Top Quotes: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” — Isabel Wilkerson

Introduction

“In the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history, whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be.”

“The sentiment of returning to an old order of things, the closed hierarchy of the ancestors, soon spread across the land in a headline-grabbing wave of hate crime and mass violence. Shortly after Inauguration Day, a white man in Kansas shot and killed an Indian engineer, telling the immigrant and his Indian co-worker to “get out of my country” as he fired upon them. The next month, a clean-cut white army veteran caught a bus from Baltimore to New York on a mission to kill black people. He stalked a sixty-six-year-old black man in Times Square and stabbed him to death with a sword. The attacker would become the first white supremacist convicted on terrorism charges in the state of New York.

On a packed commuter train in Portland, Oregon, a white man hurling racial and anti-Muslim epithets attacked two teenaged girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. “Get the fuck out,” he ranted. “We need Americans here.” When three white men rose to the girls’ defense, the attacker stabbed the men for doing so. “I’m a patriot,” the attacker told the police en route to jail, “and I hope everyone I stabbed died.” Tragically two of the men did not survive their wounds.”

“In. the fall of 2018, eleven worshippers were slain at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst anti-Semitic attack on U.S. soil. Outside Louisville, Kentucky, a man attempted a similar assault on a black church, yanking the locked doors to try to break in and shoot parishioners at their Bible study. Unable to pry the doors open, the man went to a nearby supermarket and killed the first black people he saw — a black woman in the parking lot headed in for groceries and a black man buying poster board with his grandson. An armed bystander happened to see the shooter in the parking lot, which got the shooter’s attention. “Don’t shoot me,” the shooter told the onlooker, “and I won’t shoot you,” according to news reports. “Whites don’t kill whites.””

“Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.”

“One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been Untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first.

He had flown in from another continent, had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, 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, see him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for — 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.

And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”

In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.”

“Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans and of their descendants in the pre-Civil War United States. Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jotiba Phule found inspiration in the abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide.”

Many decades later, in the summer of 1946, acting on news that black Americans were petitioning the United Nations for protection as minorities, Ambedkar reached out to the best known African-American intellectual of the day, W.E.B. Du Bois. He told Du Bois that he had been a “student of the Negro problem” from across the oceans and recognized their common fates.

“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”

Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India.””

“The Europeans could and did escape from their masters and blend into the general white population that was hardening into a single caste. “The Gaelic insurrections caused the English to seek to replace this source of servile labor entirely with another source, African slaves.””

“”This fact is of great significance for the understanding of racial conflict,” wrote the sociologist Guy B. Johnson, “for it means that white people during the long period of slavery became accustomed to the idea of regulating Negro insolence and insubordination by force with the consent and approval of the law.””

“It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States would be an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.”

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

“Back before Amazon and iPhones, I was a national correspondent at The New York Times, based in Chicago. I had decided to do a lighthearted piece about Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, a prime stretch of Michigan Avenue that had always been the city’s showcase, but now some big names from New York and elsewhere were about to take up residence. I figured New York retailers would be delighted to talk. As I planned the story, I reached out to them for interviews. Everyone I called was thrilled to describe their foray into Chicago and to sit down with the Times.

The interviews went as expected until the last one. I had arrived a few minutes early to make sure we could start on time, given the deadline I was facing.

The boutique was empty at this quiet hour of the late afternoon. The manager’s assistant told me the manager would be arriving soon from another appointment. I told her I didn’t mind the wait. I was happy to get another big name in the piece. She went to a back corner as I stood alone in a wide-open showroom. A man in a business suit and overcoat walked in, harried and breathless. From the far corner she nodded that this was him, so I went up to introduce myself and get started. He was out of breath, had been rushing, coat still on, checking his watch.

“Oh, I can’t talk with you now,” he said, brushing past me. “I’m very, very busy. I’m running late for an appointment.”

I was confused at first. Might he have made another appointment for the exact same time? Why would he schedule two appointments at once? There was no one else in the boutique but the two of us and his assistant in back.

“I think I’m your appointment,” I said.

“No, this is a very important appointment with The New York Times,” he said, pulling off his coat. “I can’t talk with you now. I’lI have to talk with you some other time.”

“But I am with The New York Times,” I told him, pen and notebook in hand. “I talked with you on the phone. I’m the one who made the appointment with you for four-thirty.”

“What’s the name?”

“Isabel Wilkerson with The New York Times.”

“How do I know that?” he shot back, growing impatient. “Look, I said I don’t have time to talk with you right now. She’ll be here any minute.”

He looked to the front entrance and again at his watch.

“But I am Isabel. We should be having the interview right now.”

He let out a sigh. “What kind of identification do you have? Do you have a business card?”

This was the last interview for the piece, and I had handed them all out by the time I got to him.

“I’ve been interviewing all day,” I told him. “I happen to be out of them now.”

“What about ID? You have a license on you?”

“I shouldn’t have to show you my license, but here it is.”

He gave it a cursory look.

“You don’t have anything that has The New York Times on it?”

“Why would I be here if I weren’t here to interview you?

All of this time has passed. We’ve been standing here, and no one else has shown up.”

“She must be running late. I’m going to have to ask you to leave so I can get ready for my appointment.” I left and walked back to the Times bureau, dazed and incensed, trying to figure out what had just happened.

This was the first time I had ever been accused of impersonating myself. His caste notions of who should be doing what in society had so blinded him that he dismissed the idea that the reporter he was anxiously awaiting, excited to talk to, was standing right in front of him. It seemed not to occur to him that a New York Times national correspondent could come in a container such as mine, despite every indication that I was she.

The story ran that Sunday. Because I had not been able to interview him, he didn’t get a mention. It would have amounted to a nice bit of publicity for him, but the other interviews made it unnecessary in the end. I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won’t step inside that retailer.”

Casteism

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. Caste pushes back against an African-American woman who, without humor or apology, takes a seat at the head of the table speaking Russian. It prefers an Asian-American man to put his technological expertise at the service of the company but not aspire to CEO. Yet it sees as logical a sixteen-year-old white teenager serving as store manager over employees from the subordinate caste three times his age. Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

“Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

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.”

“When we assume that the woman is not equipped to lead the meeting or the company or the country, or that a person of color or an immigrant could not be the one in authority, is not a resident of a certain community, could not have attended a particular school or deserved to have attended a particular school, when we feel a pang of shock and resentment, a personal wounding and sense of unfairness and perhaps even shame at our discomfort upon seeing someone from a marginalized group in a job or car or house or college or appointment more prestigious than we have been led to expect, when we assume that the senior citizen should be playing Parcheesi rather than developing software, we are reflecting the efficient encoding of caste, the subconscious recognition that the person has stepped out of his or her assumed place in our society. We are responding to our embedded instructions of who should be where and who should be doing what, the breaching of the structure and boundaries that are the hallmarks of caste.”

Caste in India vs the US

“Unlike the United States, which primarily uses physical features to tell the castes apart, in India it is people’s surnames that may most readily convey their caste. Dalit names are generally “contemptible” in meaning, referring to the humble or dirty work they were relegated to, while the Brahmins carry the names of the gods. Generally, you must know the significance of the name, learn the occupation of their forefathers, and perhaps know their village or their place in the village to ascertain their caste, But after centuries of forced submission and in-group marriage, they may also be identified by their bearing, accents, and clothing, all of which, over the centuries, were required to be lowly and menial, as well as a tendency to be darker than upper-caste people, though not always.”

“Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and had followed it so closely that, in the 1970s, they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party.

