers. If Black immigrants reside in the upper reaches of the lowest caste — due to their actual and perceived difference from descendants of the American South — as outlined in chapter 16, how ought we to account for their representation as frequent victims of state violence? Where do we place their children, Black Americans whose descendants’ migrations do not fit the regional patterns explicated in The Warmth of Other Suns ?

But this is not actually a problem for the interior life of the book, which doesn’t care much for post-’70s history, in which Blackness in America became more ethnically hybrid. It also mostly concerns itself with the South; the primary, and a good portion of secondary, research (including an oft-cited 1956 study of slavery by late historian Kenneth M. Stampp) emerges from the expanse of Jim Crow. And contemporary scenes tend toward autobiography. In scenes such as these, another awkwardly unavoidable term emerges, the C-word: class. In Caste , class is, like race, variable, its privileges “acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity.” Caste is fascinated by scenarios in which white people misread Black affluence, bringing them low in the face of pedigree, education, and the fineness of their dress. In chapter 23, “Shock Troops on the Borders of Hierarchy,” Wilkerson shares three personal encounters at the scene of a plane’s front cabin. Though “I frequently have cause to be seated in first or business class,” she writes, the occasion “can turn me into a living, breathing social experiment without wanting to be.” She is judged, gossiped about, ignored by staff, accosted by a passenger who retrieves his luggage as if her body isn’t there, while the rest of the cabin watches silently. The chapter concludes with an incident that happened to someone else, David Dao, who was dragged by his legs down the aisle of a United Airlines plane at O’Hare. Dao, a Vietnamese-American physician, belongs to the racially and ethnically jumbled category of “middle caste,” according to Wilkerson, and therefore on a higher rung of the ladder, or higher floor of the apartment complex, than she. It is thus not clear what the proximity of these narratives is meant to illuminate. Deprived the terms of race, class, and gender, not much is revealed besides the cross-caste indignities of air travel.

I am being only a bit facetious, conforming to the language of caste in Caste , which I now suspect is more unyielding than caste itself, unprepared for anomalies that, if one spends enough time observing Earth, tend to amass into banalities. (In the case of the white officer, Eric Casebolt, who body-slammed a teenage Black girl at a McKinney, Texas, pool party in 2015, Wilkerson remarks that it “would be hard to imagine” an officer doing the same “with a young girl from the same caste”; the following chapter, however, includes the circumstances of Freddie Gray, who was killed by officers who shared his caste, as an example of “the otherwise illogical phenomenon” of intra-caste violence.) Caste could benefit from more, or maybe deeper, research on the histories of resistance movements, particularly the work of late Caribbean scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose Silencing the Past appears as a bibliographic entry but is not cited in the body of Caste . As Trouillot writes in that book, historians, or readers of history, cannot assume that our inheritance of the past is identical to the past as it unfolded in its time. There is danger in drawing too fine a parallel.

Wilkerson knows this well enough when she ventures across the Atlantic for firsthand research into Indian caste and German Nazism, the other two castes she considers as formidable as America’s own. This is another benefit of caste language — historical comparison, getting America and Germany and the Indian subcontinent on the same page, which she stresses is a unique feat of her book. Though historical and cultural asides about how caste exists or existed in these places are numerous, anecdotes are selected by glint of their similarity to U.S. formulations of caste. If you thought the Nazis were awful, well, they learned it from Jim Crow, and even softened some aspects of U.S. caste deemed too severe for a German populace.

If caste is us, the book asks, how does one “dig up the taproots of hierarchy” without killing the tree, or torching the house, or whatever image one prefers. It would seem that it can’t be done, an answer fine by me. If caste is “who we are” — inside of us, deep, to the bone, in the nerves, at the heart of our matter — it leads to reason that the only answer to a problem of caste is self-immolation. But the book does not end on such a note, or anything like it. Instead, it finds comfort in sentimentality, faith that the answer lies in the heart — “the Last Frontier,” according to the final full chapter. I can’t blame Wilkerson, it’s a nice place to be, a place where we can believe people in power are one sincere interaction away from radical empathy. A place where the phrase “newly minted anti-racist, anti-casteist, upper-caste woman,” given to a family friend after she tells off a waiter who neglects their interracial table in favor of white patrons, rolls off the tongue without irony. The language is slightly different, but we’ve been here before, have we not?

