Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste (The Lies That Divide Us) has been on my reading list for long. Though I bought it a couple of months ago, only recently I decided to take the plunge into this voluminous book. It delves deep into the race problem in the United States and draws parallels with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany and the long-standing caste system in India.
Wilkerson, a New York Times veteran turned academic, feels the term racism is insufficient to encapsulate the systemic oppression of African American people in the US and prefers to use the term ‘caste’, which in Indian society is used to describe a person’s social standing in the well-demarcated hierarchy.
The term Caste originated from the Portuguese word Casta, meaning race or breed, and it was coined by Portuguese traders. While doing business with their Indian counterparts, these traders observed some well demarcated divisions within Indian society.
Caste has been present in the Indian subcontinent for over a millennium, while the first batch of slaves from Africa came to America around 400 years ago.
The first time I heard the term slavery was when I had to study a small portion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in school. The chapter described some of the sub-human living conditions of slaves in the US in the 18th century.
Ever since I have been hearing intermittently about the friction between the African Americans and the whites in the US. They become a talking point when there is a Rodney King or George Floyd-type incident of police high-handedness towards African American youths, resulting in widespread protests. Even the term ‘African American’ is a refined and politically correct avatar of Negro or black that was freely used in the 1970s and 80s.
Caste in India
In India, your status in society gets decided by the accident of birth with Brahmins figuring at the top of the pecking order, followed by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and a vast underclass - collectively called Dalits or Bahujans or outcastes. The widespread practice of marrying only within one’s own caste has kept this water-tight segregation alive for centuries.
This hierarchical order, also known as Brahminical order, is well entrenched with each caste showing deference to those above them and riding roughshod over the less fortunate. The father of the Indian constitution and a Dalit himself, B R Ambedkar, had succinctly termed it as ‘graded inequality’.
Even religions like Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism that profess to be opposed to casteism tend to acknowledge this Brahminical order as a fait accompli of Indian society. In fact, some sects like Syrian Christians in Kerala take pride in their professed Brahmin ancestry before they embraced Christianity.
Racism in the US
In the US, when the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, the welfare of the blacks was not there in their minds. Slavery was considered an accepted practice and a vital element in keeping the US farm sector running on near-zero wage bills.
Even the White House had a slave quarter. The third president Thomas Jefferson, who had authored the epoch-making Declaration of Independence, had fathered six children from one of his slaves.
Though Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1865, after a four-year-long civil war, the subsequent rulers did precious little to help the newly freed slaves join the mainstream.
On the contrary, the southern states that had fought against the abolition of slavery during the Civil War introduced the Jim Crow laws (Jim Crow being a pejorative term for an African American). These laws supported racial segregation in public places and proposed a host of other discriminatory measures aimed at keeping the African American community on the fringes of society.
‘Negroes and dogs not allowed’ boards were proudly flaunted in front of shops and restaurants. Even where they were allowed, blacks were served only after all the white customers had been attended to. Public buildings and movie halls in some towns had separate entrances for blacks and whites, and hospitals had separate wards for black patients. In the armed forces, they had separate barracks for white and black soldiers.
It is said that when World War II was drawing to a close, a school in Columbus, Ohio, held an essay contest with the topic “What to do with Hitler after the war.” An African American girl wrote just one sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of life in America.” The Jim Crow laws remained for around a hundred years in the southern states and were repealed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Pat from the Nazis
While studying ways and means to prosecute the Jewish community and other minorities, the Nazis were quite impressed by the way the United States had sustained its white supremacy by treating African Americans and other minorities as second-class citizens.
They were particularly impressed by American eugenicist Madison Grant who firmly believed in Aryan supremacy and was considered close to US Presidents Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt. Grant had persuaded the US administration in the 1920s to tighten laws related to immigration and interracial marriages. He believed that ‘inferior stocks’ should be sterilized and quarantined in order to get them eliminated. His book ‘The Passage of a Great Race’ advocated ‘cleansing’ the gene pool and had a special place in Adolf Hitler’s library.
The common thread among the ruling class and elites of the US, India, and Germany was the zeal to maintain the purity of the bloodline. In the three countries, there were legal and societal curbs on interracial marriages.
Another commonality was the ‘sanctity’ in the usage of water. In the US, offices had separate water fountains for white and black employees, and many beaches were out of bounds for African Americans. In India, the Dalits and other lower castes too faced similar restrictions and the Nazi Germany also barred Jews from using many beaches.
Race Purity
Among the whites, anyone not having Anglo-Saxon blood was considered ‘polluted’. People from other European countries such as Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, and others fell into this category. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, another luminary of the American War of Independence, was concerned about the rising influx of German immigrants to Pennsylvania State and feared that they may ‘Germanize’ the state by imposing their language and culture.
However despite all these intra-continental prejudices, the European immigrants always enjoyed a privileged status in the US as regardless of their country of origin or vocation, they were slotted in the ‘white’ category once they entered America. Whereas people migrating from Asia, Africa or South America were classified as ‘coloured’ or ‘blacks’. And however successful they are in their careers or businesses they are seen through the lens of their race.
By the 1880s the US policymakers started getting worried that the increased immigration might upset the white supremacy and began imposing curbs, especially those from the non-European countries. The axe first fell on the Chinese in 1882 and this tightening of curbs continued until the 1960s.
Trump Legacy
Donald Trump came to power by tapping the insecurities of white voters. He capitalized on their fears that whites would turn into a minority sometime in the 2040s. His presidency polarized the US society and opened the old wounds of the Civil War era.
The neo-Confederates, who drew inspiration from the Confederacy movement that fought against the abolition of slavery, started gaining prominence in some of the southern states. Though the Confederacy movement was defeated and slavery was abolished, they remained a force in southern states and subsequent governments did little to keep them in check. The neo-Confederates saw the advent of Trump in the White House as an act of reclaiming their 'glorious past' and this further strained the tenuous racial equation in many cities, leading to violent clashes.
Personal Anecdotes
Wilkerson recounts a few personal anecdotes to highlight the subtle racism in the present-day US. As she lives in a predominantly white neighbourhood, salesmen coming to her house assume she is the housemaid and ask her to call the ‘madam’! She also recalls an unsavoury incident at a restaurant along with her white host.
She also narrates an interesting nugget regarding Ambedkar. She happened to attend a seminar on casteism organized by a US-based Indian group. The organizers presented her with a small bronze bust of Ambedkar.
When she was in the airport undergoing a security check, the African American security officer spotted it and grew suspicious. He got it closely checked and asked, “Who is this?” Wilkerson thought telling him about Ambedkar would be a laborious process. So she told him: “This is Martin Luther King of India.”
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