Thanks to Nandakishore Sir.
*Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents*
*by Isabel Wilkerson*
As a child, I was fed the myth that America was "the land of the free" and "the land of equal opportunity". The right-wing liberals prescribed it as the antidote to the "communist hell" of the Soviet Union, where everyone was living a life of perennial poverty, and ordinary citizens were tortured and murdered for just speaking even a single word against the government. In similar fashion, Hinduism was touted as the "tolerant" religion, unlike Christianity and Islam, where all beliefs were accepted as the way to the ultimate Godhead.
It took me a long time to realise that these were half-truths, worse than lies.
Hinduism, despite all its lofty philosophy, is institutionalised apartheid in practice. And in the USA, the "equality", "freedom" and "opportunity" are available only for the privileged class, much like "free" countries anywhere in the world.
In this book, Elizabeth Wilkerson links the evils of both these cultures to one common cause: caste. The deep-rooted belief that certain groups of human beings are inherently better than others, and that certain groups are so utterly devoid of any merit that the only fate they deserve is to live a semi-human existence at the bottom rung of the social ladder. When these feelings become extreme, we have something like the "final solution". (Nazis were directly influenced by the Jim Crow laws in the USA. More about that later.)
//We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, "I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves." And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.//
The USA is a country which was created out of the massive genocide of the native occupants of the land: and it was built up through the labour of hundreds and thousands of Africans who were treated as property and lived a sub-human existence for centuries. Even after the Civil War which emancipated the slaves, under the infamous "Jim Crow" laws they were forced to exist as beings which were considered barely human. Of course, they were free, but the state allowed them to do only the lowest of jobs which ensured that they lived in virtual penury; there was strict segregation to ensure that they stayed at the bottom of the social ladder; and they had no say in the government because they had no voting rights. Even the small transgressions on the part of an African-American resulted in the most horrendous punishments.
Even after the Civil Rights movement succeeded in the repeal of the Jim Crow laws and African-Americans slowly managed to move into the mainstream, things were far from egalitarian. Segregation still remained in the mind of the White American, and it was there to stay. And it is here that it resembles the caste system of India.
//Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you which shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.//
Caste is very resilient because it is ingrained in the minds of people: and not necessarily only in those at the top. Caste works because everyone more or less accepts it as the "natural" order of things.
Ms. Wilkerson defines eight pillars on which caste stands.
1. Divine will and laws of nature: sanction for the gradation of humans based on "holy" texts, like the Manusmriti of India, and the labelling of Africans as the sons of the cursed Ham from the Old Testament.
2. Heritability: caste is generally understood to be inherited, and its supposed characteristics are considered genetic traits.
3. Endogamy and control of marriage and mating
4. The concept of purity. The "lower" castes "pollute" the "upper" castes through contact.
5. Occupational hierarchy: the "lower" castes are allowed to do only undignified jobs, which are beneath contempt for the "upper" castes.
6. Dehumanising and stigmatising people on a regular basis, based on their birth.
7. Cruelty and violence as a means of control.
8. The inherent superiority of the "upper" caste versus the inherent inferiority of the "lower".
Anyone from India will have no problem in recognising these in their own country; however, it may come as a surprise that the same system holds in the USA too, with minor variations.
In fact, the Jim Crow South was what gave inspiration to none other than the Nazis.
//Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country's near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had "shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as "a model for his program of racial purification," historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."
By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States "was not just a country with racism," Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. "It was the leading racist jurisdiction-so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration." The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.//
Most people will dismiss these as things of the past. _After Civil Rights Act of 1964, things are on the mend,_ they will say. _Of course change will take time. But look at America now - you have to admit it's much, much better than what it was fifty years ago, isn't it? Hell, we even had a two-term African-American President!_
Yes, things are changing - but the hard-core patriarchal white supremacists are unchanged, and they still call the shots. That's why a person like Donald Trump is sitting in the president's chair.
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Repeat Quotes:
"We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, "I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves." And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.
And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands."
- Isabel Wilkerson, Caste
She is talking about the USA, but this is 100% applicable to India too.
Would you believe that USA was the model for Nazi Germany? Many of us, who have been fed the lie about "the land of the free" and "land of equal opportunity" would be shocked at the comparison. But unfortunately, that seems to be the fact.
Isabel Wilkerson, in 'Caste', says:
'Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country's near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had "shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as "a model for his program of racial purification," historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."
By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States "was not just a country with racism," Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. "It was the leading racist jurisdiction-so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration." The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.'
As a child, I was fed the myth that America was "the land of the free" and "the land of equal opportunity". The right-wing liberals touted it as the antidote to the "communist hell" of the Soviet Union, where everyone was living a life of perennial poverty, and ordinary citizens were tortured and murdered for just speaking even a single word against the government. The reality was, in fact, very different: the "equality", "freedom" and "opportunity" was available only for the privileged class, much like "free" countries anywhere in the world.
Here is Isabel Wilkerson talking about the "Manusmriti" of Louisiana! An eye-opener, really!
'Louisiana had a law on the books as recently as 1983 setting the boundary at "one-thirty-second Negro blood." Louisiana culture went to great specificity, not so unlike the Indian Laws of Manu, in delineating the various subcastes, based on the estimated percentage of African "blood." There was griffe (three-fourths black), marabon (five-eighths black), mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-fourth), octaroon (one-eighth), sextaroon (one-sixteenth), demi-meamelouc (one-thirty-second), and sangmelee (one-sixty-fourth). The latter categories, as twenty-first-century genetic testing has now shown, would encompass millions of Americans now classified as Caucasian. All of these categories bear witness to a historic American, dominant-caste preoccupation with race and caste purity.'
"The first African-American to win an Academy Award, Hattie McDaniel, was commended for her role as Mammy, a solicitous and obesely desexed counterpoint to Scarlett O'Hara, the feminine ideal, in the 1939 film 'Gone with the Wind'. The Mammy character was more devoted to her white family than to her own, willing to fight black soldiers to protect her white enslaver.
That trope became a comforting staple in film portrayals of slavery, but it was an ahistorical figment of caste imagination. Under slavery, most black women were thin, gaunt even, due the meager rations provided them, and few worked inside a house, as they were considered more valuable in the field. Yet the rotund and cheerful slave or maidservant was what the dominant caste preferred to see, and McDaniel and other black actresses of the era found that those were the only roles they could get."
Isabel Wilkerson, 'Caste'
//When people have lived with assumptions long enough, passed down through the generations as incontrovertible fact, they are accepted as the truths of physics, no longer needing even to be spoken. They are as true and as unremarkable as water flowing through rivers or the air that we breathe. In the original caste system of India, the abiding faith in the entitlement of birth became enmeshed in the mind of the upper caste and "hangs there to this day without any support," Ambedkar wrote, "for now it needs no prop but belief-like a weed on the surface of a pond."//
- Isabel Wilkerson, 'Caste'
In India, this is further reinforced by privilege masquerading as "merit". The entrenched caste hierarchy in society ensures that very few Dalits come up in life, even with reservations, which are nothing but paper placebos. Except in states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder would find it impossible to climb up to a level where they can make use of them; and even the few who do are bullied and harassed and hounded out of the educational system. Their failure is then used to reinforce their image as underperformers. It is a huge vicious circle.
"Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth-that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away. . . It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations. Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself."
- Isabel Wilkerson, 'Caste
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