DWill wrote:

LanDroid wrote: [*] Cultural norms or silent programming transmitted for many generations.
[*] Tendencies to follow those instructions without much conscious thought or questioning.[/list]

I still don't know if I can go along with her Matrix analogy. I think she's saying that without very explicit markers of caste separations, such as "whites only" signs, caste can be firmly entrenched on a subconscious level. That is plausible, so I suppose my discomfort is that the analogy seems to go a bit far. More apparent to me is how little active maintenance could be required for a caste system, how, once started, it could be almost self-maintaining. Part of what accounts for that is that what is not happening around you is unlikely to be noticed.

I do think there are differences in the extent to which people "buy in" to the insinuations of status that get passed on. I always thought they were stupid, and my best friend was of Middle Eastern stock with olive skin and dark curly hair, but I also absorbed some of the assumptions about who could be trusted and who might be violent. But some people find that reinforcing the stereotypes is part of their fight for recognition and status, and so the caste system is meaningful and important to them. So that message gets passed on, while those who, like me, did not care, don't pass on a counter-message.

In the South today, it has become recognized that racist messages are crude and ignorant as well as hateful, and the bulk of churches in the city are open to integration like my church was in California when I was a child, but it is also impolite to raise the issue of differences in experience or police discrimination. So perceptions are still shaped by both forces, an underground current of racism and the possibility that if it surfaces the person responsible might lose a job or face social condemnation.

DWill wrote: The scene is fictional as far as I know, but it illustrates the benign face of racial caste. It was the best way for society to get along--no hard feelings. It was necessary to make the upper caste feel virtuous in order to keep such a system. That would not be possible if the basis was hate.

I think that's a good observation. The flip side is that the upper caste could virtuously be kind to the lower caste even while holding, like Atticus Finch in "Go Set a Watchman," that it would be foolish to let Black people vote. The power relations are about power, and upper castes who don't fundamentally believe that the average person should have much say (a temptation I am subject to myself) are likely not to care much who can shove whom on the street with impunity, but can feel free to look down on anyone who would be shoving on the street.

LanDroid wrote:
The caste system is like an immense concrete wall where artwork is displayed. We rotate exhibits of race, religion, etc. on that wall and "Ku-Kluck" at how horrible those people are. Americans hung caricatures of Irish, Italian, and Chinese people on that wall, then later took them down. Other ancient paintings likely will remain for much longer. We study the artwork in detail, yet we do not notice the separation caused by the wall itself. We have no curiosity or clue about the genesis of that wall. That's how I'm starting to understand differences between race and caste - not sure if it's correct, probably incomplete. Ay?

A good metaphor that I might call Wilkersonian. Could we also allow for the out-of-regard wall changing, becoming stronger or weaker, or somehow adapting to changes in society? Maybe in times of caste-building, the surface holds those paintings tightly, whereas various influences can begin to lessen the holding power of the wall, though it's unlikely to crumble away.

My edit is that the metaphor doesn't--for me, at this moment--explain the race/cast difference. The caste wall might be composed of different combinations of elements. A notion of race, given force by religion and so-called science, was the main element composing the caste system for the U.S. and Nazi Germany, but race doesn't seem to be as large a constituent for the Indian caste structure.

LanDroid wrote:

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.
P. 70

Interesting. This seems to be saying caste is above the fray: Keep the power structure in place, but it's not important how that is accomplished.

In the case of Nazi Germany, the process was revolutionary rather than evolutionary, as it was in India and the British colonies/U.S. There was a strong sense of ordainment by a higher force in all of the settings though.

DWill wrote:My edit is that the metaphor doesn't--for me, at this moment--explain the race/cast difference. The caste wall might be composed of different combinations of elements. A notion of race, given force by religion and so-called science, was the main element composing the caste system for the U.S. and Nazi Germany, but race doesn't seem to be as large a constituent for the Indian caste structure.

Wilkerson seems to gloss over biological elements of human behavior, for example: in-group and out-group psychology, a basic distrust of outsiders instilled during millions of years of evolution when we lived in small tribes on the African savannah. Maybe those earlier tribes were far more egalitarian, but as societies grew larger we became increasingly inclined towards social segmentation. In England there used to be a rather sharp division between classes. In Marxist terms, a division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In some Muslim countries, the divide between Sunnis and Shia is all pervasive. In America, the color of skin has become the rather arbitrary line between the haves and have-nots.

But the real story perhaps is not the arbitrary lines of division themselves but that we are so programmed to create them.

Wilkerson discusses a startling comment made by a Nigerian playwright, who said that there are no black people in Africa.

Wilkerson wrote:Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that? “Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

One of Dawkins observations in The Selfish Gene is that we can rise above our primitive hardwiring. But we have to first see that we have instincts to fear outsiders. And that we really seem to want divisions so that we can form groups. We are most comfortable being in the in-group, so that we can fear and distrust the out-group. And so we hyper focus on every little difference between us, whether it's skin color, dialect, religious affiliation or whatever.

And so in Africa, where everyone has the same color of skin, blackness makes no sense. Africans will have to create other arbitrary divisions.

