March 30, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 7 of the Nihilism series is the last segment on revisionist history. It is not exactly a revision, but a new slant on race in America. The new slant is from Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her critically acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns. In Caste she contends that slavery in America established a caste system comparable to the caste systems of India and the Nazi Third Reich. The book not only is a New York Times bestseller but was highly promoted by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and has a remarkable 20,560 reviews on Amazon with an overall 5-star rating.
Also included in the segment are excerpts of research I did on India’s caste system from BBC News and the “Human Rights Watch” publications, to assist you in drawing your own conclusions on the Wilkerson’s claims. Additional research from the book Castes in India by B. R. Ambedkar, a prominent Indian politician who is considered the chief architect of the Constitution of India, can be found in the PDF attachment.
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs
A Verified Prediction
The U.S. is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be outnumbered by people not of European descent within two decades.
Next:
Segment 8 is the first of two segments on slavery. In both segments I am attempting to get a better sense of what life was like in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in America, what slavery was like from 1619 until its abolishment in 1863, plus the nature of indigenous people and how they interacted with the first settlers. There are two very pertinent set of excerpts in the segment. The first is from The Life of Frederick Douglas an autobiography of his life as a slave written in 1845. The second is from Of Plymouth Plantation which are the chronicles of the Governor of the Plymouth settlement, William Bradford, written in 1645.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 7 of the Nihilism series is the last segment on revisionist history. It is not exactly a revision, but a new slant on race in America. The new slant is from Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner for her critically acclaimed book The Warmth of Other Suns. In Caste she contends that slavery in America established a caste system comparable to the caste systems of India and the Nazi Third Reich. The book not only is a New York Times bestseller but was highly promoted by Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and has a remarkable 20,560 reviews on Amazon with an overall 5-star rating.
Also included in the segment are excerpts of research I did on India’s caste system from BBC News and the “Human Rights Watch” publications, to assist you in drawing your own conclusions on the Wilkerson’s claims. Additional research from the book Castes in India by B. R. Ambedkar, a prominent Indian politician who is considered the chief architect of the Constitution of India, can be found in the PDF attachment.
My Takeaways:
Challenges to Traditional Beliefs
- Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation and American institution created for the benefit of the elites of the dominant class and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences.
- It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.
- Throughout human history three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid of the United States.
- Black citizens labor cleared the wilderness and built the country’s wealth.
- White dominance has already been assured by the inherited advantage of the dominant caste in most every sphere of life, and in the securing of dominant caste interests in most aspects of governing – from gerrymandered congressional districts to voter suppression to the rightward direction of the judicial branch, to the Electoral College, all of which favors the dominant caste.
A Verified Prediction
The U.S. is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be outnumbered by people not of European descent within two decades.
Next:
Segment 8 is the first of two segments on slavery. In both segments I am attempting to get a better sense of what life was like in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in America, what slavery was like from 1619 until its abolishment in 1863, plus the nature of indigenous people and how they interacted with the first settlers. There are two very pertinent set of excerpts in the segment. The first is from The Life of Frederick Douglas an autobiography of his life as a slave written in 1845. The second is from Of Plymouth Plantation which are the chronicles of the Governor of the Plymouth settlement, William Bradford, written in 1645.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 7
AMERICA’S CASTE SYSTEM – EXCERPTS
From: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (2020)
WHAT IS A CASTE SYSTEM? 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. 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 of 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. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings and mortality, it is about power – which groups have it, and which do not. It is about resources – which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence.
AMERICA’S CASTE SYSTEM: In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do exist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Americans are loath to talk about enslavement. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a “sad, dark chapter” in the country’s history. It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces. Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, and American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant class and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. Slavery built the man-made chasm between blacks and whites that forces the middle castes of Asians, Latinos, indigenous people, and new immigrants of African descent to navigate within what began as a bipolar hierarchy. It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.
CASTE VERSUS RACE: Social scientist often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women, whites over people of color, and the dominant over the subordinate. But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flow, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. 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 their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
PARALLELS OF INDIA AND AMERICA: Both countries have since abolished the formal laws that defined their caste systems – the U.S. in a series of civil rights laws in the 1960s and India before, in the 1940s, but both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. The American system was founded as a primarily two-tier hierarchy. The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcases correlated to region and village which fall under four main varnas and the excluded fifth, known as Untouchables or Dalits.
