Few today can doubt the centrality of the division in American society that goes by the name of race. The police violence to which black people in the us are routinely subjected has become more widely visible, thanks to cellphone videos and social media. The names of those killed by the police in the past few years, across the country—Eric Garner in New York, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Rekia Boyd in Chicago, George Floyd in Minneapolis, to name but a few—are borne on the placards of protests often galvanized by working-class communities.

Yet despite the inescapable significance of the colour line in the us, its basis is curiously elusive. Race, needless to say, is not a biological classification. Even when considered as a socio-cultural category, it cannot account for the persistent forms of oppression and exclusion faced by African-Americans, in contrast to other groups—as illustrated by the famous anecdote, told by Malcolm X among others, of a dark-skinned friend who put on a turban and was duly seated and served in a segregated restaurant in Atlanta. Colour alone was not the issue. Whether or not the story is true, the mere possibility that such a stunt might work points to an aspect of African-American identity that lies beyond the physical markers of ‘race’ or ethnic ancestry alone.

Nor is anti-black racism in the us a form of xenophobia, as might be said of prejudice against immigrants in Europe. The American form is mitigated, not deepened, by signs of foreign extraction. Malcolm X, for one, made that principle the foundation of his political philosophy. From his original commitment to the faux-exoticism of the Nation of Islam sect to the pan-Africanism of his final years, he sought to raise black Americans generally to the status of visiting Africans. As part of that project, he called—like a number of black leaders before and since—for the recognition of his people as an oppressed nationality. Yet black people in America do not constitute a nation. They have no territory or economic life of their own; black culture is archetypically American. While some have been attracted to nationalist movements, the vast majority of blacks have aspired not to secede but to integrate.

The nation is not the only type of community to which African-Americans have been ascribed. In recent years the notion of ‘caste’, by analogy with the position of ‘untouchables’ in India, has come to the fore. In 2002, the Berkeley sociologist Loïc Wacquant depicted slavery, Jim Crow, the Northern ghetto and the prison system as successive instruments for shoring up a ‘racial-caste’ system, combining the extraction of labour with social ostracization. Drawing on Wacquant’s work, civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander likewise analysed the mass incarceration of African-Americans as the reincarnation of a racial-caste system in The New Jim Crow.footnote¹ At the same time, New York Times feature writer Isabel Wilkerson wrote of a Southern caste system in her book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson has now produced a full-blown theoretical elaboration in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a 500-page blockbuster that has been on us best-seller lists for the past year.footnote² Given these prominent efforts to deploy the terminology of caste to define the situation of us blacks, it may be useful to review their history and consider the lessons that might be drawn from it for future attempts at characterization.

Though it sounds novel today, there is a long history of describing African-Americans as a caste. In the mid-19th century, the term was current among advocates for black rights such as Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. In that revolutionary epoch there was reason to hope that black oppression would be swept away along with chattel slavery. Calling it ‘caste’, by analogy with the caste system in India, defined it as foreign, retrograde, outmoded. In the 1930s, the term was revived in the us social sciences by the ‘caste school of race relations’, centred at Chicago and Yale. By then, the structures of Jim Crow segregation seemed as stable and unchanging as the Indian system was thought to be. In that new context, an analogy between the two could suggest that the Southern way of life was capable of resisting change indefinitely. Robert E. Park, the doyen of Chicago urban sociology, wrote in 1937: ‘Slavery is dead, and no one now defends it. But caste remains and is still so much a part of the natural and expected order that few people in the South either question its right to exist or discuss its function.’footnote³

Park’s Chicago colleagues did not go so far as to dismiss the possibility of reform, but took segregation as a given—a standpoint conceptually supported by the terminology of caste. A case in point was Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941) by Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner and Mary Gardner, supervised by W. Lloyd Warner. With his wife Elizabeth, Davis undertook courageous fieldwork in a small town in 1930s Mississippi.footnote⁴ They found that, though blacks were socially inferior to whites as a group, individual black people were able to improve their class position to a certain extent. If more blacks were helped to do so, Warner and Davis argued, the two communities could reach parity in status and opportunity—without challenging the ‘separate but equal’ framework that was the legal cornerstone of Jim Crow. They held that the rules governing separation were enforced by both groups. As Davis wrote, ‘For learning and maintaining the appropriate caste behaviour, an individual of either the Negro or the white group is rewarded by approval and acceptance from his caste.’footnote⁵

Over the next decade, Warner, Davis and their collaborators accumulated a vast amount of data on African-American social conditions. The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal would draw upon their material, along with their concept of an American racial-caste system, for his best-selling, Carnegie-funded mega-study, An American Dilemma (1944). For Myrdal, as for the Chicago sociologists, the concept of caste served to obscure class divisions and enshrine the racist status quo as a fact of life. But where Warner and Davis presented the colour line as a self-acting system, Myrdal identified an interest behind it: ‘lower-class whites’ who, unlike the upper and middle classes, competed with black labour. ‘Caste struggle’ was said to explain American social reality more profoundly than the class struggle, white workers’ caste interests leading them to violate the principle of equality of opportunity on which the us was supposedly founded.footnote⁶ ‘In America’, Myrdal would remark a quarter-century later, ‘the real antagonists are the poor whites and the Negroes.’footnote⁷