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Held hostage in labor camps in different centuries and an ocean apart, both Jews and African-Americans were subjected to a program of purposeful dehumanization. Upon their arrival at the concentration camps, Jews were stripped of the clothing and accoutrements of their former lives, of everything they had owned. Their heads were shaved, their distinguishing features of side-burns or mustaches or the crowns of lush hair, were deleted from them. They were no longer individuals, they were no longer personalities to consider, to engage with, to take into account.
the Untouchables of India were assigned surnames that identified them by the lowly work they performed, forcing them to announce their degradation every time they introduced themselves,
In Virginia, there were seventy-one offenses that carried the death penalty for enslaved people but only imprisonment when committed by whites,
In a famous though controversial 1963 study of people’s threshold for violence
Study for reference
In a similar experiment,12 conducted at Stanford University in 1975,
Study for reference
There was an attraction called the “Coon Dip,”14 in which fairgoers hurled “projectiles at live African Americans.” There was the “Bean-em,” in which children flung beanbags at grotesquely caricatured black faces,
Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who oversaw the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands during that Trail of Tears, used bridle reins of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding.
The dominant caste often forced its captives to exact punishment on one another or to dispose of the victims as their tormenters watched.
It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.”
In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat.
Who are you if there is no one to be better than? “It’s a great lie on which their identity has been built,”1 said Dr. Sushrut Jadhav, a prominent Indian psychiatrist,
refusing to back mortgages in any neighborhood where black people lived, a practice known as redlining,
Together, these and other government programs extended a safety net and a leg-up to the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of white Americans of today, while shutting out the foreparents of African-Americans from those same job protections and those same chances to earn or build wealth.
The under-treatment 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 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.
True alphas, the behaviorist told me, are fearless protectors against outside incursions, but they rarely have to assert themselves within the pack, rarely have to act with aggression, bark orders, or use physical means of control.
True alphas command authority through their calm oversight of those who depend upon them. They establish their rank early in life and communicate through ancient signals their inner strength and stewardship, asserting their power only when necessary.
It is a tragedy for humankind, which is deprived of the benefit of natural alphas who might lead the world with the compassion and courage that are the hallmarks of a born leader, male or female, of whatever religion or background or caste, the actual intended alphas of the species.
the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954,
As people elbow for position, the greatest tensions arise between those adjacent to one another, up and down the ladder. In India, the uppermost castes have historically at times found themselves rubbing against one another.
The caste system has historically rewarded snitches and sellouts among the lowest caste,
“If a certain member of the group starts climbing up—by doing better in life—the sheer fear of that individual’s exit pushes everyone to pull him down.”
An underlying argument of his contrarian view was that the caste system in India was singular because it was considered stable and unquestioned, because even the lowest castes embraced their degraded lot as the fate of the gods. The fact that black Americans resisted their condition, both in slavery and afterward, and aspired to equality was evidence, to Cox, that the term caste could not be applied to this country.
Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal.
It would be the rare outliers who would go out of their way to experience the world from the perspective of those considered below them, or even to think about them one way or the other,
Takamichi Sakurai wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.
Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an “inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world,8 and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior,” he wrote.
I noticed, first, upper-caste people tended to be lighter in complexion and sharper in features, though that is not an ironclad indicator. Secondly, I noticed that they were more likely to speak English with British diction,
And so, at gatherings of Indians of different castes, I could see that the upper-caste people took positions of authority, were forthright, at ease with being in charge, correcting and talking over the lower-caste people. It
discussion or doing most of the talking. They tended to speak more formally, giving direction, heads held high.
Decades later, a granddaughter would find a photograph of her. It shows a teenage girl holding a measuring tape to her face, a relic of the paranoia of the dominant caste. Even the favored ones were diminished and driven to fear
Though the syndrome has no universally accepted definition or diagnosis, it is generally seen as a phenomenon of people bonding with those who abuse or hold them hostage. It takes its name from a 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, where the hostages came to feel empathy for the men who held them captive during the six-day siege.
“What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,”12 Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.”
From the start of the caste system in America, people who were lowest caste but who had managed somehow to rise above their station have been the shock troops on the front lines of hierarchy.
The more ambitious the marginalized person, the greater the risk of what evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves calls “the out-of-place principle of social dominance.”7 Graves found that hypertension rates of blacks and whites are roughly the same when affluent African-Americans are deleted from the equation. The caste system takes years off the lives of subordinate-caste people the more they find themselves in contention with it.
“There is a black tax that we pay that hurts our health, and the gap is larger among the college-educated than it is among high school dropouts,” Williams said.
Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country’s first black president.
Lyndon B. Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is said to have predicted that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation for having stood up for the citizenship rights of African-Americans. That prophecy would prove to be correct but also an understatement. The Democrats would lose more than just the South and for well longer than a generation. From that moment forward, white Americans overall moved rightward toward the Republicans as the country enacted more egalitarian policies.
A new party of right-wing detractors arose in his wake, the Tea Party, vowing to “take our country back.”
Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy.
Bradley Effect—inflated polling numbers that do not materialize on Election Day due to people telling pollsters what they believe is the socially acceptable answer about their voting plans but then choosing differently in the voting booth.
The 2016 election became a remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America, from highest to lowest status, in a given group’s support of the Republican: White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent.
While CNN did not break down the Asian vote by gender, Asians, like other nonwhites, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, at 65 percent versus 27 percent for Trump, tracking the Latino vote overall.
What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.”
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. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will.
