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February 24 - August 16, 2025
the male candidate would stalk the female candidate from behind during a debate seen all over the world. He would boast of grabbing women by their genitals, mock the disabled, encourage violence against the press and against those who disagreed with him. His followers jeered the female candidate, chanting “Lock her up!”
Inexplicably to many outside the United States, the outcome would turn not on the popular vote, but 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 Vitals of History
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. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.
In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for 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.
Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States.
an artificial hierarchy in which most everything that you could and could not do for much of our history was based upon what you looked like and that manifested itself north and south.
Are there differences in appearance between the castes in India.
The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to Virginia colony in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. Over time, colonial laws granted English and Irish indentured servants greater privileges than the Africans who worked alongside them,
Alexis de Tocqueville to observe in 1831: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”
The cast members become associated with their characters, typecast, locked into either inflated or disfavored assumptions. They become their characters. As an actor, you are to move the way you are directed to move, speak the way your character is expected to speak.
Caste as roles in a play with actors becoming type caste into the future.
The social pyramid known as a caste system is not identical to the cast in a play, though the similarity in the two words hints at a tantalizing intersection. When we are cast into roles, we are not ourselves. We are not supposed to be ourselves. We are performing based on our place in the production,
In the decades to follow, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste system that would become the cornerstone of the social, political, and economic system in America.
The Africans were not cited by age or arrival date as were the Europeans, information vital to setting the terms and time frame of indenture for Europeans,
At first, religion, not race as we now know it, defined the status of people in the colonies. Christianity, as a proxy for Europeans, generally exempted European workers from lifetime enslavement.
When Africans began converting to Christianity, they posed a challenge to a religion-based hierarchy.
The strengths of African workers became their undoing.
British colonists in the West Indies, for example, saw Africans as “a civilized and relatively docile population,” who were “accustomed to discipline,” and who cooperated well on a given task.
The colonies farther south were suited for sugarcane, rice, and cotton—crops with which the English had little experience, but that Africans had either cultivated in their native lands or were quick to master.
The Europeans could and did escape from their masters and blend into the general white population that was hardening into a single caste.
Americans are loath to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world.
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 was in becoming American that they became white. “In Ireland or Italy,” López wrote, “whatever social or racial identities these people might have possessed, being White wasn’t one of them.”
Hostility toward the lowest caste became part of the initiation rite into citizenship in America.
Chapter Six The Measure of Humanity
Geneticists and anthropologists have long seen race as a man-made invention with no basis in science or biology.
Two decades ago, analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,”
“We think we ‘see’ race when we encounter certain physical differences among people such as skin color, eye shape, and hair texture,” the Smedleys wrote. “What we actually ‘see’…are the learned social meanings, the stereotypes,
Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power,
But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not.
While people will admit to or call out sexism or xenophobia and homophobia, people may immediately deflect accusations of racism, saying they don’t have “a racist bone in their body,”
But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like.
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.
In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario.
Given the author’s distinction between racism and castism, why is it books of this type banned?
For this reason, many people—including those we might see as good and kind people—could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group.
Chapter Seven Through the Fog of Delhi to the Parallels in India and America
Unlike the United States, which primarily uses physical features to tell the castes apart, in India it is people’s surnames that may most readily convey their caste.
Brahma, the “grandfather of all the worlds.” And then, to fill the land, he created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishya from his thighs, and, from his feet, the Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas, or divisions of man, millennia ago and into the fullness of time.
“The Brahmin is by Law the lord of this whole creation,” according to the Laws of Manu. “It is by the kindness of the Brahmin that other people eat.”
Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even the feet of the Shudra. They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.
The story of Ham’s discovery of Noah’s nakedness would pass down through the millennia. The sons of Shem, Ham, and Japheth spread across the continents, Shem to the east, Ham to the south, Japheth to the west, it was said. Those who decreed themselves the descendants of Japheth would hold fast to that story and translate it to their advantage. As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and
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From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin,
And thus, a hierarchy evolved in the New World they created, one that set those with the lightest skin above those with the darkest.
The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures.
Pillar Number Two Heritability
each caste society relied on clear lines of demarcation in which everyone was ascribed a rank at birth, and a role to perform, as if each person were a molecule in a self-perpetuating organism.
Virginia General Assembly declared the status of all people born in the colony. “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free,” the Assembly decreed in 1662, “be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.”
It invited them to impregnate the women themselves if so inclined, the richer it would make them. It converted the black womb into a profit center and drew sharper lines around the subordinate caste, as neither mother nor child could make a claim against an upper-caste man, and no child springing from a black womb could escape condemnation to the lowest rung.
