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You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact, you do the opposite. You educate yourself. You talk to people who have been through it and to specialists who have researched it. You learn the consequences and obstacles, the options and treatment. You may pray over it and meditate over it. Then you take precautions to protect yourself and succeeding generations and work to ensure that these things, whatever they are, don’t happen again.
We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.
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.
Yasss
Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.
Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realization that the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society was not race, but caste, that perhaps it was the only term that addresses what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value.
This caste system would trigger the deadliest war on U.S. soil, lead to the ritual killings of thousands of subordinate-caste people in lynchings, and become the source of inequalities that becloud and destabilize the country to this day.
The vast majority of African-Americans who lived in this land in the first 246 years of what is now the United States lived under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath, subject to people who faced no sanction for any atrocity they could conjure.
“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.
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.
Color is a fact. Race is a social construct.
The Indian concept of rankings, however, goes back millennia and is thousands of years older than the European concept of race. The rankings were originally known as varnas, the ancient term for the major categories in what Indians have in recent centuries called the caste system.
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.
The fixation with smoking out individual racists or sexists can seem a losing battle in which we fool ourselves into thinking we are rooting out injustice by forcing an admission that (a) is not likely to come, (b) keeps the focus on a single individual rather than the system that created that individual, and (c) gives cover for those who, by aiming at others, can present themselves as noble and bias-free for having pointed the finger first, all of which keeps the hierarchy intact.
Oooh facts and facts only. It is also woven into economic issue as well
It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class, a term to which it is often compared.
“No matter how great you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do,” NBA star LeBron James told reporters just the year before, “if you are an African-American man or African-American woman, you will always be that.”
Painful
In so doing, he defined the fifth pillar of caste, the division of labor based on one’s place in the hierarchy.
Wow
Thus, caste did not mean merely doing a certain kind of labor; it meant performing a dominant or subservient role.
Under slavery, most black women were thin, gaunt even, due to the meager rations provided them, and few worked inside a house, as they were considered more valuable in the field. Yet the rotund and cheerful slave or maidservant was what the dominant caste preferred to see, and McDaniel and other black actresses of the era found that those were the only roles they could get.
We would all like to believe that we would resist the impulse to inflict such horror on fellow members of our own species, and some of us very likely would. But not as many as we might like to believe.
Painful
The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at six times the rate as whites accused of similar offenses.
If one of the requirements of a hierarchy is that the lowest caste must remain the scapegoat, on the bottom, the culture works to keep it that way by playing up the stereotypes that affirm their lowliness and minimizing indications to the contrary.
Yes
Historically, the caste system has granted privileges to some in the subordinated group with the use of a toxic tool of caste known as colorism.
Davis and the Gardners determined that caste was “the fundamental division” in the Jim Crow town they studied, built on economic interdependence, in which “the caste system and the economic system reinforce each other.”
Deep South was published in 1941 and has long been overshadowed by the two earlier works produced by scholars from the dominant caste. The Davis and Gardner project seemed to meet the same fate of marginalization as the subordinate caste that they had studied.
Oh wow
Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.
Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. “There is never caste,” the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. “Only castes.”
Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.
“If I make a mistake, my community makes a mistake,” he said. “If I fall, the community falls. I walk a very thin line.”
What follows is not an analysis of the presidency of Barack Obama, but rather a look into the caste system’s response to his ascension and the challenges it would place in his path.
who, beyond all this, ran a scrupulous, near-flawless campaign, a movement really.
You really gotta admire Obama for this. The perfect campaign
“These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” he said, “ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”
The goal of this work has not been to resolve all of the problems of a millennia-old phenomenon, but to cast a light onto its history, its consequences, and its presence in our everyday lives and to express hopes for its resolution.
Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.
With our current ruptures, it is not enough to not be racist or sexist. Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations.
We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.