THE FORMATION OF THE NAZI CASTE: A young Nazi intellectual was task with compiling a table of U.S. race laws and was confounded by the length to which America went to segregate its population. With the results of their research laid out before them, they first, created a legal definition for the categories of Jews and Aryans, and second, prohibiting intermarriage between the two. He reported that Americans had made interracial marriage a crime punishable by as much as ten years’ imprisonment in some jurisdictions.
THE EIGHT PILLARS OF CASTE: These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were burrowed deep within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function.
THE DOMINANT GROUP STATUS THREAT: During the time period from 1998 to 2013, the rise in the white death rate was at odds with prevailing trends in the rest of the Western world. Since the 1970s, real wages had stagnated for blue-collar workers, leading to economic insecurity and to a generation less well off than previous ones. In caste terms, these are the least well-off whites, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America. For generations they could take for granted their inherited rank in the hierarchy and the benefits that accrued from it. We may underestimate the aftershocks of a shift in demographics. And resentment that the kind of security their fathers could rely upon might now be waning. In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. If a lower-caste person goes up a run, an upper-caste person comes down, thus equality feels like a demotion. Social scientists have found that most Americans have been exposed to a culture with enough negative messages about African Americans and other marginalized groups that as much as 80% of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it. It’s an automatic process, people who engage in this unthinking discrimination are not aware of it. The research suggests that about 70 to 80% of whites fall into this category. In the life-and -death world of medicine, African Americans and other marginalized people are granted fewer procedures and poorer quality care than whites across every therapeutic intervention. The undertreatment of the subordinate caste leaves them to suffer needlessly and the overtreatment of the dominant caste may have contributed to the rising mortality rate for white Americans who become addicted to opioids.
A CHANGE IN THE SCRIPT: The greatest departure from the script of the American caste system was the election of an African American to the highest office in the land. The symbolism of Obama’s election was a profound loss to whites’ status. This was something that no one in the dominant caste, or any other group in the country had ever had to contemplate.
THE RESURGENCE OF CASTE: Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics. Many voters, in fact, made the assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most – the benefits they had grown accustomed to as member of the historically ruling caste in America. The tremors within the dominant caste had been building long before Trump announced his candidacy. Defections accelerated over the course of Obama’s presidency. Racial attitudes appear the more likely culprit.
THE SYMBOLS OF CASTE: Across the U.S., there are more than 1700 monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to most of the Confederates in a bid to move from sectional tensions and to put the matter to rest. Robert E. Lee did not jail time and suffered little censure. Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, chose to erect memorials to the victims or its aggressions. In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the U.S. the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south.
In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial. Many were hanged at the hands of the Allies for their crimes against humanity. The people who kidnapped and held hostage millions of people during slavery, condemning them to slow death, were not called to account and did not stand trial. In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the 20th century, not only went free but rose to become leading figures – southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors. In Germany it was through the station doors that thousands of Jews took their last look at their beloved Berlin before being forced onto trains that would take them to their deaths. This fact, this history, is built into the consciousness of Berliners as they go about their everyday lives. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who they are because it is a part of what they have been. It is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students and is never far from view for any citizen.
EPILOGUE: The fact is that the bottom caste, though it bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often been least likely to want to. As it stands, the U.S. is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be outnumbered by people not of European descent within two decades. White dominance has already been assured by the inherited advantage of the dominant caste in most every sphere of life, and in the securing of dominant caste interest in most aspects of governing – from gerrymandered congressional districts to voter suppression to the rightward direction of the judicial branch to the Electoral College, which favors the dominant caste, whatever the numbers.
To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system – the twelve-year reign of the Nazis – can be created, it can be dismantled. Anyone who truly believes in a meritocracy would not want to be in a caste system in which certain groups of people are excluded or disqualified by long-standing deprivations.
Source: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
RESEARCH ON INDIA’S CASTE SYSTEM: From BBC News: Hindu law dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society. The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories – Brahmins (teachers, priests and intellectuals), Kshatriyas (warriors and rules), Vasishyas (traders) and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation. The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 subcastes, each based on their specific occupation. Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots – the Dalits or the untouchables. For centuries, caste had dictated almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life with each group occupying a specific place in this complex hierarchy. Rural communities have long been arranged on the basis of castes, with the upper and lower castes living in segregated colonies. The water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one’s caste. The system bestowed many privileges on the upper castes while sanctioning repression of the lower castes by privileges groups. Often criticized for being unjust and regressive, it remained virtually unchanged for centuries, trapping people into fixed social order from which it was impossible to escape.
