[Craic] Caste or Class warfare? Open inquiry. Saturday Craic Oct. 30th at 10:30 EDT zoomlink attached

[Arthur Blomme]

Join virtual craic zoom meeting 10:30 eastern time
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/516255319?pwd=ZnpFbTdEOFI1d2ZEdnpKTWt5UnJWZz09

Meeting ID: 516 255 319
Passcode: 0210


Hi Ted and all

Thank you for your book review of Cast. I think that this is a very 
important work for our time and place.  I tried to get an ecopy from the 
library but failed to pick it up in  timely fashion.  I think I may have 
some prejudice of the work as it comes from Oprah's book club.

it would be a good topic to  discuss this Saturday.  You have read it. 
So you  may be able to answer some of my suspicions.  I have read some 
other discussions on the topic as I am sure others have.  Maybe Remo 
would be willing to participate in a more directed forum.  So please let 
us use some discipline and correct each other when we are off topic.

Regards

Art

On 10/21/21 8:23 a.m., Ted Schmidt wrote:
>
>
> Caste by Isabel Wilkerson review – a dark study of violence and power
> A renowned writer considers the social divisions in American society, 
> many of them unacknowledged, using comparisons with India and Nazi Germany
> A bust of Andrew Jackson in Williamsburg, Virginia.
> A bust of Andrew Jackson in Williamsburg, Virginia. Photograph: 
> Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
> Fatima Bhutto
> As US president in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a feverish advocate 
> of “Indian removal”, the banishing of Native Americans from their 
> ancestral homelands and relocation on desolate reservations. It was 
> Jackson who oversaw the infamous “Trail of Tears”, the forced 
> migration on which more than 20% of the Cherokee people perished. 
> History has been kind to Jackson; it remembers him as Old Hickory, a 
> nation-builder who drove America’s westward *expansion and honours him 
> by placing his image on the $20 bill. It doesn’t remember him as the 
> enslaver of 161 people *or as a man who went horseback riding with 
> reins carved from the flesh of indigenous Americans. And this is 
> precisely how caste works, according to Isabel Wilkerson: it *elevates 
> and empowers members of a “dominant caste” at the perpetual expense of 
> a “subordinate caste”.
> *
> The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, 
> a*n expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised 
> inequality and injustice. It was while working on her *sweeping, 
> Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a 
> history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, 
> that Wilkerson realised she was studying a *deeply ingrained 
> caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself 
> had existed, dating back to colonial *Virginia. In Caste, 
> Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she 
> compares with two of the *best known caste systems in the world: that 
> of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, 
> where caste *as a modern experiment in barbarism was 
> ultimately vanquished.
>
> BR Ambedkar, the Indian social reformer who fought the scourge of 
> caste all his life, called it “graded inequality”. Caste is a complex 
> system of infinite hierarchy; in Indian society, it divides humans 
> according to varnas, or classes – *Brahmins, or priests; warriors; 
> traders; and labourers. Dalits are considered so low that they stand 
> outside the varnas.* Caste in India is a fraught and ugly thing, 
> degrading everything in its path.
>
> *Wilkerson’s is essentially a two-tier caste system – dominant or 
> white and subordinate or non-white. Th*e signal of rank in the 
> American hierarchy is caste’s “faithful servant”, race. Caste and race 
> continually bleed into each other; *Wilkerson defines a racist as 
> someone who harms, mocks or institutionalises inferiority on the basis 
> of race. A casteist is someone who upholds or benefits from an 
> ingrained system of hierarchy, never challenging its assumptions. 
> *Wilkerson’s choice of examining caste rather than race is a valuable 
> one; this book is not about biology, social history or science, but 
> about structural power. Caste is a “hologram”, she explains, 
> an “insidious” force that operates outside of hatred or intolerance, 
> animated by practice and reflex. It’s not just the far right or 
> trigger-happy cops; even the “good” can be casteists – such as the 
> guest at a Tina Brown book party who asked the then state senator 
> Barack Obama to get them a drink.
>
> A statue of the confederate general Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia.