DWill wrote:My edit is that the metaphor doesn't--for me, at this moment--explain the race/cast difference. The caste wall might be composed of different combinations of elements. A notion of race, given force by religion and so-called science, was the main element composing the caste system for the U.S. and Nazi Germany, but race doesn't seem to be as large a constituent for the Indian caste structure.

That's fine, it's just my attempt to understand those differences. The wall is the structural requirement to have separations, dominance, and subservience without any specifics - our underlying demand for, and allegiance to, divisive programming. The artwork displayed on the wall (and changed on rare occasions) is the detail of that power structure worked out by a specific culture, whether by race, religion, etc. Hmmmm...I was going to say worked out in each society, but that is not true. Wilkerson mentions only three caste systems - America, Nazi Germany, and India. We'll learn more about the latter in the next chapter.

My wall and artwork metaphor is probably derivative of one Wilkerson used earlier. Caste is a creaky old multi-tiered house that represents the underlying structure of divisiveness. We did not build the house, it was inherited. The furniture and decorations are the specifics of how inequality is enforced, again whether by race, religion, etc. We may be disgusted at the bad taste of the decor, and seek to go so far as to rearrange the furniture, but we don't worry about the house. Its quirky weaknesses are accommodated and have been accepted as normal.

• What is so special about India, Nazi Germany, and America that we are the only societies blessed with a caste system?
• Are we indeed the only three?

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. 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.
p. 70

If you don't find metaphors useful, perhaps this will help.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Through the Fog of Delhi to the Parallels in India and America

The United States and India are profoundly different from each other—in culture, technology, economics, ethnic makeup. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, both protected by oceans and ruled for a time by the British, fertile and coveted. Both adopted social hierarchies and abide great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Both were conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on earth. The older country, India, the largest.

Their respective hierarchies are profoundly different. And yet, as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols. Both countries kept their dominant caste separate, apart and above those deemed lower. Both exiled their indigenous peoples—the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States—to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.

LanDroid wrote: [*] What is so special about India, Nazi Germany, and America that we are the only societies blessed with a caste system?
[*] Are we indeed the only three?[/list]

I suspect every society has some sort of regimentation that under a microscope would look like caste. Perhaps the castes in India, Nazi Germany and America are only extreme forms of a kind of class structure that exists almost everywhere. Although i've heard that pirate society was strictly egalitarian.

I suspect many would not see the systemic racism in America as a form of caste. It probably boils down to semantics.

LanDroid wrote:

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. 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.
p. 70

If you don't find metaphors useful, perhaps this will help.

Just to be clear, I do find metaphors useful, and yours is a fine one. I shouldn't try to over think a metaphor, adjusting it to the more complicated reality it tries to explain. Metaphors are suggestive and I think often appropriate in letting us see essential similarities through use of novel terms. A more poetic understanding, I suppose.

Ezra Klein had a long podcast last week on Trumpism and the internet. Mostly it went over familiar ground, and I am not particularly recommending it. The title is something like "An Appalled Conservative Considers the Future of the Republican Party." The guest, the appalled conservative, is Yuval Levin and he does a good job of representing the positive values associated with the conservative point of view, for those who are interested.

I am bringing it up because at one moment a phrase jumped up and grabbed me, and I think it's relevant to this discussion. They were talking about what is the basis for Trump's appeal, and Levin said, "in addition to the question of who will be in charge." He didn't mean just one thing with that, but when Klein came back and repeated it, "the question of who will be in charge" a lot of pieces fell into place for me. What was astonishing to me was how little they wanted to discuss the point even though they both agreed it was an important part, maybe the main part, of Trump's appeal.

I spent more time thinking about it, in the context of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Caste" and another book I am reading which takes up such matters from a very different angle, "Where the Crawdads Sing." And the more I thought about it the more I settled in on the notion that the famous prediction of a "majority minority" nation by 2045 had triggered deep feelings of wrongness, of injustice, by those who believe in caste. The dominance of Whites is, in their mind, just. "We" built this country. "They" can't be trusted. (And of course, as Wilkerson pointed out, Trump would repeal "Obamacare" for "them" but not for "us".)

I realize that "they" is a bigger category these days. The ones who can't be trusted may be "radical socialists" who are allied with "them". In the South radical socialist is still code language for those who side with Black people and other racial minorities, but in much of the Midwest and Northeast it means what it says it means, the issue is property and economic freedom, and the racial angle is less important. But in the whole country there is a substantial part of the White population, (not all of them Trumpists but for the most part, yes,) who still feel that racial minorities are interlopers, allowed to be here on sufferance by "us" the White majority.

All the stuff captured by "who is going to be in charge?" is too big and amorphous to pin down, and it certainly includes things like attitudes toward religion and willingness to tolerate atheists and Jews and Hindus (and maybe Muslims) as long as they stay in their place. But I have to keep digesting the question of what it means that "Freedom" means freedom for people who look like me and think like me. It is not abstract philosophical freedom, it is "our freedom".

Many people here will say, "Well, duh!" to that, and I accept the criticism. I am committed to listening to all sides, and so that generally means taking people's word for what they mean when I should probably see through it. Here's naive me, listening to a couple of highly educated Jews discussing "who is going to be in charge" and never recognizing the shadow of the gas chambers lurking in what they refer to but don't want to discuss.