A few years ago, a group of mostly African-American professors made a trip to a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India. There, hundreds of villagers from the lowliest sub-caste, the scavengers, came together for a ceremony to welcome the Americans. The villagers sang Dalit liberation songs for the occasion. Then they turned to their American guests and invited them to sing a liberation song of their own. A law professor from Indiana University, Kenneth Dau Schmidt, began a song that the civil rights marchers sang in Birmingham and Selma before they faced sheriffs’ dogs and water hoses. As he reached the refrain, the Dalit hosts joined in and began to sing with their American counterparts. Across the oceans, they well knew the words to “We Shall Overcome.””

Nazi Caste

“The man chairing the meeting, Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice, introduced a memorandum in the opening minutes, detailing the ministry’s investigation into how the United States managed its marginalized groups and guarded its ruling white citizenry. The seventeen legal scholars and functionaries went back and forth over American purity laws governing intermarriage and immigration. 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.””

“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 yespecially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.””

“Hitler had made it to the chancellery in a brokered deal that conservative elites agreed to only because they were convinced they could hold him in check and make use of him for their own political aims. They underestimated his cunning and overestimated his base of support, which had been the very reason they had felt they needed him in the first place. At the height of their power at the polls, the Nazis never pulled the majority they coveted and drew only 38 percent of the vote in the country’s last free and fair elections at the onset of their twelve-year reign. The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was “to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy.””

“[Jews were] the scapegoats for Germany’s loss and humiliation at the end of World War I. Seen as dominant in banking and finance, Jews were blamed for the insufficient financial support of the war effort, although historians now widely acknowledge that Germany lost on the battlefield and not solely for lack of funds.

Still, Nazi propaganda worked to turn Germans against Jewish citizens. Nazi thugs taunted and beat up Jews in the streets and any Aryans who were found to be in relationships with them. The regime began restricting Jews from working in government or in high-status professions like medicine or the law, fields that incited jealousy among ordinary Germans who could not afford the expensive cars and villas on the lake that many successful Jews had acquired. This was the middle of the Great Depression, and more than a third of Germans were out of work in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. The Jews’ prestige and wealth were seen as above the station of a group that Nazis decreed were beneath the Aryans.”

“[He was] confounded by the lengths to which America went to segregate its population. He made note that, by law in most southern states, “white children and colored children are sent to different schools” and that most states “further demand that race be given in birth certificates, licenses and death certificates.” He discovered that “many American states even go so far as to require by statute segregated facilities for coloreds and whites in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses, steamboats and even in prisons and jails.” In Arkansas, he noted, the tax rolls were segregated. He later remarked that, given the “fundamental proposition of the equality of everything that bears a human countenance, it is all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is in the USA.”

Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers “who thought American law went overboard.””

“The men who gathered for that meeting did not agree on how much to draw from American jurisprudence. The moderates at the table, among them the chair himself, Franz Gürtner, argued for less onerous methods than the Americans were using. He suggested that “education and enlightenment” about “the perils of race-mixing” might be enough to discourage Aryans from intermarrying with others. At one point, he sought to downplay the U.S. prototype because he had a hard time believing that Americans actually enforced the laws the Nazis had uncovered. “Gürtner simply refused to concede that the Americans actually went so far as to prosecute miscegenists,” Whitman wrote.”

“The people had ingested the lies of an inherent Untermenschen, that these prisoners — Jews, Sinti, homosexuals, opponents of the Reich — were not humans like themselves, and thus the townspeople swept the ash from their steps and carried on with their days. Mothers pulled their children inside when the wind kicked up, hurried them along, to keep them from being covered in the ash of fellow human beings.”

Pillars of Caste

“Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism. Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom. They made postcards out of the gelatin prints for people to send to their loved ones. People mailed postcards of the severed, half-burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo, Illinois, in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times. Some people framed the lynching photographs with locks of the victim’s hair under glass if they had been able to secure any. One spectator wrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas, in 1916: “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe.” This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning subde partment of the postcard industry.” By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the US. postmaster general banned the cards from the mails. But the new edict did not stop Americans from sharing their lynching exploits. From then on, they merely put the postcards in an envelope.”

“The Supreme Court did not overturn these prohibitions until 1967. Still, some states were slow to officially repeal their endogamy laws. Alabama, the last state to do so, did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000. Even then, 40 percent of the electorate in that referendum voted in favor of keeping the marriage ban on the books.

It was the caste system, through the practice of endogamy — essentially state regulation of people’s romantic relationships.”

“In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public — somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question. They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence. A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to “drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints” and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his “foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin.”

Touching or drawing near to anything that had been touched by an Untouchable was considered polluting to the upper castes and required rituals of purification for the high-caste person following this misfortune. This they might do by bathing at once in flowing water or performing Pranayama breaths along with meditation to cleanse themselves of the pollutants.”

“In Florida, the books for black children and white children could not even be stored together. African-Americans were prohibited from using white water fountains and had to drink from horse troughs in the southern swelter before the era of separate fountains. In southern jails, the bedsheets for the black prisoners were kept separate from the bedsheets for the white prisoners. All private and public human activities were segregated.”

“If a black person happened to die in a public hospital, “the body will be placed in a corner of the “dead house” away from the white corpses,” wrote the historian Bertram Doyle in 1937.”

“In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated. There were two separate Bibles — one for blacks and one for whites — to swear to tell the truth on. The same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races.

This pillar of purity, as with the others, endangered the lives of the people in the subordinate caste. One day in the 1930s, a black railroad switchman was working in Memphis and slipped and fell beneath a switch engine. He lay bleeding to death, his right arm and leg severed. “Ambulances rushed to the man’s aid,” according to reports of the incident. “They took one look, saw that he was a Negro, and backed away.””

“In the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep [black people out].”

“The town of Newton, Kansas, went to the state supreme court to keep black people out of the pool it built in 1935. The city and its contractor argued that black people could never be permitted in the pool, not on alternate days, not at separate hours, not ever, because of the type of pool it was. They told the court that it was “a circulatory type of pool,” in which “the water is only changed once during the swimming season.” White people, they argued, would not go into water that had touched black skin. “The only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks,” wrote the historian Jeff Wiltse, “was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed.””

“The manager sald this was the only way the maintenance crew could get “sufficient time to properly cleanse and disinfect it after the Negroes have used it.”

A white woman in Marion, Indiana, seemed to be speaking for many in the dominant caste across America when she said that white people wouldn’t swim with colored people because they “didn’t want to be polluted by their blackness.””

“It was in this atmosphere, in 1951, that a Little League baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio, won the city cham-pionship. The coaches, unthinkingly, decided to celebrate with a team picnic at a municipal pool. When the team arrived at the gate, a lifeguard stopped one of the Little Leaguers from entering. It was Al Bright, the only black player on the team. His parents had not been able to attend the picnic, and the coaches and some of the other parents tried to persuade the pool officials to let the little boy in, to no avail. The only thing the lifeguards were willing to do was to let them set a blanket for him outside the fence and to let people bring him food. He was given little choice and had to watch his teammates splash in the water and chase each other on the pool deck while he sat alone on the outside.

“From time to time, one or another of the players or adults came out and sat with him before returning to join the others,” his childhood friend, the author Mel Watkins, would write years later.

It took an hour or so for a team official to finally convince the lifeguards “that they should at least allow the child into the pool for a few minutes.” The supervisor agreed to let the Little Leaguer in, but only if everyone else got out of the water, and only if Al followed the rules they set for him.

