• In total there is 1 user online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Caste: Part 4 - The Tentacles of Caste

#173: Jan. - March 2021 (Non-Fiction)
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Caste: Part 4 - The Tentacles of Caste

Unread post

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung

In late 2015, two economists at Princeton University announced the startling revelation that the death rates of middle-aged white Americans, especially less-educated white Americans at midlife, had risen for the first time since 1950. The perplexing results of this study on mortality rates in the United States sounded alarms on the front pages of newspapers and at the top of news feeds across the nation.

The surge in early deaths among middle-aged white people went counter to the trends of every other ethnic group in America. Even historically marginalized black and Latino Americans had seen their mortality rates fall during the time period studied, from 1998 to 2013. The rise in the white death rate was at odds with prevailing trends in the rest of the Western world.
This is a complicated chapter, I suspect related to the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (which I have not read). It posits an increase in white suicide and terminal illness related to the loss of a sense of white supremacy.
In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This phenomenon “is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior,” writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status.”
Working-class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, “need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white.”
I remember our discussion of A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn in which he claims poor whites were purposely instilled with vicious racism to prevent them from cooperating with blacks to change the power structure. Is this still active? :hmm:
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Caste: Part 4 - The Tentacles of Caste

Unread post

Some people from the groups that were said to be inherently inferior managed to make it into the mainstream, a few rising to the level of people in the dominant caste, one of them, in 2008, rising to the highest station in the land. This left some white working-class Americans in particular, those with the least education and the material security that it can confer, to face the question of whether the commodity that they could take for granted—their skin and ascribed race—might be losing value.

...In the zero-sum stakes of a caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person comes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.
p.183
I gotta admit that personally I find it difficult to relate to these emotions, but I s'pose I understand them. I am definitely not upper class, but I don't feel these changes as a threat. Obviously this must be extremely serious for many who are dying too young. Can you relate to this decline in health, a loss of status, a threat from the majority becoming a minority at some point in the future?
User avatar
LanDroid

2A - MOD & BRONZE
Comandante Literario Supreme
Posts: 2800
Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2002 9:51 am
21
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Has thanked: 195 times
Been thanked: 1166 times
United States of America

Re: Caste: Part 4 - The Tentacles of Caste

Unread post

Unconscious Bias: A Mutation in the Software
Toward the end of the twentieth century, social scientists found new ways to measure what had transformed from overt racism to a slow boil of unspoken antagonisms that social scientists called unconscious bias. This was not the cross-burning, epithet-spewing biological racism of the pre-civil-rights era, but rather discriminatory behaviors based on subconscious prejudgments by people who professed and believed in equality.
We think things are getting better, and to some extent they are, but as Harry Marks pointed out white people with a criminal record are more employable than minorities with clean records.
In his book Dying of Whiteness, Metzl told of the case of a forty-one-year-old white taxi driver who was suffering from an inflamed liver that threatened the man’s life. Because the Tennessee legislature had neither taken up the Affordable Care Act nor expanded Medicaid coverage, the man was not able to get the expensive, lifesaving treatment that would have been available to him had he lived just across the border in Kentucky. As he approached death, he stood by the conviction that he did not want the government involved. “No way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens,” the man told Metzl. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it. I would rather die.” And sadly, so he would.
Seems like a creepy twist on drained pool politics: "If they can have it, then no one can, not even me even if it kills me."
User avatar
geo

2C - MOD & GOLD
pets endangered by possible book avalanche
Posts: 4779
Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2008 4:24 am
15
Location: NC
Has thanked: 2199 times
Been thanked: 2200 times
United States of America

Re: Caste: Part 4 - The Tentacles of Caste

Unread post

LanDroid wrote: Seems like a creepy twist on drained pool politics: "If they can have it, then no one can, not even me even if it kills me."
I suspect that this guy’s attitude is more libertarian than racist. I didn’t much like Obamacare (ACA) when it was first enacted either (though I support it now primarily because it protects those with pre-existing conditions). We see a similar backlash to other government policies, most recently a preference to be exposed to COVID (and possibly die) rather than have the government shut down certain businesses and enact various social distancing measures.

Not that race isn’t ever-present in such issues. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” is a kind of dog whistle to bring back a time when white superiority was more or less taken for granted. LanDroid mentioned the new law in Georgia that makes it illegal to give food and water to people waiting in line to vote. Several other laws were passed that would arguably disproportionately disenfranchise black voters. My question is this: Are Republicans in fact trying to make it more difficult for blacks to vote? Are they trying to reinforce the caste system? Or are they really concerned about the sanctity of elections, worried that some will cheat?

Maybe it doesn’t matter what the intention is if black voters are disproportionately disenfranchised by such laws. I like to think there’s room for some middle ground where we can enact some rules to ensure the integrity of an election while ensuring that no one is disenfranchised unfairly.

Regarding the tentacles of caste, in a recent NYTimes op-ed, Charles Blow talks about Tucker Carlson and "white replacement theory." This is the fear by some whites that they are gradually being replaced by blacks and other minorities. It's true, of course, that whites will eventually become a minority in America. Conservatives generally do seem unusually fearful of foreigners, but is this fear in itself racist? The Confederate flag is seen by many as much a symbol of southern rebellion, not hatred against blacks. It’s hard to tell sometimes where racism ends and distrust of government begins.
-Geo
Question everything
Post Reply

Return to “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - by Isabel Wilkerson”