Approach proves clarifying
In conceptualizing the malady as one of caste, Ms. Wilkerson achieves several things simultaneously – she names the malady, thus providing a lexicon, describes its symptoms, and most importantly, in our opinion, shares some of the compelling data from her field studies. By focusing on India, Nazi Germany, and the United States, she describes how easily one system influences another in the global effort to maintain power among the privileged.
This is not a new way of conceptualizing racial hierarchy; however, what is truly persuasive is Ms. Wilkerson’s ability to weave her rigorous research, sociopolitical analysis, and cogent psychological insights and interpretations to explain the 400-year trajectory of racialized caste in the United States. She achieves this exigent task with beautiful prose that motivates the reader to return time and time again to learn gut-wrenching painful historical details. She summarizes truths that have been unearthed (again) about Germany, India, and, in particular, the United States during her research and travels around the world. In doing so, she provides vivid examples of racism layered on caste. Consider the following:
“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’ ” Ms. Wilkerson informs us that Hitler sent emissaries to study America’s Jim Crow system and then imported some features to orchestrate the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
and a corresponding sense of inadequacy in the presence of someone who is considered to be from a higher caste.
A painful account of interpersonal racism is captured as Ms. Wilkerson recounts her experience after a routine business flight from Chicago to Detroit. She details her difficulty leaving a rental car parking lot because she had become so disoriented after being profiled and accosted by Drug Enforcement Administration agents who had intercepted her in the airport terminal and followed her onto the airport shuttle bus as she attempted to reach her destination. She provides a description of “getting turned around in a parking lot that I had been to dozens of times, going in circles, not able to get out, not registering the signs to the exit, not seeing how to get to Interstate 94, when I knew full well how to get to I-94 after all the times I’d driven it. ... This was the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition. They were not, like me, frozen and disoriented, trying to make sense of a public violation that seemed all the more menacing now that I could see it in full. The quiet mundanity of that terror has never left me, the scars outliving the cut.”
This account is consistent with the dissociative, disorienting dynamics of race-based trauma. Her experience is not uncommon and helps to explain the activism of those in the subordinate caste who have attained some measure of wealth, power, and influence, and are motivated to expend their resources (energy, time, fame, and/or wealth) to raise awareness about social and political injustices by calling out structural racism in medicine, protesting police use of force by taking a knee, boycotting sporting events, and even demanding that football stadiums be used as polling sites. At the end of the day, all of us who have “made it” know that when we leave our homes, our relegation to the subordinate caste determines how we are perceived and what landmines we must navigate to make it through the day and that determine whether we will make it home.
This tour de force work of art has the potential to be a game changer in the way that we think about racial polarization in the United States. It is hoped that this new language opens up a space that allows each of us to explore this hegemony while identifying our placement and actions we take to maintain it, for each of us undeniably has a position in this caste system.
Having this new lexicon summons to mind the reactions of patients who gain immediate relief from having their illnesses named. In the case of the U.S. malady that has gripped us all, Ms. Wilkerson reiterates the importance of naming the condition. She writes:
“Because, to truly understand America, we must open our eyes to the hidden work of a caste system that has gone unnamed but prevails among us to our collective detriment, to see that we have more in common with each other and with cultures that we might otherwise dismiss, and to summon the courage to consider that therein may lie the answers.”
The naming allows both doctor and patient to have greater insight, understanding its origins and course, as well as having hope that there is a remedy. Naming facilitates the space for a shift in thinking and implementation of treatment protocols, such as Nazi Germany’s “zero tolerance policy” of swastikas in comparison to the ongoing U.S. controversy about the display of Confederate symbols. At this point in history, we welcome a diagnosis that has the potential to shift us from these poles of dominant and subordinate, black and white, good and bad, toward integration and wholeness of the individual psyche and collective global community. This is similar to what Melanie Klein calls the depressive position. Ms. Wilkerson suggests, in relinquishing these polar splits, we increase our capacity to shift to a space where our psychic integration occurs and our inextricable interdependence and responsibility for one another are honored.
Dr. Dunlap is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University. She is interested in the management of “difference” – race, gender, ethnicity, and intersectionality – in dyadic relationships and group dynamics; and the impact of racism on interpersonal relationships in institutional structures. Dr. Dunlap practices in Washington and has no disclosures. Dr. Dennis is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Her interests are in gender and ethnic diversity, health equity, and supervision and training. Dr. Dennis practices in Washington and has no disclosures.