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Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson – review

A Pulitzer prize winner draws parallels between America, India and Nazi Germany in her unsettling history of racial hierarchies

I n the late 1960s, in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent social unrest, a white school teacher in the farm town of Riceville, Iowa, undertook a now famous experiment on her all-white class of third graders.

She separated the blue-eyed kids from those with brown eyes, telling them that the brown-eyed kids were not as good as the blue-eyed kids; that they were slower, not as smart, would not be allowed to drink from the water fountain and could not play with the blue-eyed ones. She wanted them, like so many African American children, to experience, if only for a moment, prejudice based on an arbitrary physical trait.

By break-time, “brown eyes” had been adopted as a playground insult. Soon after, the brown-eyed children “looked downcast and defeated” and by the end of the day the impact on their academic performance was apparent as brown-eyed children were taking twice as long as normal to finish their phonics exercises.

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and acclaimed author Isabel Wilkerson recounts this story in Caste: The Lies That Divide Us as a key illustration of the way that, beyond the specific categorisations of race or class, this process of creating artificial hierarchies can work to subjugate people in any culture.

Wilkerson invites us to see this as the deeper psychological process that defines 400 years of racism – what she calls America’s caste system – drawing a comparison with two other such structures – “ the tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany” and “the lingering, millennia-long caste system of India”. In each of these cases, one group sets out to stigmatise and dehumanise another to justify a state of lasting domination.

Laying bare the roots and machinations of that process in a style that combines history, personal testimony and analysis, Wilkerson itemises “eight pillars of caste”, which range from assertions of divine will and natural law to strategies of “terror as enforcement” and “cruelty as a means of control”. If race is the language in which Americans have been trained to see humans, she argues, then caste is its grammar and enduring structure.

Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer, for her feature reporting of the midwestern floods in 1993, when she worked for the New York Times . Since then, she has taught at Emory, Princeton and Boston universities and lectured at more than 200 colleges around the world. Caste is the follow-up to her acclaimed bestselling debut in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns .

As research for that book, she interviewed more than a thousand African Americans who, between 1915 and 1970, had made “the great migration” in search of jobs and freedom from the entrenched racial hierarchies of the American south, towards the perceived promised land of the country’s northern and western cities.

When she started working on The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson initially thought she was writing about “geography and relocation”. Only later did she realise that she was uncovering the story of “a stigmatised people, 6 million of them, who were seeking freedom … only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went”. It was these thoughts that led her to explore the history of American racism within the context of other, global systems of exploitation; a “desire to reach out across the oceans to better understand how all of this began”.

The approach she takes is both persuasive and unsettling. In Caste , she demonstrates, for example, how architects of the Third Reich, “in debating how to institutionalise racism [in Germany], began by asking how the Americans did it” and found, in the US, the “classic example” of a “racist jurisdiction”, leaving us to consider how far this legacy persists, whether in modern America today or elsewhere.

In the everyday acts of subtle racism – at the airport, in a restaurant, at an academic conference – Wilkerson finds that this “unseen hierarchy” repeatedly undermines her self-image as a middle-class professional, and even a member of the cultural elite. It suggests that beneath the veneer of meritocratic idealism lie deeper layers of the American psyche where white supremacy still reigns.

But the case Wilkerson puts forward is inspiring and hopeful. Her writing incorporates and reflects the anti-racist traditions embodied by figures such as African American liberationist WEB Du Bois and the trailblazer of India’s Dalit movement, Bhimrao Ambedkar, who wrote: “Caste is [just] a notion; it is a state of mind.” Like him, Wilkerson wants us to recognise that caste can be dismantled, setting everyone free.

