Caste and Race: The Contingent Politics of Comparison and Connections

• In Event: 40210 - Violence, Interpretation, and the State: Authoritarian Strategies from Coercion to Consent

Abstract

In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson writes, “Caste is the infrastructure of our division” that “embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics.” By employing caste as a metaphor for race, Wilkerson highlights the entrenched fixity of the color line structuring African American oppression, reigniting debates between the “caste school of race” and Black Marxists.

Charisse Burden-Stelly rejects caste as an analytic, arguing that it emphasizes custom and attitude over capitalist exploitation and class antagonism. From a Black Marxist perspective, race—produced through slavery and indenture—is integral to capitalist modernity, while caste, as a “religious-social structure,” exists outside this order. This distinction, she contends, is evident in Black revolutionary agency and historical resistance, in contrast to caste’s persistence, which she attributes to its metaphysical nature. Metaphors—modes of understanding one context through another—carry implicit frameworks, making comparison inherently fraught.

Burden-Stelly’s critique underscores the stakes of comparison: how do we balance historical specificity with the practical uses of historicizing? Within Black Marxist caution about vexed metaphors, caste becomes a question of history and politics yet remains subordinated to “nation” and rendered “pre-political” through a Weberian logic of subordination. The imperative to extricate caste from nation and situate it within global capitalism haunts anti-caste politics, raising an ethical question: what historical analytics and politics of listening do the anti-oppression politics of global South demand?

Through a conjunctural reading of W.E.B. Du Bois and anti-caste radical Jotirao Phule on the empire of cotton, this essay argues that the quest for the “silver fleece” produced Black and Dalit political subjects through slavery, indenture, and enclosure. Reading oppression and resistance through connected histories offers anticolonial theory the potential to generate new politics.

Author

• Swati Birla, SUNY-New Paltz