Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. ”

“The Confederacy would lose the war in April 1865, but in the succeeding decades would win the all-important peace. The Confederates would manage to take hold of the public imagination with gauzy portrayals of the Lost Cause. Two of the most influential and popular films of the early twentieth century—Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind—fed the country and the world the Confederate version of the war...”

“Never forget
The minute we look away,
the minute we stop fighting, bigotry wins
There is no more room for hate
That all men are created equal”

“the ruptures exposed in 2016 transcend a single election or candidate and go well beyond the initial theories of economic insecurity ways, a sense of as the driver of the white vote. "In many group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn," wrote the political scientist Diana Mutz, "because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune."”

“"Even though white Americans still comprise a clear political majority and continue to possess most of the country's wealth," observed the legal scholar Robert L. Tsai, "it is possible to stoke outlandish fears of a coming reckoning where racial and ethnic minorities will seek to subjugate white citizens." The sense of perceived injury found a voice in 2016.”

“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.”

“To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes.' People identifying as white evangelicals, regardless of their personal religiosity, "rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation," Dowland writes. "They have proven to be loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims.”

“the priorities of white evangelicals—ending abortion, restricting immigration, protecting gun rights, limiting government, and, more recently, the disdain for science and the denial of climate change—have become the menu of belief systems for the Republican Party. What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups... is not theology but politics," writes Seth Dowland”

“it would be the duty of the party representing and dependent on the subordinate caste to open the eyes of their fellow Americans and make the case for a more egalitarian country.”

“white evangelicals are to Republicans what African-Americans are to Democrats, though each makes up a minority of the total electorate. But the foremost concerns of the Democrats' most reliable voting bloc-affordable housing, clean water, police brutality, the racial wealth gap, and reparations for state-sanctioned discrimination...have remained on the back burner, or have even been considered radioactive issues”

“For their part, Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs.”

“For the Republicans, the singularity of focus, the sense of rallying around an existential threat, combined with the inherent caste advantages of the collective wealth and influence of its voters overall, gives the GOP a seeming advantage in firing up its supporters against Democratic opposition.”

“A subliminal awareness of the power of caste...appears also to be at work... in how the parties respond to their respective bases. The Republican reverence for its base of white evangelicals stands in stark contrast to the indifference often shown the Democratic base of African-Americans, who are devalued for a host of reasons, among them their suppressed status at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”

“"The parties have grown so divided by race," writes the political scientist Lilliana Mason, "that simple racial identity, without policy content, is enough to predict party identity." There was perhaps no clearer measure of white solidarity than the actions of white women in 2016. The majority of them—53 percent—disregarded the common needs of women and went
...to vote... the white side of their identities”

“In a caste context, the two main political parties bear the advantages and burdens of the castes they most attract and with which they are associated. At times, the stigma and double standard attached to disfavored minorities have accrued to the Democrats, while the privilege and latitude accorded the dominant caste has accrued to the Republicans, who have come to be seen as proxies for white America.”

“Consciously or not, many white voters "are seeking to reassert a racial order in which their group is firmly at the top." The 2016 election thus became a cracked mirror held up country that had not been forced in this way to search its origins in more than a generation and was now seeing itself perhaps for the first time as it truly was. It was the culmination of forces that had been building for decades.”

“no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy. Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe that a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics.”

“"Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying." James Baldwin once wrote, "because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality." Which is why Obama's presidency and his high approval ratings "masked an undercurrent of anxiety about our changing nation," according to Jardina. "It hid a swell of resistance to multiculturalism, and a growing backlash to immigration."”

“With rising resentments, it would not be surprising that attacks on African-Americans might not only not have abated but would worsen under the unprecedented reversal of the social hierarchy. By the second term of the administration, in 2015, police were killing unarmed African-Americans at five times the rate of white Americans.”

“Contrary to the wistful predictions of post-racial harmony, the number of hate groups in the United States surged from 602 to more than 1,000 between 2000 and 2010, the middle of Obama's first term in office, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

“That sense of fear and loss, however remote, "brought to the fore, for many whites," Jardina wrote, "a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group," a sense of needing to band together to protect their place in the hierarchy. The caste system sprang into action against this threat to the preexisting order...”

“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 well longer than a generation.”

“As a measure of the enduring role of caste interests in American politics, the shadow of the Civil War seemed to hang over the 2008 election. It turned out that Obama carried every state that Abraham Lincoln had won in 1860, an election with an almost entirely white electorate but one that became a proxy for egalitarian sentiment and for the future of slavery and of the Republic.”

“Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country's first black president. An estimated 43% went for him in 2008... fewer still—39% — voted for him in 2012. In ...Mississippi, only 1 in 10 white voters...for Obama. For much of his presidency, he was trying to win over people who did not want him in the Oval Office and some who resented his very existence.”

“ "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. "We still carry that burden, to engage in a heightened vigilance, which means you're careful of how you look, how you appear, how you dress." ”

“ "Middle class African American men and women are more likely to suffer from hypertension and stress than those with lower incomes," wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress-inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.”

“These studies initially focused on the accelerated aging of the telomeres of African-Americans. But expanded research is finding that this kind of cell damage results from one's exposure to social inequity and difficult life conditions, rather than merely one's race and ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites...”

“This leaves many Americans at risk without knowing it. As they go about their days interacting with co-workers, neighbors, contractors, or other ordinary people perceived as unlike themselves, they can be in danger of worsened health and premature illness due to the threat signals triggered by the person's own unaddressed prejudice.”

“But to do so in a meaningful way requires forethought, an awareness of the unconscious biases passed down through the generations, and the chance for people different from one another to work together as equals, on the same team, with shared goals that "require cooperation to succeed," Fiske said. Outside of sports and the military, American society provides few such opportunities.”

“When whites have a bit more time for the conscious mind to override the automatic feeling of threat, the amygdala activity switches to inhibition mode. When whites are prompted to think of the black person as an individual, imagine their personal characteristics, the threat level falls. This shows that it is "possible to override our worst impulses and reduce these prejudices," wrote the psychologist Susan Fiske.”