The author decries enslavers profiting by impregnating slaves, so this may be the right place to reference one of the most scorching statements about American history I have ever read.

You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?

I have rape-colored skin.

No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual.

Caroline Randall Williams
6/26/2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/opin ... acism.html

LanDroid wrote:I'm certainly no expert, but I'd venture to say there is little hope for reform of the caste system within the Hindu religion. In Chapter 3, the author discusses Bhimrao Ambedkar, a Dalit who rose to such prominence as to be considered the chief architect of the constitution of India. Wilkerson described him as "the Martin Luther King of India." However, he converted to Buddhism and led the Dalit Buddhist Movement. So much for reform within Hinduism?

Bhimrao Ambedkar even influenced Mahatma Gandhi's views on caste. It seems although Gandhi fought against untouchability, he supported the caste system in general to some extent.

But Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 and Ambedkar died in 1956. Are there any contemporary leaders of India seeking to completely dismantle the caste system? Is this feasible in the face of ancient religious beliefs?

No, I don't think reform of caste within Hinduism is likely, either, although Modi is a strong Hindu who also wants India to modernize rapidly. I wondered whether that dynamic applies in India whereby the variety, inconsistency, or contradiction in a vast scripture can be used to create space for social change to occur, without the change having to be led by the religion. In other words, might religion at least get out of the way. One thing I remember well from the Robert Wright book we read here (I think it was The Evolution of God) is his central point: religions aren't only what their scriptures and leaders say they are. You have to view religions "on the ground" to talk about what they're doing in contemporary times. There might be movements in the religion that seem out of keeping with some scripture or with tradition, and I would be glad for it if the divergence makes possible humane reforms. Of course, divergence can go in the other direction. You can argue that this is what's happened to Islam.

LanDroid wrote:

Mr. Tulip wrote:The Biblical roots of racism are in the revenge covenant of Moses, not the forgiveness covenant of Christ, and served as a primary justification for modern colonial conquest.

DWill wrote:We've seen how flexible a document the Bible can be, which is largely because of, as Robert says, the sequel it includes.

We've gotten into it over this supposed split between the two testaments before and I don't really want to go there again, so I'll just say it's not as clean a break as you maintain. The Apostle Paul on more than one occasion admonishes slaves to obey their masters, "doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord" etc... In DWill's quote, I'd replace the word "flexible" with "contradictory." Christianity was used to enforce slavery and to fight against it. I cannot respect a religion that is ambivalent on that matter.

Abolitionism comprised both freethinkers and Christians. The Christians struggled to wrest away the soul of their faith from the many who used the Bible to justify slavery. Obviously, the many were not mistaken that the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, gave support to the institution of slavery (although they didn't recognize that American chattel slavery was probably worse for its victims than was ancient slavery). The abolitionist Christians remained Christians, yes, exploiting a thread of New Testament theology that emphasized Christ's love for all peoples (Paul's statement is often quoted: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" ). Was this really consistent, though, overall, with scripture? Probably not, but countering the Bible-quoting slavery upholders with a different take on Christianity and slavery, was perhaps the most powerful tool available to the abolitionists. They were trying to make space within a Christian outlook for the abolition of slavery. Holy War against slavery was possible, as John Brown showed.

PILLAR NUMBER THREE
Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific social group, caste, or ethnic group, rejecting those from others as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogamy

I figured we'd get that definition out of the way first.

The framers of the American caste system took steps, early in its founding, to keep the castes separate and to seal off the bloodlines of those assigned to the upper rung. This desire led to the third pillar of caste—endogamy, which means restricting marriage to people within the same caste. This is an ironclad foundation of any caste system, from ancient India, to the early American colonies, to the Nazi regime in Germany. Endogamy was brutally enforced in the United States for the vast majority of its history and did the spade work for current ethnic divisions.

“Caste,” wrote Bhimrao Ambedkar, the father of the anti-caste movement in India, “means an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy.” Thus, “in showing how endogamy is maintained,” he added, “we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste.”

There is quite a bit of endogamy outside of the caste system. I knew a Jewish father who refused to call his daughter in law by name; his son's wife was merely "The Shiksa." Many Greek mothers cry when their daughters do not marry "a nice Greek man." Etc. What other examples are you aware of?

But caste systems brought endogamy to a "whole 'nother" level.

The protocol was strictly enforced against lower-caste men and upper-caste women, while upper-caste men, the people who wrote the laws, kept full and flagrant access to lower-caste women, whatever their age or marital status. In this way, the dominant gender of the dominant caste, in addition to controlling the livelihood and life chances of everyone beneath them, eliminated the competition for its own women and in fact for all women. For much of American history, dominant-caste men controlled who had access to whom for romantic liaisons and reproduction.

My veterinarian father always spoke up for hybrid vigor in dogs. The healthiest dogs were the mutts. Humans have been largely unaware that exogamy would promote the highest degree of hybrid health in children. Even if they'd known, they'd prefer to keep their illusions of having some special identity to preserve. Endogamy enabled them to do that.

PILLAR NUMBER FOUR
Purity versus Pollution

The fourth pillar of caste rests upon the fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it. Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes. Both India and the United States at the zenith of their respective caste systems, and the short-lived but heinous regime of the Nazis, raised the obsession with purity to a high, if absurdist, art.

I think this is where a light bulb went on for me. I knew about separate and unequal, but purity and pollution? Just think back to all those photos you've seen of segregated facilities. Aha! Of course, it's so obvious!





Here's a contemporary twist on purity and pollution.

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.”

In Germany, the Nazis banned Jewish residents from stepping onto the beaches at the Jews’ own summer homes, as at Wannsee, a resort suburb of Berlin, and at public pools in the Reich. “They believed the entire pool would be polluted by immersion in it of a Jewish body,” Jean-Paul Sartre once observed.

In the United States, the subordinate caste was quarantined in every sphere of life, made untouchable on American terms, for most of the country’s history and well into the twentieth century.

...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.

What 'Drained Pool' Politics Costs America

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” These pools were the pride of their communities, monuments to what public investment could do. But they were, in many places, whites-only. Then came the desegregation orders. The pools would need to be open to everyone. But these communities found a loophole. They could close them for everyone. Drain them. Fill them with concrete. Shutter their parks departments entirely. And so they did.

...Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, a decent social safety net.

Ezra Klein
2/16/2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/opin ... cghee.html

I expect there was also a strong element of purity and pollution in closing these pools. I recall as a kid the pool would close at 10 minutes 'til the hour when only adults could swim. At the top of the hour kids would sit down around the edge of the pool and we would kick our feet as chlorine was poured into the water to spread it around. I expect this was a ritual hangover from when blacks were permitted to swim separately for only 10 minutes per hour, dunno if it's true, just a strong suspicion.

The Sanctity of Water

The waters and shorelines of nature were forbidden to the subordinate castes if the dominant caste so desired. Well into the twentieth century, African-Americans were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools, both north and south, lest they pollute them, just as Dalits were forbidden from the waters of the Brahmins, and Jews from Aryan waters in the Third Reich. This was a sacred principle in the United States well into the second half of the twentieth century, and the dominant caste went to great lengths to enforce it.

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 them out.

Hey, that's where I'm from... I wonder if that happened at Sunlite Pool, a gigantic 2 acre water system that has been open for 90 years.