First, everyone meaning his teammates, the parents, all the white people, had to get out of the water. Once everyone cleared out, “Al was led to the pool and placed in a small rubber raft,” Watkins wrote. A lifeguard got into the water and pushed the raft with Al in it for a single turn around the pool, as a hundred or so teammates, coaches, parents, and onlookers watched from the sidelines.

After the “agonizing few minutes” that it took to complete the circle, Al was then “escorted to his assigned spot” on the other side of the fence. During his short time in the raft, as it glided on the surface, the lifeguard warned him over and over again of one important thing. “Just don’t touch the water,” the lifeguard said, as he pushed the rubber float. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the water.”

The lifeguard managed to keep the water pure that day, but a part of that little boy died that afternoon. When one of the coaches offered him a ride home, he declined. “With champion trophy in hand,” Watkins wrote, Al walked the mile or so back home by himself. He was never the same after that.”

“There was an attempt to exclude Italian voters from “white” primaries in Louisiana in 1903. The decade before, in 1891, eleven Italian immigrants in New Orleans lost their lives in one of the largest mass lynchings in American history, after the police chief was assassinated and the immigrants were seen as the prime suspects. After the lynching, hundreds more were rounded up and arrested. One of the organizers of the lynch mob, John M. Parker, later described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in [their] habits, lawless, and treacherous.” He went on to be elected governor of Louisiana.

Later, in 1922, a black man in Alabama named Jim Rollins was convicted of miscegenation for living as the husband of a white woman named Edith Labue. But when the court learned that the woman was Sicilian and saw “no competent evidence” that she was white, the judge reversed the conviction. The uncertainty surrounding whether she was “conclusively” white led the court to take the extraordinary step of freeing a black man who in other circumstances might have faced a lynching had she been seen as a white woman.”

“Vaishno Das Bagai, an Indian immigrant, had been in the United States for eight years by the time the Supreme Court ruled that Indians were not white and thus were ineligible for citizenship. He had a wife and three children and his own general store on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. He tended his store in three-piece suits and kept his hair cut short with a part on the side. Bagai lost his citizenship in the crackdown on nonwhite immigrants. He was then stripped of the business he had built, due to a California law restricting the economic rights of people who were not citizens. Shorn of a passport, he was then thwarted in his attempt to get back to India and was now a man without a country.

Far from his original home and rejected by his new one, he rented a room in San Jose, turned on the gas and took his life. He left a suicide note, in which he lamented the futility of all that he had sacrificed to come to America: “Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and bridges burnt behind.””

“In bars and restaurants in the North, though they might be permitted to sit and eat, it was common for the bartender to make a show of smashing the glass that a black patron had just sipped from. Heads would turn as restaurant patrons looked to see where the crashing sound had come from and who had offended the sensibilities of caste pollution.

Untouchables were not allowed inside Hindu temples, and black Mormons in America, by way of example, were not allowed inside the temples of the religion they followed and could not become priests until 1978. Enslaved black people were prohibited from learning to read the Bible or any book for that matter, just as Untouchables were prohibited from learning Sanskrit and sacred texts.”

“The burden fell on those in the lowest caste to adjust themselves for the convenience of the dominant caste whenever in contact with white people. An African-American man who managed to become an architect during the nineteenth century had to train himself “to read architectural blueprints upside down,” wrote the scholar Charles W. Mills, “because he knew white clients would be made uncomfortable by having him on the same side of the desk as themselves.”

Well into the twentieth century, a panic could afflict people in the dominant caste if ever a breach occurred. A frantic white mother in civil-rights-era Mississippi yanked her young daughter inside one day, held her over the kitchen sink and scrubbed her little hand with a Brillo pad as if both their lives depended on it. The girl had touched the hand of a little black girl who was working on the family’s land. The mother told her never to touch that girl’s hand again, though that was not the term she used.

“They have germs,” the mother said. “They’re nasty.” The mother’s fury frightened the little girl and brought her to tears as they stood there, bent over the sink. And the daughter’s tears brought the mother to tears over the manufactured terror she had allowed to consume her and over the box that she realized in that moment had imprisoned her for all of her life.

This was a sacred prohibition, and it was said that, into the 1970s, the majority of whites in the South had not so much as shaken the hands of a black person.”

“A black man in the 1930s was on his way to pay a visit to a young woman he fancied, which occasioned him to go into the town square. There, some white men approached him and “forced him to procure overalls, saying he was ‘too dressed up for a weekday.’””

“African-Americans would later convert the performance role that they were forced to occupy — and the talent they built from it — into prominence in entertainment and in American culture disproportionate to their numbers. Since the early twentieth century, the wealthiest African-Americans — from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali — have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a 2020 ranking of the richest African-Americans, seventeen of the top twenty — from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan — made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports.

Historically, this group would come to dominate the realm carved out for them, often celebrated unless they went head to head against an upper-caste person, as did the black boxer Jack Johnson when he unexpectedly knocked out James Jeffries in 1910. The writer Jack London had coaxed Jeffries out of retirement to fight Johnson in an era of virulent race hatred, and the press stoked passions by calling Jeffries “the Great White Hope.” Jeffries’s loss on that Fourth of July was an affront to white supremacy, and triggered riots across the country, north and south, including eleven separate ones in New York City, where whites set fire to black neighborhoods and tried to lynch two black men over the defeat. The message was that, even in an arena into which the lowest caste had been permitted, they were to know and remain in their place.”

“In one case, two planters in South Carolina were dining together at one of their plantations. The two were passing the time, discussing their slaves and debating whether the slaves had the capacity for genuine religious faith. The visiting planter said he didn’t much believe they did.

The planter who was hosting begged to differ.

“I have a slave who I believe would rather die than deny his Saviour,” he said.

The guest ridiculed the host and challenged him to prove it. So the host summoned an enslaved man of his and ordered him to deny his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The enslaved man affirmed his faith in Jesus and pleaded to be excused. The master, seeking to drive home his point to the fellow slaveowner, kept asking the man to deny Jesus, and the man, as expected, kept declaring his faith. The host then whipped the enslaved man, now for disobedience, and continued to whip him, the whip cord cutting to bone. The enslaved man of faith “died in consequence of this severe infliction.”

Similarly, soldiers of the Third Reich used weakened and malnourished Jewish prisoners for entertainment. An SS squad leader, who oversaw the construction of the firing range at Sachsenhausen, forced prisoners to jump and turn like dancing bears around a shovel for his amusement. One of them refused to dance and, for this, the SS squad leader took the shovel and beat him to death with it.

Every act, every gesture, was calculated for the purpose of reminding the subordinate caste, in these otherwise unrelated caste systems, of the dominant caste’s total reign over their very being. The upper caste, wrote the nineteenth-century author William Goodell, made “the claim of absolute proprietorship in the human soul itself.””

“Upon their arrival at the auction blocks and labor camps of the American South, Africans were stripped of their given names and forced to respond to new ones, as would a dog to a new owner, often mocking names like Caesar or Samson or Dred. They were stripped of their past lives and identities as Yoruba or Asante or Igbo, as the son of a fisherman, nephew of the village priest, or daughter of a midwife. Decades afterward, Jews were stripped of their given and surnames and forced to memorize the prison numbers assigned them in the concentration camps. Millennia ago, the Untouchables of India were assigned surnames that identified them by the lowly work they performed, forcing them to announce their degradation every time they introduced themselves, while the Brahmins, many quite literally, carried the names of the gods.”

“The point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target’s own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting, Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste. During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live.

They were punished for the very responses a human being would be expected to have in the circumstances forced upon them. Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant caste kept telling itself. They were punished for being the humans that they could not help but be.”

