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It was not merely a torn thread in “an otherwise perfect cloth,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “It would be closer to say that slavery provided the fabric out of which the cloth was made.”
What the colonists created was “an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world,” wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross. “For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the ‘human race’ and into a separate subgroup that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity.”
No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.
“They don’t have the corner on humanity,” he told her. “They don’t have the corner on femininity. They don’t have the corner on everything it means to be a whole, admirable, noble, honorable female member of the species. They haven’t cornered that.”
And thats all it is.
When the summer came to a close, and it was time to return to school, the grandmother was despondent at her leaving, so attached had she grown to her. “I wish you would stay,” the matriarch said, looking forlorn and hoping to convince her still. Miss reminded her that she would need to be leaving. “There was a time,” the matriarch said, in warning and regret, “when I could have made you stay.” She adjusted herself, her voice trailing off at her impotence….
If all the humans on the planet were lined up by a single physical trait, say, height or color, in ascending or descending order, tallest to shortest, darkest to lightest, it would confound us to choose the line between these arbitrary divisions. One human would blend into the next and it would be nearly impossible to make the cutoff between, say, the San people of South Africa and the indigenous people along the Marañón River in Peru, who are scientifically measured to be the same color, even though they live thousands of miles apart and do not share the same immediate ancestry.
Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
The social theorist Takamichi Sakurai, channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism. An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism.”
The friction of caste is killing people. Societal inequity is killing people. The act of moving about and navigating spaces with those whom society has trained us to believe are inherently different from us is killing people, and not just the targets.
