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on the Electoral College, an American invention from the founding era of slavery by which each state has a say in declaring the winner based on the electoral votes assigned them and the outcome of the popular ballot in their jurisdiction.
The election would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one’s own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even of the planet itself.
the sobering message of 2016
and the waning second decade of a still-new millennium: that rising heat in the earth’s oceans and in the human heart could revive long-buried threats, that some pathogens
Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.
We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.
It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.
It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations, and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the
signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance.
Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.
Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in
Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now
the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.
The use of inherited physical characteristics to differentiate inner abilities and group value may be the cleverest way that a culture has ever devised to manage and maintain a caste system.
In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.
More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion
they were to convert this wilderness and civilize it to their liking, they decided they would need to conquer, enslave, or remove
deemed lesser beings to tame and work the land to extract the wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines.
There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe with rungs inside that designation, the English Protestants at the very top as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight over North America. Everyone
There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like, an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed, unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they
Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity.
“Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.”
human pyramid encrypted into us all.
caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation.
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one,
country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not
chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order.
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
The seventeen legal scholars and functionaries went back and forth over American purity laws governing intermarriage and immigration. In debating “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,” wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”
they were seeking legal prototypes for the caste system they were building. They
nations shows an upward line for the death rates of middle-aged white Americans against the plunging lines for their counterparts in fellow Western countries.
In caste terms, these are the least well off, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America. For generations, they could take for granted their inherited rank in the hierarchy and the benefits that accrued from it. We may underestimate, though, the aftershocks of a shift in demographics, the erosion of labor unions, the perceived loss of status, the fears about their place in the world, and resentment that the kind of security their fathers could rely upon might now be waning in what were supposed to be the best years of their lives. Rising immigration from across the
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In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This
“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.”
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 a psychic
“a tremendous gain in psychological security…as a
The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion. If the lower-caste
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,
messages about African-Americans and other marginalized groups that as much as 80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so
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.”
The undertreatment of the subordinate caste leaves them to suffer needlessly, and the overtreatment of the
dominant caste may have contributed to the rising mortality rate for white Americans who become addicted to opioids.
In a caste system, whether in the United States or in India or in World War II Germany, the lowest caste performed the unwitting role of diverting society’s attention from its structural ills and taking the blame for collective misfortune. It was seen, in fact, as misfortune itself. Thus
which have aroused the whites, and he becomes a warning against future
Thousands of African-Americans are behind bars for having been in possession of a substance
that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.
It is to say that one of the more disturbing aspects of a caste system, and of the unequal justice it produces, is that it makes for a less safe society, allowing the guilty to shift blame and often to go free. A caste system gives us false comfort, makes us feel that the world is in order, that we automatically know the good guys from the bad guys.
but usually the innately self-assured one who can chastise a pack member with a mere look or a low voice. A true alpha wields quiet power judiciously apportioned.
“The main characteristic of an alpha male wolf is a quiet confidence, quiet self-assurance,”