“Enslaved people were ordered to put on a cheery face to bring a higher profit to the dominant-caste sellers who were breaking up their families. Women were forced to disrobe before the crowd, to submit to hours of physical probing by roughhousing men who examined their teeth, their hands, or whatever other parts of their bodies the potential bidders decided to inspect. Their bodies did not belong to them but to the dominant caste to do whatever it wished and however it wished to do it. At auction, they were to answer any question put to them with “smiling, cheerful countenance” or be given thirty lashes for not selling themselves well enough to the seller’s satisfaction.

“When spoken to, they must reply quickly and with a smile on their lips,” recalled John Brown, a survivor of slavery, who was sold away from his own mother and subjected to these scenes many times thereafter. “Here may be seen husbands separated from their wives, only by the width of the room, and children from their parents, one or both, witnessing the driving of the bargain that is to tear them asunder for ever, yet not a word of lamentation or anguish must escape from them; nor when the deed is consummated, dare they bid one another good-bye, or take one last embrace.””

“In a similar experiment, conducted at Stanford University in 1975, the participants did not have to be ordered to deliver the shocks. They needed only to overhear a single negative comment about the subjects. The participants were led to believe that students from another college were arriving for a joint project. Some participants over heard the experimenters, presumably by accident, make neutral or humanizing comments about the visiting students (that they seemed “nice”). Other participants heard dehumanizing comments (that they seemed like “animals”). Participants gave the dehumanized people twice the punishment of the humanized ones and significantly more than those they knew absolutely nothing about. The participants were willing to go to maximum intensity on the dehumanized group.”

“In America, a culture of cruelty crept into the minds, made violence and mockery seem mundane and amusing, built as it was into the games of chance at carnivals and county fairs well into the twentieth century. These things built up the immune system against empathy. There was an attraction called the “Coon Dip,” in which fairgoers hurled “projectiles at live African Americans.” There was the “Bean-em,” in which children flung beanbags at grotesquely caricatured black faces, whose images alone taught the lesson of caste without a word needing to be spoken.

And enthusiasts lined up to try their luck at the “Son of Ham” shows at Coney Island or Kansas City or out in California, “in which white men paid for the pleasure of hurling baseballs at the head of a black man,” Smith wrote.”

“Well into the 1960s in the American South, the mere boarding of a public bus was a tightly choreographed affair devised for maximum humiliation and stigma to the lowest caste. Unlike dominant-caste passengers who climbed aboard, paid their bus fare, and took a seat, black passengers had to climb up, pay their fare, then get off the bus so as not to pollute or disturb the white section by walking through it. Having been forced to disembark after paying, they then had to run to the back door of the bus to board in the colored section. It was not uncommon for the bus to drive off before they could make it to the back door. The passengers who had the least room for error, the least resources to lose the benefit of the ticket they had paid for, the least cushion to weather a setback, would now be humiliated as the bus pulled off without them, now likely to arrive late for work, thus putting already tenuous jobs at further risk.”

Impact

“America was fighting in World War IL, and the public school district in Columbus, Ohio, decided to hold an essay contest, challenging students to consider the question “What to do with Hitler after the War?”

It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.””

“He remembered the Dalit students whose exams went ungraded. “The tests were not marked,” he said, “because the teacher was upper caste and would not touch the paper touched by a Dalit. So you laugh or you cry.”

He told me about the upper-caste woman in an office where he once worked. She would get up from her desk and walk the length of the office, down the hall and around the corner, to ask a Dalit to get her water. “The jug was there next to her desk,” he said. “The Dalit had to come to where she was sitting and pour it for her.”

“By adulthood, researchers have found, most Americans have been exposed to a culture with enough negative messages about African-Americans and other marginalized groups that as much as 80 percent of white Americans hold unconscious bias against black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it, according to the Harvard sociologist David R. Williams. The messaging is so pervasive in American society that a third of black Americans hold anti-black bias against themselves.”

“Of the sixty most common procedures reimbursed by Medicare, he said, “African-Americans receive fewer procedures than white patients even though they have a higher rate of illness.” The only procedures that African-Americans receive at higher rates than whites, Williams said, are shunts for renal disease, the removal of stomach tissue for ulcers, leg amputation, and the removal of testicles.”

Conclusion

“Every year on the day of Atonement, the ancient Hebrews took two male goats and presented them before the Lord at the entrance to the tent of meeting. Then the high priest cast lots to determine the fate of each goat.

One they would kill as a sacrifice to the Lord to cleanse and make sacred the sanctuary. The other, the scapegoat, they would present to the Lord alive.

The high priest would lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess upon its head all the guilt and misdeeds of the Israelites. All of their sins he would transpose to the goat, and the goat was then banished to the wilderness, carrying on its back the weight of the faults of the Israelites, and thus freeing the Israelites to flourish in peace.

The goat was cast out to suffer for the sins of others and was called the scapegoat.”

“Before the brother arrived, Charles had stopped the car and shot his wife in the head, after which Charles pointed the gun at himself, intending to shoot his foot but misfiring into his torso instead. Charles told his brother to take and dispose of Carol’s jewelry and purse and the gun that Charles had used to kill her. This would make it look like the robbery he would later report to the police.

But afterward, the brother’s conscience began to plague him, and he told other members of the family. He said he thought he was helping his brother in an insurance scam when he got the purse and gun, not in a murder plot. Word got back to Charles Stuart that his brother was planning to go to the police and testify against him in exchange for immunity. With the investigation closing in on him, the husband jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge into the Mystic River that January. His brother, Matthew, later pleaded guilty to conspiracy and possession of a firearm, among other charges, and served three years in prison.

In the end, the husband alone was responsible for the death of his wife, but the caste system was his unwitting accomplice. He knew that he could count on the caste system to spring into action as it is programmed to do, that people would readily accept his account if the perpetrator were black, believe the dominant-caste man over subordinate people, focus on them rather than him, see the scapegoat caste as singularly capable of any depravity, and would deflect any suspicion away from him.

The story didn’t even have to be airtight to be believed. It needed only to be plausible. Any sympathy would accrue to him and not the scapegoat caste, which bears the burdens of someone else’s sins, no matter the protestations.”

“In the years of anxiety after the 2016 election, Anthony Stephan House, a thirty-nine-year-old project manager in Austin, Texas, was getting ready to take his eight-year-old daughter to school. It was just before seven in the morning on March 2, 2018. Something prompted him to go to his front door, and when he stepped over the threshold, he noticed a package on the porch. As he picked it up, it exploded. He died shortly after his arrival at the hospital.

His death was ruled a homicide for obvious reasons at first, but the investigation quickly pivoted away. House was African-American, living on the working-class black and Latino east side of Austin with its aging ranch houses and ramblers. The police figured that the bombing might be drug-related. Maybe it was intended as retribution for a drug dealer but left at the wrong house. They considered another possibility, that maybe he had detonated the bomb himself, a theory that blamed the victim for his own death.

“We can’t rule out that Mr. House didn’t construct this himself and accidentally detonate it, in which case it would be an accidental death,” Assistant Police Chief Joseph Chacon said.

“Based on what we know right now,” Brian Manley, then interim police chief, told reporters the day of House’s death, “we have no reason to believe this is anything beyond an isolated incident that took place at this residence and in no way this is linked to a terroristic attack.”

Those assumptions would prove to be tragically misdirected. Ten days later, seventeen-year-old Draylen Mason, a high school senior who was a beloved bass violinist with the Austin Youth Orchestra, discovered a package outside his family’s door. When he brought it inside, it exploded in the kitchen, killing him, and leaving his mother critically wounded. They, too, were African-American. Later that morning, a few miles away, a seventy-five-year-old Latina, Esperanza Herrera, was critically injured when a package left at her mother’s house detonated when she picked it up.