Source: BBC News 6/19/2019
From: Human Rights Watch: Despite its constitutional abolition in 1950, the practice of “untouchability” – the imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason of birth into a particular caste remains a substantial part of rural India. Representing over one-sixth of India’s population, or some 160 million peoples (half the population of the U.S.) Dalits endure near complete social ostracization. “Untouchables” may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Dalit children are frequently made to sit at the back of classrooms. In what has been called India’s “hidden apartheid,” entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. The state administration installs electricity, sanitation facilities, and water pumps in the upper-caste section, but neglects to do the same in the neighboring, segregated Dalit area. Basic amenities such as water taps and wells are also segregated, and medical facilities and the better, thatched-roof houses exist exclusively in the upper-caste colony. As revealed by the case study on the earthquake in Gujarat, India on January 26, 2001, these same practices hold true even in times of great natural disaster.
Dalits are relegated to the most menial of tasks as removers of human waste and dead animals, leather workers, street sweepers, and cobblers. Dalit children make up the majority of children sold into bondage to pay off debts to upper-caste creditors. According to government statistics, an estimated one million Dalits in India are “manual scavengers” (a majority of the women) who clear feces from public and private latrines and dispose of dead animals; unofficial estimates are much higher. Handing of human waste is a caste-based occupation deemed too “polluting and filthy” for anyone but Dalits. An estimated 40 million people in India, among them 15 million children, are working in slave-like conditions in order to pay-off debts as bonded laborers. Due to the high interest rates charged the debts are seldom settled. Bonded laborers are frequently low-caste, illiterate, and extremely poor, while the creditors/employers are usually higher-caste, literate, and comparatively wealthy and relatively more powerful member of the community. Children often inherit their families’ debts and remain trapped in a cycle of debt bondage.
In Pakistan women have also been sold into marriage or prostitution should a male family member leave the land or area. The life expectancy rate of Nepal’s Dalits is five years short of the national average of 55. In Nepal the literacy rate for Dalits is appallingly low at 10% for men and 3.2% for women compared to a national literacy rate that exceeds 50%.
While India remains the world’s largest democracy, for many of its Dalit citizens democracy has been a sham. During elections, many are routinely threatened and beaten by political party strongmen in order to compel them to vote for certain candidates. Already under the thumb of local landlord and police officials. Dalit villagers who do not comply have been harassed, beaten and murdered. Incidences of gang-rape, stripping are parading women naked through the streets, and making them eat excrement are all crimes specific to Dalit women in India.
Source: Human Rights Watch 2001.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
AMERICA’S CASTE SYSTEM – EXCERPTS
From: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (2020)
WHAT IS A CASTE SYSTEM? 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. 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 of 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. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings and mortality, it is about power – which groups have it, and which do not. It is about resources – which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence.
AMERICA’S CASTE SYSTEM: In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do exist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Americans are loath to talk about enslavement. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a “sad, dark chapter” in the country’s history. It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces. Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, and American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant class and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. Slavery built the man-made chasm between blacks and whites that forces the middle castes of Asians, Latinos, indigenous people, and new immigrants of African descent to navigate within what began as a bipolar hierarchy. It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.
CASTE VERSUS RACE: Social scientist often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women, whites over people of color, and the dominant over the subordinate. But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flow, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. 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 their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
PARALLELS OF INDIA AND AMERICA: Both countries have since abolished the formal laws that defined their caste systems – the U.S. in a series of civil rights laws in the 1960s and India before, in the 1940s, but both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. The American system was founded as a primarily two-tier hierarchy. The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcases correlated to region and village which fall under four main varnas and the excluded fifth, known as Untouchables or Dalits.
THE FORMATION OF THE NAZI CASTE: A young Nazi intellectual was task with compiling a table of U.S. race laws and was confounded by the length to which America went to segregate its population. With the results of their research laid out before them, they first, created a legal definition for the categories of Jews and Aryans, and second, prohibiting intermarriage between the two. He reported that Americans had made interracial marriage a crime punishable by as much as ten years’ imprisonment in some jurisdictions.
THE EIGHT PILLARS OF CASTE: These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were burrowed deep within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function.
- Divine Will and the Laws of Nature: Organizing principles in any caste system.
- Heritability: Each caste society relied on clear lines of demarcation in which everyone was ascribed a rank at birth.
- Endogamy and Control of Marriage and Mating: The third pillar of caste – endogamy, which means restricting marriage to people within the same caste.
- Purity versus Pollution: The fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear the castes deemed beneath it.
- Occupational Hierarchy: The division of labor based on one’s place in the hierarchy.
