Why would African American intellectuals want to claim that Caste, not Race, is the origin of America's discontents? The very idea of Caste is that one can heartily loathe one's own Race and very cheerfully serve those who have enslaved it. This could be on the basis of either miscegenation (i.e. having an ancestor of the Master Race) or it might arise from pure Tardean mimetics. Since the Master treats the Slave as shit, the slave is shit. You should treat your own people like shit if you wish to emulate the Master.
In Mexico, the Spanish granted hidalgo status to their indigenous allies who fought the Aztecs. But those allies had plenty of grievances to motivate their joining hands with the foreigner. Sadly, epidemics seem to killed off a large portion of the indigenous stock.
The Mexican caste system was based on both miscegenation as well as mimetics. No doubt, the upshot was a Society which appeared comfortable with a Mestizo identity and which was prepared to go in a Revolutionary Socialist direction. But this was only on the surface. Mexico has separatist movements and civilizational differences of a type unknown to its Northern neighbor. Furthermore, Socialism failed in Mexico. African Americans don't want to exchange their lot for what obtains South of the Border.
Isabel Wilkerson, for some mysterious reason, has revived the notion of Caste as an alternative to Race not in connection with the Hispanic hierarchy of 'Los Castas' as depicted below
but in emulation of a shithole country- India- which everybody, except Indian Nationalists- who deny the political significance of Caste or Dynastic entitlement- is trying to flee or, more modestly, merely fuck over.
Why is Wilkerson doing something so stupid?
Sunil Khilnani tries to explain Wilkerson's bizarre decision in the New Yorker. He depicts Dr. King's visit to India, after an assassination attempt by a crazy Black woman, as a pilgrimage. He does not explain that America was betting big on India as an alternative development model to Communist China. The State Department and the Pentagon could see that 'Jim Crow' was hurting the West in its struggle against International Communism. King's visit to India was strategic. Mahatma Gandhi was known for non-violence. His disciple, Vinobha Bhave- who had featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1953- was pretending to redistribute land to the poor on a purely voluntary basis so as to remove any motive for peasants to join the Communists. King was a great Christian, and, as is typical of African Americans, a great patriot. His visit to India was highly beneficial for both countries. Khilnani, however, suggests that King was a silly fellow. He came to India as part of some sort of 'Eat, Love, Pray' odyssey of self-discovery.
On the other hand, King was no expert on India. Still he was diplomatic in his utterances
“Today no leader in India would dare to make a public endorsement of untouchability,”
Sadly, there were plenty of casteist leaders around. Indeed, some 'Gandhians' seem to have backtracked.
King told reporters. “But in America, every day some leader endorses racial segregation.”
Malcolm X, in 1963, gave a speech explaining why many Black leaders favored, not segregation, which already existed, but Racial Separation. America had never had untouchability. It did have separatism. Segregation meant African Americans would be available as cheap labor and that the System would work to prevent Capital accumulation within that Community. Separatism could be voluntary. If African Americans developed their own Schools and Colleges and Neighborhoods and Industries they might rise in the way that other hyphenated Americans had risen. What was important was to have collective, countervailing, power to defend such gains. In the Sixties, it seemed obvious that African Americans would go down this route. As Thomas Sowell would later point out, it had delivered much- at least to the 'Talented Tenth'- and educational and criminological outcomes for African American males tended to decline after, not before, desegregation. The interessement of 'White Liberals' may well have damaged the Black Community.
Is Wilkerson arguing that African Americans should develop the sort of close mutual ties of interdependence which are a feature of endogamous castes of an upwardly mobile type? But these already exist within her community. African American women are not going to take kindly to being told they can only marry within the community while the men can sow wild oats all over the place.
Khilnani elides such questions. He says 'Gandhi gained India's freedom'- which is untrue. 'Ambedkar ended untouchability'- which is untrue. He says 'Dr. King made a pilgrimage to India. The Indian way has been sanctified by that great martyr.' But this is foolish. Kennedy was saying America had to double down on aid to India so as to counter the attraction posed by Red China to the newly independent nations of the Global South. Kennedy soon learned he was wrong. Nehru was a cretin. India's Gandhian soul was the hole in its vast begging bowl. As Gandhi had said to the British, and as Nehru said to the Americans, India could neither feed itself, despite being a Nation of farmers, nor defend itself- though, under the British, it had projected force onto the battlefields of Europe and altered the trajectory of the Levant.
As for Untouchability- it was burgeoning because the population was growing much faster than a sclerotic, gerontocratic, Government could find means of educating the masses and lifting them out of the idiocy of an involuted agricultural existence.
Khilnani is Indian. He knows all this. Yet he writes-
In “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House), Isabel Wilkerson contends that the brutal Indian system of hierarchy illuminates more about American racial divides than the idea of race alone can, and early in her book she relays a story that King told about his India trip. He was visiting a school for Dalit children when the principal introduced him as “a fellow untouchable.” The comparison made King flinch—but then its truth overwhelmed him. “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 that system all of his life,” Wilkerson writes. “It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.”
This is mad. America had a 'one drop' rule. It didn't have a notion or ritual impurity. Furthermore, within Racial categories, Social Stratification was based on Wealth and Education. In India, a Rich man's cook was likely to be of higher caste. A very poor man would rather kill his daughter than let her marry the richest man in the province if that man belonged to a slightly lower sub-caste. Why? His sept would be ostracized, they would fall in rank, they would not be able to marry off their children properly, they might lose their livelihoods, if he permitted a mesalliance.
