Racism at Home, Racism Abroad: “Caste” and “How to Hide an Empire” Book Review
Isabel Wilkerson and Daniel Immerwahr offer new paradigms to explain the history and present of U.S. racism and colonialism
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $30.00
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 496 pages, $32.00
The United States is a country that prides itself on its accomplishments. Its canonical self-image presents its rights, laws, and morals as exemplary, even unique. In this telling, both it and its people are exceptional.
There is a counter-narrative to this view that instead probes all of the negative spaces around American virtues. Yes, there are rights — but for whom? Where do laws oppress, rather than protect? And who counts as the American people, those who benefit from public and private power, not those excluded or subjugated by it?
This critical view isn’t new, but it finds articulation in two recent books: Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste (2020) and Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire (2019). Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recasts the very foundation of the American republic as having been built on organized hierarchy and oppression, primarily based on race. This oppressive system, which she calls caste, predates the United States’ birth and imbues it to this day. Wilkerson presents a staggering arithmetic: because American slavery lasted nearly 250 years — a quarter of a millennium — 2022 “marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil.” Only in 2111 will African Americans “have been free for as long as they had been enslaved.”
If Wilkerson focuses on those who live within the U.S., Immerwahr, a historian, instead looks at and beyond its borders. He traces the physical, political, and legal demarcations that set apart those who lived in the U.S. from those who lived outside the states. His narrative covers Americans’ forceful 19th century expansion as they reached south and west from the original 13 states, consuming Indigenous lives and land on the continent. Unsated, they sprawled beyond the mainland to Alaska, Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Both Caste and How to Hide an Empire are about identity and hierarchy. Wilkerson defines her titular system as “the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.” Critical to her argument is the distinction between casteism and racism:
Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.
Wilkerson uses caste as a lens through which to examine and explain U.S. history and society, from interpersonal relations to presidential politics. She chronicles instance after instance of higher-caste individuals (who are typically white and male) performing acts of explicit or implicit aggression against people in the lower castes (who are typically non-white, and mostly African American) to keep them in their place. In the aggregate, Wilkerson writes, it is these beliefs and behaviors that led many higher-caste people to vote for someone like Donald Trump: not because he would materially improve their conditions, but because he would guarantee their supreme status in the national pecking order.
If Caste is about a complex power structure, then Immerwahr frames American imperial dynamics as a trilemma between “republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion.” As the U.S. expanded westwards and around the globe, time and time again politicians had to decide whether to bestow rights on its new subjects. But doing so would jeopardize the dominant view that only whites could participate in the body politic, and that the conquered — labeled as “savages,” “backward races,” or other epithets — could only pollute it. And so it was that, invariably, the U.S. denied personhood, statehood, and protections under the Constitution to those it had conquered, trading republicanism for white supremacy.
This tension led to the creation of a submerged empire. While the British and others trumpeted their conquests, the U.S. mostly kept them outside of public view. In a telling episode, the U.S. soldiers who liberated the Philippines from Japanese rule in early 1945 were surprised to find English-speaking people, and confused to learn that the Philippines had been an American territory prior to Japanese conquest. This erasure conceals the two bloodiest events to occur on U.S. soil: the Philippine War (1899–1913), in which the U.S. conquest and occupation killed upwards of 700,000 Filipinos; and the Second World War, in which 1.1 million Filipinos, half a million Japanese, and more than 10,000 mainlanders died in just four years.
The history of American empire, Immerwahr argues, is as concealed from public consciousness as its present:
There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised.
Empire, especially one with such racist undertones, is inherently hierarchical. Those who conquer are at the top, perhaps sitting above a middle layer of local allies and abetters who trade sovereignty for protection and self-advancement. At the bottom are the vanquished, whether in the colonies or in the homeland. But is a hierarchical system by definition a caste system? When Immerwahr describes U.S. imperial racism, he primarily relies on the intuitive distinction between white and non-white. It doesn’t matter if the latter are descendants of Africans, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, or Native Hawaiians or Alaskans — each are part of a zero-sum game where any accrual of rights to non-whites threatens the white establishment. Comparing the debates around different colonies, Immerwahr writes:
Countenancing Philippine independence had required U.S. leaders to let go of the racist fear that Filipinos couldn’t govern themselves. Ending the colonial status of Hawai’i and Alaska required overcoming racism of a different sort. To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control.
