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Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

#173: Jan. - March 2021 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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LanDroid wrote: With the above recent scientific confirmation, consider the genesis of dividing humans into arbitrary categories and our systems of subordination and power.
Why are these categories so superficial?
As a matter of fact, of course, tallness does confer a social advantage, at least if it's not "freakish" tallness, and probably only for men in our society. So we can see the different ways in which superficial characteristics are seized upon by a largely visual species. With faces being the primary image we latch onto after birth, it makes sense that we make things of significance out of accidental and unimportant differences in facial features. Resisting such programing becomes an objective of education and enlightenment.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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DWill wrote:not knowing about caste was a clear indication that one is in an upper caste.
For the rich and successful, their lifestyle seems normal, sensible and obvious, something anyone could freely achieve who wants to and has the required talent. Anyone who deviates from these standards carries a taint of failure in the eyes of the successful, blamed for blaming the world instead of working hard and organising themself.

This 'failure to be normal' carries a moral opprobrium. The successful tend to associate only with other successful people, like the happy families in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The unhappy stew in their particular problems.

For the upper caste, whether in India or western countries, the blindness to how external factors constrain people's success is almost a necessary part of their own self-confidence about living in a free country. Prejudice against the 'out-caste' is a natural product of this normalisation of success, blaming the victim, especially with how the traumatic legacy of slavery in the USA continues to inhibit the potential of black people.

Those whose families benefited from holding slaves stand upon the economic and social platform that slavery provided for ongoing intergenerational success. They prefer not to see how the past exists as a real ongoing constraint on the present.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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DWill wrote:As a matter of fact, of course, tallness does confer a social advantage, at least if it's not "freakish" tallness, and probably only for men in our society.
Yes, but in the author's thought experiment short people were given the advantage while tall people were considered "gangly," etc. She says if we inherited such a culture, it would be accepted as the natural state of affairs. I take this to mean superficial categories such as race, religion, or however India determines its categories are less important than the underlying power of the caste system, which demands a dominant class, subordinates, and protections against infection from the subordinate castes.

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?
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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LanDroid wrote:Discuss / compare / contrast these two statements.
“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.
Well, of course we know from Shakespeare's "Othello" that this is an exaggeration. Yet it is true that racial difference was more a curiosity than a fact of everyday life for most Europeans through most of history. Race played no role in caste, but it was a marker of insider and outsider. Those markers were mainly language and folkways, so that the differences people were preoccupied with were those of nationality, which in Europe up to the time of Louis XIV could be very much a matter of 100 mile differences. There was no "German" language until Luther translated the Bible, for example, even though at the boundaries people could easily have distinguished Germanic tongues from French or Slavic.

Were Wilkerson's work more of an academic enterprise I would hold her responsible for separating the business of marking "us" from "them" as distinct from the business of creating hierarchies of caste. Something like caste happened in Europe because of the blond barbarians dominating Spain and Italy for centuries, but the distinctions are not as marked or as reliable (even if blonds only marry blonds, the occasional dark haired genes will crop up).

I think this is critical to the issue of perpetuation in the present day. Most of today's barriers to people of color are not due to intentional creation of hierarchy, like the White Supremacists would like to see. Rather they are due to stereotypes, some of which correspond to statistical averages, combined with "us" and "them" perceptions. For example, if one believes that most Black people are poor, one might not want to be served in a bank by a Black person for any number of reasons, with varying degrees of rationality behind them. If there is no marker of someone as "other" then one might look for other clues to danger, but stereotyping stops the checking before it gets serious. A well-off Black person might prefer to be served by a White bank officer, not because of a sense of difference but because of stereotyping.
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.

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.”
This is also true and not true at the same time. Having lived in West Africa I can say for certain there is very strong White Privilege. There are plenty of White folks around in the city, and they are assumed to be well off and therefore worth treating with great respect. But it is also true that Africans are acutely attuned to language differences and ethnicities, and will form up sides if there is conflict on the street. The differences that people are mainly interested in, there, are the ethnic ones. I was pretty impressed at how well many people would reach across those boundaries, learning 4 to 6 languages just as easily as the Europeans do. But I also heard stories of the continuing exclusion of refugees from poorer countries and it was clear that there was little effort to provide opportunities for outsiders.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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.
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DWill

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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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.
Last edited by DWill on Sun Feb 07, 2021 8:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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.
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Re: Caste: Part 2 - The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions

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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? :hmm:
  • Are we indeed the only three?
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