Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The American caste system, which co-opted this class of white workers nearly from the start, "drove such a wedge between black and white workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests" who are "kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interests," DuBois wrote.”

“In the... Great Depression... DuBois observed that working-class white Americans had bought into the compensation of a "public and psychological wage... They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white." They had accepted the rough uncertainties of laboring class life in exchange for the caste system's guarantee that, no matter what befell them, they would never be on the very bottom.”

“They had relied on this illusion, perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group in a forbiddingly competitive society "in which downward social mobility was a constant fear," the historian David Roediger wrote. "One might lose everything, but not whiteness." ”

“In a psychic way, the people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion, an awakening to the holes in an article of faith that an inherited, unspoken superiority, a natural deservedness over subordinated castes, would assure their place in the hierarchy.”

“Rising immigration from across the Pacific and the Rio Grande and the ascendance of a black man as president made for an inversion of the world as many had known it, and some of them might have been more susceptible to the calls to "take our country back" after 2008 and to "make America great again" in 2016. ... political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat.”

“We may underestimate, though, the aftershocks of a shift in demographics, the erosion of labor unions, the perceived loss of status, the fears about their place in the world, and resentment that the kind of security their fathers could rely upon might now be waning in what were supposed to be the best years of their lives.”

“It was white Americans at midlife who were dying of despair in rising numbers. In caste terms, these are the least well off, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America. For generations, they could take for granted their inherited rank in the hierarchy and the benefits that accrued from it.”

“We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author. He had defied his caste from on high and I, from below, and we had met at this moment in London at our own Maginot Line of equality, standing on different sides of the same quest to understand the forces that had sought to define us but had failed.”

“We had both been miscast, each in our own way, and could see through the delusion that had shaped and restricted us from the other side of our respective caste systems. We had broken from the matrix and were convinced that we could see what others could not, and that others could see it, too, if they could awaken from their slumber.”

“He told me about the upper-caste woman in an office... She would get up from her desk and walk the length of the office, down the hall and around the corner, to ask a Dalit to "The jug was there next to her desk," he said. "The Dalit had to get her water. come to where she was sitting and pour it for her. It was beneath her dignity to get the water herself from the desk beside her. This is the sickness of caste."”

“But here was a man born upper-caste in India and a skeptic of inherited status, seeing me as an individual who might be of any rank. He was not putting me in a box nor making the assumptions that I labor under every day. His question was liberating in its innocent lack of judgment. Yet it brought to mind Dr. King's epiphany nearly sixty years before in India.”

“Ambedkar himself affirmed the religious evolution of his people. "I would be glad to take a leading part in the destruction of the caste system," Ambedkar wrote, "if the Hindus are willing to work in earnest towards that end, even if they had to forsake their kith and kin and their religious notions." ”

“"Caste defines everything in India," he said. "It is the Hindu religion that maintains the caste system. That is why Ambedkar became a Buddhist. It was not an escape for him, it was a liberation. Casteism is another form of racism. God knows how long it will take for people to let it go." "I am wondering then, are you still a Hindu?" I asked him. "I am atheist," he said. "No religion. Since I was thirteen."”

“In the slaveholding South, some in the dominant caste grew so accustomed to the embedded superiority built into their days, and the brutality that it took to maintain it, that they wondered how they might manage in the afterlife. "Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to Heaven," a dominant-caste woman in South Carolina asked her minister, "and I must see them there?"”

“... in the expression of countenance; in the motion of the head; in the gait, manner and bearing." ... "if tolerated, would destroy that subordination, upon which our social system rests," the North Carolina judge said. This code extended for generations. Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americans were still being brutalized for the least appearance of stepping out of their place.”

“The Nazis in Germany and the planters in the authoritarian South sowed dissension among the subordinate caste by creating a hierarchy among the captives, rewarding those who identified more with the oppressor rather than the oppressed and who would report back to them any plots of escape or uprising. They would select a captive they felt they could control and elevate that person above the others.”

“The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity...”

“the abolitionist minister William Goodell observed the quandary of black people in antebellum America. "He is accounted criminal for acts which are deemed innocent in others," Goodell wrote in 1853, "punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy."”

“the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target's own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting. Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste... They were punished for... responses a human being would be expected to have... Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant caste kept telling itself.”

“Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy.”

“Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it.”

Just concluded the "Tower of Babylon." That was different and unexpected. An intriguing story.

“It is harder to dehumanize a single person standing in front of you, wiping away tears at the loss of a loved one, just as you would, or wincing in pain from a fall as you would, laughing at an unexpected double entendre as you might. It is harder to dehumanize a single individual that you have gotten the chance to know... people...who seek power and division... attach a stigma... to an entire group.”

“To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species.”

“Dehumanization is a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group, and it is a monumental task. It is a war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own.”

“African-Americans would later convert the performance role that they were forced to occupy—and the talent they built from it—into prominence in entertainment and in American culture disproportionate to their numbers. Since the early twentieth century, the wealthiest African-Americans—from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali—have traditionally been entertainers and athletes.”

“Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.”

“Those permitted under the white tent could reap the rewards of full citizenship, rise to positions of high status, or as far as their talents could take them, get access to the best the country had to offer, or, at the very least, be accorded respect in everyday interactions from subordinate groups who risked assault for any misstep.”

“For most of American history, anyone not Anglo-Saxon fell somewhere on a descending scale of human "pollution." Like a field marshal defending his flanks in multiple theaters, the dominant caste fought the "tainted" influx of new immigrants with two of the most stringent immigration bans ever enacted, just before and after the turn of the twentieth century.”