Joshua T Craig

Understanding Caste in an American Context

When most Americans hear the word caste, they think of India’s centuries-old system that divides people into hereditary groups. They may envision strict social rules, limited upward mobility, and generations confined to predetermined roles. In theory, America rejects such a structure. We tell ourselves—and the world—that we are a meritocracy, where effort and talent determine our fate. But beneath the rhetoric lies something far more stubborn: a social order that operates with many of the same principles as caste.

The American version is less explicit, less codified in law, but often just as effective in shaping lives. Instead of being written into religious texts or centuries-old traditions, it is embedded in our institutions, our neighborhoods, and even our assumptions about each other. It is the silent architecture that influences where we live, how we are educated, whom we marry, and the extent of power we hold.

America prides itself on being the land of freedom and equality, a place where anyone can climb the ladder of success. Yet beneath this national myth lies a rigid social structure — a hidden caste system — that defines people’s status, access to opportunity, and sense of worth. Unlike formal caste systems of other nations, America’s version is unofficial, unspoken, and yet deeply embedded in its institutions, culture, and history.

This hidden caste system is not simply about wealth or class; it’s about identity and inherited status. It is the quiet force that decides who gets the benefit of the doubt, who gets stopped by the police, who gets hired, and who is seen as “American.” Caste lives in our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, and our politics — shaping the outcomes of people’s lives in predictable ways.

To understand the United States today, its inequalities, its tensions, its political divides. We must first acknowledge the enduring presence of caste. This post will explore how this system works, where it comes from, and what we can do about it.

The Difference Between Class and Caste

A key to understanding this hidden structure is distinguishing between class and caste. Class refers to one’s economic position, income, wealth, and occupation, and it can change over time. A person may be born into poverty, become educated, and rise into the middle or upper class. Caste, however, is about status and identity, and is far harder to escape. It is reinforced by deep-seated biases, cultural expectations, and institutional barriers that can persist even when money changes hands.

For example, an immigrant family might achieve financial success but still face social exclusion in predominantly white elite circles. Conversely, someone from a historically privileged background may enjoy trust, access, and influence far beyond what their current economic status might suggest.

How the American Caste Works Without Being Named

In India, caste is named, ranked, and widely recognized. In America, it is unnamed and often denied. This denial is one reason it’s so enduring. You cannot dismantle what you refuse to acknowledge. Instead of overt declarations of superiority or inferiority, the American caste operates through coded language and “neutral” policies that have unequal effects. Terms like “good neighborhood,” “cultural fit,” or “low-skill worker” often mask deeper judgments about race, class, and worth.

The Psychological Weight of The Caste System

One of the most powerful effects is psychological. It doesn’t just limit resources; it shapes expectations. Those on the lower rungs may internalize the belief that certain spaces, opportunities, or ambitions are “not for people like me.” Those on top often feel entitled to their position, viewing it not as inherited privilege but as the natural result of their abilities.

Caste systems endure by resting on certain pillars — shared beliefs and institutional practices that keep the hierarchy intact. In America, these pillars are numerous, but some are especially powerful:

1. Heritability: Your position in the hierarchy is passed down through generations. The zip code you’re born in, the school you attend, and even your name can reflect and reinforce your caste position.
2. Endogamy: While not enforced by law, social norms often discourage deep, equal relationships across caste lines. Romantic, professional, and even casual associations tend to remain within the same social rung.
3. Purity and Pollution: In classic caste systems, the dominant caste must be “protected” from the supposed pollution of the subordinate caste. In America, this has taken the form of segregated bathrooms, water fountains, schools, and hospitals — and today, in more subtle ways like gated communities or unequal access to resources.
4. Dehumanization: By framing the lower caste as lazy, dangerous, or inferior, society justifies their mistreatment. These stereotypes are repeated in media, politics, and daily conversation.
5. Terror as Enforcement: From lynchings to modern police brutality, violence has been used to enforce boundaries and remind the lower caste of their “place.”

By examining these pillars, we begin to understand how caste is not only maintained but justified in the minds of the people living within it. In short, caste is a silent compass that points people toward different futures before they’ve even had a chance to chart their own. It’s the reason some doors open with ease for a few, while others find them locked at every turn — and why so many never question the locks at all.

The Roots of America’s Caste System

To understand how caste operates in America, we have to trace its roots. It did not appear overnight, nor was it imported wholesale from another country. Instead, it grew from a combination of colonial ambitions, economic systems, and the human tendency to create hierarchies.