It was only then, ten days after the first bombing, that the Austin police began warning citizens to take precautions with unknown packages. A serial bomber was at large in Austin, had been at large from the first bomb attack. The bombings were now being considered a possible hate crime. The fact that the victims were black and Latina meant that some people could distance themselves from the bombings if they chose. Until the bomber expanded his reach. Less than a week later, on the other side of Austin, two white men in their twenties were walking in a well-to-do white neighborhood when a bomb triggered by a trip wire detonated in the street and seriously injured them.

Two days after that, a bomb exploded on a conveyor belt at a FedEx warehouse, and another was discovered at a FedEx before it could detonate. The police now raced at warp speed. Surveillance cameras caught images of the man who had dropped off the last package bombs and recorded the license plate on his car. The police began tracking him by the location of his cellphone. They discovered that the suspect was a twenty-three-year-old unemployed white man named Mark Conditt, who was from a conservative Christian family. The day after the explosion at the FedEx warehouse, a SWAT team closed in on him. Cornered by officers, Conditt detonated a bomb inside his car and blew himself up.

Spectacular police work had brought the bomber down within twenty-four hours, aided in no small part by the suspect’s own change in tactics but also by their taking swift action once the caste blinders were removed.”

“A woman at a nearby booth had been listening to their exchange. She was an older, grayish-blond woman from the dominant caste. She scooted from her booth and walked over to the table where the father and son were sitting. The father could see the shadow of her form moving toward them. The woman stopped and stood over them. She leaned toward the little boy and told him: “You drink your juice if you want to. It’s okay to drink your juice.”

The woman did not address or acknowledge the father. She focused her attention on the little boy as she stood there. The father was beside himself. A perfect stranger had gotten up, disregarded a parent, and told a child to disobey the parent right in the parent’s face.

The woman had crossed so many boundaries it was hard to process. Something had made her feel entitled enough to enter into the private space of people she did not know and veto a father’s decision regarding his own son. This was Oakland, bright blue home of Huey and Tupac, where such phrases as gender nonconformity and micro-aggressions are part of everyday language. The woman would not have gotten up if she didn’t perceive she had a right to. Had she done this to other parents? Would she have breezed past a white father, ignored him to tell his son to do precisely what the father had just told him not to?

The father held up his hand like a traffic officer signaling a car to stop.

“Ma’am, you need to go sit down,” the father said. “Don’t come to my table. I don’t know you.”

The woman looked stunned at the rejection but turned around and went back to her booth. The father had a hard time enjoying his own food after that. He would remember this moment long afterward.”

“A college professor in Chicago had just returned from a bike ride and picked up his mail in the lobby of his apartment building off Michigan Avenue. He was African-American, in his thirties, patrician of face, still in his helmet and cycling gear. He stepped onto the elevator en route to his floor and, barely noticing the other man on the elevator with him, began going through his mail. He saw something of interest and unsealed one of his envelopes.

The other man was horrified.

“You’re supposed to be delivering the mail, not opening it.”

This seemed to have come out of nowhere, and the college professor looked up and saw that the other man was white, but didn’t fully register the accusation, was just going about his day, and gave an honest reply.

“Oh, I want to see what’s inside,” the professor said.

The other man looked even more stricken now, shaking his head in disgust, mistakenly believing he was witnessing a crime in progress.

The professor got off on his floor and only later did it occur to him that he had been taken for a delivery boy in his own building, an assumption so ludicrous he hadn’t bothered to consider it in the moment, which left the dominant-caste man convinced that he had just seen a black messenger brazenly break open an “actual” resident’s mail in full view of another resident. This is the self-perpetuating mischief of caste.”

“A woman walking her dog stood and blocked a marketing consultant from getting into his own condo building in St. Louis. She demanded that he show proof that he lived there before she would step aside. When he walked past her, she followed him into the elevator and onto his floor to see if he in fact lived there. In the video that the man took as a precaution, she can be seen tracking him all the way to his apartment, checking whether he was a resident even after he unlocked his door to go inside.

And a woman began to stalk a black man in Georgia when she saw him out with two white children. From her car, the woman trailed Corey Lewis, their babysitter, as he drove from a Walmart to a gas station and to his home after he did not permit the woman, a complete stranger, to talk with the children alone to see if they were all right.

Lewis, a youth pastor who runs an after-school program, started recording the situation on his cellphone. In it, the children can be seen calm and unfazed, buckled in their seatbelts in the back of his car.

His voice is strained and disbelieving. “This lady is following me,” he says in the video, “all because I got two kids in the back seat that do not look like me.”

The woman called 911 and asked if she should keep following him. She continued to trail him even though she was told not to. By the time Lewis got home, a patrol car had pulled up behind him, an officer heading toward him.

“Jesus have mercy — what is wrong with this country?” a woman outside of the camera frame cried. The officer told the children, a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, to step out of the car, and Lewis’s voice grew tense.

The outcome of this police encounter and his very safety depended on what those children said, and he asked them to please tell the officer who he was.

“Please,” he said to them.

Satished that Lewis was, in fact, their babysitter and that the children were okay, the officer, just to be safe, called the parents, who were out at dinner.

“It just knocked us out of our chair,” the children’s father, David Parker, told The New York Times.

Afterward, a reporter asked one of the children, ten-year-old Addison, what she would tell the woman who followed them that day. Her father told the Times her response: “I would just ask her to, next time, try to see us as three people rather than three skin colors, because we might’ve been Mr. Lewis’s adopted children.””

“A white mob massacred some sixty black people in Ocoee, Florida, on Election Day in 1920, burning black homes and businesses to the ground, lynching and castrating black men, and driving the remaining black population out of town, after a black man tried to vote. The historian Paul Ortiz. has called the Ocoee riot the “single bloodiest election day in modern American history.””

“In the summer of 1721, an epidemic of smallpox, one of the deadliest afflictions of the era, besieged the city of Boston. It sent stricken people into quarantine, red flags signaling to all who might pass, “God have mercy on this house.”

Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that protected him from this illness. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it “variolation.” It would become the precursor to immunization and “the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,” wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.

During the 1721 outbreak, Mather tried to persuade Bostonians to protect themselves with this revolutionary method, but did not anticipate the resistance and rage, the “horrid Clamour,” that arose from Bostonians. The idea sounded outlandish to them. They feared it could spread smallpox all the more, and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave. Physicians dismissed the procedure out of hand and “resented being told by a gaggle of ministers that Africans had devised the panacea they had long sought,” Washington wrote. Rage turned to violence when someone hurled a lighted grenade into Mather’s house. Mather escaped serious injury, but wrote that he could see no difference between adopting the African solution for smallpox and using the Native Americans’ antidote for snake venom, which the colonists had readily taken up.

Only one physician, Zabdiel Boylston, was willing to try the new method. He inoculated his son and the enslaved people he owned. In the end, the epidemic would wipe out more than 14 percent of Boston’s population. But of the 240 people that Boylston had inoculated, only six died — one in forty, as against one in seven people who forwent inoculation.

By 1750, vaccinations, based on the method introduced by Onesimus, would be standard practice in Massachusetts and later in the rest of the country. “What is clear is that the knowledge he passed on saved hundreds of lives — and led to the eventual eradication of smallpox,” wrote the author Erin Blakemore. “It remains the only infectious disease to have been entirely wiped out.”

