Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.

Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, as law and custom stated that “submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons.” 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.”

quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners and for an economy from which they drew no benefit, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil.

This was what the United States was for longer than it was not. It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States would be an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. 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.

The colonists made decisions that created the caste system long before the arrival of the ancestors of the majority of people who now identify as Americans. The dominant caste controlled all resources, controlled whether, when, and if a black person would eat, sleep, reproduce, or live. The colonists created a caste of people who would by definition be seen as dumb because it was illegal to teach them to read or write, as lazy to justify the bullwhip, as immoral to justify rape and forced breeding, as criminal because the colonists made the natural response to kidnap, floggings, and torture—the human impulse to defend oneself or break free—a crime if one were black.

Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority. Somewhere in the journey, Europeans became something they had never been or needed to be before. They went from being Czech or Hungarian or Polish to white, a political designation that only has meaning when set against something not white. They would join a new creation, an umbrella category for anyone who entered the New World from Europe. Germans gained acceptance as part of the dominant caste in the 1840s, according to immigration and legal scholar Ian Haney López, the Irish in the 1850s to 1880s, and the eastern and southern Europeans in the early twentieth century. It was in becoming American that they became white.

“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.

They might have arrived as neutral innocents but would have been forced to choose sides if they were to survive in their adopted land. Here they had to learn how to be white. Thus Irish immigrants, who would not have had anything against any one group upon arrival and were escaping famine and persecution of their own under the British, were pitted against black residents when they were drafted to fight a war over slavery from which they did not benefit and that they did not cause. Unable to attack the white elites who were sending them to war and who had prohibited black men from enlisting, Irish immigrants turned their frustration and rage against the scapegoats who they by now knew were beneath them in the American hierarchy. They hung black men from lamp poles and burned to the ground anything associated with black people—homes, businesses, churches, a black orphanage—in the Draft Riots of 1863, considered the largest race riot in American history. A century later and in living memory, some four thousand Italian and Polish immigrants went on a rampage when a black veteran tried to move his family into the all-white suburb of Cicero, Illinois, in 1951. Hostility toward the lowest caste became part of the initiation rite into citizenship in America.

Their lives were to some degree a lie and in dehumanizing these people whom they regarded as beasts of the field, they dehumanized themselves.

The supremacist police chief, Bull Connor, had a favorite in that 1961 race. He decided to secure the election of the man he wanted to win by framing the man he wanted to lose: he paid a black man to shake the opposing candidate’s hand in public as a photographer lay in wait. The story took up a full page in a local newspaper, and the opponent lost the election as Bull Connor knew he would. For white southerners, it was a “cardinal sin,” it was “harrowing,” wrote the historian Jason Sokol, “to call a black man ‘Mister’ or to shake hands with him.”

A white porcelain sugar bowl sat between us on the table. She swept her hand over the top of the bowl. “I find that white people are fine with me,” she said, “as long as I stay in my place. As long as I stay in ‘the container we have built for you.’ ” She tapped the side of the sugar bowl, gentle, insistent taps. “As soon as I get out of the container,” she said, lifting the lid from its bowl, “it’s a problem.”

In a caste system dominated by Short people, anyone in the subordinate race of Tall people would be dismissed merely as brawn, consigned to menial, servile positions, seen as good only for entertainment or servitude. Short people would be seen as born to leadership due to their presumed innate intellect and culture, admired for the longevity said to attend people smaller in stature, regarded as the standard of beauty, the default setting for human. Tall people would be made to feel insecure and self-conscious, gangly and unappealing, having been born at the opposite end of the ideal. Society would assume that any Tall person was good at sports and physical labor, whether or not he or she had interest or aptitude. Scientists might devise tests to measure the difference between Talls and Shorts beyond height alone, tests that would largely track the results of generations of either advantage or exclusion and likely affirm widely held assumptions about the Shorts’ inherent supremacy and the Talls’ misfortune of deficits. There would be few Tall people in the boardrooms and corridors of power, and a disproportionate number of them in prisons and on the streets. Being tall would become shorthand for inferior in a caste system ruled by Short people, and vice versa.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.

