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Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

#173: Jan. - March 2021 (Non-Fiction)
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Harry Marks
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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DWill wrote: I don't know whether it's possible that America, or any complex society, is essentially any thing.

DWill wrote:I did feel some wariness as I listened to the section comparing a caste system to the Matrix. Wilkerson loves to use analogy, and she uses it well to give her writing interest and heft. But I heard her saying that caste-ism operates on an unconscious level and doesn't need explicit commands, so that denying that it could be present is almost a signal that such a program exists. No matter what claim is presented, I would always shy away from such an "unseen forces" rationale. That is not to deny that caste has some quality of "the air we breathe."

I had never thought that "breakdown" of caste-thinking could happen unconsciously, but now I see how it probably does. That is what gradualism seems to be about.
Evidently a person, and mind in general, is not essentially any one thing. The book I finished last month about trauma, "The Body Keeps the Score" by van der Kolk, emphasizes over and over that PTSD is about inability to integrate the traumatic experience with our cognitive structures that get us through ordinary life. The mechanisms of isolation include inability to talk to others about it, largely because the emotional aspects so completely override any structure that reason can provide; but also inability to consider it, because the victim relives the trauma rather than remembering it; and, especially for prolonged stressors such as incest, inability to perceive other people's intention in a way that reflects reality rather than reflecting the heightened sensitivity to danger and the "fight or flight" response that becomes the filter for so much of the victim's perception.

Some of the same issues are surely present in the perpetuation and the potential breakdown of caste structures. Why is it that some people are able to reflect on caste structures and shake them off (for the most part) while other people jump to a stance of defensiveness and denial, seeing mainly the aspects of caste that make sense to them even after it is pointed out to them that this "sense" is created by motivated reasoning? Surely part of these barriers to reflection come from heightened sensitivity to threat, especially status threat, and part from a kind of dominance of this emotional response over thought and cognitive processing.

I think I am waiting to see Wilkerson bring out some of the ways these emotional misguidance structures can lay dormant for years, even decades, and then emerge as from the permafrost. More life stress, more direct evidence of status loss, more "socialism" which people may have primed themselves to sense as a threat to their privilege, any of these may be able to rouse the dragon, to bring these forces of caste perpetuation back to the fore.

And it may even be that the progress occurring in between spells of racist ugliness become a kind of defense against seeing caste. We no longer prevent excellent Black athletes from achieving, so now rooting for Connor McGregor because he is white has become okay, because prejudice is a thing of the past :hmm: . (How's that for motivated reasoning?)
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