- Dehumanization and Stigma: Dehumanizing the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable. Both Nazi Germany and the U.S. reduced their out-groups, Jews and African Americans, respectively, to an undifferentiated mass of nameless, faceless scapegoats.
- Cruelty as a Means of Control: Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe, African Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who had been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them and had incentives to try to prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against their fellow humans. Above all, the people in the subordinate caste were to be reminded of the absolute power the dominant caste held over them.
- Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority: Beneath each pillar of caste was the presumption and continual reminder of the inborn superiority of the dominant caste and the inherent inferiority of the subordinate.
THE DOMINANT GROUP STATUS THREAT: During the time period from 1998 to 2013, the rise in the white death rate was at odds with prevailing trends in the rest of the Western world. Since the 1970s, real wages had stagnated for blue-collar workers, leading to economic insecurity and to a generation less well off than previous ones. In caste terms, these are the least well-off whites, most precariously situated members of the dominant caste in America. For generations they could take for granted their inherited rank in the hierarchy and the benefits that accrued from it. We may underestimate the aftershocks of a shift in demographics. And resentment that the kind of security their fathers could rely upon might now be waning. In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. If a lower-caste person goes up a run, an upper-caste person comes down, thus equality feels like a demotion. Social scientists have found that most Americans have been exposed to a culture with enough negative messages about African Americans and other marginalized groups that as much as 80% of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it. It’s an automatic process, people who engage in this unthinking discrimination are not aware of it. The research suggests that about 70 to 80% of whites fall into this category. In the life-and -death world of medicine, African Americans and other marginalized people are granted fewer procedures and poorer quality care than whites across every therapeutic intervention. The undertreatment of the subordinate caste leaves them to suffer needlessly and the overtreatment of the dominant caste may have contributed to the rising mortality rate for white Americans who become addicted to opioids.
A CHANGE IN THE SCRIPT: The greatest departure from the script of the American caste system was the election of an African American to the highest office in the land. The symbolism of Obama’s election was a profound loss to whites’ status. This was something that no one in the dominant caste, or any other group in the country had ever had to contemplate.
THE RESURGENCE OF CASTE: Many political analysts and left-leaning observers did not believe a Trump win was possible and were blindsided by the outcome in 2016 in part because they had not figured into their expectations the degree of reliable consistency of caste as an enduring variable in American life and politics. Many voters, in fact, made the assessment of their circumstances and looked beyond immediate short-term benefits and toward, from their perspective, the larger goals of maintaining dominant-caste status and their survival in the long term. They were willing to lose health insurance now, risk White House instability and government shutdowns, external threats from faraway lands, in order to preserve what their actions say they value most – the benefits they had grown accustomed to as member of the historically ruling caste in America. The tremors within the dominant caste had been building long before Trump announced his candidacy. Defections accelerated over the course of Obama’s presidency. Racial attitudes appear the more likely culprit.
THE SYMBOLS OF CASTE: Across the U.S., there are more than 1700 monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to most of the Confederates in a bid to move from sectional tensions and to put the matter to rest. Robert E. Lee did not jail time and suffered little censure. Rather than honor supremacists with statues on pedestals, Germany, chose to erect memorials to the victims or its aggressions. In Germany, displaying the swastika is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. In the U.S. the rebel flag is incorporated into the official state flag of Mississippi. It can be seen on the backs of pickup trucks north and south.
In Germany, some of the Nazis who did not kill themselves were tracked down and forced to stand trial. Many were hanged at the hands of the Allies for their crimes against humanity. The people who kidnapped and held hostage millions of people during slavery, condemning them to slow death, were not called to account and did not stand trial. In Germany, restitution has rightly been paid, and continues to be paid to survivors of the Holocaust. In America, it was the slaveholders who got restitution, not the people whose lives and wages were stolen from them for twelve generations. Those who instilled terror on the lowest caste over the following century after the formal end of slavery, those who tortured and killed humans before thousands of onlookers or who aided and abetted those lynchings or who looked the other way, well into the 20th century, not only went free but rose to become leading figures – southern governors, senators, sheriffs, businessmen, mayors. In Germany it was through the station doors that thousands of Jews took their last look at their beloved Berlin before being forced onto trains that would take them to their deaths. This fact, this history, is built into the consciousness of Berliners as they go about their everyday lives. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who they are because it is a part of what they have been. It is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students and is never far from view for any citizen.