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.

Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist from New York whose social circle included Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, converted his zeal for Aryan supremacy into helping enact a series of American immigration and marriage restrictions in the 1920s, as the Nazi Party was forming across the Atlantic. Grant went far beyond southern segregationists in his contempt for marginalized people. He argued that “inferior stocks” should be sterilized and quarantined in “a rigid system of elimination of those who are weak or unfit” or “perhaps worthless race types.” Grant published a rabid manifesto for cleansing the gene pool of undesirables, his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, the German edition of which held a special place in the Führer’s library. Hitler wrote Grant a personal note of gratitude and said, “The book is my Bible.”

Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”

By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like “rivers of fire.” Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god-chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

Mindful of appearances beyond their borders, for the time being at least, the Nazis wondered how the United States had managed to turn its racial hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage. They noticed that in the United States, when it came to these racial prohibitions, “public opinion accepted them as natural,” wrote the historian Claudia Koonz.

He discovered that “many American states even go so far as to require by statute segregated facilities for coloreds and whites in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses, steamboats and even in prisons and jails.” In Arkansas, he noted, the tax rolls were segregated. He later remarked that, given the “fundamental proposition of the equality of everything that bears a human countenance, it is all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is in the USA.”

The Americans had come up with a definition of race apart from logic or science, an approach that Freisler called the “political construction of race.” What the Nazis could not understand, however, was why, in America, “the Jews, who are also of interest to us, are not reckoned among the coloreds,” when it was so obvious to the Nazis that Jews were a separate “race” and when America had already shown some aversion by imposing quotas on Jewish immigration. Aside from what, to the Nazis, was a single vexing omission, “this jurisprudence would suit us perfectly,” said Freisler, who, unbeknownst to those at the table would one day be in a position to make heartless use of it in his career as the hanging judge of the Reich. “I am of the opinion that we need to proceed with the same primitivity that is used by these American states,” he said. “Such a procedure would be crude but it would suffice.”

As cataclysmic as the Nuremberg Laws were, the Nazis had not gone as far with the legislation as their research into America had taken them. What did not gain traction on the day of the closed-door session or in the final version of the Nuremberg Laws was one aspect of the American system. While the Nazis praised “the American commitment to legislating racial purity,” they could not abide “the unforgiving hardness” under which “ ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks,” Whitman wrote. “The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”

There was no denying the slaughter and torment on the other side of the barbed wire. The fruit of evil fell upon villagers like snow dust. They were covered in evil, and some were good parents and capable spouses, and yet they did nothing to stop the evil, which had now grown too big for one person to stop, and thus no one person was complicit, and yet everyone was complicit. It had grown bigger than them because they had allowed it to grow bigger than them, and now it was raining down onto their gingerbread cottages and their lives of pristine conformity.

It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelties to which they had grown accustomed, inequalities that they took to be the laws of nature.

Later, in 1922, a black man in Alabama named Jim Rollins was convicted of miscegenation for living as the husband of a white woman named Edith Labue. But when the court learned that the woman was Sicilian and saw “no competent evidence” that she was white, the judge reversed the conviction. The uncertainty surrounding whether she was “conclusively” white led the court to take the extraordinary step of freeing a black man who in other circumstances might have faced a lynching had she been seen as a white woman.

Virginia went all in and passed what it called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which besides prohibiting interracial marriage, defined a white person as one “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” “The ‘traceable amount’ was meant to ensure that even blacks who did not look black were kept in their place,” wrote Diamond and Cottrol. “Tracing black ancestry as far back as possible became a prerequisite to the smooth functioning of the caste system.”

That doctor, James Marion Sims, would later be heralded as the founding father of gynecology. He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was “not painful enough to justify the trouble.” Instead, he administered morphine only after surgery, noting that it “relieves the scalding of the urine,” and, as Washington writes, “weakened the will to resist repeated procedures.”

