Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor.

I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany.

Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately ordering it from Amazon. I've only read the first 35 pages so far. I'm liking the book a lot. Here's how Wilkerson describes caste early on in the book.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.

A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

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 throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

Here's an excerpt from Caste that I found fascinating. When Wilkerson spoke to some Indian scholars of caste, she found that she could tell who was upper-caste and lower-caste from their bearing and behavior. I'll have more to say about the book after I'm further along in it.

In embarking upon this work, I devoured books about caste in India and in the United States. Anything with the word caste in it lit up my neurons. I discovered kindred spirits from the past -- sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, writers --- whose work carried me through time and across generations.

Many had labored against the tide, and I felt that I was carrying on a tradition and was not walking alone.

In the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste, based here in America. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where W.E.B. Du Bois's papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a six-hundred-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American South, the time of naked white supremacy, but that the word racism did not appear anywhere in the narrative.

I told them that, after spending fifteen years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I realized that the term was insufficient. Caste was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why.

They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony that I had not been aware of ahead of time, the hosts presented to me a bronze-colored bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared scenarios of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome.

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy -- in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

After one session, I went up to a woman presenter whose caste I had ascertained from observing her interactions. I noticed that she had reflexively stood over the Dalit speaker and had taken it upon herself to explain what the Dalit woman had just said or meant, to take a position of authority as if by second nature, perhaps without realizing it.

We chatted a bit, and then I said to her, "I believe you must be upper caste, are you not?" She looked crestfallen. "How did you know?" she said, "I try so hard."

We talked for what seemed an hour more, and I could see the effort it took to manage the unconscious signals of encoded superiority, the presence of mind necessary to counteract the programming of caste. I could see how hard it was even for someone committed to healing the caste divide, who was, as it turned out, married to a man from the subordinate caste and who was deeply invested in egalitarian ideals.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

"Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States."

That's ...interesting, intriguing actually. Everyone who knows anything about India knows about its infamous and very deep-rooted and entirely reprehensible caste system. But those other two, that's something new. I mean, sure, there's the big fat racism thing in the US, probably way more than in Europe for instance, given the shameful slave-owning history that's such an intrinsic part of what the US is all about; and as for the Nazis, those lowlifes are like the epitome of racism and the worst of its excesses, sure. But to think of those two as some caste system? That's new.

Not doubting Wilkerson's thesis, I'm sure she knows what she's talking about. Just, I'm not sure how that works, in practice. If it's just the two "castes", those at the oppressor end of racism, and those at the oppressed end of racism: well then, what we have is simply racism, is all. For it to amount to a caste thing, we'd need a full-on hierarchy, of the kind that prevailed (and, although now diluted down, but still continues to persist to a not insignificant degree) in India. How might that translate to the US, and also to Nazi Germany, is what I'm wondering.

[Appreciative Reader]

Thinking about this some more: might casteism, of a kind, not better describe the situation in the UK, than in the US or with the Nazis? What you have over there is a whole hierarchy of classes, of "castes" if you will. Obviously less cast in stone than in the past, obviously watered down aplenty, obviously allowing for like a huge amount of toing and froing across classes: and yet, that absurd, and reprehensible, hierarchy, it's still a thing, as anyone who's spent some time in the UK will attest. (We've got lots of commenters here who actually live there, no doubt they can attest to this far more authoritatively than an occasional and casual visitor might.)

Right at the top of this absurd UK caste/class system sits the monstrosity that is the monarchy. Next the aristocracy, another complete abomination, that still holds jaw-dropping economic clout in terms of land holding and inherited weatlh, and not to forget a whole fucking House dedicated to these --- cringe at the term! --- "Lords", most of whom are there via unearned and undeserved hereditary titles, and only a few actually people of worth who've earned their title through merit. Then you've a whole absurd string of highs and lows and people-we-admire and not-good-enoughs, the like of which people who haven't actually spent some time in the UK will be hard put to properly appreciate.

A full-on casteist hierarchy? India obviously is the mother of that abomination. But it is UK that I'd say comes a close second.

Not that racism in America isn't reprehensible, of course it is, completely so. As for the Nazi horror, that's like a whole different category of evil, obviously. But I really don't see a hierarchy proper in there, is what I'm saying.

(But of course, that's just a knee-jerk reaction, made in ignorance of Isabel Wilkerson's complete thesis, and based just off of a quick persual of these excerpts here, so the pinch of salt thing when you read this.)