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Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste

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

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Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste

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Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste

Please use this thread for discussing Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste.
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Re: Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste

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Wilkerson begins Part five with a powerful description of her experience in a cave of a viewing room at a Berlin museum viewing black and white film footage of Hitler returning to Berlin after the German forces seized Paris. She describes in great detail the excitement and jubilation of thousands in the street and on balconies cheering their hero. “This is the worship service of the true believers”. She goes on to remind us that this hyper celebration went on even though most of the population would have been well aware of the violence on the French, Kristallnacht two years earlier, and the humiliation and disappearance Jews they would have known as friends and neighbors.

She goes on to make the critical point that , like the Dalits, the decimating of Native Americans and the lynching of African-Americans - “happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded … that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving their fate”.

“They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important”.

Sadly, all too familiar.
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Re: Caste: Part 5 - The Consequences of Caste

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It is not the doing of a single person that a caste system makes the dominant caste the center around which every other caste rotates . It underlines the dominant caste as the default-setting model of regularity, beauty and intelligence which is the criteria against which every other caste is measured. The other casts are graded downward by their closeness to the upper caste.

Members of the dominant caste see themselves everywhere as worthy and better in most areas of life. Very few people will not accept the fabricated superiority of the upper group. A few individuals may go against the tide to experience the world from the viewpoint of those beneath them, but the caste system does not need them to do so.

Wilkerson makes this interesting analogy, “It imitates the configuration of narcissistic family systems, the game of clashing supporting roles including the golden-child middle castes of supposedly model minorities, the lost-child indigenous groups, and the scapegoat caste at the foot of the system”.

People below the dominant caste fully realize the significance of the upper caste as well. The top and bottom rungs of the ladder seem fixed. Those occupying the middle of the caste system will understandably surrender to anxiety and doubt in their attempt to reach an upper rung. In such a society, everyone receives continuous training to crave closeness to the upper caste. Those in the upper castes can find satisfaction that, even though their life may be difficult, at least they’re not at the bottom . As long as those at the bottom stay in their assigned position, their identities and future are safe.
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