Slavery as the Original Framework

The first and most enduring pillar of America’s caste structure was slavery. Beginning in the early 1600s, Africans were forcibly brought to the colonies as enslaved laborers. Their status as property was codified in law, making it permanent and hereditary. Skin color became an unmistakable marker of social position, a visual shorthand for who belonged at the bottom. Even after emancipation, the psychological and institutional framework of this system persisted.

Native Dispossession and Erasure

Parallel to the enslavement of Africans was the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Their land was seized, treaties were broken, and they were forced into marginal spaces both geographically and socially. Unlike enslaved Africans, Native Americans were often portrayed as “vanishing” — an idea that justified their exclusion by claiming they were destined to disappear.

Immigration and the Creation of “Whiteness”

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, waves of immigrants from Europe complicated the hierarchy. Groups such as the Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews were initially excluded from the privileges of “whiteness.” Over time, many of them were allowed into this dominant caste, partly by distancing themselves from Black Americans and other minorities. This gradual inclusion reveals a crucial truth: caste lines are not purely about skin color — they are about preserving power.

Legal and Cultural Reinforcement

The American caste system was reinforced by law (segregation, anti-miscegenation statutes, restrictive covenants) and culture (Hollywood stereotypes, educational tracking, biased hiring). These weren’t isolated acts of prejudice — they were interconnected mechanisms designed to maintain the existing order.

The Myth of the Self-Made Nation

From the start, America has told a story about itself as a land of opportunity. This narrative often serves as a cover for a hidden caste system. Implying that anyone who fails to rise simply didn’t work hard enough. It ignores how access to opportunity is rationed, guarded, and inherited.

By the end of the 19th century, the structure of American caste was deeply entrenched, even as the country prided itself on being a democracy. The stage was set for the 20th century, where these invisible walls would be both challenged and fortified in new ways.

The Mechanics of Modern Caste

By the mid-20th century, America’s caste system was no longer enforced by explicit laws in many places, yet it remained alive through subtler mechanisms. Understanding these tools is essential to seeing how a supposedly open society can still trap people in inherited positions.

Residential Segregation

Where you live determines much about your life — the quality of schools, the safety of your streets, the air you breathe, and even your life expectancy. Redlining, a practice in which banks and the federal government refused loans to certain neighborhoods (often because they were Black or immigrant-heavy), ensured that wealth-building through homeownership was largely reserved for white families. Even decades after redlining was outlawed, the economic effects remain, with predominantly Black neighborhoods often undervalued compared to similarly situated white ones.

Education as a Gatekeeper

Education is often described as the great equalizer, but in practice, it is one of caste’s most effective gatekeepers. Public schools are funded by local property taxes, meaning wealthier neighborhoods get better schools. “Gifted” programs, selective admissions, and standardized testing often advantage students whose parents can afford tutors, test prep, or private schooling. By adulthood, the education gap translates into unequal job prospects, cementing the divide.

The Job Market and Professional Networks

Even in the absence of explicit discrimination, hiring often works through informal networks — “someone who knows someone.” These networks are typically segregated along lines of class, race, and geography. In addition, “cultural fit” has become a modern euphemism for preferring people who share the background, mannerisms, or even hobbies of those already in power.

The Criminal Justice System

Another pillar of modern caste is the disproportionate policing and punishment of certain groups. Black and Latino Americans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and given longer sentences for the same crimes as white Americans. A criminal record becomes a lifelong barrier to employment, housing, and voting rights, effectively cementing someone into the lower rungs of society.

Media and Representation

Popular culture both reflects and shapes perceptions of worth. When certain groups are repeatedly portrayed as dangerous, lazy, or exotic, those stereotypes seep into the public consciousness and influence everything from jury decisions to hiring choices. Conversely, the dominant caste is often depicted as the default — the “normal” — against which others are measured.

By the late 20th century, these mechanisms had replaced much of the open bigotry of earlier eras. But the effect was the same: keeping certain people in positions of advantage and others in positions of disadvantage, generation after generation.

Race as the Spine of America’s Caste System

Although caste in America includes many factors — class, gender, religion — race has always been its backbone. Unlike economic status, race in America has been seen as fixed and visible, a category into which people are slotted at birth.

The Creation of Racial Categories

In colonial America, laws were deliberately written to harden racial lines. Marriage between Black and white people was prohibited; any child born to an enslaved mother was automatically enslaved, regardless of the father’s status. These laws ensured that race became not just a physical descriptor but a social and political identity.

