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The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.
the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history,5 whites would no longer be the majority
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.
Definition
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.
If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children,
Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.
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.
“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” King was floored.
“A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,”5 wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.”
When we are cast into roles, we are not ourselves. We are not supposed to be ourselves.
Africans demonstrated an immunity to European diseases, making them more viable to the colonists than were the indigenous people the Europeans had originally tried to enslave.
The colonists had been unable to enslave the native population on its own turf and believed themselves to have solved the labor problem with the Africans they imported. With little further use for the original inhabitants, the colonists began to exile them from their ancestral lands and from the emerging caste system.
white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of ‘regulating’ Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law.”
People on the bottom rung could be beaten or killed with impunity for any breach of the caste system, like not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough or trying to vote.
“No one was white before he/she came to America,”22 James Baldwin once said.
Americans of today have inherited these distorted rules of engagement whether or not their families had enslaved people
Newcomers learn to vie for the good favor of the dominant caste and to distance themselves from the bottom-dwellers,
6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration,
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,”
“two men and two women were killed, and four Negroes.”
Edmund Pettus Bridge
The idea of race is a recent phenomenon in human history. It dates to the start of the transatlantic slave trade
He coined the term Caucasian on the basis of a favorite skull of his that had come into his possession from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia.
That is how people now identified as white got the scientific-sounding yet random name Caucasian.
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,”
The word caste, which has become synonymous with India, did not, it turns out, originate in India. It comes from the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for “race” or “breed.” The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions.
The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.
Caste is structure. Caste is ranking.
Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines
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.
What is called “affirmative action” in the United States is called “reservations” in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries,
in India it is people’s surnames that may most readily convey their caste. Dalit names are generally “contemptible” in meaning, referring to the humble or dirty work they were relegated to, while the Brahmins carry the names of the gods.
In debating “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,”1 wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”
eugenics, the pseudoscience of grading humans by presumed group superiority.
Hitler had studied America from afar,1 both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock.
At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee,1 or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.”
“association clause” in their marriage bans that helped those states decide if an ambiguous person was black or white, privileged or disfavored. Such a person would be counted in the disfavored group if they had been married to or had been known to associate with people in the disfavored group, thus defying caste purity.
“The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”
When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, and the generations to follow, saying, “Cursed be Canaan!2 The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.”
the first pillar of caste, Divine Will and the Laws of Nature,
heritability became the second pillar
In India, it was generally the father who passed his rank to his children. In America, dating back to colonial Virginia, children inherited the caste of their mother both by law and by custom. And in disputes beyond these parameters, a child was generally to take the status of the lower-ranking parent.
This new law allowed enslavers to claim the children of black women, the vast majority of whom were enslaved, as their property for life and for ensuing generations. 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,
It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class,
third pillar of caste—endogamy,
1958, a Gallup poll found that 94 percent of white Americans disapproved of marriage across racial lines.
fourth pillar of caste rests upon the fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it.
In 1922, the Court held unanimously that white meant not skin color but “Caucasian,” and that Japanese were not Caucasian, notwithstanding the fact that few white Americans had origins in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia either and that those who did were at that very moment being kept out, too.
The Court did not agree and rejected Thind’s quest for citizenship in 1923. “It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity,”30 wrote the Court, “but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.”
Since the early twentieth century, the wealthiest African-Americans—from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali—have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a 2020 ranking of the richest African-Americans, seventeen of the top twenty—from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan—made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports.