> A statue of the confederate general Robert E Lee in Richmond, 
> Virginia. Photograph: Steve Helber/AP
> Since its inception, the American caste system has reinvented itself 
> in terrifying and hideous ways. “Before there was a United States of 
> America,” Wilkerson writes, “there was enslavement. Theirs was a 
> living death passed down for twelve generations.” Caste is a dark 
> history of the inexhaustible scope of human violence. Enslaved 
> Africans were seen as incapable of injury, worked to the bone and 
> starved, and routinely subjected to torture and rape. The *American 
> caste system, like India or Germany’s, was constructed and practised 
> openly; it did not hide its *savagery. Even Hitler recorded his 
> admiration for the uniquely American “knack for maintaining an air of 
> robust innocence in the wake of mass death”. Wilkerson reminds us that 
> the Nazis, though inspired by America’s race laws, ultimately thought 
> they went too far.
>
> Writing of the South, where the purest form of American caste is 
> practised, Wilkerson threads microhistories into the l*arger, 
> horrendous tapestry. She describes local lynching trees, schools 
> letting out early so children could accompany their parents to watch 
> murder*, advertised by newspapers as though they were sporting events. 
> Photographers brought portable printing presses to sell photos of the 
> hanged men as souvenirs. Lynching postcards were a thriving industry 
> at the turn of the 20th century, wish-you-were-here’s of the severed, 
> half-burned head of Will James, lynched in Illinois in 1909 or of 
> burned torsos from Waco. “This is the barbeque we had last night,” a 
> Texan wrote to his mother on the back on one such card.
>
> Wilkerson writes about a country trembling with indignation when 
> asked to simply acknowledge that black lives matter. *Congress has 
> steadfastly refused even to debate reparations for the descendants of 
> the people they enslaved, *refusing for 30 years to pass HR 40, a bill 
> that would do nothing more than table a discussion on the matter. The 
> author unearths much disquieting material in Caste. We know that 
> during the Jim Crow era, black Americans were forced*to drink from 
> separate water fountains, but before they were given fountains, 
> Wilkerson *writes, they had to drink from horse troughs.
>
> Caste as a concept can be dizzying, but Wilkerson makes plain th*e 
> deeply embedded infrastructure of American *hierarchy. Caste is why 
> Robert E Lee, the Confederate general who went to war against his own 
> country for the *right to enslave other humans can be honoured by 230 
> memorials across the land*. It is why Alabama was the last state in 
> the union to throw out its law banning interracial marriage, which it 
> did in 2000, 36 years after the Civil Rights Act ended segregation. 
> And it is why Lyndon B Johnson, who signed that act into law, was the 
> last Democrat ever to win the presidency with the majority of the 
> white electorate.
>
> A march by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). .
> A march by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Photograph: Pacific 
> Press Agency/Alamy
>
> Wilkerson ends the book by holding up Nazi Germany as a caste 
> system successfully dismantled. But if Germany is an example of how 
> caste can be ended then India is the understressed counterpoint: the 
> nightmare of how caste can thrive and become more monstrous if 
> casteists are put in charge. There is no mention of the spate of 
> bloody lynchings *that has gripped India since Narendra Modi* came to 
> power in 2014; no mention of Modi himself, a disciple of the Rashtriya 
> Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), *a crypto-fascist casteist organisation 
> allegedly inspired by nazism*. This blind spot would not be worth 
> mentioning if it were not for the author’s stated intention to examine 
> India, and the fact that the book is based on a distinctly 
> Indian idea, one that has grown more visible and gruesome in recent years.
>
> *This is an American reckoning and so it should be. Wilkerson has a 
> deft narrative touch and she activates the history in her pages, 
> bringing all its horror and possibility to *light, illuminating both 
> the bygone and the present. Caste joins the New York Times’ “1619 
> Project” in exposing the edifice of white platinum privilege and 
> exploding how we understand American power and supremacy. It is a 
> painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.
>
>
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