The One-Drop Rule

One of the starkest examples of caste logic was the “one-drop rule,” which defined anyone with any African ancestry as Black. This rigid classification wasn’t just about identity — it was about control. It prevented mixed-race individuals from moving into the dominant caste, keeping the lines firmly drawn.

Immigration and Racial Hierarchies

New immigrants were slotted into the racial order based on how closely they could align with whiteness. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese internment during World War II, and quotas on non-European immigrants all reveal how the state enforced a racialized caste system.

Colorism Within Caste

Even within racial groups, lighter skin has often been rewarded with better job opportunities, social status, and representation. This is not incidental — it’s a direct inheritance from a caste logic that values proximity to whiteness

Race is not the only factor in American caste, but it has been the most enduring and visible one. While economic barriers can sometimes be overcome, the racial hierarchy has proven harder to dismantle because it is reinforced at every level — from law to culture to everyday assumptions.

The Inheritance of Inequality

Caste is most powerful when it becomes invisible — when its effects are seen not as the result of an unjust system, but as the “natural” order of things. In America, much of this invisibility comes from the way inequality is passed down like an heirloom.

Wealth as Generational Power

Wealth isn’t just money in a bank account; it’s access. It’s the down payment for a first home, the tuition for a better school, the ability to weather a job loss or medical bill. For centuries, the dominant caste accumulated wealth while others were blocked from doing so through slavery, discriminatory lending, and wage exploitation. That gap compounds across generations.

Family Networks

Children from privileged families inherit not only money but also social capital — knowing how to navigate institutions, having role models in positions of influence, and being shielded from early mistakes that might derail a career. Those without such networks are left to learn by trial and error, often paying a steep price.

Debt as a Caste Anchor

Student loans, medical bills, and high-interest credit trap many people in financial precarity. Predatory lending often targets marginalized communities, ensuring that instead of building wealth, they are constantly paying it away.

In the end, the caste system’s greatest trick is making inequality look like the inevitable outcome of individual choices, rather than the result of centuries of structured advantage and disadvantage.

Gender, Sexuality, and The Caste System

While America’s caste structure has been built primarily on race, gender, and sexuality form important layers of oppression within it.

Patriarchy’s Place in Caste

From the earliest days of the colonies, women — regardless of race — were considered legally and socially inferior to men. But for women of marginalized racial groups, the restrictions were doubled: they faced both gendered and racial barriers.

Work and Wages

Even in the 21st century, women earn less than men on average, and women of color earn significantly less than white men. Job segregation keeps women concentrated in lower-paying roles, and motherhood often comes with career penalties rather than support.

LGBTQ+ Identities and Caste

Queer people often find themselves navigating not only the mainstream caste hierarchy but also exclusion within their own racial or cultural communities. Discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment remains common, with transgender individuals facing some of the most severe disparities.

These intersecting identities create complex realities in which people experience multiple forms of caste at once — a reality often overlooked in mainstream conversations.

Religion as a Boundary Line

Religion has been another major fault line in America’s caste system throughout history.

Protestant Supremacy

Protestantism was also viewed as the de facto religion in colonial times. Catholics, Jews and in the future Muslims were still treated with suspicion and exclusions of English public life. Through most of our history, the path to high office or corporate power has followed a course that was least resistant to those who found favor with the Protestant majority.

Immigrant Faiths

They arrived in waves, bringing their own new faith traditions — Catholicism from Ireland and Italy, Judaism from Eastern Europe, Islam from the Middle East, Hinduism and Buddhism from Asia. The first group encountered resistance, usually in cultural (as opposed to racial) terms, but based on the same caste logic.

Post-9/11 Islamophobia

Thousands of years after the creation of the caste system, people were again persecuted on the basis of its structures: surveillance, hate crimes, and suspicion against Muslims or those perceived as Muslim surged since the early 21st century. It represented a more lasting impulse within America to brand some groups as “perpetual aliens.

The Illusion of Meritocracy

The promise of the American Dream is that toiling away and being good at what you do is all it takes to lift yourself. The caste system is a promise kept selectively, silently.

Barriers at the Starting Line

As we reminded earlier, not all the children start from same point. The paths we take as we grow up often depend on our access to nutrition, healthcare, safe housing and early education. You are facing obstacles existing without the basics lol.

