And then there is, even here, the problem of segregation. We call it race in America; They call it caste in India. In both places, it means that some are considered inferior, treated a though they deserve less."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , "My Trip to the Land of Gandhi"
In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents ," Isabel Wilkerson reminds us of Dr. Martin L. King Jr. and Coretta Scott King's 1959 visit to India. It's a story I was familiar with, but it takes on a different reveal in Caste .
Accepting Prime Minister Jawdharal Nehru's invitation to visit India, Martin and Coretta as to spend time with the "untouchables" (Dalits, which means, "broken people") in the state of Kerala, the city of Trivandrum. There, writes Wilkerson, the Kings visit a school where the principal introduces the couple to the "untouchables."
"' I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.'"
King wrote about how he was taken aback. "'I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.'"
Not recognizing the connection, writes Wilkerson, King "did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves." King, the gesture suggested, was one of them!
How does a caste system operate in the US?
As W. E. B. Du Bois, King, and Wilkerson recognized, there is a caste system in the US, and it has served as the "bone" in relationship to the "skin" (that is, race). All the way from Kerala, the Dalits, revealed to King a truth about the foundational hierarchy in the US that situates the "superior" above the "inferior." Based on the color line!
The US is built on a caste structure, where the color of someone's skin matters. King came to the same conclusion. The people he was fighting for, "some 20 million," in the 20 th Century, writes Wilkerson, were "consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries." And these people were, as King wrote, "'still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty.'" Many, Wilkerson continues, lived in the isolation of ghettos, "exiled in their own country."
King, writes Wilkerson, realized that he may live in the Land of the Free but was subject to an "imposed" caste system, "not unlike the caste system of India," and he had been living as a member of a caste in the US all of his life.
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While caste is invisible, it's race that is visible and race that garners so much discourse. And anguish. And pushback. Pushback and anguish. But, as Wilkerson argues, we'll learn more about what keeps racism in place if we study caste, since it's caste that offers a structure in which rest the color line . The race problem, she continues is actually a caste problem.
Before there was a United States, there was a caste system. "Caste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation." People designated to reside at the bottom of this system are subject to violence against them. Violence with impunity! Caste, writes Wilkerson, predates race. In the US, ordinary whites had to maintaining the color line in order to uphold the caste system. In order to keep the "'Negro in his place.'" In other words!
Decades before King recognized in the plight of the Dalits a marginalized people much like African Americans in the US, Du Bois was introduced Bhimrao Ambedkar, educated at Columbia, and a man who focused, writes Wilkerson, on "the difference between race, caste, and class." He would later be called the MLK of India. But for now, Du Bois recognized in Ambedkar their "common fates, despite the "ocean" between them.
It was Du Bois, Wilkerson adds, who in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935), wrote that once the Black was free and briefly, in the sun, they were returned by force "back again toward slavery." Wilkerson explains, the "whole weight of America was thrown to color caste" when the US entered the era of Jim Crow-- legalized segregation.
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Beginning in the years after the arrival of enslaved Africans to Virginia in 1619, writes Wilkerson, "the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not." The colonists, she continues, could easily develop "a caste of people" who then could be defined and always recognized, for the most part, "as dumb because it was illegal to teach them to read or write." Those designated at the bottom of the caste system could be considered "immoral" and therefore "raped and forced" to breed. These human beings could be treated as "criminal" since "the colonists made the natural response ti kidnap, floggings, and torture-- the human impulse to defend oneself or break free-- a crime if one were black."
As Wilkerson argues, there's India and the US. But Germany in the 1930s, determined to do away with democracy and replace it with fascism, looked to the US. The Germans, particularly Hitler, studied America for its "near genocide" of Indigenous people and its enslavement of Blacks. And that "custom of lynching."
For Hitler, the shooting down of Indigenous people and the forcing of survivors onto reservations was good. It was good, too, to witness the "ritual torture" of Black people. Hitler "saw the U. S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as a 'model for his program of racial purification.'" Hitler, according to James Whitman, in Hitler's American Model , writes that the US "'was not just a country with racism. It was the leading racist jurisdiction-- so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration."
For one political candidate for the US presidency, strengthening the caste system would assure a return to a great America!
The caste system destroys democracy. Or at least, makes a mockery of the idea or countries such as the US and India, declaring themselves democracies. Focusing then, writes Wilkerson, on the "derogatory actions" misses the invisible structure of caste. "Casteism," she argues, "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." No country can fully engage democracy with a caste system in place! The structure is intended to look "like the natural order of things."
It's far from it!
We have to be taught this illogical way of thinking about humanity, writes Wilkerson. As I see it, why else would certain politicians and Moms for Liberty or, for that matter, ordinary citizens, becomes so embittered and determined to keep their children in the dark about the history of this country? Why do they fear learning about the impact and legacy of slavery in the US? Or why the era of Jim Crow followed the dismantling of Reconstruction? Why the police shootings now? Gentrification now? Why all the attacks on affirmative action and "wokeness"?
We are all "ranked," Wilkerson writes. "Cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production." Think on this: caste is marketable too! It has benefits for the corporate class!
As it stands now in this 21 st Century, "none of us are ourselves."
King starts the fight for justice with this reveal in mind. "These are revolutionary times," he wrote. "All over the globe men [and women] are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born."
