Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and the Power of Metaphors

A nonfiction work that can help us see how metaphors can enhance our teaching, both on the page and in the classroom.

My next book, Write Like You Teach: Bringing Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in April of 2025. I promise I won’t turn this space into an advertisement for the book, but I see so many parallels between writing and teaching that you can expect that my posts here will occasionally touch on both acts of creation.

Write Like You Teach has a section on how nonfiction can stimulate the thinking of a reader, instead of just presenting information and ideas. That section has a few pages on the use of metaphors, a way to illuminate an idea or experience by comparing it to some unlike thing. (Similes are just a form of metaphor that use “like” or “as” to announce that comparison.) We associate the term metaphor with creative writing, but we encounter it all the time in writing, including in good nonfiction.

Throughout Write Like You Teach, I draw examples of great nonfiction writers practicing the techniques I discuss, and I am sorry that I had not read Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent before I finished drafting the manuscript, because Wilkerson models well some of the techniques that can fuel nonfiction writing aimed at a wide audience.* I was especially struck by her use of extended metaphors to shake readers out of their settled perspectives on the familiar topic of race in America, and in this post I want to analyze how and why metaphors work, and how that can translate into teaching.

Very briefly, Wilkerson analyzes America’s racial history (and present-day injustices) by comparing it to two infamous caste systems in world history: the one developed over many centuries in India, and the one that developed much more quickly in Nazi Germany. With these three cases of deeply layered discrimination against subject people in view, she explains that American racism rests on a deeper foundation of caste:

Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

The book draws examples from India and Nazi Germany to frame her analysis of US history, from the arrival of enslaved people in 1619 to the present day, arguing that all three historical contexts reveal eight “pillars of caste” that still shape American society. For the full argument, you’ll have to read the book yourself—which you should. It’s thought-provoking and wonderfully written. You should also read some of the critical responses to it, which have suggested that Wilkerson ignores essential drivers of American racism, such as capitalism, or that she doesn’t acknowledge the complex history of the Indian caste system.

Whatever the merits of her historical argument might be, the book reached an incredible level of popular acclaim, with a glowing review in the New York Times that would satisfy the wildest fantasy of any writer, as well as endorsements from Roxane Gay, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and a million other famous people. Undoubtedly its success was also helped along by the fact that Wilkerson already had both critics and readers on her side, as she had won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, and a Pulitzer Prize for her journalism.

I could point to multiple features of the book’s prose and construction—such as her liberal use of anecdotes, both personal and historical—that contribute to its popular appeal. Most of all, though, I was intrigued by Wilkerson’s use of extended metaphors in the opening paragraphs of new sections, often in surprising and unexpected ways. One might not think of metaphors as an essential item in the toolkit of a serious nonfiction writer, but Wilkerson leans into the use of metaphor in a way that grabs attention. Indeed, when you begin reading the first chapter of the book, you might wonder whether someone at the printer bound the wrong book between the covers. Wilkerson’s story of the perniciousness of caste systems begins . . . in the Siberian permafrost in 2016?

As you might remember, a warm summer that year loosened the Russian permafrost enough that the carcasses of reindeer who had been poisoned by anthrax during World War II rose to the surface. Spores of anthrax were thus released into the soil, were eaten by grazing reindeer, and then spread to humans. Wilkerson spends full four paragraphs telling this story in rich detail. When she finally transitions to the story she wants to tell, she has prepared the reader for her argument that while we might feel like our national history of enslavement might seem long buried in the past, its poison remains just below the surface today, always ready to surface when the conditions are right in contemporary America: in an encounter with police, a hiring practice, or a presidential vote.

What makes such a metaphor work? First, it turns something hard to envision—the long arc of America’s racial history—into a concrete image. The next time I read about some new act or feature of American racism, I will think about that image of those poisoned reindeer floating to the surface of a seemingly tranquil soil. Second, metaphors tend to work most effectively when they yoke two very different realms of experience together. A metaphor that compares one kind of drink to another doesn’t have the same impact as one that compares racism in America to an environmental crisis in the Russia tundra. The more unusual the comparison, the more it makes us pause and think—exactly what we want to provoke in readers and students.