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A Book Review on

Caste: The origins of our discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson (2020). New York, NY: Random House. 388 pp.

Caste , by American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson, is a book that exposes the struggles the United States has experienced due to the preservation of the constraints and legacy of slavery that still leaves its mark on our modern society. It attempted to articulate the incessant confusion that ensues as two sides struggle to either maintain or tear down the de facto caste boundaries that have been oppressing one side of the American society. The latent caste dwells on many different aspects of society and notable peoples who have challenged the system. The author has also been noted for her previous work known as The Warmth of Other Suns, detailing the great migration of millions of African Americans leaving the South to escape the brunt of Jim Crow. She has also won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism along with the National Humanities Medal. Along with this line of work, Caste describes the intricate network placed within the United States to constrain the African Americans in society, a literal caste system designed to make sure that a race takes “their role” in society.

The network of caste functioning in many different situations still exists in American society from sports to science, criminal justice to poverty. Aligning with the perspective of critical race theory, this book specifically presents how a race came to enforce a role that forces suppression by outlining how the suppression not only takes a toll on the suppressed caste, but also on the enforcers in society. Wilkerson provides many historic examples and even her own accounts and emphasizes the cost that the caste system takes on the society it encompasses, especially the extreme amount of stress and turmoil that comes from all sides through attempts to keep the system in place. The suppressed become a miserable class that only grows to accept their own misery, with even the behaviors and innate personalities of a person being altered heavily by one’s presumed role in a society, which is all based upon a shaky concept of race in America.

Through the use of many narratives throughout the book, Wilkerson compares the caste system in America with those that could have been found globally, from the subcontinent of India to the forced oppression that was subjected to people under Nazi Germany. This comparison allows readers to see the innate system that is being upheld, but through a unique analytic lens. With such comparisons, the author points out the false sense of entitlement, superiority, and policing that the upper-class places on itself, a damaging illusion that ends up doing more harm than good as the entirety of society loses out on many opportunities to advance. She especially enunciates the use of propaganda and false senses of superiority in her explanation of caste, which explains how the lower caste is eventually led to believe that their role on the bottom rungs of society was naturally the role they were supposed to hold. She argues that caste will, in the end, damage so many people, literally leading to death for many, and develop unnecessary social turmoil due to the class boundaries it creates. Most of the book discloses this deep-strung caste society that even turns one against their own race, as the caste becomes innate within a group, and the suppression manifests itself. This central theme clearly reveals how white supremacy becomes morally and legally justified despite the absence of official de jure segregation ( Orbe and Allen, 2008 ).

Wilkerson also examines attempts to subvert the caste system and reveals that even such attempts were not as obviously “change based” as demonstrated in the 2008 election. She rather highlights the backlash and the pushes against those attempts at change, while maintaining the stance that those changes would have helped society in general. In retrospect, many challenges to the caste system are duly noted, ranging from the free African Americans of the early United States to an African American president in our modern society. Overall, Wilkerson arrays and sheds light on a wide range of perspectives and accounts that the caste system based upon absurd guidelines is a sly concept that only damages American society, directly contradicting the values of democracy that America had supposedly found itself on.

The book, Caste, contains a multitude of narratives to deliver deep-running messages by showing many different aspects of American life from the perspectives of the people who had to live on the bottom rungs of the caste society. The narratives portray unveiling realities from the origins of the caste system to the modern day through stories like Satchel Paige’s baseball career, writer Allison Davis’ accounting of the South, and even the author’s own experiences of the caste system. Interestingly, this work takes a new approach to analyze the innate trend of caste systems by comparing the American caste with the methods of Nazi Germany and the infamous Indian caste system, convincing the audience that any caste system destroys society by wrapping around all aspects of life.