America, like England in its colonies, had imposed a Racial, not a Caste, hierarchy. Churchill & Amery regretted the Raj's 'one drop rule' which even discriminated against 'country bottled' Whites- i.e. people of pure European race who had been educated in India. Perhaps, if the Brits had encouraged Princes to marry English girls, the Raj could have continued on a miscegenated basis. Dr. King could see that the Portuguese had adopted the 'casteist' approach. But their colonies in India and Africa were scarcely models to emulate.
Khilnani rightly points out that no 'Dalit principal' would have called him a 'fellow untouchable'.
This story is almost certainly apocryphal, borrowed from a sermon that one of King’s mentors gave more than two decades earlier. In later years, King took little interest in how the idea of caste might apply in his own country. But the anecdote at once lends a civil-rights hero’s weight to Wilkerson’s bold thesis and provides the model response to it: a lightning flash of insight about the mechanics of white supremacy. In her view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper. Underlying and predating racism, and holding white supremacy in place, is a hidden system of social domination: a caste structure that uses neutral human differences, skin color among them, as the basis for ranking human value.
Endogamy is about ranking people you are related to higher than others. This is in accordance with the Price Equation which rules over the entire Animal Kingdom. It is foolish to worry about how Lions view us as nice things to eat because, as a species, we have discovered the means to either kill Lions or put them in a zoo.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal,” she writes.
The problem here is that you could say this about any society. Yet, clearly some Societies- more particularly those where endogamy is not normative- don't really have Caste. One can say 'the thing is so invidious, that you don't know it exists.' But why stop there? Why not embrace David Icke's idea that elites are shape-shifting lizards from another planet. This is reflected in DNA but in a manner so invidious that Scientists don't notice.
“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.”
Very true! I've got so used to seeing the neighbor's cat sunning itself on the roof of the garden shed that I've come to believe the phenomena is not sinister at all- Cat is spying on me for the Lizard-people- but rather belongs to the natural order of things.
The caste model moves white behavior away from subjective feelings (what motivates these people to do what they do) and into the objective realm of power dynamics (what they do, and to whom).
So, if a White man has sex with a Black woman it isn't coz he loves her and is married to her and she is the mother of his beloved children; no. It is because fucking over Black peeps is what Whitey do.
The dynamic that concerns Wilkerson the most is how a dominant caste stops a low-ranking caste from gaining on it.
But, under this model, anything the dominant caste does stops the low-ranking caste from gaining on it. Suppose you take a dump. You just fucked over the low-ranking caste! You should not take a dump. You should die horribly of extreme constipation. If you don't die you are perpetuating your dominant status. Fuck is wrong with you? Why are you being such an evil bastard? Did you just take a breath? How dare you! Don't you understand, not till you stop breathing and suffocate to death, will you cease to be complicit in an evil Social System!
The most enduring caste system, India’s,
didn't endure at all. Why? India got conquered. Its Warrior Princes were under the suzerainty of foreign Emperors who didn't give a toss for caste. Its Priests were emaciated wretches supported by ignorant peasants who were only slightly better off in material terms.
turned a division of labor into a division of lineage.
No. Endogamy came later. But Khilnani himself knows that endogamous groups rise and sink and fracture within a purely notional ritual hierarchy.
In the Laws of Manu and other ancient Hindu texts,
which India's rulers did not give a toss about save as a tertius gaudens holding down the country more cheaply via divide et impera
caste was inscribed with rigid precision,
Notionally, anything can be 'inscribed with rigid precision'. David Icke has given a very extensive taxonomy of all the various types of shape-shifting lizards who rule the Earth
slotting occupations into four varnas, or ranks—priest, ruler-warrior, merchant, laborer—and a fifth category, outcastes (another old name for today’s Dalits). Caste as a lived Indian reality, though, is crueller than any study of scriptural texts would indicate; it’s also more fluid. Each varna comprises innumerable subcastes, or jatis, and, over generations, some jatis have climbed up the ranks as others have slipped down. New occupational groups have been incorporated into the system as others have vanished. In the nineteenth century, the hierarchy, vicious enough by its own design, was entrenched by taxonomies imposed by the British Raj—categories used as instruments of colonial control. What fascinated King, during his sojourn in the subcontinent, was how the newly independent state intended to weaken the caste order by insuring entry for low-caste citizens into schools, universities, and government jobs. What fascinates Wilkerson, like many progressives before her, is the ossified model—heritable hierarchy in its purest form.
Which, however, would lead to separation under the rubric of Religions and Ideologies which denied a type of heritable hierarchy involving races God intended to be slaves.
Writing with calm and penetrating authority, Wilkerson discusses three caste hierarchies in world history—those of India, America, and Nazi Germany—and excavates the shared principles “burrowed deep within the culture and subconsciousness” of each.
This is crazy. Nazi Germany didn't last long. Its 'caste system' was ridiculous. Blonde Jews were killed while dusky Indians were drinking beer and sleeping with French girls as members of the Waffen SS.
America had a one drop rule- which is the opposite of the Latin American Caste system. India has endogamous groups which however don't consider themselves part of a universal Hierarchy save for strategic purposes. Just as Mummy & Daddy are the bestest Mummies and Daddies in the world, so too is one's own sub-caste the bestest in the World. Notionally, this may be linked to a particular occupation- but that occupation is considered an imitatio dei.
