actually lasts, Wilkerson marvels at the human impulse to kill and oppress one’s fellows. She imagines how much better the world could have been if the many million victims of caste-based violence had had the chance to reach their full potential and similarly conjectures what could have been accomplished if all the members of the dominant caste obsessed with maintaining the social order had instead channeled the same amount of passion and energy into solving humanity’s urgent problems. When Albert Einstein fled Nazi Germany for the United States in the 1930s, he was astounded to find that he had escaped Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaigns only to find another, not-so-different caste hierarchy at work. As a Jewish person, Einstein identified with the suffering and exclusion of African Americans and became an outspoken advocate for civil rights, unafraid to break establishment taboos. He devoted his later life to activism and service in the cause of social and educational justice for African Americans, even joining the NAACP.

Wilkerson points out that what makes caste such a powerful organizing force is that it is based on unchangeable, ancestral characteristics that reflect nothing about who the person really is. Caste endures because people accept it as truth without challenging its artificiality and unfairness—and because those with the most authority to reform the status quo are typically the least motivated to do so, lest their interests be challenged at the top of the hierarchy. With America's upcoming shift of its demographic majority, the only way to avoid a reversion to an explicitly race-based society is for the dominant caste to accept the facts of the damaging consequences of caste and the reality that improving lives at the bottom of the hierarchy leads to society-wide gain. Wilkerson imagines a world where the only thing that matters about someone is what they can make of themselves and how they treat others, concluding that in such a world, all would be free.

Analysis

The “awakening” of this section’s title introduces these chapters’ central idea about the need for a new way to see the world and each other based not on familiar scripted roles but on an empathic understanding of shared pain and experience. By opening one’s eyes to see through the coding and strictures of caste, people could recognize a common humanity rather than arbitrary differences that divide and oppress. This was the Brahmin’s epiphany in chapter 30, as his personal experience invalidated his cultural programming, and the lesson Wilkerson’s dinner companion learned after experiencing the indignity of caste-based discrimination herself. Just as Wilkerson writes about the “shock troops” battling hierarchy, she knows that it will take individual acts of daring in order to hack away at the invisible foundations of caste. By crossing the psychological line in engaging the plumber in the “Make America Great Again” hat, Wilkerson is rewarded for her boldness and faith with her own “awakening” to the possibilities of universal empathy. Interestingly, the story Wilkerson tells of the upper-caste Indian man is strikingly similar to the story of the historical Buddha, a Brahmin prince raised in luxury and privilege who, like Wilkerson’s acquaintance, comes to detest the cruelty inflicted on the most vulnerable and turns his back on his birthright for a life of contemplation and simplicity. Einstein, perhaps unsurprisingly as one of the greatest geniuses ever known, had an equally prodigious emotional intelligence that Wilkerson points to as an “enlightened” example of the human capacity for empathic wisdom. This is the goal of the “awakening” that Wilkerson concludes is essential if America is to live up to its stated ideals and allow every citizen to pursue their full potential freely, to the liberation of all.