The thinking that metaphors can provoke can and should—especially in the hands of a teacher—include nudging the reader to question the metaphor itself. The very next chapter of Caste opens with another metaphor, this one comparing America to an old house, one that requires constant upkeep to address both its aging infrastructure and the flaws in its original construction. This metaphor struck me because I have owned three old houses, one of which was built in 1906. It was a beautiful old house, with lots of wood furnishing and decorative touches. And while we loved it, the prospect of some expensive repair draining our budget was never far from my mind, so we eventually moved.

When I put the book down after reading this chapter, I began to reflect on Wilkerson’s metaphor. Sometimes, when the deep infrastructure of an old house has been seriously damaged—say by termites or an earthquake—a home or one of its systems isn’t worth saving. It should be torn down to the studs (or beyond) and rebuilt. Early in my time as an old house owner, I would often jump to this conclusion when some inspector or repair person told me about a significant issue. But that was never true in our case. A fix was either available, or we found a workaround. We never tore down any of our houses, or tore them down to the bones.

So which kind of old house is America? A tear-down? One that needs a full renovation of the first floor? Or one that we can keep chugging along with the help of the neighborhood carpenter? But if caste does form the joists of America, would any fix be enough to create a more equitable society?

Wilkerson’s text is littered with these extended metaphors, perhaps more so than it should be. It was sometimes hard to keep track of them all. But I found most of them fulfilling the key components of a well-crafted metaphor used in support of learning:

• The comparison was made between a contemporary event or everyday experience with a historical event or more abstract idea. The connection between these two parts of the metaphor was a striking or unexpected one.

• The metaphors received full attention from Wilkerson. These are not one-sentence metaphors, although Wilkerson uses those as well. They would sometimes take up multiple paragraphs or even pages to describe. Details always improve our writing, here and everywhere else.

• While I was reading the metaphor, or after I had finished my reading, they stuck in my mind and began raising questions for me: Is this really like that? What does this comparison leave out? Where does it focus my attention?

Wilkerson’s use of metaphors models a technique that writers should consider experimenting with, especially if they seek to expand their audiences. But there are lessons here for teachers, as I think well-developed metaphors can enhance a lecture or discussion as a way to promote student engagement and understanding of a new topic. The bafflement I felt when I opened up a book about race and encountered a story about anthrax in the permafrost would have even more impact in a lecture hall than it did in my reading chair. It can give a learner a familiar entry point (an old house) to a complex topic (racial history), or just grab their attention at the outset of a lecture.

Beyond the lecture, metaphors can serve as effective discussion prompts. I might find a metaphor that illustrates a concept I am trying to teach, and present it to the students, and then turn the floor over to them with questions like this: What makes this metaphor work? Where does it fall short? How could we make it fit more closely to our subject? What would we need to tweak in our description? Such questions could generate a whole class discussion, a small group activity, or even a brief assignment or discussion board post.

To make such critiques, the learner has to search for the deep structures in a topic. It requires some good analytic thinking to tease out the various elements of a metaphor—the anthrax, the permafrost, climate change—and match them to the features of a topic, and see if they line up. Metaphors never line up perfectly, which opens that critical space for thinking, discussing, and arguing—exactly what we want to create in our classrooms.

If you’re teaching right now, and have an upcoming lecture, see if you can find a metaphor that will invite your students to see the material in a new way, and build a discussion about it. If you are writing, make a commitment to use one good metaphor in your next writing session. Whether you experiment with this strategy in the classroom or the page, begin by introducing the metaphor, and then prompting the learner to reflect upon how well it fits with the topic.

* This book was first recommended to me a few months ago by my colleague Horane Diatta-Holgate, the Program Director of Inclusive Pedagogy at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at Notre Dame. I didn’t follow up just because it was a busy time of the year. But last month I was on campus and visited the bookstore to see what books people were assigning in their English and philosophy courses (this is one of my favorite things to do on a college campus). I picked up a copy of Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable, which is a fascinating account of a Dalit boy in India, and made me interested in learning more caste systems. I highly recommend Anand’s novel as well.