American Caste: A Secret History – Michigan Quarterly Review

American Caste: A Secret History

The United States is a nation with a deeply entrenched caste system. To understand American history, especially the recent rise in populism and right-wing extremism, an understanding of its caste system is essential. The populism and identity politics ushered in by Donald Trump are the culmination of this desire for revenge against those espousing anti-caste democracy on the part of working-class conservative whites. Their issues are commingled with those of identity and the preserving of a historical order of domination of which they themselves were never part. By attempting to assimilate into a certain white caste hierarchy, desperate caste of lower-class whites continue to support an oppressive caste model of society that they envision benefits them. 

The story of America is one that smooths over the story of caste. It has nourished a narrative examining the past through European, Christian democratic values as a supposedly great passage of modern history. This story has many versions. The one that is considered the most authentic is that of the crusades into the “New World” by colonists. The elite castes of Europe’s aristocracy and the newly minted class of middlemen sponsored travel initiatives to explore the world. The modern story of the world starts from here. 

To ideologically understand America, one has to seriously engage with the seeds of Americanism that relied on the domination of a particular group of people made to be “outcastes” in the economic order. This order was supplemented by a social rationale that bolstered the importance of re-forming society into castes—a term and system familiar to Europe’s elite. As a result, Europeanized castes were reproduced in economic terms and then social ones. 

Economic markers created a commonly attributed position identified as a class. The class represented one’s status in the plantation and early capitalist society. Economic status determines whether one belongs to a community. The new riches made by the unlanded white caste found comfort in the class norms. They created a new world around their class identity. Economic expediency was the earliest driver of class formation.

Race, in contrast, was not a provable concept. It had to be invented, and theories, mostly from anatomy and biological science, had to be constructed to describe its significance. Race gets vaguely assembled in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, it gained new life. Race, then, is an assembly of class qualified under physical contrasts.

Caste represents class, race, and gendered dimensions to structure society. It is a graded hierarchical institution that distributes power relations according to one’s descent and bloodline. At base, it describes a social position that is rooted in historical codes. 

The caste myth has now become pronounced with its assertion of class dynamics. Aided by the theory of color-centric nationalism, race helped to galvanize the politics of faith and progress. The “American dream” became the most potent way to salvage the ruthlessness of the caste war at play. The modern definitions of political identity created a new alignment of castes circling racial paradigms.

Over my decade of research studying the comparative models of caste in the world, I have come to realize that a conclusive understanding of castes warrants a thorough revamping of our sociological practices. We need to create apparatuses that help us explain the complicated demography made to appear as a simple census directory. The many nationalities and racialized groupings have been presented with color and geographical identities. These do not represent the true experience of individual subgroups that are bunched into a postcolonial national register.

India’s caste system, for example, is a particularly religio-social institution that has become a fixed stratifying organ of society. India’s caste system operates in every public and private sphere of life. The status of caste or jati—subcastes—is granted the moment one leaves the mother’s womb. Children carry the caste identity throughout their life. It is regulated by the conventions in religion, schools, and professional institutions. Caste is a hallmark of one’s identity in India that is locally practiced, yet its locality does not in itself explain its reason for existence. The answer to this question is that caste has achieved the status of one’s identity, which cannot be neatly separated from a person’s representation in their society. The society here is built upon the organization of subcaste and castes.

Comparatively, in the United States, caste has been operating as a para-religious and extra-social institution hiding under the mask of color-based ethnicities. Each child is born in and treads through America’s unique caste formations. Caste is inherited through descent and is maintained through intimate cultural and social organizations. For example, one’s caste status is evident in their last name and in the social groups they can access. It determines their political future. This eventually forms the ecosystem of castes. The last names, clubs, socialization around sub-religious denominations, vocations, marriage choices, political parties, and ideological orientations are determined according to the relations established through caste culture. 

The dominant castes generally espouse socially orthodox and economically conservative political positions. They claim their right as vanguards of tradition. They do not leave their history behind but reenact it in each generation of society with the entrenchment of the caste system. 