As a result, in the 1940s and 1950s Southern senators ardently opposed granting statehood to Hawaiʻi and Alaska on the basis that it would tilt the national political balance against Jim Crow. Fortunately, they were right: after gaining statehood in 1959, both former territories elected senators and congresspeople who supported civil rights.
These dynamics are clear without the additional framework of caste. In her ambition to redefine the explanatory paradigm for American society, Wilkerson offers an alternative that is hard to grasp. Her distinction between racism and casteism rests on the notion of hierarchy and on what she calls the “eight pillars” of caste: fundamental features like the control of marriage and mating, dehumanization of lower-caste members, and the system’s enforcement through terror and cruelty.
Wilkerson traces these pillars in the U.S., India (the archetypal caste system), and Nazi Germany. However, while some parallels do exist across the experiences of African Americans, Dalits, and Jews, Wilkerson’s comparisons are simplistic. Her chapter on the Indian caste system is all of five pages; that on Nazi eugenics, eleven. Neither is more nuanced than a high-school history textbook: one representative passage simply reads “The Indian caste system […] is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and the excluded fifth, known as Untouchables or Dalits.” Beyond such cursory descriptions, Wilkerson provides examples of African Americans and Dalits who recognize similarities in the societies and hierarchies they each inhabit. But while the empathy that forms among people from vastly different places and contexts in the face of common struggles is touching, it does not clarify whether caste is truly the most fitting paradigm for the American system.
If the Indian analogy is rudimentary, the German case is superficial at best. Wilkerson’s brief exposition on the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic laws misses a fundamental difference in the systems she juxtaposes. The Indian and American hierarchies, for all of their subjugation of lower-status groups, are structures of coexistence. Nazi Germany, however, had only two possible outcomes for its Jewish population: complete emigration or extermination. The beginning of the Second World War in 1939 tilted the balance entirely towards the latter. For Adolf Hitler, the simultaneous existence of the German people and Jews was incompatible. In his eyes, the latter would forever pose a mortal threat as leaders of an international Bolshevik conspiracy against the Third Reich. Nazi Germany’s racial laws were an expedient: rather than a caste system, they constituted a temporary societal quarantine before Jews could be eliminated from the body politic.
Wilkerson’s narrow focus on Nazi anti-Semitism ignores the regime’s more nuanced — though not necessarily less murderous — calculations vis-à-vis the multiplicity of other peoples who found themselves ruled from Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s. Works like Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction or Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War detail the tensions that Hitler and his henchmen managed in the politics, economies, and societies of Germany and its occupied territories. In the example of Soviet prisoners of war, the Nazis worked or starved to death millions of captured soldiers while conscripting tens of thousands of others into auxiliary forces to defend the Reich’s borders from their former comrades. While broader comparisons on the status of European populations in the Nazi hierarchy may have been more applicable to Wilkerson’s argument than focusing on anti-Semitism alone, ultimately the Völkisch paradigm was a product of racism, nationalism, and imperialism rather than of “caste.”
In the end, Wilkerson also draws a puzzling conclusion about the fall of the Nazis. “To imagine an end to caste in America,” she writes, “we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system — the twelve-year reign of the Nazis — can be created, it can be dismantled.” How Germany addressed Nazism is a controversial topic about which entire books are written, like Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt. Caste’s facile treatment of this contradicts Wilkerson’s assertion that caste “is as if alcoholism is encoded in [the U.S.’s] DNA, and can never be declared fully cured.” It is hard to reconcile Wilkerson’s emphasis on the quadricentenarian entrenchment of the U.S. system with what she claims to be the lessons from the end of a decennial regime.