The way the author presents her messages, backing main points with many smaller stories, is very effective in detailing a variety of circumstances and lifestyles, describing all aspects of life as well as her central message: caste is a menacing octopus that spreads its tentacles around all facets of life, devastating all that it touches so that nobody is truly benefited from it. Moreover, racism yields cumulative effects across institutional, social, economic, and political levels ( De La Garza, 2015 ). Everything from the Charles Stuart case all the way to Wilkerson’s own experiences with a plumber all ties into how caste has truly warped all aspects of life in an oppressive black hole that society cannot escape from. This perspective is strengthened by Wilkerson’s decision to spread her messages among a network of different stories that only come together over the central message of caste. This micronarrative method well validates the argument that racism is a challenge that is ever dominant, emerging throughout every aspect of society, and a shadow that envelops the society even though the upper caste may not even see it ( De La Garza and Ono, 2016 ).

Caste is very persuasive because of this specific methodology Wilkerson uses. The intricate blanket that caste acts as is made even more evident due to the fact that Wilkerson delivers her main themes through smaller stories. But something especially more noteworthy is the smaller ideals that appear within the stories as well. Wilkerson, as the book goes on, is constructing an image, as each critical aspect comes together to form a central idea much like how each small story comes together to display a central message. This comes not just from the similar ideals that occur in her stories, but also from the differences in them. The book is in fact organized by those smaller ideals that are behind the caste system, as the individual stories tell diverse aspects of the caste. Examples include the absorption of the caste identity by the bottom caste in attempts to try to avert the oppressive fist of the dominant caste established by the history of “sellouts” that have existed since the times of slavery; the sustaining need for the dominant caste to control the lower caste to perpetuate their power is demonstrated by an incident in Oakland where a father was overruled by a dominant stranger in addressing his own son, and; the purposeful lack of attention given to the lower caste during times of crisis is exemplified by the lack of attention given to a bombing incident in 2018 Austin Texas based on caste lines. These stories that illustrate what builds and sustains caste are how Wilkerson claims that racism extends to all aspects of life, not a solid entity that is a mere obstacle and infuses a series of false ideals that have clogged every path available with roadblocks.

Consistently, Wilkerson focuses on the continuation of a caste system, stating that the legacy of slavery and racism in America is not a mere thorn in history that still causes bleeding today. It is something that was always innate in American society, resulting from the attempts by the dominant caste to assert a false sense of dominance over the lower caste due to the ideals of a previously slave-holding society. In fact, with many comparisons and testimonies from the societies of Nazi Germany and India in particular, caste is recognized to be more of a way that society functions, as every individual action must be aligned into the caste system as well. This perspective serves to support the idea that caste is not only based on American circumstances, but that caste can exist everywhere.

Many of the stories Wilkerson uses, like the previously mentioned Austin bombing, are from modern times, while some, like the references to the Nazis, are from a bygone age. Emphasizing the fact that caste encompasses every aspect of life across the relevant American timeline, she has compiled stories from a variety of backgrounds across a variety of ages and successfully created her analogy of caste: the dark octopus that stretches its tentacles across all facets of society. This variety of stories from differing times symbolizes the reiterating social inequality descending continuously, reminding that caste is not a relic of the past, but present today even if some people are oblivious to it. As critical race theorists argue, the social structure that the white men are on top still exists in American society as a result of the continued presence of de facto segregation. This frontal message also implies that the symptoms of caste can seem very small or very coincidental but are the results of the time of de jure segregation. Wilkerson carefully builds the image of caste as an imperishable cage in society with this masterfully compiled series of stories and studies, which serves first and foremost as a reminder that America’s past problems have only been carried over.