For his contribution to science, Onesimus does not appear even to have fully won his freedom. What little that is known is that Mather grew sour on him, and Onesimus managed to buy partial freedom by paying Mather money toward the purchase of another slave.”

“In hiring black teachers for segregated schools during Jim Crow, a leading southern official, Hoke Smith, made a deliberate decision: “When two Negro teachers applied to a school, to ‘take the less competent.’” It was a nakedly creative way to cripple black prospects for achievement.”

Conclusion

“Little more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor, and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in America, at 27 percent. But a 2017 study by Travis Dixon at the University of Illinois found that African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two-thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news.

These generations-old distortions shape popular sentiment. A political scientist at Yale, Martin Gilens, found in a 1994 study that 55 percent of Americans believed that all poor people in America were black. Thus, a majority have come to see black as a synonym for poor, a stigmatizing distortion in a country that glorifies affluence. Like poverty, crime, too, receives coverage out of proportion to the numbers. Crimes involving a black suspect and a white victim make up 42 percent of the crimes reported on television news even though crimes with white victims and black suspects make up a minority of crimes, at 10 percent, according to the Sentencing Project, an advocate for criminal justice reform.”

“Caste inverts the path to acceptance in America for people of African descent. Immigrants from Europe in the previous century were often quick to shed their names and drop the accents and folkways of the old country. They played down their ethnicity to gain admission to the dominant caste. Black immigrants discover that because they look like the people consigned to the lowest caste, the caste system rewards them for doing the opposite of the Europeans. “While white immigrants stand to gain status by becoming ‘Americans,’” wrote the sociologist Philip Kasinitz, “by assimilating into the higher status group black immigrants may actually lose social status if they lose their cultural distinctiveness.””

“It is in keeping with caste protocols that, of the few officers who have been prosecuted for police brutality in recent high-profile cases, a notable number of them were men of color — a Japanese-American officer in Oklahoma, a Chinese-American officer in New York City, and a Muslim-American officer in Minneapolis. These are cases in which men of color pay the price for what upper-caste men often have gotten away with.”

“From the moment I saw the pictures, they rattled me. It was November 2014, in the middle of the post-Ferguson protests against police brutality. At a rally in Portland, Oregon, there appeared a melancholy black boy in front of a crowd of protesters, holding a sign in the direction of the officers that said, “Free hugs.”

There was something deeply unsettling about that image that I could not figure out at first. For one thing, the boy’s face looked more like that of a man’s on a child’s small frame. His face was contorted in anguish, tears glistening down his cheeks, a wrenching emotion out of sync with the circumstances. He was wearing a fedora that seemed of another century. He did not have the carefree look of a child nor the affectionate cheer of someone offering hugs to strangers.

A white police officer responded to the sign and hugged the boy. The photograph went viral, shown on every television network. It comforted many in the dominant caste to see this gesture of compassion and grace.”

“The world would not know the tragedy beneath that moment until years later. Two white women in Minnesota had adopted the boy, Devonte Hart, and five other black children from Texas, receiving more than $2,000 a month from the state for doing so. Over the course of ten years, the women essentially held the children captive, keeping them isolated in remote locations, withholding food from them.

They used them as props to attract a social media following with staged videos of the children forced to dance and sing for their captors. Off-camera, the women beat the children with belts and closed fists and held one girl’s head under cold water as punishment after the women found a penny in the girl’s pocket. When the children sought help and food from neighbors and teachers, the women defaulted to caste stereotypes, told the other adults not to feed them, that the children were playing the “food card,” that they were lying, that they were “drug babies,” whose birth mothers, they told people, were addicted while pregnant.

Authorities in multiple states inquired into reports of abuse but seemed unable to protect the children. Even after one of the women pleaded guilty in Minnesota in 2010 to misdemeanor assault of one of the daughters, the children remained in their custody. After that, whenever anyone got close enough to intervene, the women pulled the children out of school and moved to a different jurisdiction. They were able to rely on both the patchwork of disconnected social service agencies and their own caste privilege the presumptions of competency and the benefit of the doubt accorded them to evade state investigations and to deflect the children’s pleas for help.

That day in November 2014, they posted pictures of Devonte hugging the police officer and got adulation from people all over the world. People saw what they wanted to see and not the agony in the face of a twelve-year-old boy who had the body of an eight-year-old due to starvation, his hug, on some level, a bid to be rescued. People saw a picture of black grace when what the world was actually looking at was an abused hostage.

On March 26, 2018, with caseworkers closing in, the two women put the children in their SUV and drove off a cliff in Northern California along the Pacific Coast Highway, killing themselves and the children they had held captive. Blindness to the depth of pain in the boy’s face, the latitude granted these white saviors to abuse children seen as throwaways, the collective desire to solve tribal wounds with superficial gestures of grace from the wounded all of these things contributed to this tragedy and haunt many of us still. We were all witness to a crime that ended in horror.”

“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.

“White people embrace narratives about forgiveness,” wrote the essayist and author Roxane Gay after the massacre, “so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.” The act of forgiveness seems a silent clause in a one-sided contract between the subordinate and the dominant. “Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.”

In 2018, as every week seemed to bring a new case of dominant-caste people calling the police on black people going about their daily lives, a middle-aged white woman in Brooklyn called the police on a nine-year-old boy who she said had sexually assaulted her as he passed her at the register at a corner deli. The boy said he had not done such a thing, had not touched her, and began to cry. What saved the boy from further action was the store video, which later went viral. It shows the boy passing the woman in the crowded deli and his bag brushing against her, unbeknownst to him as he walked by.

The woman was shamed into apologizing for the false accusation. Afterward, people wanted to know, had he forgiven her? The boy had not learned all the rules of caste yet, had not lived long enough to have read the whole script or have it completely downloaded to his subconscious. He was thinking with the still-free mind of an innocent who had not yet faced the consequences of breaking caste. “I don’t forgive the woman,” he said, “and she needs help.”

The little boy had the X-ray vision of childhood. He had not accepted the inversion of right and wrong, had not been willing to concede a privilege that should not be extracted but granted freely at the discretion of the aggrieved.”

“In 2013, on a flight into Atlanta, a white passenger actually slapped a black baby in the face because the baby was crying due to the change in altitude upon descent. Such an assault would be virtually inconceivable had a baby from the dominant caste been crying, no matter his decibel level.”

“Modern medicine has long sought to attribute the higher rates of disease in African-Americans relative to white Americans to genetics. But it turns out that sub-Saharan Africans do not have high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, while African-Americans have the highest rates of those conditions of all ethnic groups in the United States.”

“A study of white Americans who scored high on a measure of automatic prejudice, meaning the degree to which they associate certain ethnic groups with negative stereotypes at the level of the unconscious, found that when they were put into situations where they were, for example, to be interviewed for a job by an African-American or to have social interaction with Latinos, they perceived the people of a different ethnicity as a threat, even in a safe laboratory setting.

The threat they perceived as a result of their prejudice set off their body’s alarm system. Their panic produced automatic physiological responses as would occur if they were in combat or confronting an oncoming car — restricted blood flow to the heart, the flooding of the muscles with glucose as the body releases cortisol, the hormone useful in the rare moment when one might need to escape danger, but damaging to the body on a regular basis. The combination of reduced blood flow, constrictions to the circulatory and digestive systems, and the breakdown of muscle by cortisol can lead to life-threatening damage to the heart and the immune system and to death before one’s time.