The Role of Gatekeepers

Connections (friend-of-a-friend, legacies, etc) or insider knowledge of a particular system can often mean elite universities and prestige internships / high-level jobs. There are a few truly great artists who can rise above this, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The Comfort of the Myth

The largest beneficiaries of meritocracy are those already in power — it frees them to believe that their means are entirely deserved, rather than predetermined.

Policing the Boundaries

Caste requires constant maintenance. In America, this frequently involves an enforcement of literal and abstract demarcations.

Legal Barriers

Racist voter suppression, exclusionary immigration quotas, and savage racism directed at Black people, US colonized communities and immigrants are all efforts to maintain this power in as few hands as possible. Even facially neutral laws can have disparate impacts — like voter ID requirements that hit communities without immediate access to government offices particularly hard.

Social Enforcement

On the law, about caste it has defined. A small details invited into neighborhoods, treated as suscious in a store; seated first at a restaurant, all contribute to an image of who belongs where.

Violence as a Tool

Lynching in the Jim Crow to police brutality today, violence is used as a tool for keeping caste boundaries defined.

Media Narratives and Cultural Reinforcement

Control the narrative, you control what people perceive as reality.

Stereotypes in Entertainment

Too often marginalized groups are portrayed in film and television in damaging pithy tropes like criminals, subordinates, or mystical. Ultimately, some of these portrayals filter into the collective mind rather than just existing within their fictional spaces.

News Coverage

Media framing often reinforces white supremacy: the race of crime victims is noted when they are not white; economic hardship in a white community is deemed a crisis, while in communities of color it is taken for granted.

Representation Matters

When media shapes society and how people see themselves portrayed, it pushes the boundaries of assumed castes. And this is why representation is not just symbolic but a battlefield.

Education — The Great Divider

Education is said to be the great equalizer, yet in reality it serves as a tool to continue and reinforce existing inequalities.

Funding Disparities

However, because public schools receive a large portion of their funds from local property taxes, this equals nicer facilities, more advanced teachers with higher salaries, and extracurriculars for the wealthy areas — while poorer districts are desperately trying to find all the basic supplies they need.

Curriculum Control

Classroom curricula are often whitewashed with sanitised versions of history, reinforced through the textbooks and teaching standards that typically reflect the worldview of the dominant caste.

College Access

Standardized testing advantages students who can afford expensive prep courses. The scales are tipped against the underprivileged — thanks to legacy admissions and donor influence. Indeed, for most people, the increasing price of tuition has put a wall around a particular model: “high education beyond this point only for those with money.

Health and Life Expectancy

It kills people off — literally by caste.

Environmental Racism

Leona stated that most polluting industries are found near communities of color. Chronic diseases abound thanks to subpar air and water quality,

Medical Bias

These studies reveal that certain doctors continue to carry incorrect stereotypes about biological distinctions based on race, which translates into lower pain treatment in addition to other symptoms for patients of color.

Access to Care

High medical and insurance coverage gaps, located hospital closures in rural parts of the country and low-income urban areas all limit healthcare access. Translated, life expectancy at the bottom of the caste hierarchy is substantially lower.

Homeownership and the Silent Geography of America’s Caste System

Your place determines your fate. In America, not everyone is slotted cleanly into the binary of above and below. In between are the millions who comprise what might be described as the ‘middle castes’ — neither at the top nor at the bottom of society.

In the caste system, these groups — which can range from immigrants to ethnic minorities and working-class whites — are frequently deployed as buffers. He may desire to move up near the dominant caste, or dread that he will fall near the subordinate one.

The term “provisional privilege” — social advantage that can be stripped away at any time — applies as well to our native Indian middle castes. For instance, some immigrant groups may be welcomed when they are needed for their labour, but then discriminated against or even physically attacked in times of economic recession or political tension.

That location may result in either a competition with other workers, or conflict, or solidarity. For example, some middle-caste groups have attempted to pass as dominant by distinguishing themselves strongly from the oppressed. And others joined together in solidarity, acknowledging their common plight.

The middle castes are the battles of future — because what they do next may or may not support the system, or might lend a hand in dismantling it.

Redlining’s Legacy

Simply put, mid-20th-century redlining policies would not grant mortgages to Black families in some neighborhoods Though the process is now illegal, it’s legacy can still be seen today in the housing patterns.

Gentrification

When real estate is redeveloped in urban areas, older residents (often disadvantaged groups) are displaced by increasing rents and property taxes.