EPILOGUE: The fact is that the bottom caste, though it bears much of the burden of the hierarchy, did not create the caste system, and the bottom caste alone cannot fix it. The challenge has long been that many in the dominant caste, who are in a better position to fix caste inequity, have often been least likely to want to. As it stands, the U.S. is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be outnumbered by people not of European descent within two decades. White dominance has already been assured by the inherited advantage of the dominant caste in most every sphere of life, and in the securing of dominant caste interest in most aspects of governing – from gerrymandered congressional districts to voter suppression to the rightward direction of the judicial branch to the Electoral College, which favors the dominant caste, whatever the numbers.
To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system – the twelve-year reign of the Nazis – can be created, it can be dismantled. Anyone who truly believes in a meritocracy would not want to be in a caste system in which certain groups of people are excluded or disqualified by long-standing deprivations.
Source: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
RESEARCH ON INDIA’S CASTE SYSTEM: From BBC News: Hindu law dating back to at least 1,000 years before Christ was born, acknowledges and justifies the caste system as the basis of order and regularity of society. The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories – Brahmins (teachers, priests and intellectuals), Kshatriyas (warriors and rules), Vasishyas (traders) and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation. The main castes were further divided into about 3,000 castes and 25,000 subcastes, each based on their specific occupation. Outside of this Hindu caste system were the achhoots – the Dalits or the untouchables. For centuries, caste had dictated almost every aspect of Hindu religious and social life with each group occupying a specific place in this complex hierarchy. Rural communities have long been arranged on the basis of castes, with the upper and lower castes living in segregated colonies. The water wells were not shared, Brahmins would not accept food or drink from the Shudras, and one could marry only within one’s caste. The system bestowed many privileges on the upper castes while sanctioning repression of the lower castes by privileges groups. Often criticized for being unjust and regressive, it remained virtually unchanged for centuries, trapping people into fixed social order from which it was impossible to escape.
Source: BBC News 6/19/2019
From: Human Rights Watch: Despite its constitutional abolition in 1950, the practice of “untouchability” – the imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason of birth into a particular caste remains a substantial part of rural India. Representing over one-sixth of India’s population, or some 160 million peoples (half the population of the U.S.) Dalits endure near complete social ostracization. “Untouchables” may not cross the line dividing their part of the village from that occupied by higher castes. They may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls. Dalit children are frequently made to sit at the back of classrooms. In what has been called India’s “hidden apartheid,” entire villages in many Indian states remain completely segregated by caste. The state administration installs electricity, sanitation facilities, and water pumps in the upper-caste section, but neglects to do the same in the neighboring, segregated Dalit area. Basic amenities such as water taps and wells are also segregated, and medical facilities and the better, thatched-roof houses exist exclusively in the upper-caste colony. As revealed by the case study on the earthquake in Gujarat, India on January 26, 2001, these same practices hold true even in times of great natural disaster.
Dalits are relegated to the most menial of tasks as removers of human waste and dead animals, leather workers, street sweepers, and cobblers. Dalit children make up the majority of children sold into bondage to pay off debts to upper-caste creditors. According to government statistics, an estimated one million Dalits in India are “manual scavengers” (a majority of the women) who clear feces from public and private latrines and dispose of dead animals; unofficial estimates are much higher. Handing of human waste is a caste-based occupation deemed too “polluting and filthy” for anyone but Dalits. An estimated 40 million people in India, among them 15 million children, are working in slave-like conditions in order to pay-off debts as bonded laborers. Due to the high interest rates charged the debts are seldom settled. Bonded laborers are frequently low-caste, illiterate, and extremely poor, while the creditors/employers are usually higher-caste, literate, and comparatively wealthy and relatively more powerful member of the community. Children often inherit their families’ debts and remain trapped in a cycle of debt bondage.
In Pakistan women have also been sold into marriage or prostitution should a male family member leave the land or area. The life expectancy rate of Nepal’s Dalits is five years short of the national average of 55. In Nepal the literacy rate for Dalits is appallingly low at 10% for men and 3.2% for women compared to a national literacy rate that exceeds 50%.
While India remains the world’s largest democracy, for many of its Dalit citizens democracy has been a sham. During elections, many are routinely threatened and beaten by political party strongmen in order to compel them to vote for certain candidates. Already under the thumb of local landlord and police officials. Dalit villagers who do not comply have been harassed, beaten and murdered. Incidences of gang-rape, stripping are parading women naked through the streets, and making them eat excrement are all crimes specific to Dalit women in India.
Source: Human Rights Watch 2001.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 7_nihilism_long_caste_--_segment_7.pdf |