Caste

 

Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Random House, 2020, 388 pp.

In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race—a 400-year-old hierarchy (beginning in 1619) placing white people at the top and Black people at the bottom. Wilkerson examines the different caste systems around the world and how they damage the lives of everyone involved, even those at the top. She believes that to understand how to move forward, we must examine the past and the racial structures that keep progress as a nation at bay.

My Notes:

 Pg. 17:  Throughout human history, three-caste systems have stood out.  The tragically accelerated, chilling system of Nazi Germany.  The millennia-long caste system of India.  And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US.  Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.  A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced through0ut the culture and passed down through the generations.  The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality.  It is about power.

Pg. 45:  The American colonists created an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world.  For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the human race and into a separate sub-group that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity.  It was the conversion of human beings into currency.

Pg. 48:  Slavery had a brief twelve-year respite brought the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War: this short period has been labeled Reconstruction.  This ended in 1877 and the Jim Crow period began and would not be relieved until 1965.

Pg. 78:  In June of 1934 the Nazis had a meeting to hash out what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the first topic on the agenda was the US and what they could learn from it.  They went back and forth over American purity laws governing intermarriage and immigration.  In debating how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich, they began by asking how the Americans did it.

Pg. 104f:  The US 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.  In 1662, for instance, the Virginia General Assembly declared the status of all people born in the colony.  “Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free,” be it therefore enacted and declared by this present Grand Assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” (So if your Mother was a slave, so too would you).

Pg. 122:  Congress in 1790 restricted American citizenship to white immigrants, “free white persons,” according to the statute.

Pg. 228:  It was largely black efforts to rise beyond their station that set off the backlash of lynchings and massacres after Reconstruction following the Civil War, that sparked the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and the imposition of Jim Crow laws to keep the lowest caste in its place.  A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920.

 Pg. 315:  Since 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s prophecy, no Democrat running for president has ever won a majority of the white vote.  Only three Democrats have made it to the Oval Office since Johnson and the civil rights era—Carter, Obama, and Bill Clinton, who won with 39 percent of the white vote in 1992 and 44 percent in 1996.

Pg. 330:  It is politics, not theology, which distinguishes Evangelicals from other religious groups and nonbelievers.

Pg. 336:  The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient.  As they foreclosed the hopes of African Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

Pg. 385:  Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough.  They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death.  A caste system spares no one.

 

 Below is taken from the Internet:                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The Definition of Caste

According to Wilkerson, caste describes a man-made social order developed to rank the value of certain groups of people. This order is based on the assumed supremacy of one group and the assumed inferiority of others according to heritage, personal characteristics, religious preferences, or economic status. More often than not, Wilkerson argues, the characteristics used to delineate groups are arbitrary and benign in other contexts. They only become important when one group uses them to segregate people and assign parameters for the appropriate behaviors of each group.

 

How Casteism Differs From Racism

Wilkerson believes that while race and caste are not synonyms, they support each other within American culture. Race is the physical evidence of difference and the set of meanings assigned to that evidence. Caste is how we organize that evidence to maintain division among groups and ascribe the appropriate lifestyles. Therefore, Wilkerson believes it would be more accurate to refer to someone who discriminates against another race as a casteist, not a racist. That’s because, according to the author, the definition of racism has changed over time.

Originally, racism signified one group that uses their social power to oppress another group based on race. However, Wilkerson argues that in the last century, racism has become synonymous with beliefs, actions, and character. Today, if you’re a racist, it means you hate people who are not like you and condone oppression. Wilkerson believes that this misunderstanding is why the dominant caste flinches at the term. The author argues that if racism were understood as a byproduct of casteism, society might actually be open to acknowledging racial problems.

Are “Race” and “Caste” Really Different?

To understand the difference between race and caste, it helps to understand how other scholars define “racism.” As Ijeoma Oluo describes in So You Want to Talk About Race, there are two culturally accepted definitions of racism. The first is personal (bias against a person based on their race), and the second is structural (racially biased power structures and institutions that discriminate against a particular racial group). Wilkerson argues that most people rely on the personal definition, while only social scientists tend to use the structural definition.

Wilkerson’s solution to the confusion over how to define “racism” is to focus on caste, not race. However, her description of caste as the structure of American inequality sounds almost identical to the second (systemic) definition of racism. If this sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone: Multiple reviewers have questioned whether there’s a meaningful difference between discussing “casteism” and discussing “systemic racism.” They argue that Wilkerson’s distinction is arbitrary and weak. Other reviewers, however, argue that reframing the situation in terms of caste “neatly lift[s] the mind out of old ruts,” even if readers don’t fully buy into Wilkerson’s logic.

The Three Major Caste Systems—America, India, and Nazi Germany

Wilkerson believes there are three main examples of caste systems in history—the American South, India, and Nazi Germany.

It is unexplained why Wilkerson’s list of the primary examples of caste systems in history contains a notable exclusion: the apartheid system that governed South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Like the systems in Nazi Germany, India, and the US, the South African caste system was codified into law and impacted every aspect of citizens’ lives, including where they could live and work, who they could marry, and even which train car they could ride in.)