Caste

Last year the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that 7 of 10 Republicans think that recent demographic changes are driven by liberal policies aimed at “replacing” conservative whites.  Earlier surveys showed most Americans believe that white people suffer discrimination, and many think that discrimination against whites is more severe than against minorities. But where does the idea that there is such a thing as white, or a race of whites.  It is because Americans, uniquely among nations, decided long ago that there is such a thing as a race of blacks.

Isabel Wilkerson, in Caste, offers a compelling argument that in America, while we may have a fluid class system for whites, but for blacks, we do not include them in a class.  Black Americans are in a caste system and in the lowest caste.  American untouchables.  Even the prejudice against immigrants such as Asians or Latins can be overcome with time and effort. As in India, the lowest caste, the Untouchables (properly called Dalits) must not hope to rise or overcome their status.

When Martin Luther King visited India, he was introduced at a high school for Dalits as an “untouchable from the United States of America.  King thought that “every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”

The American caste system is like the Hindu system (now outlawed yet still practiced), and like the Nazi system for relegating Jews to a dehumanized, lowest caste.  Formerly laws enforced the caste system but despite the new laws designed to guarantee equality, black people remain, in the eyes of many Americans, a separate and unequal group.  And the lowest class of whites needs the system to ensure their belief that they are, at least, white.  I think of Pap in Huckleberry Finn.  A violent drunk, the lowest form of white American, who was enraged when he learned that a freed slave could read and write even vote.  He needed a lower set of people than he was.

Wilkinson describes a caste system as having eight major characteristics that define it and distinguish it from a simple class system. The caste system is supported by religion. It is inherited. Marriage and mating are controlled by law or simply by racist attitude.  The untouchable class, the Jews of Nazi Germany, the Untouchables of India, and blacks of America are to be avoided physically as impure and polluted.  The lowest caste are relegated to occupations that are the most undesirable and yet these jobs are those that are the foundation of a society and absolute necessities.  The caste system is controlled by terror and fear.  And those at the lowest of the low are inherently inferior and importantly, those not in the untouchable class, those of white America must be inherently superior regardless of merit or achievement.

The idea of the American Dream is that anyone can rise from impoverished immigrant to a higher, richer, more privileged class.  But for the caste of African Americans, class is static and immutable.  LeB James said that no matter how great or wealthy or worshipped you become, if you are an African American, “you will always be that.”

The rise of Trump and the explosion of social discord, hatred and violence cannot be explained simply by racial prejudice but only by caste.  Barack Obama broke the caste system and a resentful mass of people rebelled.  The real resentment is that not only with Obama’s election but also with the rise of black Americans to positions of influence and honor.  Many white Americans saw that the superiority of “whiteness” was slipping away.  The “replacement” belief is fundamental to the idea that we must go back to when America was great.  America was free from enforced equality.

Isabel Wilkinson writes like a journalist not an academic. The book is convincing not only by diligent research but also by the author’s personal experience and her travels and interviews in preparation for this book.  Here are some things that surprised me:

Wilkinson was told by and African born woman that there are no blacks in Africa.  Africans “are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele.  They are not black.  They are just themselves.”  Blackness is a uniquely American idea born of the slave trade.  The author discovered that the architects of the Nazi caste system modelled their caste system on the Jim Crow laws of the South.  But the Nazis found it too harsh:  they would not go so far as to say that one drop of Jewish blood puts a person in the hated caste of Jews.  Wilkinson notes that W.E.B. Dubois realized that after emancipation, the white power structure were afraid that former slaves may actually succeed.  In a caste system, a bottom caste is a necessity.  It is when black citizens succeeded in politics or business that violent and murderous backlash results. 

The concept of caste not only helps to explain the Republican victory in 2016 but also helps explain the Democrat loss of working-class support.  The working class was always supporting their own interests and now see the dominance of the white working class slipping away.  Caste is a powerful explainer of our history and present social division.