She identifies several “pillars” of caste, including inherited rank,
If property can be inherited and rank is related to property then Caste exists in your society. But so do shapeshifting Lizards from Planet X. How come? Well you can point at the rich and say 'That is Caste!' or 'That is the shapeshifting Lizard elite!' with equal truth or unfalsifiability.
taboos related to notions of purity and pollution,
So guys who put on condoms before going to town on each other in a bath-house are Casteist. So are people who wear face-masks during the COVID lockdown. David Icke's followers may be wrong about Lizard-people, but, in opposing the lockdown, they are fighting Casteism.
the enforcement of hierarchies through terror and violence,
Interestingly, China in the Sixties and North Korea to this day, had a Caste system whereby former landowners or those of suspect class origin were at the bottom of the heap. There was plenty of 'terror and violence' available to enforce this hierarchy.
The 'nomenklatura' could lose Caste and be sent off to the Gulag if they became polluted by 'Western' ideas. No doubt, this was part of the Lizard-people's evil plan.
and divine sanction of superiority.
or Marxist, or Nazi, or David Ickean sanction
(The American equivalent to the Laws of Manu is, of course, the Old Testament.)
But most Americans are Christians. They have a New Testament. As for the Jews, the fact is both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Chief Rabbis of Palestine decreed Black Indian Jews had equal status with White or Yemenis in the mid Thirties.
In Wilkerson’s first book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” which documented the Great Migration of American Blacks in the twentieth century, she wrote about past lives with finer precision and texture than most professional historians have done. So she must have considered the risks involved in compressing into a single frame India’s roughly three-thousand-year-old caste structure, America’s four-hundred-year-old racial hierarchies, and the Third Reich’s twelve-year enforcement of Aryanism. Even on her home terrain, where she focusses on what she calls the “poles of the American caste system,” Blacks and whites, her analysis sometimes seems more ahistorical than transhistorical, as temporal specificities collapse into an eternal present. But this effect is consonant with the view of history she presents in her book—one involving more grim continuity than hopeful departures, more regression to the mean than moments of progress.
This is finely written. But what Khilnani is saying is that Wilkerson is babbling Paranoid nonsense.
In the nineteen-thirties, Allison Davis,
who, like his father before him, was a product of Dunbar High School. Sowell has explained that discrimination against educated Blacks meant that the smartest graduates, or even PhD holders, had to teach in Black High Schools. In other words, like other endogamous communities subject to discrimination, a 'talented tenth' found new niches on the fitness landscape.
Davis's work was important in its time. But Econ has moved on. Institutionalist shite has been winnowed out. Exploitation occurs because of inelasticity. If you are being fucked over, it makes sense for those fucking you over to invest some money in reducing your elasticity of response. So endogamous groups should invest money in increasing opportunity cost, and hence elasticity. In other words, you find alternatives to whatever it is you consume or produce. That is 'regret minimizing'. It represents 'risk pooling'. If this is done, suddenly endogamy looks good. It represents a superior 'separating equilibrium'. Kamala Harris's dad approved of Malcolm X because, to his mind, this is what X was trying to do.
a pathbreaking African-American social anthropologist whom Wilkerson calls her spiritual father, risked his life to examine the interplay of caste and class in Natchez, Mississippi.
The fact that his life was at risk shows that his class standing- the guy had an M.A from Harvard and a PhD from Chicago- was wholly irrelevant. Still, at the time, it made sense to sugar-coat things. The South could only rise up economically if it got rid of a stupid social system more fitted to a banana Republic or starving, colonized, India.
The work that he and his collaborators ultimately produced, “Deep South” (1941), was the first systematic, empirical study of post-Reconstruction life in the region. Confirming the work of other social theorists of the time, they concluded that the structures that kept Blacks immiserated and imperilled were so entrenched that they constituted a caste system.
These were purely legal and economic structures of an unconscionable type.
When Gunnar Myrdal incorporated their research into his own classic report, “An American Dilemma” (1944), the idea of caste fully entered the twentieth-century American conversation about race.
The Myrdals, whose son turned against them, were equally wrong about India. On the other hand they were gung-ho for the Eugenicist program of forcible sterilization.
Twenty years after Myrdal published his report, and five years after King travelled to India, the dream of seeing aggressive anti-discrimination legislation in America was realized: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Wilkerson emphasizes the recoil that followed this victory. No Democratic contender for President has won the majority of the white vote since.
Jimmy Carter came close. But he was associated with 'malaise'. White Americans want optimism. Reagan delivered that.
In her analysis, the arc of the political universe bends toward caste, as progressive legislative or electoral victories activate the threatened dominant group. Had observers better grasped white anxieties unleashed by the growth of America’s nonwhite population and the two-term Presidency of Barack Obama, Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 would have come as no surprise. In the voting booth, Wilkerson argues, whites across the board set aside considerations like gender affinity and such class concerns as access to health care in order to support a man who had signalled his commitment to the continued dominion of their caste.
Not caste. Race. The context was immigration, BLM protests, and 'political correctness'. The fact that Clinton came across as 'high caste' while Trump pitched himself as a declasse populist does not seem to have affected the outcome. Race, not Caste or Class, caused about a tenth of Obama's white voters (some of whom had already defected to Romney) to switch to Trump. If Trump's core support has held, it is because he has doubled down on Race. If he wins- which seems impossible- it will only be because the anti-fa element in the BLM protests has so alienated Whites that they forget the economic misery inflicted on them by this botched lockdown.
Trump didn’t need to tweet out “You will not replace us.” Throughout American history, Wilkerson says, white-supremacist ideas deemed taboo have simply gone undercover.
Sadly American history shows that nothing deemed taboo actually becomes so.
When, in the early years of the twentieth century, the Postmaster General banned the grotesque postcards that certain whites liked to send, featuring the corpses of the lynched (“This is the Barbecue we had last night”), the cards kept on circulating in envelopes.
