By Milo Leong
American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner, Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents has received global praise from the general public and became a New York Times best-seller last year. But it has been met with harsh criticism from some in academia.
Isabel Wilkerson’s New York Times best-seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, published in August 2020.
As part of its “Tertulia” series, the Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS) program hosted a live Zoom event in which UC Santa Barbara faculty had the opportunity to give their own critique of Wilkerson’s work.
A tertulia is a salon-like gathering to discuss culture and current affairs. The speakers were assistant professors Utathya Chattopadhyaya of the History department, Terrance Wooten of the Black Studies department, as well as LAIS program director, Cecilia Méndez, who initiated the idea for the event.
In her book, Wilkerson describes race in America as part of a caste system by comparing the experience of people of color in the United States to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany. “Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you,” she writes.
UC Santa Barbara professor of History Utathya Chattopadhyaya, spoke on Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents during an event hosted by the Latin American and Iberian Studies program.
“Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin,” Wilkerson writes in Caste. This is the main idea Wilkerson seeks to explain in the book and was the biggest point of contention for the UCSB panelists.
Chattopadhyaya, who specializes in the history of South Asia and British Imperialism, feels that Wilkerson not only mischaracterizes race but overdetermines caste. “To say that caste is the bones and race the skin is to miss the historical fact that caste and race mutually co-constitute one another,” Chattopadhyaya said. He said that those who truly wish to ponder oppression and all of its complications -- race, gender, caste, etc -- need not replace one for the other as they build on intersectionality.
On a similar note, Wooten voiced frustration with how the book handles race in the United States. Wilkerson rarely uses the word “racism” in Caste.
UC Santa Barbara professor of Black Studies Terrance Wooten, contributed to a conversation on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents during a Latin American and Iberian Studies program event.
“I found this narrative both intriguing, as I admittedly do find myself sometimes moved by a good origins story, and troublesome,” he said. “Just as quickly as I find myself moved, I remember to move away from these stories because of how they often ask us to think about power and sometimes conflate how power is operating.”
Wooten sees Caste as moving us away from confronting how Anti-Blackness and its philosophies and ideologies are fully present in our lives.
Cecilia Mendéz, director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies program, organized the discussion of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Méndez was the last to share her critique and admitted that her impressions of Caste were more positive than those of her two colleagues. But she acknowledged that was likely because her specialty is in Peruvian Andean history, which is not discussed in the book, whereas India and the United States, the specialties of Chattopadhyaya and Wooten, are discussed heavily. “I agreed with much more of the book because I found that it is connected to my own experience in the United States,” Mendez said.
Chattopadhyaya, Wooten, and Méndez agreed on one point though: the path Wilkerson laid out in her book to annihilate caste and racism was soft and asked too little of society.
Wilkerson’s theory is that through deep reflection and “radical empathy” the dominant class will have an awakening that leads them to free the subordinated class.
“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective,” Wilkerson writes in Caste. All three panelists agreed this belief dangerously removes the political urgency from both caste annihilation and anti-racism.
Milo Leong is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Economics. He wrote this article for his Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.