BookTalk.org

LanDroid wrote:PILLAR NUMBER FIVE Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill
What long term effects on a culture result from being relegated to the lowest career rungs for many generations?

One obvious effect is the reduced cultural value on education. Since education is unlikely to lead to economic opportunities, the talk about it would have a decidedly different flavor. It's easily imagined that talk of a stepping stone to a better life is missing, and talk of putting on airs is what remains. That tension is present in higher castes, but the hopeful side weighs much more heavily.

And education is the keystone of an arch. On one side is the way children are raised, with more consciousness of learning to do things properly and fit into cultured ways. On the other is the chatter that goes on around careers. Who set himself up in a practice and made it work. Whose extended family understands cars because so-and-so is good with them, and found opportunities in repair or sales or whatever.

Nobel prize-winner Kenneth Arrow published, late in life, an analysis of ethnic differences in achievement that found that the entire difference in average earnings by groups could be explained by supposing that one's opportunities are mainly influenced by the earnings of the people you have contact with. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Arrow and his co-author modeled this in terms of hearing about job opportunities, but you can imagine much denser sets of cultural understandings that influence the likelihood that a person will capitalize on the opportunities available.

That's just the Whig side of the matter, looking at the economic waste of human potential. It doesn't even get into the stress of humiliation and trauma that goes with people trying to cope with being actively suppressed. With knowing that your great-uncle was a gifted musician but was hauled off to a chain gang for getting drunk one night. Or that your older brother is good with numbers but was told by the teacher that math was a waste of time for someone of his color.

Excellent point - it makes sense that education would be devalued if one is blocked from career rewards. The bottom caste was also totally blocked from education for many generations. Once education became available, poor quality education has been used as a tool to keep that caste in place. Consider how primary education is funded in the US - through property taxes. How much additional money is automatically raised in areas with higher real estate values than average? Wealthier areas also easily raise additional funds for schools. Areas with low real estate values never catch up to the average.

I expect education may become more devalued overall since it is now out of reach except for wealthy families. It is not realistic to raise a family if you have $50K to $120K in education debt on top of housing and all other costs. Children from families that can fund that amount per child can go to college; it's no longer worth it for the average family. Unpaid internships are a gateway to certain careers, yet another block to those not from wealthy families.

"Education used to be a way out of poverty, not a path into it."
- Sarah Kendzior

Making enslaved people perform on command also reinforced their subjugation. They were made to sing despite their exhaustion or the agonies from a recent flogging or risk further punishment. Forced good cheer became a weapon of submission to assuage the guilt of the dominant caste and further humiliate the enslaved. If they were in chains and happy, how could anyone say that they were being mistreated? Merriment, even if extracted from a whip, was seen as essential to confirm that the caste structure was sound, that all was well, that everyone accepted, even embraced their station in the hierarchy.
p. 136

Hadn't realized that - even the slave merriment that Southerners used to claim as evidence was "extracted from a whip."

PILLAR NUMBER SIX
Dehumanization and Stigma

Dehumanization is a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group, and it is a monumental task. It is a war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own.

...Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it.

...Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable.

As in war, so in caste systems. Please compare and contrast dehumanization in the three caste systems under discussion as well as dehumanizing caricatures deployed during war.

Harry Marks wrote: One obvious effect is the reduced cultural value on education. Since education is unlikely to lead to economic opportunities, the talk about it would have a decidedly different flavor. It's easily imagined that talk of a stepping stone to a better life is missing, and talk of putting on airs is what remains. That tension is present in higher castes, but the hopeful side weighs much more heavily.

I might not be understanding your point, because I want to read "likely" instead of "unlikely."

LanDroid wrote:PILLAR NUMBER SIX
Dehumanization and Stigma

Dehumanization is a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group, and it is a monumental task. It is a war against truth, against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own.

...Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it.

...Dehumanization distances not only the out-group from the in-group, but those in the in-group from their own humanity. It makes slaves to groupthink of everyone in the hierarchy. A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action against them is seen as reasonable.

As in war, so in caste systems. Please compare and contrast dehumanization in the three caste systems under discussion as well as dehumanizing caricatures deployed during war.

A caste system like India's, so far as I know a unique one, seems to operate with dehumanization at the bottom rung, but above that it appears to exploit the idea that society sorts itself into categories of quality, categories that endure across generations. Does karma hold out the hope that in the next life one can be rewarded with a higher assignment?

I'd like to know, just by the way, if India's system was, or is now, really national in reach. Are there regions where it applies less strongly, as we could say for the U.S. (at least historically)?

The maybe-too-obvious difference between India and the other two caste systems is the reliance on race in the latter. On the surface, those appear to have two tiers, people whose humanity is recognized and those whose isn't. Dehumanizing caricatures are important for maintaining the separation, with the difference from wartime situations being that, with caste, only the side in power gets to do the caricaturing, whereas in war both sides have the power to engage in that. Rebels and Yankees, Hutus and Tutsis.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: One obvious effect is the reduced cultural value on education. Since education is unlikely to lead to economic opportunities, the talk about it would have a decidedly different flavor. It's easily imagined that talk of a stepping stone to a better life is missing, and talk of putting on airs is what remains. That tension is present in higher castes, but the hopeful side weighs much more heavily.