Unlike in India’s caste system, there aren’t visible subcastes in America. This limits the prospects of overt caste politics in America. The tribal affiliations were submerged into the new dogmas of the American social order that preached a bootstrap theocracy of capital and profit. Under this rubric, the subcastes were unified into more significant groupings. These were adjusted around one’s lineage and bloodline. It was implemented with endogamy as a codified social rule.

America’s inheritance of caste

The American social hierarchy inherited the original sins of Europe. The old elite aristocratic class of Europe was a strict caste order that reproduced its forms worldwide. Old familial associations adjusted along fluid caste rules designated a social role per one’s inheritance. The European caste of merchants, who profited from their gains in the New World, was perhaps the most unregulated of the caste order. Their names and status had to be designated from a respectable family. Finally, the settlers, the hustlers trying to make it into society by facing the risks of the frontier, were a caste trying to better themselves. If we understand the caste order that was at play, we can make more sense out of the violent history of the United States. The earliest slave-like groups that were brought to America were European lower castes. The white indentured servants were the first to produce tobacco in Virginia and Maryland. From England alone, around 72,000 lower caste British white indentured servants left for America in the 1650s.

The dominant caste society in Britain repelled the lower caste society, including beggars, street children, prostitutes, Quakers, and vagabonds. The vocation addressed to them evinced their actual status. “Tinkers, gypsies, begging scholars, palm readers, wandering musicians and actors” were defined as vagabonds.

By the seventeenth century, after indentured servitude, the lower caste whites started to formalize their status in America. As a result, America developed its own caste code. America assiduously adopted a model that granted divisions of superiority and lower status. Color-based order was regulated on the newly imported African bodies. The African slaves became black and the owners white. The indentured British servants, which were despised castes, recognized the similar fate of their African caste successors. 

The earliest known arrivals from Africa in 1619 were treated as indentured servants and were on par with white indentured servants. However, by 1641 the laws began to strengthen as slave-produced surplus was in demand. The shift gradually replaced indentured servants with slaves. The white and black identities came into the picture, creating a rift between the economic and caste subordinates. The ruling castes of Europe cleverly deployed the difference to assimilate the lower caste whites into their project of expansionism. 

The white and black dualism was produced. A wedge was driven between the caste subalterns. This did not prevent the messier history of the time from playing out. Indigenous nations across America became a caste of eliminated, ignored peoples. Race as an identifier was to come into the picture only in the eighteenth century. Until then, the European understanding of social orders was in use, which fated groups such as the Irish and Italian peasantry to remain outside the social rank of white. Light skin alone was not an automatic guarantee of social advancement into whiteness. 

American society had to wrestle with the vast array of European castes coming to America. The key way that these caste differences were resolved was to create the idea of blackness in contrast to those designated as whites. Physical attributes became markers of identity, and color overwrote caste. Class remained subtle and in control of the ruling castes. The lower caste European Americans who were primarily engaged in the peasantry, artisan, and subaltern jobs on the farm were kept in the same order by using the logic of race, caste, blood, and religious superiority. Lineage became the only reliable source to delineate social status in America.

In my research on the American caste system, I traced the existence of caste lingo in public use to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Caste was often understood in the dual chambers of an enslaver and his slave. In the church, politics, and society, caste was understood as a terminology of establishing fixed differences. American whiteness was the combination of lineage, ancestry, and pedigree into the creation of the uniform white identity of the Europeans. The same was evident with enslaved Africans whose diverse identities and backgrounds were reduced to the single identity of a soulless slave who only has caste status to determine who they are. White became white in opposition to the black. However, black remained a subordinated thesis of race. And just as the slaves of African descent gradually lost their original identities, the white ruling class dissolved its own heritage in the name of maintaining its caste privilege.

Race was not limited to the exploitation of resources and human beings in the colonies but also transmuted into structures of society. Education, jobs, culture, and politics came to be defined by a color-based superiority.


For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.

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