Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Because even if I should speak,
no one would believe me,
And they would not believe me precisely because
they would know that that I said was true.
--------James Baldwin

If the majority knew of the root of this evil,

then the road to its cure would not be long.

-------------------Albert Einstein

Dedication

To the memory of my parents
who survived the caste system
and to the memory of Brett
who defied it

First words

In the haunted summer of 2016, an unaccustomed heat wave struck the Siberian tundra on the edge of what the ancients once called the End of the Land.

There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. (The Man in the Crowd)

We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are. (Epilogue)

In the spring and into the summer of 2022, an unholy heat arose on the surface of the planet and in the hearts of men. (Afterword)

Quotations

Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reasson the had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country's last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was "to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy." (p 82)

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

The human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures, predates the idea of race, and thus is farther reaching, deeper, and older than raw racism and the comparatively new division of humans by skin color.

Except that this was and is our country and this was and is who we are, whether we have known or recognized it or not.

The most respected and beneficent of society people oversaw forced labor camps that were politely called plantations, concentrated with hundreds of unprotected prisoners, whose crime was that they were born with dark skin. Good and loving mothers and fathers, pillars of their communities, personally, inflicted, gruesome tortures upon their fellow human beings.

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“No matter how grand you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do,” NBA star LeBron James told reporters just the year before, “if you are an African-American man, or African-American woman, you will always be that.”

Louisiana culture went to great specificity, not so unlike the Indian laws of Manu, and delineating the various subcastes, based on the estimated percentage of African “blood.” There was griffe (three-fourths black), marabon (five-eighths black), mulatto (one-half), quadroon (one-fourth), octaroon (one-eighth), sextaroon (one-sixteenth), demineamelouc (one thirty-second), and sangmelee (one-sixty-fourth). The latter categories, as twenty-first-century genetic testing has now shown, wood encompass millions of Americans now classified as Caucasian. All of these categories bear witness to a historic American, dominant-caste preoccupation with race and caste purity.

But Ebola, and potentially planet-wide catastrophes like it, as the world would discover beyond imagining six years later, have a way of reminding human beings that we were all indeed, one species, all interwoven, more alike than different, more interdependent on one another then we might otherwise want to believe. Ebola has been merely a whispered for warning of what was to come.

Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth—that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people that we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal.

Though they may not recognize it on a conscious level, dominant-caste Americans often show nearly as much curiosity about the ethnic, and thus caste, origins of their fellow Americans as do people in India…They will question a person whose race is ambiguous until they are satisfied of an origin.

…white support has intensified for Republicans, now seen as the party of an anxious but powerful dominant-caste electorate.

But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.

Last words

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