In a similar experiment, conducted at Stanford University in 1975, the participants did not have to be ordered to deliver the shocks. They needed only to overhear a single negative comment about the subjects. The participants were led to believe that students from another college were arriving for a joint project. Some participants overheard the experimenters, presumably by accident, make neutral or humanizing comments about the visiting students (that they seemed “nice”). Other participants heard dehumanizing comments (that they seemed like “animals”). Participants gave the dehumanized people twice the punishment of the humanized ones and significantly more than those they knew absolutely nothing about. The participants were willing to go to maximum intensity on the dehumanized group. “Dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture and the architecture of the human mind,” Smith wrote. “The human story is filled with pain and tragedy, but among the horrors that we have perpetrated on one another, the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people, the brutal enslavement of Africans, and the destruction of Native American civilizations in many respects are unparalleled.”

An order from the justices went out in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in the search of a runaway named London, granting that “any person may KILL and DESTROY the said slave by such means as he or they may think fit.” This casual disregard for black life and the deputizing of any citizen to take that life would become a harbinger of the low value accorded African-Americans in the police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black citizens that continued into the early decades of the twenty-first century.

The elder asked the overseer, one of the men who had inflicted this upon another human being, “the offence for which all this was done.” He was told that the enslaved man had made a comment that was seen as beyond his station. It began when the owner said that the rows of corn the enslaved man had planted were uneven. The enslaved man offered his opinion. “Massa, much corn grow on a crooked row as a straight one,” the enslaved man replied. For that, he was flogged to the brink of death. “This was it, this was enough,” the Presbyterian elder said. The overseer boasted of his skill in managing the master’s property. The enslaved man “was submitted to him, and treated as above.”

For the lowest-caste person, “his unquestioned inferiority had to be established,” wrote the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley, and that alleged inferiority would become the “basis for his allocation to permanent servile status.”

The historian Kenneth Stampp described the arbitrary nature of life for enslaved people in the caste system, the terrifying forced submission to individuals who were unfit for absolute power over the life and death of another. “They were owned by a woman ‘unable to read or write,’ ” Stampp wrote, “ ‘scarcely able to count to ten,’ legally incompetent to contract marriage,” and yet had to submit to her sovereignty, depend upon her for their next breath. They were owned by “drunkards, such as Lilburne Lewis, of Livingston County, Kentucky, who once chopped a slave to bits with an ax,” Stampp wrote; “and by sadists, such as Madame Lalaurie, of New Orleans, who tortured her slaves for her own amusement.”

The most trivial interaction had to be managed with ranking in mind. Well into the 1960s in the American South, the mere boarding of a public bus was a tightly choreographed affair devised for maximum humiliation and stigma to the lowest caste. Unlike dominant-caste passengers who climbed aboard, paid their bus fare, and took a seat, black passengers had to climb up, pay their fare, then get off the bus so as not to pollute or disturb the white section by walking through it. Having been forced to disembark after paying, they then had to run to the back door of the bus to board in the colored section. It was not uncommon for the bus to drive off before they could make it to the back door. The passengers who had the least room for error, the least resources to lose the benefit of the ticket they had paid for, the least cushion to weather a setback, would now be humiliated as the bus pulled off without them, now likely to arrive late for work, thus putting already tenuous jobs at further risk.

“The human meaning of caste for those who live it is power and vulnerability, privilege and oppression, honor and denigration, plenty and want, reward and deprivation, security and anxiety,” wrote the preeminent American scholar of caste, Gerald Berreman. “A description of caste which fails to convey this is a travesty.”

When the brown-eyed children were put on a pedestal and made dominant, Elliott told the network, she saw “little wonderful brown-eyed white people become vicious, ugly, nasty, discriminating, domineering people in the space of fifteen minutes.” With the blue-eyed children scapegoated and subordinated, “I watched brilliant, blue-eyed, white Christian children become timid and frightened and angry and unable to learn in the space of fifteen minutes,” she said. “If you do that with a whole group of people for a lifetime,” she said, “you change them psychologically. You convince those who are analogous to the brown-eyed people that they are superior, that they are perfect, that they have the right to rule, and you convince those who take the place of the blue-eyed students that they are less than. If you do that for a lifetime, what do you suppose that does to them?”