Indeed. But bans on the wearing of hoods and masks were only instituted when Whites felt intimidated by the lunatic fringe of the KKK. This was White self-policing, not a liberal taboo concerned with protecting colored people.
With Trump, a twenty-first-century version of these clandestine networks
Clandestine? Breitbart is clandestine? Steve Bannon was a shrinking violet? Are you kidding me?
produced what Wilkerson sees as a “consolidation of rank among the historic ruling caste” following the disruption represented by a Black First Family.
There is no 'historic ruling caste' in America. That is why it is the richest most powerful Society on Earth. When a group rises up economically, it gets a seat at the top table. Otherwise, it is welcome to die deaths of despair in a trailer park or a crack house. Oddly, the prison-industrial system can raise longevity and educational and occupational outcomes by warehousing certain types of Youth till they become less prone to shooting each other.
The Obamas have been touted, in some circles, as proof of progress toward racial equality.
Despite the fact that Obama was forced to clean the toilets in the White House. Biden would get drunk and brutally rape him. Michelle would weep her little eyes out and pray to Lord Jesus Christ to deliver her family from that Sodom. That's why she won't make a Presidential bid of her own.
The experience of élite Black Americans is central to Wilkerson’s account, but for the opposite reason.
They aren't made to clean toilets or submit to sodomy by those they supervise or otherwise have power over.
She sees in their attempts to transcend their assigned place in the hierarchy a natural caste experiment—and a failed one at that.
It's like what happened to my neighbor's cat when it won the leadership of the Conservative Party and became Prime Minister. Queenji refused to let cat 'kiss her hands'. She said 'Cat may look at Queen. But kissing hands is not permitted.' Queen's corgis then chased cat all the way from Bucking Palace back to Fulham where it resentfully returned to sunning itself on the garden shed.
Regardless of their wealth or refinement, the system tries to shove them back down.
Same thing happens to Australians. A British Court has awarded a White Australian Man a 100,000 pounds because of 'racial harassment' he suffered from his English wife.
I myself am often told to fuck off back to Fulham by wealthy relatives in T.Nagar.
To illustrate this phenomenon, she ranges across disciplines from sociology to economics to medicine, interspersing her analysis with what she calls “scenes of caste,” among them wrenching personal ones.
We can identify with such 'scenes' coz of our own bitter experiences with Mommy and Granny and Wifey etc.
One evening, violating caste’s pre-written script, she is flying first class. As she stands in the aisle and waits to disembark, the lone African-American passenger in the cabin, a white man retrieving his bag from an overhead compartment thrusts his full weight onto her body, while other travellers watch, their faces determinedly blank.
So she belted him one, right? Then the police arrested her. Fortunately, it turned out that the guy had numerous convictions for rape and indecent assault. Also, he turned out to be Persian.
“Over the course of American history, black men have died for doing far less to white women than what he did to me,” she writes.
And men of all types have had their face smashed in by women who object to sad losers copping a feel to get their jollies.
The men and women in the cabin would have suffered no material consequence for defending her, she notes, yet every one of them chose “caste solidarity over principle, tribe over empathy.”
Because she didn't holler. I have often protested against women who press up against me- well, that isn't strictly true, but I do wail very piteously if they gobble up the last of the cake.
One of those impassive witnesses, the lead flight attendant, is a Black man, and she imagines his own caste calculations. This low-caste man doesn’t know what power the upper-caste man might possess. To defend a low-caste woman, even if it is his professional responsibility to do so, could bring negative consequences.
The problem here is that only the victim has locus standi. She alone knows whether the thing was accidental or deliberate. If she won't speak up, why should anyone else?
Suppose a black guy presses up on a white woman. You are white. You intervene. if she doesn't back you up, you are in trouble. You come across as a Jim Crow type.
“In a caste system,” she concludes, “things work more smoothly when everyone stays in their place, and that is what he did.”
The Justice system only works smoothly if victims come forward. An important part of group identity is the notion that you must speak up. Black people know this. Jewish people know this. Indians know this- Mahatma Gandhi is seen as a guy who objected to being thrown out of a first class railway carriage. He rose to become a global icon.
There may be 'caste' reasons to keep quiet. An aristocratic lady may chose not to report an assault because she does not want to drag her family name through the law courts and the vulgar tabloid newspaper columns. But, where Race, or Gender, is a factor, such reluctance is treacherous.
In Wilkerson’s book, one senses that each word choice has been carefully weighed, and her tone remains measured even when describing her own assault. But she conveys a particular frustration with those members of her caste,
surely a flight attendant or police officer is of different caste to a Pulitzer prize winner? Their race may be the same but they don't inter-marry. Instead there is education based 'assortative mating'. Wilkerson is beautiful. Her late husband was handsome. But they belonged to different races. Arguably, they belonged to the same social class and, by their marriage, may have enabled a particular sub-caste to burgeon. However, by the 'one drop' rule they will still be classed as African American in the same manner as Kamala Harris.
from the flight attendant to the Black police officers involved in the deaths of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, who try to rise by rejecting their own. The caste system, she says, in an echo of Malcolm X, has always rewarded “snitches and sellouts.”
Jamaica could be said to have had a caste system. But Governor Eyre's atrocious actions, around the time the Civil War was ending, changed the thinking of Kamala's paternal ancestors. They realized 'snitches' should get stitches and 'sellouts' should be forced to get the hell out.
Mustering old and new historical scholarship, sometimes to shattering effect, “Caste” brings out how systematically, through the centuries, Black lives were destroyed “under the terror of people who had absolute power over their bodies and their very breath.”