I might not be understanding your point, because I want to read "likely" instead of "unlikely."

Harry was talking about education for slaves. Learning to read might lead to slaves becoming house slaves rather than field slaves, as I recall we discussed in Uncle Tom's Cabin. But even that does not constitute much of an economic opportunity, since the Uncle Tom house slave still remains a chattel with no rights of ownership of anything.

DWill wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: One obvious effect is the reduced cultural value on education. Since education is unlikely to lead to economic opportunities, the talk about it would have a decidedly different flavor. .

I might not be understanding your point, because I want to read "likely" instead of "unlikely."

There are certainly cases in which people of color benefited from education, including higher education. But caste normally meant they could not expect the kind of return on the investment that White folk earned. As recently as the 70s the standard result in studies of human capital was that earnings rise with education, but at a much lower rate for Black and Hispanic earners. Law degrees were not going to lead to lucrative corporate jobs, medical degrees, if they could be had, were unlikely to lead to high income jobs serving the wealthy White communities. Insurance sales and real estate sales and auto sales and most other jobs that leverage skill with education were essentially closed to Black applicants except to serve the Black community, which was, of course, poor.

We have an image that education is the ticket out of the working class, and to some extent it worked that way for African-Americans as well (provided they lived in Black neighborhoods in cities, where they would not be lynched for being uppity), but out of the working class did not mean into the middle class until at least the 1980s.

Robert Tulip wrote:Harry was talking about education for slaves. Learning to read might lead to slaves becoming house slaves rather than field slaves, as I recall we discussed in Uncle Tom's Cabin. But even that does not constitute much of an economic opportunity, since the Uncle Tom house slave still remains a chattel with no rights of ownership of anything.

I took Landroid's question to be about generational effects left over from the times when caste systems were enforced, meaning we are more interested in Jim Crow times than all the way back to slavery. It's an interesting question and one that White people often have no awareness of. If, as the question pointed out, your options were mainly field hand or house help, where is the incentive to get an education? Those who did often became preachers or teachers in low-pay jobs serving low-pay clients.

DWill wrote:I'd like to know, just by the way, if India's system was, or is now, really national in reach. Are there regions where it applies less strongly, as we could say for the U.S. (at least historically)?

I have some passing acquaintance due to studying development economics and knowing some Dalit advocates during my years in Geneva. There are more backward areas (Bihar and Orissa get mentioned often) where caste is more likely to be enforced and violating endogamy can still get you killed. There are more prosperous areas (Punjab, with a highly influential Sikh community that rejects caste, gets mentioned most often) where caste is not much more interesting than ethnic background among Whites in the U.S. - a conversation topic more than a life-determining status.

The real issue is post-secondary education, where parents will bribe, cheat and pay money they don't have for tutoring to get their kids admitted, and the reserved spots for the "scheduled castes" were getting to be hot button issues in the 90s and played a heavy role in bringing the BJP (Modi's party) to power. The parents from the English-educated middle class built up tremendous resentment against students from the countryside, with obviously inferior education, getting admitted ahead of their kids.

The middle class in India is larger than the population of the U.S. The number of driver's licenses and cars, for example, is comparable to the total in the U.S. But the other 3/4 of the population competes for the jobs available in the modern sector. In very much the same way as in the U.S., the privileged are willing to (grudgingly) accept "fair" competition, where they know their advantages will get their kids in the doors to the good jobs, but any hint that they face discrimination can bring out Mama Bear behavior.

And then there is politics. In Bihar and Orissa the leaders of the Dalit castes often get the votes to be elected and then carefully manage how much they allot of government jobs, fertilizer subsidies and the like to poor people. Too little and they don't get re-elected, too much and the power structures turn against them and they don't get re-elected. This ought to sound familiar.

Harry Marks wrote:. . . I took Landroid's question to be about generational effects left over from the times when caste systems were enforced, meaning we are more interested in Jim Crow times than all the way back to slavery. It's an interesting question and one that White people often have no awareness of. If, as the question pointed out, your options were mainly field hand or house help, where is the incentive to get an education? Those who did often became preachers or teachers in low-pay jobs serving low-pay clients.

This is something I wonder about (See bolded part). I think we can easily accept Wilkerson's argument that there is a caste system in America, one that arose from slavery and continued into the Jim Crowe era. But we have never set out, per se, to create a caste system, correct? It was never the end goal. It just happened as an outcome of a multitude of factors. Perhaps it could be argued that slavery in the New World was an economic necessity and we have engaged in a lot of cognitive dissonance ever since to justify our actions. "All men are created equal" according to The Declaration of Independence. And, yet even through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, we seem to resist this notion or selectively apply it only to the upper caste (which in our case means white people). What makes us do that? I suspect Wilkerson will address this at some point. It just seems that we are missing something in this analysis of castes. I guess what I'm suggesting is that the social sciences only give us a partial answer. Perhaps the bigger picture can be provided through evolutionary psychology?