Even the briefest exposure is all it takes to activate the body’s response. Among whites, the sight of a black person, even in faded yearbook photographs, can trigger the amygdala of the brain to perceive threat and arm itself for vigilance within 30 milliseconds of exposure, the blink of an eye, researchers have found. When whites have a bit more time for the conscious mind to override the automatic feeling of threat, the amygdala activity switches to inhibition mode. When whites are prompted to think of the black person as an individual, imagine their personal characteristics, the threat level falls.”

“This kind of cell damage results from one’s exposure to social inequity and difficult life conditions, rather than merely one’s race and ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites, whose resources might better help them weather life’s challenges.

The opposite is true for people in the lower castes in America. Socioeconomic status and the presumed privilege that comes with it do not protect the health of well-to-do African-Americans. In fact, many suffer a health penalty for their ambitions. “Middle class African American men and women are more likely to suffer from hypertension and stress than those with lower incomes,” wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress- inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.

The pattern applies to another marginalized group, Mexicans in America. It turns out that poorer Mexican immigrants have longer telomeres, meaning healthier, younger cells, than better-off Mexican-Americans. Poorer Mexicans are likely to be newer to this country and to cluster together in closer support networks. Their isolation from the mainstream and the language barrier could inadvertently insulate them from the discrimination that more affluent Mexicans may face as they navigate the caste system on a daily basis. Those who were born in the United States or have lived in the country for many years would have greater exposure to the damaging effects of stereotyping and stigma.

All of these groups appear to be paying a price when they step outside of the roles assigned them in the hierarchy. “High levels of everyday discrimination contribute to narrowing the arteries over time,” said the Harvard social scientist David R. Williams. “High levels of discrimination lead to higher levels of inflammation, a marker of heart disease.”

People who face discrimination, Williams said, often build up a layer of unhealthy fat, known as visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, just under the skin. It is this visceral fat that raises the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and leads to premature death. And it can be found in people of all ethnicities based on their experience of discrimination.”

“Williams had a friend, a middle-class black businessman, who would never leave the house in the sweats and sneakers that his white neighbors wore without a moment’s thought. He couldn’t afford to. He took great care whenever he left the house, and it took more time and more forethought for even the most casual errand.

“If his wife needed a gallon of milk and he needed to run to the supermarket to get that gallon of milk, he would run into the house to get a jacket and tie,” Williams said. “It was his way of trying to minimize the likelihood that he’s going to be perceived as criminal because he’s a young black male. That is what we live with, and it is taking a toll on our lives.””

“Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country’s first black president. An estimated 43 percent went for him in 2008. Thus, a solid majority of white Americans — nearly three out of every five white voters — did not back him in his first election, and fewer still — 39 percent — voted for him in 2012. In the former Confederate state of Mississippi, only one in ten white voters pulled the lever for Obama. For much of his presidency, he was trying to win over people who did not want him in the Oval Office and some who resented his very existence.

As a measure of the enduring role of caste interests in American politics, the shadow of the Civil War seemed to hang over the 2008 election. It turned out that Obama carried every state that Abraham Lincoln had won in 1860, an election with an almost entirelv white electorate but one that became a proxy for egalitarian sentiment and for the future of slavery and of the Republic.”

“In the more than half century since that prophecy of 1964, no Democrat running for president has ever won a majority of the white vote. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to win the presidency with a majority of the white electorate. Since that time, the Democrat who came closest, who attracted the largest percentage of white voters — at 48 percent — was fellow southerner Jimmy Carter in 1976.”

“With rising resentments, it would not be surprising that attacks on African-Americans might not only not have abated but would worsen under the unprecedented reversal of the social hierarchy. By the second term of the administration, in 2015, police were killing unarmed African-Americans at five times the rate of white Americans. It was a trend that would make police killings a leading cause of death for young African-American men and boys, these deaths occurring at a rate of 1 in 1,000 young black men and boys.”

“That same day, a troubled sixty-four-year-old man in South Florida took the most extreme action imaginable. In the time leading up to the election, according to police, Henry Hamilton, owner of a tanning salon in Key West, told friends, “If Barack gets reelected, I’m not going to be around.” He kept his word. His lifeless body was found in his condominium a day and a half after the returns came in. Two prescription bottles sat empty in his dining room. Beside him was a handwritten note demanding that he not be revived and cursing the newly reelected president.”

“At two o’clock in the morning on April 24, 2017, a SWAT team positioned its sharpshooters at strategic locations at a dangerous intersection in downtown New Orleans. K-9 units patrolled the grounds and perimeter. At the center of the targeted area, men in face masks and bulletproof vests went about their perilous duty in the darkness. Others had refused to risk their lives for this, declined even to attempt the operation, after the death threats and firebombing that preceded this moment. These men in face masks were the only ones willing to take up the mission. They were removing the first of four Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans.”

“More than a century later, the city was within its right to remove its own property, and Mayor Landrieu thought it would be a fairly straightforward process of public hearings and a vote by a city council as progressive as the city it represented. With the country newly reminded of the enduring nature of white supremacy, supporters came forward, including an influential citizen who pledged to donate $170,000 toward the cost of removing the monument as long as he could be assured of anonymity.

The city tested the idea with the public. At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. “They are ashamed,” he said. “The question is, why aren’t we?”

As time wore on, though, things got ugly. The city had trouble finding a contractor to remove the statues. Every contractor who considered the city’s request got threatening attacks at home, at work, and on social media. It turned out that not one construction company in New Orleans wanted to touch it. Finally a contractor in Baton Rouge agreed to do it, but he pulled out, too, after his car was firebombed. The Confederate sympathizers made it clear that “any company that dared step forward,” Landrieu wrote, “would pay a price.”

The faithful of the old Confederacy held candlelight vigils at the monuments and clogged the city hall switchboard, cursing and threatening the receptionists. Soon the benefactor backed out of his promise of donating money for the removal effort. If it were ever discovered, he said, “I’ll get run out of town.”

The issue was now dividing all of New Orleans. “People who had served for years on civic boards quit,” Landrieu said. “There was a “deep, mean chill we felt when we entered a room for a public event.” Some of the mayor’s own neighbors and some of the people he thought of as friends averted their gaze when they saw him. He had not anticipated “the ferocity of the opposition.”

Finally, the city found a construction company willing to take on what had become hazard duty in a virtual war zone. It could be seen as karma that the only construction crew willing to risk their lives to remove the Confederate statues was African-American. Due to the dangers of the operation, the company charged four times what the city had anticipated to remove the three largest monuments, and said the company would only go in if there was police protection. By now, the city had few other options if it wanted the statues gone.

The mayor decided first to remove a monument to a supremacist organization called the White League because white citizens seemed to have the least attachment to that one. Still, the city took no chances.

That night, the men wore long sleeves and masks both to protect their identities and to conceal their skin color. Cardboard covered the company name on its trucks and cranes and hid the vehicle license plates. Still, the pro-Confederate forces poured sand in the gas tank of one of the cranes. As the workers proceeded to remove the obelisk in pieces, drones lurked above them taking unauthorized photographs of the operation. People in the crowd trained high-definition cameras on the workers to try to identify them. Finally, the pieces of the obelisk were down and driven to a storage shed.

The next month, the Robert E. Lee monument, a larger-than-life bronze likeness, arms crossed, standing on a sixty-foot marble column in a manicured circle in the center of town, was the last of the four to be removed. His figure dangled from a crane in full daylight and, this time, to cheering crowds.”

“In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.”

“If the U.S. prison population were a city, it would be the fifth largest in America.”