Purely on the basis of Race. A Jamaican of the same 'caste' as Prof. Harris's ancestors who sought to establish a plantation in the South using his own slaves soon found he was himself regarded as a slave- because of the one drop rule.
In considering the present, though, she often focusses on questions of dignity. Many scenes involve whites failing to recognize the status of successful Blacks—like the white man, having recently moved into a wealthy suburb, who mistakes his elegant Black neighbor for the woman who picks up his laundry.
Black people make mistakes of the same type. But a mistake is just a mistake. It isn't 'epistemic violence'. My dignity was not compromised by people who assumed I was a teenage prostitute- rather than Brittany Spears- by reason of my voluptuous figure and skimpy attire. Still, Mummy made Daddy stop passing remarks of that sort once I turned 50.
As for how caste dynamics affect those Black Americans who really do pick up the laundry—or shell the shrimp, or clean the motel rooms—Wilkerson has little to say.
Probably because they keep getting mistaken for Oprah Winfrey or Mike Tyson. Stupidity cuts both ways.
At one point, she implies that poor people of color are in some ways more fortunate than wealthier ones, because they have fewer stress-related health problems. She surmises that this has to do with low-income people of color getting less white pushback. But the claim isn’t supported by most recent research, and she doesn’t mention the significant diagnostic gap created by unequal access to health care. Considerations of material resources, in her analysis, can disappear in the shadow of status.
Khilnani, very politely, is saying Wilkerson is an entitled, cosseted, fool.
Applying a single abstraction to multiple realities inevitably creates friction—sometimes productive, sometimes not. In the book’s comparison of the Third Reich to India and America, for example, a rather jarring distinction is set aside: the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish people, not just to subordinate them. While American whites and Indian upper castes exploited Blacks and Dalits to do their menial labor, the Nazis came to see no functional role for Jews. In Nazi propaganda, Jews weren’t backward, bestial, natural-born toilers; they were cunning arch-manipulators of historical events. (When Goebbels and other Nazis reviled “extreme Jewish intellectualism” and claimed that Jews had helped orchestrate Germany’s defeat in the Great War, they were insisting on Jewish iniquity, not occupational incapacity.) The violence exercised against Dalits in India and Black people in America provides an ill-fitting template for eliminationist anti-Semitism.
So, Khilnani tells us, Wilkerson is one batty biddy who is as ignorant as shit.
Even in this country, as Wilkerson prosecutes the case for her caste model, she occasionally skirts facts that resist alignment with her thesis. To clinch her argument that Trump was elected because whites were protecting their caste status, she says that he won them over at every education level. According to the Pew Foundation’s 2018 validated-voter analysis, though, most whites with a college education or higher voted against him. Wilkerson seems at times to have a sophisticated idea of how caste operates in the modern world, with all its internal diversities. But at this and other points in her book she appears to be reaching back toward older understandings of the system, in which each group is a monolith, consistent in its interests and political allegiances, impervious to contingencies or context.
Why would College educated Whites not want Trump? Surely, the answer is economic. Even in India, once the economy started to grow, poor people stopped 'voting their caste'.
Indeed, reading Wilkerson’s chapter on Allison Davis, one could forget that “Deep South” pointedly billed itself as “a study of caste and class.” She leaves out the fact that Davis and his co-authors were fascinated by the ways in which the two gradients could complicate each other—the ways in which solidarities of class sometimes trumped those of color. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and James Foreman, who encountered “Deep South” in college, read its findings more instrumentally than Wilkerson does. The structural and individual outrages committed by Mississippi whites would not have been news to them. The news was that white élites often despised the white poor more than they did Black workers. Black and white landlords coöperated to protect their interests and exploit poor tenant farmers. And some white shopkeepers, however racist, knew that they had to be courteous to Black customers or lose their business. Many civil-rights activists concluded that, if Blacks gained more wealth and political power, they could compel whites to modify their behavior. Altering that key variable might start the process of eroding the caste system itself.
So, only money matters. Mafias and unconstitutional laws can be used to trap the exploited in poverty. But Society as a whole gains by cracking down on unjust enrichment.
Today, Republican political strategists are no doubt at work trying to capitalize on similar class and caste variables in the hope of dividing the Black vote, and undermining Black-equality movements.
They would be better off consolidating the White vote.
As it happens, a middle-caste Indian immigrant, the economist Raj Chetty, has given us an illuminating forensic picture of the complexity of the castes in question. Gender matters: Black women now slightly outearn white women who were raised in financially similar family circumstances, while the incomes of Black men account for most of a still appalling Black-white income gap. Location matters, too: Black people who moved to “better neighborhoods” as children have significantly different earning prospects as adults. (Counties with the least social mobility today often had a great density of slaves in the antebellum era.)
This hasn't been news for many decades.
Decades after King celebrated the laws Indian leaders had enacted to break down the caste system,
which failed completely, though, no doubt, economic development has eroded the more repugnant aspects of the Indian social system
that system has proved much tougher to dismantle than many observers had hoped. One thing quotas have achieved, though, is increased economic diversity within lower castes—a change that shows how labile the corresponding political alliances can be. After independence, Dalits, who constitute more than sixteen per cent of the population, were a reliable vote, first for the Congress Party and then, in some states, for their own caste-based regional parties. They were nearly as unified as the white Trump voters Wilkerson conjures. That’s no longer true. For the past six years, India has been ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.), a party with Brahminic roots which was established to promote upper-caste interests and advocates an ideology of Hindu supremacy.
Nonsense! The BJP was established to combat the hegemony of a Brahmin dynasty.
Dalits and lower castes were largely aligned against the B.J.P.—until it began courting them by exploiting the economic divisions within their ranks.