Suburban Gatekeeping

Historically, homeowners’ associations, zoning laws and real estate steering have been used to keep some groups of people out of “desirable” neighborhoods and in “undesirable” ones, maintaining economic and racial boundaries.

Work, Labor, and Economic Stratification

Caste has always divided labor by some combination of caste and work in America.

Historical Labor Roles

In the past, it was slaves working on farms or Chinese immigrants working on the railroads and through time brought us all those groups of minorities to labor in dangerous low paying work situations.

Modern-Day Segregation

Service and inspiration labor jobs remain marginalized, just like higher-paying careers continue to belong to the major caste.

Unions and Exclusion

Unions have always led the charge on workers rights, but historically excluded workers of color only to further divide labor movements by caste.

Law, Courts, and Unequal Justice

Justice is not blind, it sees caste very clearly.

Sentencing Disparities

White defendants and not people of color are canned for longer sentences for the same offenses. In its enforcement, drug laws in particular have been a source of disparity.

Bail and Wealth

Defendants are held in jail for the crime of being poor because they cannot pay their 10% to a bondsman.

Jury Selection

While perhaps more subtly so, improper jury selection (whether through removal of potential jurors due to the color of their skin or any other pretext) causes trials to return results that exist as a byproduct of systemic racism.

Immigration And The Changing Caste Lines

Caste in America has always shifted itself to new waves of newcomers.

Ellis Island vs. Angel Island

Immigrants from European countries had an easier pathway to assimilation, while immigrants from Asia faced far greater scrutiny, exclusion laws and racial violence.

Latino Communities

Latino immigrants, meanwhile, have often been understood in ambiguous terms relative to the caste system — not fully white adjacent but likewise occasionally excluded from conversations around racial justice.

Refugee Bias

Some refugees are welcomed with open arms, others suspected or locked up or sent back, depending on geopolitics and colour of skin.

Technology and the Digital Divide

Caste even survives in the digital era.

Access to the Internet

Rich tropical fruit climbing in arches, reminded of the complex work involved in bringing high-speed internet to rural and impoverished locations where opportunities for both education and employment are needed.

Algorithmic Bias

It mimics or even intensifies the latent biases described in facial recognition software, hiring algorithms and predictive policing tools.

Online Harassment

This harassment is disproportionately aimed at marginalized voices online, which has the direct effect of silencing activism and public participatiion.

Resistance and Reform

That is the nature of all caste systems — they have that resistance from everyone who insists that he IS.

Grassroots Movements

From the abolitionists to civil rights leaders to BLM, change has been born of the efforts of those most impacted and persistent in their organizing.

Legal Victories

While legal strategies like Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act have eroded some layer upon layer of such segregation wall bricks, effective enforcement has been uneven and fitful at best.

Cultural Shifts

Art, literature and music have long engaged the imagination in seeing America free of caste.

Price Paid By The Ruling Caste

Caste harms everyone. Even those at the top.

Economic Loss

It is to the disadvantage of the economy when talent is excluded based on identity.

Social Fragmentation

Caste creates an environment of mistrust, resentment and instability and therefore makes the job of collective problem-solving that much more difficult.

Moral Toll

When injustice is perpetuated we become hardened to the world, unable to appreciate beauty or understand love.

A Future Without Caste

Abolish Caste — It is a hard task but doable.

Policy Changes

Dealing with housing segregation, wealth disparity,, and education and health availability have to be the base.

Cultural Work

We need to tell new stories — in the media, in schools, and around political messaging — that celebrate unity and collective humanity.

Personal Responsibility

Everyone has a part: calling out bias, listening across differences and using their small amount of privilege to open up access for others. A casteless America would not only be just; it would also be more dynamic, inventive and united. But in order to erase them, we have to first clearly see the invisible lines that we inherited.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cautioned, we were coming to a fork in the road as a nation: chaos or community. They said the same thing today but right now they are sort of wearing a costume called caste around that warning and using it.

Or we can keep supporting an institution that dehumanizes hundreds of thousands, and pits us against one another. Or, we could build something better. One founded on equal rights, compassion, and mutual empowerment.

This is not a passive choice. It demands action, voting, teaching, organizing, protesting, and building. We need to recognize that caste is not the problem of someone else or some other place; it afflicts all of us.

We are not doomed to live out history’s mistakes if we refuse to forgive the past and set our minds on it. We can learn. We can change. We can free ourselves from the cages handed down to us. The question is not if America has a caste system. And the question is: So what are we going to do about it?

There are no pre-determined futures, it belongs to those who can see beyond.