“According to the caste system,” he said, as if informing me of the status of someone he once knew, “I belong to the second upper caste. The warrior-soldier caste.” I looked at this man who was not much taller than I, small-boned, narrow-shouldered, gentle of face, self-effacingly modest in bearing and wondered on what planet would this man be seen as a natural-born warrior? Here was living proof of the miscasting of caste. This had long ago registered to him as well, and he took the caste ascription with so little solemnity that he was not at first able to give the exact spelling of the caste, or, in Sanskrit, the varna, to which he was born. I did not yet know the four varnas at the time, or that castes were even called varnas, so I asked him to write it down for me. He wrote the words Khatriya and then Kayastras in my notepad.

In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This phenomenon “is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior,” writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status.”

By the middle of the twentieth century, the white working-class American, wrote the white southern author Lillian Smith, “has not only been neglected and exploited, he has been fed little except the scraps of ‘skin color’ and ‘white supremacy’ as spiritual nourishment.” Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.”

In the midst of the Great Depression, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois observed that working-class white Americans had bought into the compensation of a “public and psychological wage,” as he put it. “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.” They had accepted the rough uncertainties of laboring class life in exchange for the caste system’s guarantee that, no matter what befell them, they would never be on the very bottom.

“Nobody could take away from you this whiteness that made you and your way of life ‘superior,’ ” Lillian Smith wrote. “They could take your house, your job, your fun; they could steal your wages, keep you from acquiring knowledge; they could tax your vote or cheat you out of it: they could by arousing your anxieties make you impotent, but they could not strip your white skin off of you. It became the poor white’s most precious possession, a ‘charm’ staving off utter dissolution.”

In the zero-sum stakes of a caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person comes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

The subordinate caste was shut out of “the trillions of dollars of wealth accumulated through the appreciation of housing assets secured by federally insured loans between 1932 and 1962,” a major source of current-day wealth, wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. “Yet they find themselves portrayed as privileged beneficiaries of special preferences by the very people who profit from their exploitation and oppression.”

What kind of person is likely to carry this kind of unconscious bias? “This is a wonderful person,” Williams said, “who has sympathy for the bad things that have happened in the past. But that person is still an American and has been fed the larger stereotypes of blacks that are deeply embedded in the culture of this society. So, despite holding no explicit racial prejudices, they nonetheless hold implicit bias that’s deep in their subconscious. They have all these negative images of African-Americans so that when they meet an African-American, although self-consciously they are not prejudiced, the implicit biases nonetheless operate to shape their behavior. This discriminatory behavior is activated more quickly and effortlessly than conscious discrimination, more quickly than saying, ‘I’ve decided to discriminate against this person.’ “This is the frightening point,” he said. “Because it’s an automatic process, and it’s an unconscious process, people who engage in this unthinking discrimination are not aware of it. They are not lying to you when they say, ‘I didn’t treat this person differently, and I treat everyone the same.’ They mean it because, consciously, that is the way they see themselves. These implicit biases shape their behavior in ways they are not even aware of. The research suggests that about 70 to 80 percent of whites fall into this category.”

In the United States and in India, people in the dominant caste have blamed stagnant careers or rejections in college admissions on marginalized people in the lower caste, even though African-Americans in the United States and Dalits in India are rarely in positions to decide who will get hired at corporations or admitted to universities. In the United States, it is a numerical impossibility for African-Americans to wreak such havoc in employment and higher education: there are simply not enough African-Americans to take the positions that every member of the dominant caste dreams of holding.

On an autumn evening in October 1989, a suburban Boston couple, expecting their first child that December, were driving home from a childbirth class. The husband, twenty-nine-year-old Charles Stuart, was the reserved and ambitious store manager at a luxury furrier downtown. His wife, thirty-year-old Carol DiMaiti Stuart, was a petite and gregarious attorney. They had bought a split-level house in the suburbs and had already decided that if that baby was a boy, they would name him Christopher. They were both children of the dominant caste, who had risen from modest, blue-collar backgrounds. They had just celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary. That evening, they were driving home through the neighborhood of Roxbury, which had been the landing place for waves of European immigrants and, after World War II, became mostly black, poor and working class, ravaged by the war on drugs. The husband was behind the wheel of their Toyota and had taken a somewhat circuitous route. At a traffic light in the Mission Hill section, shots were fired, hitting the wife in the head and the husband in the abdomen, both at close range. The husband was in better shape than the wife, and he called police dispatch from his car phone. His wife died at the hospital of the massive wounds she sustained. Their baby was delivered in the wife’s final hours, two months premature, and named Christopher as his parents had wished. He lived for only seventeen days. The night of the shooting, Charles Stuart...