No. It played up their common religion and promised better, less corrupt, governance. Militant Islam was certainly a factor in Dalits switching to the BJP. Other parties turned a blind eye to Muslim atrocities against Dalits, though, no doubt, High Castes could attack low caste Muslims with impunity. The BJP saw that Dalits and Tribals hated Muslims more than they hated the Mercantile or Administrative Castes.
Some Dalit communities had benefitted disproportionately from the quotas for government jobs that Ambedkar (whom Wilkerson dubs “India’s Martin Luther King”) fought to write into the Constitution.
Reservations date back to the Twenties when non-Bhraman Princes and Merchants sought to challenge Gandhi's High Caste Congress Party. It was the Raja-Moonje pact which paved the way for Reservations to be accepted as at the all-India level. Ambedkar did not need to fight for them to be written into the Constitution. The fact is, he saw the greater danger as being an entrenched 'Uncle Tom' class enriching itself while neglecting the wider community. Sadly, Ambedkar died too young.
Over time, a small Dalit élite, known as “the creamy layer,” emerged. The B.J.P. recruited Dalits who were beneath that layer and resentful of it, promising them economic advancement.
The RSS did more. It promoted Dalits within its organization. It emphasized 'Hindutva'- a Hindu Nation, a Hindu 'Race'- in which caste would cease to matter. The fact that Modi is 'backward caste' made this an increasingly convincing argument.
Simultaneously, the Party’s networks tried to draw them into the Hindu-supremacist fold by inciting fear about a group even lower in the social hierarchy: Indian Muslims.
But the leaders of the Indian Muslims were upper class. They could exert muscle power over Dalits and Tribals unless the Hindus acted cohesively. The fact is, Ambedkar's ally, J.N Mandal had chosen Pakistan. But he and his fellow Namasudras were soon forced out of that country. Either the Dalits could side with their co-religionists or they would be hung out to dry.
In 2019, fully a third of Dalits voted for the B.J.P. in national elections that returned Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.
While two thirds of the 'General' Castes voted for him. Why? They thought he was the best bet for the country as a whole. Minorities may want to punish Majorities at the ballot box. Majorities don't want to punish themselves.
Suraj Yengde, a Dalit scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, sees possible benefits in his caste’s lack of unity.
But Yengde is a cretin.
As parties compete for their votes, he has argued, Dalits may have a wider and less corrupt range of candidates to choose from, and more effective representation.
Representation does not matter if the country goes down the toilet.
But Yengde’s sometime collaborator, the astringent, seventy-year-old Dalit intellectual and activist Anand Teltumbde (currently imprisoned by the Modi government on dubious charges of inciting violence), perceives a larger political failure; he believes that “the debacle of the Dalit movement” today lies in its inability to recognize how class intersects with caste.
Teltumbde married into the Ambedkar family. Despite his impressive academic credentials he seems to have had little political impact. Like many intellectuals, he thought the country would go in a left-ward direction ten years ago. So, it seems, he got into bad company and is now paying the price.
Starting in the nineteenth century, low-caste Indians looked to America’s progressives for ideas about fighting inequality. Jyotirao Phule, an anti-Brahmin agitator from a lowly gardener caste, dedicated his 1873 book, “Ghulamgiri,” or “Slavery,” to American abolitionists.
Phule says, anti-Brahminism must triumph while the Brits were still around. If they left, his class would be pushed down once again. His reading of Tom Paine made him an anti-nationalist. This was a convenient doctrine when the country was ruled by the British. However, being anti-national in an independent country is a quick route to political oblivion, if not incarceration.
A century later, young Dalits who had studied the Black Power movement launched the Dalit Panthers.
Which failed miserably for a reason Sujatha Gidla makes plain. Men should not get drunk and play at being revolutionaries while dreaming of raping, or actually having sex with, 'fair skinned' high caste women. If they do so, their own families suffer. Fortunately Dalit women, like African American women (who now earn more than White women) did not take to drugs and antagonomic poetry and pretending to be Che Guevara. Thus Sujatha and her sisters qualified as Doctors or Rocket Scientists or whatever in India and then emigrated to high paying jobs in the US or Canada.
But it was Christianity and Education, not 'Black Power' or Tokenism's 'White Lies', which enabled Gidla's family to rise up.
In Wilkerson’s estimation, what America may teach the world in the coming decades is, alas, how a numerically vulnerable dominant caste can cling to power.
72 per cent of Americans identify as White. Are they really 'numerically vulnerable'?
She recounts a conversation she had with the civil-rights historian Taylor Branch about how American democracy will fare when it reaches a demographic watershed: the moment in the twenty-forties when non-Hispanic whites are expected to see their majority disappear.
The answer is that Hispanic whites will be upgraded- if it has not already happened. But, by then, a lot of 'one drop' African Americans will have no truck with Grievance Studies.
“So the real question would be,” Branch says, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
There is no need for any such choice. Whiteness found out that it could thrive more with democracy than under a Monarch or a Mandarin Class. Minorities too benefit by using their votes to show that the nutters amongst them have no following.
Whites, Wilkerson anticipates, will rush to co-opt insecure mid-caste nonwhites—ethnic groups who have profited from affirmative-action programs that Blacks fought for. She chillingly envisages Latinos, Asians, and other citizens of color entering the voting booth and making an “autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station,” privileging features of their identity that align them with the dominant caste over features they share with other voters of color. “They will vote up, rather than across, and usually not down,” she predicts.
No. They will vote for their own unless a better candidate is available. Wilkerson forgets that politicians matter. If they are shit, the country goes down the crapper. Color and Caste and so forth don't matter. Livelihoods do.
