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The Fixed Nature of the Caste System in the US


Dr. Lenore Daniels
Message Dr. Lenore Daniels

Coating everything is the dust of ash. Suburban homes where families live. Swings where children play. Everything is coated with this dust where German citizens live as if free . Yet, as author Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, "the fruit of evil fell upon villagers like snow dust." Like that ash that settled upon everything. You could sweep away the dust but what really produced the dust was present in everyone, despite everyone pretending to be innocent .


Ash from the nearby crematory made even the silence culpable-- as silent as any tree reserved for hanging a human body in any southern American town. Local lynching trees, Wilkerson continues, "bore silent witness to black citizens of their eternal lot, and in so doing, it whispered reassurances to the dominant caste of theirs."


However collective this display of innocence and these "whispered" reassurances, the caste structure demands of its dominant caste their active participation. Silence and absenteeism aren't an excuse for denying beneficiary participation in the caste system. Even if, in East Texas, the dominant caste members refused to attend the lynching of Wylie McNeely, even if, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they insisted on having no connections with Blacks, of having never set eyes on Rubin Stacy hanging from a tree, even if they never traveled as many from the dominant caste did, from one lynching to another, to Cairo, Illinois, for example, to see Will James suffer before he died, the dominant caste benefits from the tyranny of terror committed against those designated for the lower caste.


Like slavery, lynching wasn't a secret in the US: it was a commodity. Souvenirs collected from the dead, that is, body parts and clothing, were collected and sold, along with photos, snapped when the necks of Black people snapped. Postcards were sent to family and friends miles away. And many of these postcards referred to the sender having attended a b arbecue. As Wilkerson writes, these spectacles of violence and terror were "'singularly American.'" Even Nazis, she adds, didn't stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, she writes.


Residents in Omaha, Nebraska, near the bonfire where Will Brown was set ablaze, must have smelt the human flesh burning. Fourteen-year-old Malcolm Little remembered the death of his father in Omaha. Earl Little, a Garveyite, ended up on a train track. Yes. Accidentally. Of course.

*


In Caste , Wilkerson refers to eight pillars upholding the caste structure.


According to an ancient Hindu text, Manu, the "all-knowing," was asked, before the age of "human awareness," about the "proper order of "all the social classes as well as those born in between." A caste structure comes into existence, and in time, the structure, arbitrary, becomes a tradition if not a series of inhumane laws. Ordained, no less, by a divinity!


The first pillar of the caste structure is a hierarchy based on "those with the lightest skin above those with the darkest" while the second pillar refers to heritability-- fixing the idea of humans born into "a certain caste." An inheritance, in other words, that then passes from one generation to the next. It should be noted that in India, this caste position is based on the father's ethnicity while in the US, it's the "black womb," Wilkerson explains, that is converted into a "profit center." Slaveowners could guarantee more bodies for exploitation if the practice of rape becomes institutionalized, the business model for aspiring slaveowners.


The third pillar of the caste structure, endogamy, further results in isolating the lower caste. Marriages between the lower caste and the dominant was forbidden. By law! With segregation in order, it's easy for the fourth pillar, purity, to seem a natural phenomenon. Only now, certain immigrants were to be feared; for they, like the Blacks, presented the potential for the contamination of the white race in the US.


The idea of whiteness envisions a dominant class, consisting only of Anglo populations, rather than those immigrants, for example, from Germany or Ireland. Europeans not so racially pure, in other words, were to be feared! Ben Franklin worried that the growing population of Pennsylvanians would "'become a Colony of Aliens,'" wiping out the Anglo and "Germanizing" the state.


Wilkerson: "What was to become of a country flooded by 'the most degenerate races of older day Europe,'" writes the Aryan supremacist Arthur de Gobineau, quoted in Caste . It was implied in this fear of pollution that the "grand Anglo-Saxon character" was in danger of being polluted by the Poles, Greeks, Italians, and Jews. Whiteness therefore was in danger! The idea of a pure white race of people!


Whiteness now blankets those European races once feared. What remains, still, is the idea of "negro blood." "A drop of negro blood" meant something during slavery. It still represents a belief in whiteness ; for whiteness is reserved for those with "'no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,'" according to the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. For those marching with their swastikas and claiming to be a white nation, they are still channeling Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy.


Occupational hierarchy is the fifth pillar of the caste structure, writes Wilkerson, resulting in those targeted groups only allowed to do menial work. To settle for the path that guarantees that the target experience "the drudgery of life." It was deemed that enslaved Blacks, an inferior caste, was created by God to be forever members of this caste of menial workers. "African-Americans throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition," writes Wilkerson.


The sixth pillar represents the process of dehumanizing and stigmatizing those in the lower caste. To dehumanize someone, writes Wilkerson, is to "declare that someone is not human. But programming of the targeted group, explains Wilkerson, completes "the work of dehumanizing the lower caste. For the targeted group or individuals within, must "no longer believe what their eyes can see." They must "no longer trust their own thoughts."


Both Nazi Germany and the United States, she adds, "reduced their out groups, Jews, and African-Americans, respectively, to an undifferentiated mass of nameless, faceless scapegoats, the shock absorbers of the collective fears, and setbacks of each nation." There can be no thought of individuality among those stigmatized, writes Wilkerson. She provides an example of African Americans being told to never refer to their birth names. As enslaved person, they were given names, "as would a dog to a new owner." Jews, too, were stripped and forced to memorize their prison numbers. Untouchables were assigned surnames that "identified them by the only work they performed."


The enslaved Black was punished "for being the human that they could not help but be." African Americans and Dalits weren't allowed to read or write. "In the United States," continues Wilkerson, there developed two parallel worlds existing on the same plane with flagrant double-standards to emphasize the purposeful, injustices built into the system." Not surprisingly, violence became part of the "unspoken curriculum for generations of children in the dominant caste." As a result, cruelty was the order of the day, making "violence and mockery" seem mundane and amusing."


Violence becomes structured and routine. As for the seventh pillar of the caste structure, lynching becomes the US is the "primary means of terror," with "African Americans mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and buried at the courthouse square." In the first decades of the 20 th Century, Wilkerson explains, "a lynching every three or four days sustains the order of the caste system."


In the final pillar, the eighth, "inherent superiority vs inferiority" becomes the norm. "At every turn, the caste system drilled into the people under its spell the deference due those born to the upper caste and the degradation befitting the subordinated caste."


In 1944, a sixteen-year-old girl, African American, writing an essay on what should befall Hitler, declares that Hitler should be punished. And the punishment: "'Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.'"



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Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.

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