As a child, I was fed the myth that America was "the land of the free" and "the land of equal opportunity". The right-wing liberals prescribed it as the antidote to the "communist hell" of the Soviet Union, where everyone was living a life of perennial poverty, and ordinary citizens were tortured and murdered for just speaking even a single word against the government.
It took me a long time to realise that these were half-truths, worse than lies.
In this book, Elizabeth Wilkerson links the evils of both these cultures to one common cause: caste. The deep-rooted belief that certain groups of human beings are inherently better than others, and that certain groups are so utterly devoid of any merit that the only fate they deserve is to live a semi-human existence at the bottom rung of the social ladder. When these feelings become extreme, we have something like the "final solution". (Nazis were directly influenced by the Jim Crow laws in the USA. More about that later.)
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, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life and death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.
It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure, which, in a caste system, is expected and perhaps even counted upon, but lower-caste success, which is not. Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes against the script handed down to us all. It undermines the core assumptions upon which a caste system is constructed and to which the identities of people on all rungs of the hierarchy are linked. Achievement by marginalised people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primaeval and often violent backlash.
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. Each version relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
The USA is a country which was created out of the massive genocide of the native occupants of the land, and it was built up through the labour of hundreds and thousands of Africans who were treated as property and lived a subhuman existence for centuries. Even after the Civil War, which emancipated the slaves, under the infamous "Jim Crow" laws, they were forced to exist as beings which were considered barely human. Of course, they were free, but the state allowed them to do only the lowest of jobs, which ensured that they lived in virtual penury; there was strict segregation to ensure that they stayed at the bottom of the social ladder; and they had no say in the government because they had no voting rights. Even the small transgressions on the part of an African-American resulted in the most horrendous punishments.
Even after the Civil Rights movement succeeded in the repeal of the Jim Crow laws and African-Americans slowly managed to move into the mainstream, things were far from egalitarian. Segregation still remained in the mind of the White American, and it was there to stay. And it is here that it resembles the caste system of India.
Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you which shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.
Ms Wilkerson defines eight pillars on which caste stands:
1. Divine will and laws of nature: sanction for the gradation of humans based on "holy" texts, like the Manusmriti of India, and the labelling of Africans as the sons of the cursed Ham from the Old Testament.
2. Heritability: caste is generally understood to be inherited, and its supposed characteristics are considered genetic traits.
3. Endogamy and control of marriage and mating
4. The concept of purity. The "lower" castes "pollute" the "upper" castes through contact.
5. Occupational hierarchy: the "lower" castes are allowed to do only undignified jobs, which are beneath contempt for the "upper" castes.
6. Dehumanising and stigmatising people on a regular basis, based on their birth.
7. Cruelty and violence as a means of control.
8. The inherent superiority of the "upper" caste versus the inherent inferiority of the "lower".
Anyone from India will have no problem in recognising these in their own country; however, it may come as a surprise that the same system holds in the USA too, with minor variations.
Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country's near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had "shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as "a model for his program of racial purification," historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."
By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States "was not just a country with racism," Whitman, the Yale legal scholar, wrote. "It was the leading racist jurisdiction-so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration." The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.
In the epilogue, Wilkerson makes a passionate plea for a world without caste. Considering the longevity and persistence of caste in India, such a goal sounds radical. Hannah Arendt cautioned us that efforts to eliminate inequality have a track of failure. She asked revolutionary idealism to learn from it, just as Albert Camus did. Perhaps more modest goals towards fairness are achievable.