Where Wilkerson and Immerwahr’s narratives are at their most poignant is in their descriptions of the effects that a discriminatory system have on both the oppressors and the oppressed. In How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr follows American colonial soldiers, politicians, and doctors as they pursue their professions with no regard to the lives of those whose land they have come to govern. Their callous rule and corollary of racism, torture, and medical experiments invariably caused profound suffering among Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others. Far from demonstrating lofty principles, American imperialism followed the well-worn path of European powers. American architects in the Philippines, much like the British builders that Tristram Hunt describes in Cities of Empire, built classical palaces for the occupiers on the backs of native workers, who were then excluded from the buildings on the basis of their race. In Caste, many of those who become torturers and executioners of African Americans are regular people. Shopkeepers, plumbers, and even children perpetrate atrocities on the mainland that parallel those in the territories. From the woeful response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 to frequent murders by police, the U.S.’s enduring international and domestic hierarchies continue to take their toll.
These hierarchies stand in the way of the U.S. achieving its values of republicanism and egalitarianism. Both writers claim that their lens are essential to comprehending American history. Where Immerwahr argues that “the history of the United States is the history of empire,” Wilkerson counters that “caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy.” These views are complementary: just as the international empire is an extension of the domestic hierarchy, so too is the domestic hierarchy defined by the territories and populations that get added to — though not always incorporated in — the republic.
Inevitably, both Immerwahr and Wilkerson consider the presidency of Donald Trump in their respective frameworks. Trump is a quintessentially imperial president: he views foreign relations as a zero-sum game from which the U.S. must extract the most resources and benefits as it can, with little regard for all those he regards as non-American (and non-white). His worldview would have been at home in the heyday of the country’s 19th century land grabs. Likewise, in Wilkerson’s paradigm Trump is quintessentially casteist, shaping his campaign and presidency around the notion that white Americans should maintain their exclusive hold on political, economic, cultural, and social institutions in the U.S.
However, only Wilkerson makes the explicit connection between tracing U.S. history and perfecting its present. Unlike Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which uses a single, clear metaphor to explain the motivations of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, Caste makes its readers cleave through an overgrown jungle of analogies to get to its central argument. (In the first four chapters alone, Wilkerson compares caste and its effects to pathogens, a medical history, an old house, and a play.) Nonetheless, it is clear that her book aims to overcome the ills that it describes.
Caste’s elusive definition of its central concept and superficial comparisons are fundamental flaws. Wilkerson tries to write in a way that is simultaneously scholarly, memoiristic, and inspirational, fully achieving none. Her work is too often narratively scattershot, like when she spends four pages using her dogs to make a point about social dominance. But the book comes at a moment when the U.S. is attempting to reckon with how its awful racist history spills over into its present. Caste is an imperfect messenger bearing an essential message.
Immerwahr’s normative stance is more ambiguous. He recognizes the tragedies of empire, though his enthusiastic and colloquial tone occasionally comes across as glib. (In a particularly grating sentence, Immerwahr writes that Belgium’s rule in the Congo “brought the population down by some ten million.”) As How to Hide an Empire deviates halfway through towards an analysis of technology, trade, and culture, it loses sight of empire’s political causes and human consequences. Immerwahr’s is a work of history that avoids the policy recommendations that turn too many other analytical texts into punditry. However, he fails to include his perceptive recognition of a trilemma in American imperialism into his conclusion. Keeping empire hidden has costs for both mainlanders and offshore subjects, yet he leaves their perpetuation unexplored. Empire may be a form that the U.S. will supersede eventually, but the path to this future is secondary for Immerwahr.
In their works, Wilkerson and Immerwahr examine the inhumanity that racism, hierarchy, and empire engender. By making empire a little less hidden, and by making us aware of the oppressive power structures that surround us, both authors help us to understand our world. It is our responsibility to heed their lessons and change it for the better.