“The Brahmin came to know and to admire the few Dalits who crossed his path in his work, who had pushed through the walls of caste to become educated, professional. He came to realize that they were as capable as he was, and, in fact, that because they had to come so far, they knew things about the world that his privilege had not required him to know. He saw that the caste system created a smooth path for some and broken-glass shoals for others, that creativity and intellect were not restricted to one group alone. These were the people whose very sight and touch was said to be polluting, and yet here he was sitting across from them, sharing and learning from them. He was the beneficiary of their gifts rather than the other way around, and he came to see what had been lost by one not getting to know the other for his lifetime and all the lifetimes before his. He began to see himself differently, to see the illusion of his presumed superiority, that he had been told a lie, and that his father had been told a lie, and that trying to live up to the lie had taken some part of his father away. For this, he bore a heavy guilt and shame over the tragedy that had befallen the family and a memory that would not leave him. He wanted to be free of it.

He shared this realization with a Dalit he had come to know and told him of a decision he had made. “I have ripped off my sacred thread,” he told the Dalit, a professional man. “It was a poisonous snake around my neck, and its toxic venom was getting inside of me.”

For most of his life, he had worn the sacred thread as if it were strands of hair from his head. Removing it amounted to renouncing his high caste, and he considered the consequences, that his family might reject him if they knew. He would have to determine how to manage their knowing when the time came.

He was now born a third time, the shades lifted in a darkened room in his mind.

“It is a fake crown that we wear,” he came to realize.

He wished every dominant-caste person could awaken to this fact. “My message would be to take off the fake crown. It will cost you more to keep it than to let it go. It is not real. It is just a marker of your programming. You will be happier and freer without it. You will see all of humanity. You will find your true self.”

And so he had discovered. “There was a stench coming from my body,” he said. “I have located the corpse inside my mind. I have given it a decent burial. And now my journey can begin.”

“In December 1932, one of the smartest men who ever lived landed in America on a steamship with his wife and their thirty pieces of luggage as the Nazis bore down on their homeland of Germany. Albert Einstein, the physicist and Nobel laureate, had managed to escape the Nazis just in time. The month after Einstein left, Hitler was appointed chancellor.

In America, Einstein was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had just fled.

“The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro,” he wrote in 1946. “Everyone who freshly learns of this state of affairs at a maturer age feels not only the injustice, but the scorn of the principle of the Fathers who founded the United States that ‘all men are created equal.’”

He could “hardly believe that a reasonable man can cling so tenaciously to such prejudice,” he said.

He and his wife, Elsa, settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study and observed firsthand the oppression faced by black residents who were consigned to the worst parts of town, to segregated movie houses, to servant positions, and were, in the words of his friend Paul Robeson, forced into “bowing and scraping to the drunken rich.”

A few years into his tenure, the opera singer Marian Anderson, a renowned contralto born to the subordinated caste, performed to an overflow crowd at McCarter Theatre in Princeton and to rapturous praise in the press of her “complete mastery of a magnificent voice.” But the Nassau Inn in Princeton refused to rent a room to her for the night. Einstein, learning of this, invited her to stay in his home. From then on, she would stay at the Einstein residence whenever she was in town, even after Princeton hotels began accepting African-American guests. They would remain friends until his death.

“Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination,” he told a family friend.

He grew uncomfortable with the American way of pressuring newcomers to look down on the lowest caste in order to gain acceptance. Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived refusing to see himself as superior to people he was being told were beneath him.

“The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me,” Einstein wrote. “I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.”

And so he did. He co-chaired a committee to end lynching. He joined the NAACP. He spoke out on behalf of civil rights activists, lent his fame to their cause. At a certain point in his life, he rarely accepted the many honors that came his way, but in 1946 he made an exception for Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. He agreed to deliver the commencement address and to accept an honorary degree there.

On that visit, he taught his theory of relativity to physics students and played with the children of black faculty, among them the son of the university president, a young Julian Bond, who would go on to become a civil rights leader.

“The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people,” Einstein told the graduates at commencement, “but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

He became a passionate ally of the people consigned to the bottom.”

“Without an enlightened recognition of the price we all pay for a caste system, the hierarchy will likely shape-shift as it has in the past to ensure that the structure remains intact. The definition of whiteness could well expand to confer honorary whiteness to those on the border — the lightest-skinned people of Asian or Latino descent or biracial people with a white parent, for instance — to increase the ranks of the dominant caste.

The devastating truth is that, without the intervention of humanitarian impulses, a reconstituted caste system could divide those at the bottom and those in the middle, pick off those closest to white and thus isolate the darkest Americans even further, lock them ever more tightly to the bottom rungs.”

“”We must make every effort [to ensure] that the past injustice, violence and economic discrimination will be made known to the people,” Einstein said in an address to the National Urban League. “The taboo, the ‘let’s-not-talk-about-it’ must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practices is a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.””

“For the first time in American history, the white population showed a numerical decline, the only racial or ethnic group to do so, falling by 8.6 percent, from 223.6 million in 2010 to 204.3 million in 2020. While still in the majority, the share of the dominant caste who identify as white alone in the population of the United States had fallen from 63.7 percent in 2010 to 57.8 percent in 2020, “the lowest on record,” the Associated Press reported.”

“One state, Georgia, has already elevated embryos to virtual citizens by permitting people to claim them as dependents on their tax returns after six weeks of gestation and by allowing the state to include fetuses in its population counts, potentially bolstering the state’s numbers.

Bans on abortion would seem to open the door to a disproportionate number of black and brown births, but the caste system, throughout our history, has shown that it can mutate to sustain itself when under threat. In addition to immigration restrictions to control the Latino population overall, some Latinos, the white-adjacent middle-caste subgroups already being courted by conservative elites, could conceivably be folded into the white population to shore up dominant caste power, as with the Italians and Irish in previous generations.”

“The black maternal death rate is three times that of white women overall, and, not surprisingly from a caste perspective, the death rate is five times higher for college-educated black mothers than for college-educated white mothers. The disparities are so wide that a college-educated mother from the subordinated caste is more likely to die from childbirth than a dominant-caste mother who did not finish high school.

The inequities continue to the babies themselves. The black infant mortality rate is twice that of white babies, and “black women with doctorates and professional degrees have a higher IMR than white women who never finished high school,” according to the authors of a 2018 Duke University report. “Not only does the black-white disparity for infant mortality exist at all educational levels, it is greatest for those with a master’s degree or higher. Further, the IMR is highest for black women with a doctorate or professional degree.””

“A caste system relies on strife and inequity to sustain itself. It programs people to believe they have no stake in the well-being of those they have been told are beneath them, those they are told are unworthy, undeserving. It makes for a less magnanimous society, a built-in us-versus-them distance between groups. Because of the caste system, we more readily turn against one another. Because of caste, we insufficiently protect our own. Because of caste, along with other breakdowns in society, our democracy is in danger.

Over the decades, political scientists have found ways to measure the health of a democracy and to define the characteristics of a country on the brink of unrest and civil war. It is in the liminal space between the twin poles of democracy and autocracy that civil wars are more likely to arise, and not from the ranks of the people at the bottom, but rather from those fearful of losing the status to which they had grown accustomed, according to the political scientist Barbara F. Walter. After the turmoil over the 2020 election and the resulting insurrection in January 2021, the United States dropped to its lowest democracy score since 1800, and for a time entered the uncertain space in between, known as anocracy — a partial democracy characterized by freedoms that can lull people into complacency, alongside erosions on suffrage, elections, or other democratic norms. The attempt to overthrow a presidential election was a disruption to more than two hundred years of precedent.

“Let that sink in,” Walter wrote in her 2022 book, How Civil Wars Start. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy.” And, she said, “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience a civil war as a full democracy.””