A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.
p.17 Disclaimer: Kindle edition

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States.
p. 18

The war on drugs may not have been designed explicitly against blacks, but it ultimately affected the black community in very disproportionate ways. For example, we had different penalties for crack cocaine than we had for cocaine, for no viable reason whatsoever except that the crack form was used predominantly by young black men. Because of this policy young black men were railroaded into prisons for decades. We still haven't talked about this particular travesty of justice.

Nor have we talked about how time and again the Supreme Court paved the way for police to conduct search and seizures on minorities, simply because it was expedient and convenient, and because most white people didn't care what was happening to blacks. Systemic racism is very real in the USA. This book opened my eyes to this truth. Fortunately, we live in a time when underlying racist attitudes are being exposed, but there are still way too many people who don't bother to see it.

[*] Are you skeptical that a caste system exists in the USA?

For non-Americans, what about your own country?

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

I wonder how artificial a caste system really is, especially considering that it keeps cropping up in different cultures. It has appeared in India and in the United States. And Great Britain's rigid class structure also seems a similar kind of ordering. I'm thinking of E.O. Wilson's observations that humans are "eusocial" creatures, meaning that we have "advanced" level of social organization similar to ants and termites. Eusociality is apparently an emergent trait in evolution in populations that require a lot of social cooperation. The division of labor by ants and termites (and bees and wasps) are likewise called "castes." So rather than an artificial construction, I would suggest castes may be completely natural, as far as that goes.

Perhaps it is egalitarianism, the idea that we are all equal and deserve equal rights, that is more of an artificial construction. Or maybe both are evolutionary "strategies" that can crop up in different scenarios and can ultimately be explained by game theory.

Considering that one of the main difference s between humans and eusocial insects is that we have a highly developed culture that "evolves" much the same as biological evolution. We create stories and myths to explain why things are the way they are. So if we are instinctively inclined to regiment our society in caste systems we would have to rationalize it with narratives such as white superiority. In that sense, Wilkerson is absolutely right. The ideas that support caste systems are artificial. Humans have a fantastic capacity to bullshit ourselves and look the other way when confronted by contradictory evidence that goes against our make-believe narratives.

E.O. Wilson's observations that humans are "eusocial" creatures, meaning that we have "advanced" level of social organization similar to ants and termites. Eusociality is apparently an emergent trait in evolution in populations that require a lot of social cooperation. The division of labor by ants and termites (and bees and wasps) are likewise called "castes." So rather than an artificial construction, I would suggest castes may be completely natural, as far as that goes.

Perhaps it is egalitarianism, the idea that we are all equal and deserve equal rights, that is more of an artificial construction. Or maybe both are evolutionary "strategies" that can crop up in different scenarios and can ultimately be explained by game theory.

Considering that one of the main difference s between humans and eusocial insects is that we have a highly developed culture that "evolves" much the same as biological evolution. We create stories and myths to explain why things are the way they are. So if we are instinctively inclined to regiment our society in caste systems we would have to rationalize it with narratives such as white superiority. In that sense, Wilkerson is absolutely right. The ideas that support caste systems are artificial. Humans have a fantastic capacity to bullshit ourselves and look the other way when confronted by contradictory evidence that goes against our make-believe narratives.

The rejection of caste thinking by Christianity (neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ) recognises this spiritual power and value of equality.

Yes, language is the great disruptor of instinctive evolutionary processes. All ideas are artificial, enabling mythological construction of a story that provides meaning, purpose and legitimacy. Cognitive dissonance between ethical ideas and prevailing practice requires rationalisation, as our redemption requires that we see our conduct as morally justified.
Rationalisation is the process of hiding anomalies in a defunct paradigm, such as caste thinking.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country. And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all of his life.
p. 21

“So who is this?” (the TSA agent) asked. The name Ambedkar alone would not have registered; I had learned of him myself only the year before, and there was no time to explain the parallel caste system. So I blurted out what seemed to make the most sense. “Oh,” I said, “this is the Martin Luther King of India.”

In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in America, An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realization that the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society was not race, but caste, that perhaps it was the only term that addresses what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value. He came to the conclusion that America had created a caste system and that the effort “to maintain the color line has, to the ordinary white man, the ‘function’ of upholding that caste system itself, of keeping the ‘Negro in his place.’ ”

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”
p. 24

...Alexis de Tocqueville to observe in 1831: “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.”
p. 29

It was in 1913 that a prominent southern educator, Thomas Pearce Bailey, took it upon himself to assemble what he called the racial creed of the South. It amounted to the central tenets of the caste system.

To recalibrate how we see ourselves, I use language that may be more commonly associated with people in other cultures, to suggest a new way of understanding our hierarchy: Dominant caste, ruling majority, favored caste, or upper caste, instead of, or in addition to, white. Middle castes instead of, or in addition to, Asian or Latino. Subordinate caste, lowest caste, bottom caste, disfavored caste, historically stigmatized instead of African-American. Original, conquered, or indigenous peoples instead of, or in addition to, Native American. Marginalized people in addition to, or instead of, women of any race, or minorities of any kind.

Some of this may sound like a foreign language. In some ways it is and is meant to be. Because, to truly understand America, we must open our eyes to the hidden work of a caste system that has gone unnamed but prevails among us to our collective detriment, to see that we have more in common with each other and with cultures that we might otherwise dismiss, and to summon the courage to consider that therein may lie the answers.
p. 29
Italics in original

[*] MLK was one of the most prominent civil rights leaders visiting India and yet he did not make the connection between India and a caste system in the US. Why do you think that was so shocking to him?
[*] Why was it easy for Bhimrao Ambedkar to make that comparison?
[*] Why does that connection still seem shocking to us now? [/list]

[*] Are you skeptical that a caste system exists in the USA? For non-Americans, what about your own country?

Martin Luther King also traded on this elitist fantasy of the ideals of equality, which is incompatible with the somewhat fatalistic outlook that sees people’s potential as constrained by caste. In his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech in Washington in 1963, King said “In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men - yes, black men as well as white men - would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'”