Castes: The United States, and India

 What is currently the United States of America has been dealing with the issue of slavery and its consequences since the first African slaves appeared on its shores in the seventeenth century.  Many nations have been stained by a history of slave trading and slave labor, but in none was slavery so intrinsic to a nation’s functioning as in the United States.  We began our nation with claims that all men were created equal and immediately made that notion laughable by creating a Constitution forever damaged by accommodations made to protect that vile institution.  It would take nearly a century and a bloody Civil War to end legal slavery.  It would take an additional century to make informal forms of slavery illegal.  The result would be a significant population of descendants of African slaves that the nation must figure out a way to incorporate as fully equal citizens.  Such a goal is far from being reached.  In fact, our polity is currently split between two major parties, one of which at least preaches support for universal equality, while the other facilitates white supremacy.  As the two sides seem to be settling into the same political and rhetorical extremes that preceded the Civil War, one fears for how this will end. 

Isabel Wilkerson has provided a different perspective on our racial issues in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  Most of our racial troubles are usually attributed to lingering historical racism.  In her view that is not the most productive way to consider the interactions of whites and blacks.

“What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our forefathers’ era, but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system.  In the half century since civil rights protests forced the United States into making state-sanctioned discrimination illegal, what Americans consider to be racism has shifted, and now the word is one of the most contentious and misunderstood in American culture.  For the dominant caste, the word is radioactive—resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it.  Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning.” 

It is often claimed by Southern whites that they get along better with blacks than urban whites in the West and North.  There can be some truth in that statement, but it comes with a big caveat.  Throughout the Jim Crow era, and extending into the present, whites and blacks in the South coexisted peacefully as long as blacks limited their activities to the ones deemed acceptable by the whites.  Whites used their power to enforce social and economic restrictions on blacks in order to maintain them as a group subordinate to them.  This is a classical example of a caste system.  

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”

Casteism can be supported by people who otherwise would be deemed decent and respectable.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal.  It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” 

“Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.” 

In Wilkerson’s view, we would be better served by considering the whites who flock to Donald Trump as casteists rather than racists, although some do fall into that category. 

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarch as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.  For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.”

Wilkerson quotes sociologists who have studied the dynamics of caste systems to conclude that caste produces an inevitable form of narcissism among the dominant caste.

“’No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority.  No matter what happens, they can never become “black”,’ wrote the sociologist Andrew Hacker.  ‘White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world’.” 

The elite in the slave states imbedded in their society the notion that “the lowest white is superior to the most accomplished black.”  Slavery was difficult economically for lower class whites who continually competed with slaves for their wages.  Yet, when slavery was under military threat in the Civil War, poor whites were willing to die to protect this system that so disadvantaged them. 

“History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave, and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy.  Their investment in this illusion gives them as much a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority.  ‘The survival of the group.’ Fromm wrote, ‘depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great or greater than their own lives, and furthermore that they believe in the righteousness, or even superiority, of their group as compared to others.”

In the era of Trump, we wonder at the fanaticism of his followers.  Fromm provides some necessary perspective.

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic.  The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.  ‘The greater the leader,’ Fromm wrote, ‘the greater the follower…The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him’.”

The nature of castes and their social consequences have been discussed.  Wilkerson devotes much of her volume to discussing caste systems in other countries to convince the reader that such a situation is exactly what blacks in the United States face.  She discusses the discrimination imposed by German Nazis on Jews during the Hitler era.  While they learned from the Jim Crow laws of the American South and admired the use of violence to keep the black caste in line, using American eugenics research as a theoretical underpinning for their activities, the most relevant comparison is with the ancient division of India into castes.  We will focus on only a few comparisons with that system to make the point.

The most important and longest-lasting sources of discrimination in the world are those based on religious beliefs.  To truly justify the enslavement of African Americans and the rendering of a collection of Indians as “untouchables,” one must identify these people as being subhuman in some way.  Religions provide the readiest opportunities if that is one’s intention. 

“Before the age of human awareness, according to the ancient Hindu text of India, Manu, the all-knowing, was seated in contemplation, when the great men approached him and asked him, ‘Please, Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes as well as of those born in between.”

Four major castes, or varnas, were described with their attributes and the functions to be performed.

“From lowest to highest, bottom to top: The Shudra…the servant, the bearer of burdens.  The Vaishya…the engine, the merchant, the trader.  The Kshatriya…the warrior, the protector, the ruler.  And above them all, the Brahmin…the philosopher, the sage, the priest, the one nearest to the gods.”

“Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even…the Shudra.  They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.  Their very shadow was a pollutant.  They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes.  They were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate cast of India.”

