Caste

 “The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.” Isabel Wilkerson, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (2020) 

In “Caste,” which compares America’s race-based class pyramid to India’s caste system and Nazi Germany’s persecution of “undesirables, Isabel Wilkerson traces the unequal treatment of African Americans back to1619, when a Dutch man-of-war brought two dozen black men captured from a slave ship bound for Spanish New World colonies to Point Comfort in Virginia. Especially horrific are her descriptions of lynchings that became common in the decades following the Civil War, even in places outside the South such as Coatesville, Pennsylvania and Marion, Indiana.  In 1919 in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, a mob numbering in the thousands set fire to the courthouse, seized packinghouse worker Will Brown, accused of molesting a white women, stripped him naked, strung him up, riddled his body the bullets, and dragged the corpse through the streets. Wilkerson compares such atrocities to German villagers living near Death Camps who went about their daily tasks as ashes from Jewish human remains floated down from the sky.

 

A woman told Wilkerson, “I find that white people are fine as long as I stay in my place.  As soon as I get out of the ‘container, it’s a problem.” In a chapter discussing survival skills blacks developed in the face of racism, Wilkerson cites the examples of Charleston church members forgiving the young white supremacist who murdered nine parishioners attending a Bible study class and of a black man in Dallas hugging in court the former cop who mistakenly broke into his brother’s apartment and killed him, writing: “Black forgiveness of dominant-caste sin has become a spiritual form of having to be twice as good in trauma, as in other aspects of life, to be seen as half as worthy.”  As Roxanne Gay put it: “Black people forgive because we have to survive . . . time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive.”  Hanif Abdurraqib furnished this explanation: “This expectation [of forgiveness] feels fueled by a perverse need to see harmed people demonstrate nobility because it’s how we believe the myths that political suffering builds character, and that righteousness rather than power will eventually triumph.”

 

Wilkerson attributed Trump’s political ascendency to fear by members of the dominant caste that their exalted status in the hierarchy was being threatened.  The author concluded: “The 2016 election would set the United States on a course toward isolationism, tribalism, the walling in and protecting of one’s own, the worship of wealth and acquisition at the expense of others, even the planet itself.”

 

Emiliano Aguilar posted an article about fearless labor organizer Emma Tenayuca, first arrested in 1933 at age 16 for demonstrating in support of cigar factory workers.  She fought against the repatriation of Mexicans and in San Antonio organized a 1938 strike on behalf of pecan shellers. Time magazine described her as “a slim, vivacious labor organizer with blackeyes and a Red philosophy.”