As these new “honorary” whites bolster the ranks of the dominant caste, Blacks will remain on the bottom. In Frank B. Wilderson III’s stark phrasing, those middle castes will become “junior partners” in white supremacy.
Very true! If you go to school and learn to read and rite gud, you become a junior partner in the Education racket. If you get a job, rather than just mugging people as nature intended, you become a junior partner in the Employment racket. If you wipe your bum rather than go around with a turd sticking out of your arsehole, you become a junior partner in the hygiene racket.
There’s some precedent to support this argument: Italian-Americans, who now tend to vote Republican, were nineteenth-century pariahs, seen as nonwhite and sometimes lynched.
How did they see themselves? That is the question. How did the Swedes and the Irish and the Polish and the Jews and the Levantines and the Chinese and the Japanese and, more recently, the Indians and Nigerians see themselves? Not through the lens of 'caste'. No. They, like African Americans understood that only Economics matters. Sometimes this means Laws must be changed. Sometimes it means Laws must not be changed and stupid shitheads should be told to fuck off back to the safe space of a Campus.
But, given the increasing range of America’s contemporary middle castes—consider the economic chasm between an Indian tech C.E.O. and an Indian security guard, or the ideological one between a Ted Cruz and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—it’s hard to see a concerted march toward whiteness.
Given the increasing range of arseholes popping on different parts of the bodies of America's contemporary multi-arseholed community, it is hard to see a concerted march towards the Socially prescriptive multi-areholedness of the Thysanozoon nigropapillosum flatworm. I mean just look at AOC and Ted Cruz! Why are they not sharing a platform so as to strip down to display the salutary functioning of their various arseholes? The answer, of course, is that the original sin of the American Republic was to insist on 'one man, one arsehole'. How long must our children suffer under this epistemic tyranny?
Too many of those mid-caste Americans seem, in this moment, to be an impediment to the second term of the white-supremacist-in-chief.
Trump has many assholes. Some may have been bleached. But others are brown.
Wilkerson’s conception of social rigidities may itself prove too rigid to accommodate the complexities of what’s unfolding around us. Today, the Confederate emblem has been chased off the Mississippi state flag, and talk of reparations has moved into the political mainstream.
Yet there is a conspiracy of silence about the rights of the multi-arseholed to proudly display their excretory accomplishments. Will no one think of the children?
But Wilkerson’s model does not encourage optimism: backlash follows legislative and electoral progress so reliably in her account that hopes for change begin to feel naïve. No law is etched in granite, she reminds us; each one can be chiselled away.
Thus, sooner or later the multi-arseholed will be able to proudly display their shit simultaneously from several orifices.
Although Wilkerson considers herself more a diagnostician than a clinician, she advances, toward the end of the book, two ideas for toppling the American caste system.
Which au fond is about multiple arseholedom.
She’d like to see a public accounting of the American past modelled on postwar Germany, which paid restitution to Holocaust survivors, made displaying the swastika a crime, and erected memorials to victims.
This can easily be accomplished by an American defeat in War and its occupation by the victorious powers.
However, 'public accounting' is important. Everybody must declare the number of arseholes they possess on their tax returns. To encourage honesty in this respect, tax liability will be divided by the number of arseholes your report. Soon, the vast majority of Americans will realize that they have multiple assholes.
But her greater faith lies in what she calls “radical empathy.” She has described her work as a moral “mission”: “to change the country, the world, one heart at a time.”
I too have a similar mission. I charge $9.99 per heart conversion.
And she concludes her book by celebrating individuals like Albert Einstein, who came to the U.S. shortly before the Nazis took power, empathized with Blacks facing discrimination, and began advocating for their rights. “Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps break the back of caste,” Wilkerson writes. “Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.”
Racial segregation was real, as Einstein found. Caste is not real. It is merely a metaphor or a misleading type of structural causal model. Not even David Icke can overthrow it despite his many astonishing discoveries about shape-shifting Lizard people. On the other hand, once people reveal on their tax forms that they have many many arseholes on their body, then fuck anybody would bother with Caste for? Incidentally, sweat glands are not assholes. They are peeholes.
This resort to moral psychology—a self-oriented Gandhian move of the kind that infuriated Ambedkar—seems a retreat from her larger argument that white supremacy should be seen as systemic, not personal.
This is not a retreat. Wilkerson is claiming to have an interessement mechanism- on the basis of her specialness- and an entitlement to obligatory passage point status.
Perhaps, boxed in by her caste model, she is seeking hope by reaching outside it.
Caste, after all, can be overturned by a Messiah. Why shouldn't this be Wilkerson? You could fare farther and fare worse than this beautiful, eloquent, woman.
But, if the caste model can feel unnuanced and overly deterministic, the turn toward empathy can feel detached from history in another way.
Messianic figures fulfil History. Wilkerson is offering herself as something more than a Social Scientist.
After all, were every white person in America to wake up tomorrow cured of what Wilkerson terms the “disease” of caste, the change of heart alone would not redress the deprivation of human, financial, and social capital to which Blacks have been subjected for centuries.
But that change of heart would be the miracle of a Messiah. The future would be, in great part, what she desired.
Talk of “structural racism” is meant to highlight this difficult truth;
But talk of 'structural' anything has been passe in the Social Sciences for decades.
Wilkerson’s understanding of caste,
which is that it exists where it doesn't
by emphasizing norms of respect over the promptings of distributive justice, can sometimes obscure it.
Distributive justice, again, is something which only exists in the more cretinous branches of the Academy.