Humans could learn a lot from canines. The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or seen as qualified for alpha positions—as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries—not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically, on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste, the assumption being that only those from a certain caste or gender or religion or national origin have the innate capacity or deservedness to be leaders.

Should a parent clip them a little at a time, spread it out to spare them the pain of a single blow? Should a parent sit them down and get it over with? You could argue that the sooner a child knows, the safer, more prepared he will be. Maybe a parent should hold off as long as he can, give his child the longest possible chance to be…a child. He’ll have the rest of his life, decades, to live with reality, adjust himself to the truth. Maybe the most loving thing to do is to wait, wait until something happens, somebody drops the n-word on him at the playground or a teacher checks him for running down the hall but not his white schoolmates, and he knows it’s wrong and wants to know why.

Modern-day caste protocols are less often about overt attacks or conscious hostility and can be dispiritingly hard to fight. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. It’s a form of status hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit. It is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

Decades after the Civil War, the entire world was at war and well into a fourth year of trench combat that was tearing Europe apart. The year was 1918, after the Americans had finally sent in their troops. The French welcomed the reinforcement during World War I, had badly needed it. The French began commanding some of the American troops, and it was then that the problems began. The French were treating the soldiers according to their military rank rather than their rank in the American caste system. They were treating black soldiers as they would white soldiers, as they would treat other human beings, having drinks with them, patting their shoulders for a job well done. This rankled the white soldiers in an era of total segregation back home, and this breach had to be put to a stop. American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were “inferior beings,” no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that it was “of the utmost importance” that they be treated as inferior. The fact that military command would take the time in the middle of one of the most vicious wars in human history to instruct foreigners on the necessity of demeaning their own countrymen suggests that they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself. As it was, the white soldiers were refusing to fight in the same trenches as black soldiers and refusing to salute black superiors.

Later, in the final months of the war, an African-American soldier, Pvt. Burton Holmes, was grievously wounded in a hail of machine gun fire and heavy German artillery in an ambush of his unit in September 1918. He managed to make his way back to the command post to exchange rifles because the one he had been given was malfunctioning. Commanders wanted to get him to the hospital for treatment, but he refused and rejoined the fight with a backup rifle. He continued to fire upon the enemy until his last breath. Another African-American in Company C, Freddie Stowers, crawled into enemy shelling and led the assault on German trenches. He, too, died on the front lines defending France and America. White officers who had witnessed their bravery broke with caste and nominated both men for the Medal of Honor. But this was the height of the eugenics era, when black inferiority was near universal convention in American culture. The government refused to grant the medal to either soldier. The award intended for Holmes was downgraded to a lesser citation, and the recommendation for Stowers was lost for half a century. These actions were in keeping with societal norms that people in the lowest caste were not to be commended even in death, lest the living begin to think themselves equal, get uppity, out of their place, and threaten the myths that the upper caste kept telling itself and the world.

After the war ended, in February 1946, Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr., was riding a Greyhound bus home to North Carolina from Augusta, Georgia, where he had been honorably discharged, having served in the Pacific theater. At a stop along the way, Woodard asked the bus driver if he could step off the bus to relieve himself. The driver told him to sit down, that he didn’t have time to wait. Woodard stood up to the driver and told him, “I am a man just like you.” Woodard had been out of the country and away from Jim Crow for three years, had served his country and taken on “a degree of assertiveness and self-confidence that most southern whites were not accustomed to nor prepared to accept,” in the words of the southern author and judge Richard Gergel. The driver backed down for the time being, told him to “go ahead then and hurry back.” But at the next stop, outside Aiken, South Carolina, the bus driver notified the police.