Caste

 Pillars of Caste

Divine Will and the Laws of Nature

“These tenets, as interpreted by those who put themselves on high, would become the divine and spiritual foundation for the belief in a human pyramid willed by God, a Great Chain of Being, that the founders would further sculpt in the centuries to follow, as circumstances required.” (p. 104)

Heritability

“To work, each caste society relied on clear lines of demarcation in which everyone was ascribed a rank at birth, and a role to perform, as if each person were a molecule in a self-perpetuating organism. You were born to a certain caste and remained in that caste, subject to the high status or low stigma it conferred, for the rest of your days and into the lives of your descendants.” (p. 105)

Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

“It builds a firewall between castes and becomes the primary means of keeping resources and affinity within each tier of the caste system.” (p. 109)

Purity versus Pollution

“Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.” (p. 115)

Occupational Hierarchy

“Thus, caste did not mean merely doing a certain kind of labor; it meant performing a dominant or subservient role. ‘There must be, then, a division of labor where the two races are employed, and menial labor is commonly supposed to be the division assigned to Negroes,’ Doyle wrote, ‘and he must look and act the part.’” (p. 136)

Dehumanization and Stigma

“Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy. 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.” (p. 141)

Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

“The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror.” (p. 151)

Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

“It was not enough that the designated groups be separated for reasons of ‘pollution’ or that they not intermarry or that the lowest people suffer due to some religious curse, but that it must be understood in every interaction that one group was superior and inherently deserving of the best in a given society and that those who were deemed lowest were deserving of their plight.” (p. 160)

Key Concepts

The caste system in the US is similar to those in India and Nazi Germany

“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 in the United States.” (p. 17)

“In debating ‘how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,’ wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, ‘they began by asking how the Americans did it.’” (p. 78)

“While the Nazis praised “the American commitment to legislating racial purity,” they could not abide “the unforgiving hardness” under which “ ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks,” Whitman wrote. ‘The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.’” (p. 88)

The caste system corrupts everyone involved in it

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.” (p. 70)

“Thus, a caste system makes a captive of everyone within it. Just as the assumptions of inferiority weigh on those assigned to the bottom of the caste system, the assumptions of superiority can burden those at the top with unsustainable expectations of needing to be several rungs above, in charge at all times, at the center of things, to police those who might cut ahead of them, to resent the idea of undeserving lower castes jumping the line and getting in front of those born to lead.” (p. 183)

“Through no fault of any individual born to it, a caste system centers the dominant caste as the sun around which all other castes revolve and defines it as the default-setting standard of normalcy, of intellect, of beauty, against which all others are measured, ranked in descending order by their physiological proximity to the dominant caste.” (p. 268)

“So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. ‘The essence of this overestimation of one’s own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism,’ wrote the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm. ‘He is nothing,’ Fromm wrote, ‘but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.’” (p. 270)

Caste systems require a scapegoat

“A scapegoat caste has become necessary for the collective well-being of the castes above it and the smooth functioning of the caste system. The dominant groups can look to those cast out as the cause of any fate or misfortune, as representing the worst aspects of society.” (p. 191)

Quotables

“We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.” (p. 16)

“Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue.” (p. 18)

“‘No one was white before he/she came to America,’ James Baldwin once said.” (p. 49)

“And yet, observed the historian Nell Irvin Painter, ‘Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition.’” (p. 67)

“Endogamy ensures the very difference that a caste system relies on to justify inequality. ‘What we look like,’ wrote the legal scholar Ian Haney López, ‘the literal and ‘racial’ features we in this country exhibit, is to a large extent the product of legal rules and decisions.’” (p. 111)

“The anxieties of the least secure in the dominant caste are not unlike those of a firstborn child expected to take over the family business. He may have neither the interest nor the specialized aptitude for it but feels duty-bound, pressured to take the reins, even though a younger sibling, say, a sister, is the one who was always good with numbers and has the temperament to run things but is not considered because of the family hierarchy of who goes first and who inherits what.” (p. 184)

“It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. ‘There is never caste,’ the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. ‘Only castes.’” (p. 273)

“‘Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful,’ wrote the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, ‘but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate.’” (p. 282)

“Taylor [Branch] nodded. He contemplated the meaning of that. ‘So the real question would be,’ he said finally, ‘if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?’” (p. 352)

“We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share.” (p. 387)

“We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” (p. 388)