One soggy evening in July, I visited the area where “black lives matter” has been painted on a street leading to the White House. As young white people stood on the street taking selfies, I did my best to imagine a lasting equality built on what was in their hearts, and those of millions like them. Yet their baseball caps took me back to an argument in “Caste,” about the great Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige. Wilkerson argues that, if Paige had been allowed to play in the white leagues while he was in his athletic prime (he wasn’t tapped by the majors until he was in his forties), his uncanny skill would have been further honed, spectators would have flocked to see him, his team would have risen in the rankings, and the sport as a whole would have reaped the profits. This line of argument recurs in her book, and turns up in a lot of other places lately: if you level the playing field, everyone wins.
Quite true. 'Open' markets mean economies of scope and scale become available. The industry grows and presents more 'value adding' niches.
But what about the not-quite-great white player whose major-league career happened only because Paige was barred from the competition?
They get more money as coaches, talent scouts, etc. At the margin, if they had higher transfer earnings anyway, the loss is derisory. A guy who couldn't get to play ball may make a ton of money in business.
In a fair world, dominant-caste individuals who have historically benefitted from prejudice and discrimination would lose out.
Only if this is a zero-sum game. But for almost all economic activities on open markets, this is not the case.
When I multiplied the injury of disinheritance by, to use Wilkerson’s phrase, “millions in a given day” in a foreseeable future of economic insecurity, the sustained radical empathy of downwardly mobile whites became a hard thing to envision.
If things are framed as a zero-sum game, sure, majorities are going to turn on supposedly aggressive minorities who want to eat their lunch. Fortunately, African American economists, political scientists and Obama type politicians have framed things as a positive sum game. This is perfectly sensible.
I started to wonder if Wilkerson’s faith in psychology had underestimated a particularly treacherous aspect of Indian caste, which is how well it insulates the hearts of individual oppressors from the injustices they perpetrate and profit by.
This is nonsense. If a Dalit sub-caste which has adopted vegetarianism is able to feed a wedding party more cheaply, then Brahmins suddenly discover that these are fellow Brahmins. Money matters more when you have little of it. Powerless people don't 'perpetrate' injustices- unless they actively steal. Khilnani has profited by writing shite. But he has many assholes. We must not harden our hearts against him.
Radical empathy is exactly what caste societies preclude.
So, Khilnani is saying 'Thank God the Brits, and the Turks before them, ruled over India. My ancestors were incapable or radical empathy. Truly they were shit. I however have many assholes and profusely shit out of all of them so as to demonstrate my radical empathy.'
The system’s fictitious gradations extinguish, by design, a sense of common humanity.
Till Khilnani's multiple assholes profusely shit it all over humanity.
Pinned on the new iron fence protecting the White House from the public were photos of Black people killed by the police in recent years. In the photo of the Minnesota cafeteria worker Philando Castile, I could make out the motto on his school-issue lanyard: “Live Well.” Why, I wondered, should justice for a low-wage worker murdered while complying with a law officer’s order have to depend on anything as discretionary as empathy?
If the Hispanic officer who shot him had had 'empathy' he wouldn't have emptied 7 bullets into him. He'd have understood that a guy in a car with his partner and their 4 year old baby isn't going to use his registered firearm to engage in a shootout.
America, unlike India, has a Jury system. Empathy is essential when determining questions of fact. Judges clarify points of Law. Sadly, Juries- including Black Jurors- have tended to have more empathy for police officers who say they were in fear for their lives than for their Black victims.
People have to see that Black men are people just like themselves. Sure, if you see a bunch of gangsters posing with automatic weapons, you understand that you should make yourself scarce. But a guy driving with his lady and a 4 year old kid is not looking to gain a rep as a cop killer.
I recalled a detail about King’s trip to India, when, looking for psychological strength, he’d found political strategy.
Dr. King found psychological strength in the Gospel of Lord Jesus Christ. In his own way, so did Mahatma Gandhi and millions of other people throughout history.
King came to India on the invitation of the Indian Government and under the imprimatur of Ambassador Chester Bowles. India was the biggest recipient of American Aid. It was supposed to be a role model for other decolonized nations.
A reporter in New Delhi had asked him about those who had fought him in Montgomery: had he, in the end, “transformed the hearts of the white people”? Maybe some hearts, King replied. Others remained bitter.
This was true enough.
He moved on to another question. Changing power differentials in order to redress vile histories of discrimination, he knew, was bound to be ugly. Sometimes hearts barely figured at all.
Changing power differentials to accord with incentive compatible socio-economic advancement can be beautiful. It is always utile. Why? Because hearts beat more freely and to some better purpose. Trust burgeons. Trade and Industry lift up material standards of living. Kids laugh and play. Elderly people live in a dignified manner. Crime diminishes. Culture acquires a new polish and brilliance.
Caste may not exist in America. But Christ does- in people's heart. Wilkerson's 'Social Science' may be shite- but then all Social Science is shite- what matters is that she is part of a fine old American tradition. She says 'Caste' because the word 'Race' has grown tired. Let her call upon Christ for our species is wearied. Already, vast numbers of tax-payers are clamoring to have their tax bill divided by as many assholes as they can count upon their own bodies, which number may yet exceed the number of assholes who want to fuck up the body politic by clamoring for foolish fiscal policies.
Socioproctology, as I have frequently asserted- is about pointing a finger at assholes, not inserting those fingers anywhere smelly. For the low low fee of $9.99 you can get a certificate from a self-licensed Socioproctologist stipulating that you possess as many arseholes as you say you have. This may not matter greatly at the moment. But sooner or later, tax payers will want their tax bill to be divided by as many arseholes as seek to increase their burden.
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