In conclusion, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson takes a unique way to present the subject of racism and the caste system that has been imposed in American society. Through a new narrative approach, which focuses on many individual stories and parallels to create a broader picture, this work contributes to building a clearer understanding of the vastness and depth of the caste system. It is a very illuminative work on the reality of racial relations and the influence of racial politics in American society, demonstrating how the caste system has been molded into society all the way into the present.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

De La Garza, A. T. (2015). “A Critical Eulogy for Joaquin Luna: Mindful Racial Realism as an Intervention to End Racial Battle Fatigue,” in Racial Battle Fatigue: Insights from the Front Lines of Social justice Advocacy . Editor J. Martin (New York, NY: Praeger ), 177–190.

Google Scholar

De La Garza, A. T., and Ono, K. A. (2016). “Critical Race Theory,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy . Editors K. B. Jensen, and R. T. Craig (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons ), 319–399.

Orbe, M. P., and Allen, B. J. (2008). “Race Matters” in theJournal of Applied Communication Research. Howard J. Commun. 19, 201–220. doi:10.1080/10646170802218115

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Keywords: race, diversity, culture, discrimination, upheaval, systemic racism

Citation: Kim I (2021) Book Review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Front. Commun. 6:735884. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2021.735884

Received: 03 July 2021; Accepted: 19 July 2021; Published: 02 August 2021.

Copyright © 2021 Kim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Isaac Kim, [email protected]

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THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS

by Isabel Wilkerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2020

A memorable, provocative book that exposes an American history in which few can take pride.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist chronicles the formation and fortunes of social hierarchy.

Caste is principally associated with India, which figures in the book—an impressive follow-up to her magisterial The Warmth of Other Suns —but Wilkerson focuses on the U.S. We tend to think of divisions as being racial rather than caste-based. However, as the author writes, “caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” That social order was imposed on Africans unwillingly brought to this country—but, notes Wilkerson, “caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive.” If Africans ranked at the bottom of the scale, members of other ethnic orders, such as Irish indentured servants, also suffered discrimination even if they were categorized as white and thus hierarchically superior. Wilkerson writes that American caste structures were broadly influential for Nazi theorists when they formulated their racial and social classifications; they “knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans.” Indeed, the Nazi term “ untermensch ,” or “under-man,” owes to an American eugenicist whose writings became required reading in German schools under the Third Reich, and the distinction between Jew and Aryan owes to the one-drop rules of the American South. If race links closely to caste in much of Wilkerson’s account, it departs from it toward the end. As she notes, the U.S. is rapidly becoming a “majority minority” country whose demographics will more closely resemble South Africa’s than the norms of a half-century ago. What matters is what we do with the hierarchical divisions we inherit, which are not hewn in stone: “We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.”

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-23025-1

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | PUBLIC POLICY | ETHNICITY & RACE | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Notes on the first 150 years in america.

by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE

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Caste by Isabel Wilkerson Is a Trailblazing Work on the Birth of Inequality

And it may be the book that helps save us.

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Her historical opus draws on years of research, stories, and previously published works to reveal, for example, that the Nazis used U.S. miscegenation laws as a blueprint for their own approach to genocide, and that Martin Luther King Jr., on a 1959 visit to India, observed, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” That realization informed his civil rights work thereafter. Wilkerson unearths bone-chilling parallels in systems of oppressive regimes that otherwise seem radically dissimilar to explain caste and how it predated and helped define racism in America.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Caste opens with an iconic image from a 1936 Nazi rally in Germany, in which all the shipyard workers photographed, except one, are saluting the führer. That lone man stands, arms crossed, refusing to heil Hitler, “on the right side of history,” epitomizing the energy and resilience we all must summon to get free of “the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid” that still molds our society.

Weaving in and out of past and present, Wilkerson provides the kind of history lesson that gives rise to countless aha moments. She shares relatable personal anecdotes alongside inspirational accounts of how people from Albert Einstein to Satchel Paige found their own unique ways to oppose racism. Wilkerson also revisits chapters of American history often ignored in textbooks and delineates what she terms “eight pillars of caste.”

“We in the developed world,” she observes, “are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.”