“In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public—somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question.  They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.”

“Touching or drawing near to anything that had been touched by an Untouchable was considered polluting to the upper castes and required rituals of purification for the high-caste person following this misfortune.  This they might do by bathing at once in flowing water or performing Pranayama breaths along with meditation to cleanse themselves of the pollutants.” 

One can easily view these traditions as an attempt to create a stable social structure in which those in power maintain their power over the castes below them.  In India, the identification of a caste member must be done carefully.  Lower caste members tend to be darker in skin color, but not reliably so.  They are also identified by their names and occupations.  Untouchables do the type of work that is only performed by an untouchable, and act like a subservient person thus reinforcing the system. 

Parallels with the treatment of blacks in our nation as a lower caste are apparent, but people have not taken the time to notice them.  That is why Wilkerson’s book is so important.  She tells the tale of Martin Luther King’s realization of his status only after being identified by an Indian Dalit as a fellow untouchable.  This realization would come in 1959 after he had already acquired international status as a person of repute.

“Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.” 

“And he said to himself, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable’.”

“In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under the system all of his life.  It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.” 

Western nations would find justification for imposing their power on black people from the Old Testament.  In that document, after the great flood which Noah survived, the world would be repopulated by the offspring of Noah’s three sons.  One son, Ham, would have a son named Canaan.  Ham would displease his father who would issue a curse upon his son’s offspring.

“Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers”

Driven by a lot of wishful thinking, the children of Ham would be associated with black Africans, particularly after the slave trade became profitable.  The Old Testament, in Leviticus, was further useful in encouraging the enslavement of any person who was considered a non-believer. 

“As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.  From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.”

The importance of the Bible in supporting the eternal degradation of black-skinned people is clear from this quote from a defender of slavery.

“’The curse of Ham is now being executed upon his descendants,’ Thomas R. R. Cobb, a leading Confederate and defender of slavery, wrote, 240 years into the era of human bondage in America.  ‘The great Architect had framed them both physically and mentally to fill the sphere in which they were thrown.  His wisdom and mercy combined in constituting them thus suited to the degraded position they were destined to occupy’.”

One might believe any comparison with the fears of pollution by Indians from contact with an untouchable would be overdrawn in the American caste system.  Wilkerson provides examples that parallel the Indian fear of being polluted in an American setting.

“The town of Newton, Kansas, went to the state supreme court to keep black people out of the pool it built in 1935.  The city and its contractor argued that black people could never be permitted in the pool, not on alternate days, not at separate hours, not ever, because of the type of pool it was.  They told the court it was ‘a circulatory type of pool,’ in which ‘the water is only changed once during the swimming season.’  White people, they argued, would not go into water that had touched black skin.  ‘The only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks,’ wrote the historian Jeff Wiltse, ‘was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed.’  The operators couldn’t do all that every time a black person went into the pool, so they banned black people altogether.  The court sided with the city, and, for decades more, the town’s only public pool remained for the exclusive use of the dominant caste.”

“A public pool outside Pittsburg solved this problem by keeping black people out until after the season was over in September, which meant it was closed to black swimmers at the precise time that they or anyone else would have wanted to use it.  The manager said this was the only way the maintenance crew could get ‘sufficient time to properly cleanse and disinfect it after the negroes have used it’.”

Wilkerson has made the point that relationships between blacks and whites are better thought of as those between a dominant and a subordinate cast than as ones characterized by traditional racism.  Given that, what should do about it?  She is much weaker here.  It seems there are two primary options.  The first would encourage greater interaction between the castes and assume that what would follow would be a gradual breakdown of the caste boundaries.  Haven’t we been hoping for this since the 1960s with only little progress?  Perhaps recognition of the caste nature of the status quo would accelerate this process? 

The Indians, who have lived with their caste system much longer, concluded that some more aggressive affirmative action would be required if the lot of the Dalits was to improve.  When they gained their freedom to control their own fate, they included what has become referred to as “reservations” as part of their Constitution.  From Wikipedia: 

 “Reservation is a system of affirmative action in India that provides historically disadvantaged groups representation in education, employment, and politics.”

This is essentially a set of quotas to enforce wider participation of these groups in various aspects of society.  Such an approach has not been universally popular in India and has thus far been rejected in the United States, being viewed as counterproductive in trading one form of unfairness for another. 

One could argue that both approaches have provided some benefits over time, but not that either approach is the most appropriate.  Perhaps the solution is that both approaches should be applied in some coherent form.  Hopefully, Wilkerson’s efforts will produce some original and insightful thinking.