Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“While all the countries in the New World created hierarchies with Europeans on top, the US alone created a system based on racial absolutism, the idea that a single drop of African blood, or varying percentages of Asian or Native American blood, could taint the purity of someone who might otherwise be presumed to be European, a stain that would thus disqualify the person from admittance to the dominant caste.”

“The American caste system was an accelerated one, compressed into a fraction of the time that India's caste system has been in existence. Its founders used the story of Noah and his sons to justify the bottom of the hierarchy but, without further biblical instruction, as in the Laws of Manu, they shaped the upper caste as they went along.”

“The waters and shorelines of nature were forbidden to the subordinate castes if the dominant caste so desired. Well into the twentieth century, African-Americans were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools, both north and south, lest they pollute them, just as Dalits were forbidden from the waters of the Brahmins, and Jews from Aryan waters in the Third Reich.”

“In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated. There were two separate Bibles — one for blacks and one for whites to swear to tell the truth on. The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races.”

“In the United States the subordinate caste was quarantined in every sphere of life, made untouchable in American terms for most of country's history and well into the twentieth century.”

“Endogamy enforces caste boundaries by forbidding marriage outside of one's group and going so far as to prohibit sexual relations, or even the appearance of romantic interest, across caste lines. ... Endogamy, by closing off legal family connection, blocks the chance for empathy or a sense of shared destiny between the castes.”

“This desire led to the third pillar of caste endogamy, which means restricting marriage to people within the same caste. This is an ironclad foundation of any caste system, from ancient India, to the early American colonies, to the Nazi regime in Germany. Endogamy was brutally enforced in the United States for the vast majority of its history and did the spade work for current ethnic divisions.”

“If you can act your way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years, wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the subordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliating attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of their caste position.”

“It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class ... Class is an altogether separate measure of one's standing in a society, marked by level of education, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant characteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from socioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity.”

“Tied conveniently as it was to what one looked like, membership in either the upper or the lowest caste was deemed immutable, primordial, fixed from birth to death, and thus regarded as inescapable. "He may neither earn nor wed his way out," wrote the scholars Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in Deep South, their seminal 1941 study of caste in America.”

“The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures. In both countries, the subordinate castes were consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement, owing to the sins of the past.”

“Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism. Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom. They made postcards out of the gelatin prints for people to send to their loved ones.”

“The villagers were not all Nazis... But they followed the Nazi leaders on the radio, waited to hear the latest from Hitler and Goebbels... an intravenous drip to the mind. The people had ingested the lies... that these prisoners—Jews, Sinti, homosexuals, opponents of the Reich—were not humans like themselves, and thus the townspeople swept the ash from their steps and carried on with their days.”

“... and thus no one person was complicit, and yet everyone was complicit. It [Evil] had grown bigger than them because they had allowed it to grow bigger than them, and now it was raining down onto their gingerbread cottages and their lives of pristine conformity.”

“The ash coated the swing sets and paddling pools in the backyards of the townspeople. There was no denying the slaughter and torment on the other side of the barbed wire. The fruit of evil fell upon villagers like snow dust. They were covered in evil, and some were good parents and capable spouses, and yet they did nothing to stop the evil, which had now grown too big for one person to stop,”

“While the Nazis praised "the American commitment to legislating racial purity," they could not abide "the unforgiving hardness" under which "'an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins' counted as blacks," Whitman wrote. "The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis."”

“Mindful of appearances beyond their borders, for the time being at least, the Nazis wondered how the United States had managed to turn its racial hierarchy into rigid law yet retain such a sterling reputation on the world stage. They noticed that in the United States, when it came to these racial prohibitions, "public opinion accepted them as natural," wrote the historian Claudia Koonz.”

“By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States "was not just a country with racism," Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. "It was the leading racist jurisdiction — so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration." The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.”

“The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."”

“Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country's near [complete] genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had "shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." ”

“Germany well understood the U.S. fixation on race purity and eugenics, the pseudoscience of grading humans by presumed group superiority. Many leading Americans had joined the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, including the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the auto magnate Henry Ford, and Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University. ”

“Western Europeans had long been aware of the American paradox of proclaiming liberty for all men while holding subsets of its citizenry in near total subjugation. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured antebellum America in the 1830's and observed that only the "surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint." ”

“The Nazis... in the early years of the regime... were seeking legal prototypes for the caste system they were building. They... knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti- miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans. "For us Germans, it is especially important to know and see how one of the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock already has race legislation...." ”

“Caste is... like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see. We cannot win against a hologram. Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kind ness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”

“The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like.”

“...an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits," derived from a few of the thousands of genes that make up a human being. "The idea of race," Montagu wrote, "was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste."”

“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," said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world." ”

“To gain acceptance, each fresh infusion of immigrants had to enter into a silent, unspoken pact of separating and distancing themselves from the established lowest caste... They could establish their new status by observing how the lowest caste was regarded and imitating... the... contempt, learning the epithets, joining in on violence against them to prove themselves worthy of admittance to the dominant caste.”

“The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners whose crime was that they were born with dark skin. Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally inflicted gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.”

“"This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict," wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, "for it means that white people ... became accustomed to the idea of 'regulating' Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law..." Slavery so perverted the balance of power that it made the degradation of the subordinate caste seem normal and righteous.”