We may not have built the house—or the caste system—but we are its heirs, and it’s up to us to acknowledge that what we ignore will not fix itself. “Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see,” writes Wilkerson. Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us.

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Emily Bernard is author of the acclaimed 2019 essay collection Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine . She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale and is Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

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By Justin Chang

Is it the end of the world if Kirsten Dunst isn’t around to witness it? I’m beginning to wonder. At the mystical aliens-among-us climax of Jeff Nichols’s “Midnight Special” (2016), it is Dunst, aglow with Spielbergian wonderment, who compels our surrender to the thrill of the unknown. In Lars von Trier’s end-of-days psychodrama, “Melancholia” (2011), Dunst, giving her greatest performance, all but wills her clinical depression into a cataclysmic reality. And I’m tempted to throw in Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” (2017), an intimate Civil War gothic in which Dunst, as a dour Virginia schoolteacher, distills the existential gloom of the moment into every shattered stare. It may not be Armageddon, but, from her terrified vantage, who’s to say that tomorrow is another day?

A very different civil war swirls around Dunst in “Civil War,” a dystopian shocker set in a not too distant American future. The English writer and director Alex Garland has an undeniable flair for end-times aesthetics, and he and his cinematographer, Rob Hardy, rattle off image after unsettling image of a nation besieged. Their camera lingers on bombed-out buildings, blood-soaked sidewalks, and, in one surreal tableau, a highway that has become a vehicular graveyard, with rows of abandoned cars stretching for miles. Plumes of smoke always seem to be rising from somewhere in the distance, and apart from a few congregation zones—a makeshift campsite where kids play with abandon, a crowded block where desperate Brooklynites line up for water rations—the landscapes are eerily emptied out. At night, a deceptive stillness sets in, and the sky lights up, beautifully, with showers of orange sparks. We could be watching fireflies at dusk, if the hard pop of gunfire didn’t warn us otherwise.

Strictly as a piece of staging, “Civil War” is as vividly detailed a panorama of destruction as I’ve seen since “Children of Men” (2006), or perhaps the Garland-scripted zombie freakout of “28 Days Later” (2002). Even Dunst has never stared down a more imposing vision—and stare it down she does, invariably through the lens of a camera. Her character, Lee, is a skilled photojournalist, and if your mind doesn’t automatically leap to Lee Miller, celebrated for her stunning images of the Second World War, rest assured that Garland’s script is eager to connect the dots. This Lee may not have her namesake’s celebrity glamour or her willingness to turn the camera on herself. But Dunst gives the character a comparable steeliness, a cut-the-crap professionalism that gets you immediately on her side. She has fearlessly covered sieges, firefights, and humanitarian crises the world over; now, with a tightly set jaw and an unwavering seriousness of purpose, she’s confronting the horror in her own back yard.

The plot comes at us in a rush of details so clipped and vague that you can’t help but suspect that they’re largely irrelevant. In a fanciful twist, Texas and California have cast their red-blue animus aside and forged the Western Forces, a secessionist axis seeking to topple the President (the ruthless, mirthless Nick Offerman), a despot who has appointed himself to a third term. Florida, not to be outdone, has launched a separatist campaign, too. In response, the President has called in his troops and launched air strikes against American citizens. With these militarized factions attacking one another relentlessly, the entire country has descended into poverty and lawlessness, and Lee has seen and photographed it all. Now she sets her sights on the White House, where it seems that the conflict will finally end, with the President cornered and overthrown.

But, first, there’s a treacherous road to travel from New York to Washington, D.C. Along for the ride are two reporters: Joel (Wagner Moura), who tempers his cynicism with a wolfish grin, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a distinguished political writer whose instincts are as sturdily old-school as his suspenders. Then, there’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), the youngest and most surprising addition to the group. She’s an aspiring photographer who idolizes Lee (both of them) and, like many a plucky outsider, becomes a de-facto stand-in for the audience. Jessie is talented, serious-minded, with a purist’s preference for black-and-white film. She is also reckless and naïve, and Lee is infuriated by her presence on this dangerous mission. Lee has already saved her life once, in an early scene, yanking her out of harm’s way shortly before a bomb explodes, leaving behind streams of blood and mangled body parts. There is more carnage to come, and Lee knows that Jessie—indeed, all of them—might not survive.

