October 9 - 15, 2020

On June 19, 2020, I made a commitment to educate myself on the lingering effects of racism, discrimination, and bias in America. Every day through June 18, 2021, I will read an article or book chapter, listen to a podcast, watch a movie or documentary, view a webinar, or do something substantive to educate myself in these areas. As part of that commitment, I will post to this blog each Friday with a list of what I've done over the past week as well as any pertinent thoughts or reflections.

Today's post covers the week of October 9-15, 2020.

 

Caste 

This week, I read the first 12 chapters of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's latest book, Caste. The book examines similarities among the caste systems in India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. While many might not recognize the US as having a caste system, Wilkerson argues that the American caste was set up during slavery and has persisted through Jim Crow to the present day.

Wilkerson begins by defining caste as, "an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that set the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits." In India, the caste system is based on surname, region, and occupation, among other things, while the American caste is based on skin color. Wilkerson offers evidence that Nazi Germany studied the American system in deriving its own caste that placed Aryans at the top and Jews on the bottom.

When Martin Luther King visited India in 1959, he was introduced to the Dalits (the lowest caste) as a "fellow untouchable." This reference startled King but also made him curious about the cultural similarities between the US and India. He left India believing that the human hierarchy in place in America was, in fact, a caste system.

Wilkerson spends much of the first half of the book discussing the emergence of caste in America and the parallels with India and Germany. She offers several examples of how the subordinate caste treatment by the dominant caste has been similar throughout the three countries. She also writes about the emergence of Whiteness in contrast to Blackness as a post-Civil war construct. In the early years of America, the differences among European immigrants were embedded into the caste, with Anxlo-Saxons at the top and Southern and Eastern Europeans at the bottom. Only through the contrast with persons of African descent did the concept of Whiteness emerge, as those caught between the Anglos and the Africans jostled for their place in the caste hierarchy.

Wilkerson sets up the last half of the book by defining and offering examples of the eight pillars of caste: 1) Divine Will and the Laws of Nature; 2) Heritability; 3) Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating; 4) Purity versus Pollution; 5) Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill; 6) Dehumanization and Stigma; 7) Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control; and 8) Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority.

As Wilkerson moves to the second half of the book, she begins to outline the lingering effects of caste systems even after changes in Indian and American law have rendered portions of those systems illegal. Wilkerson maintains that countries with these systems in place for thousands of years (such as India) or hundreds of years (such as America) have not effectively equalized the castes simply by changing the law. The lingering effects of the system are easily passed to each new generation through customs, language, and norms that may not be easily recognized by the participants.

The remainder of the book will be the subject of next week's blog.