This isn’t the first time Garland has sent a small group of courageous folk on a perilous journey. That’s more or less the premise in his screenplays for “28 Days Later,” the space thriller “Sunshine” (2007), and the terrifying “Annihilation” (2018), his second feature as a writer-director. (He also wore both hats on “Ex Machina” and “Men.”) We accept these premises because we accept the conventions of genre, and because the stories themselves, for all their visceral grip, stake little claim to real-world verisimilitude. But “Civil War” has loftier ambitions; its parable of American infighting means to sound a note of queasy alarm, as if we were just one secessionist screed or Presidential abuse of power away from tumbling into a comparable nightmare.

Why, then, despite the sweep and scale of Garland’s world-building and world-destroying—and with an election-year release titled “Civil War”—do we remain at arm’s length, engaged yet unconvinced? As the four principal characters make their way south, they bear witness to an America gone unsurprisingly mad. But, even when a knot forms in the pit of your stomach, you’re more persuaded by the tautness of Garland’s craft, the skill with which he modulates suspense and dread, than by his understanding of how such an immense catastrophe might really play out. Whenever the mood lightens, you know, instinctively, that a tragic swerve is right around the corner. When Lee and her companions are ambushed at an abandoned Christmas theme-park display, your terror is held in check by the winking nastiness of the setup—and that’s before a lawn Santa catches a bullet in the face. The movie’s most chilling sequence—in a nicely demented touch, Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s offscreen husband, pops up as a murderous psychopath—is also its most dubiously contrived. Was it really necessary to introduce and then immediately sacrifice two nonwhite characters to score a point about the racism that lurks in America’s heartland? It’s not the only question Garland leaves unanswered.

The point, if “Civil War” has one, is that war is not only hell but also addictive, and that, for an alarming swath of the population, the joy of meting out rough justice with a rifle outstrips any deeper moral or ideological convictions. But war coverage has its own allure, and before long Jessie is hooked; the more field experience she gets, the more indelible the rush. In skirmish after skirmish, she masters the tools of her trade and inures herself to the trauma that comes with using them. As bullets whiz by and tanks roll past, she learns what it means to embed oneself, to capture dramatic images without interfering, to risk everything for the sake of the shot. (The scenes of photographers at work are often set to jarringly irreverent needle drops; a blast of De La Soul seems to capture—and interrogate—the desensitization their job demands.)

As a tribute to the work that journalists do, “Civil War” feels entirely sincere—but even here the fuzziness of Garland’s execution undermines his nobler intentions. What outlets and platforms are Lee and her colleagues using to disseminate that work? The media industry, a disaster zone even in peacetime, appears to have collapsed. Internet connections are spotty to nonexistent, and the conflict rages, for better or worse, without the breathless incursions and distortions of social media. One character makes wry reference to “whatever is left of the New York Times ”; another notes that in the U.S. Capitol journalists are treated as enemy combatants and shot on sight. Such demonization of the press, with its grim echo (or harbinger?) of Trumpist rule, is about as close as the movie gets to advancing a remotely political point of view. The more arresting its doomsday images—a daring raid on the White House, a fiery assault on the Lincoln Memorial—the more Garland’s war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t amusing, as the credits roll on the appalling final tableau, to speculate about the aftermath. Will the Western Forces be required to make state-specific concessions in order to maintain their rickety alliance? Will California start banning books if Texas relaxes its abortion laws? I have a sneaking suspicion that Florida presses on with its own fight for independence, and in so doing ushers in the war’s next phase. If at first you don’t secede, try, try again. ♦

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