Caste

Our community book club on Caste by Isabel Wilkerson has used India’s caste system as a main comparison in explaining her particular take on systemic racism--positing that racism is a collective caste system. The author has used Nazi Germany and American slavery as her primary study examples. So far, both guests to our club--professors at Wake Forest University--have politely pushed back against the comparisons of racism in America to the Nazi Germany experience or the caste system in India.

Wilkinson of course wants to equate racism to something obviously accepted as bad. But for the purpose of study, I wonder if we could also apply the caste perspective to things we do not necessarily see as bad. For example, the family structure or the community structure. Could one say that a family is somewhat of a caste system, dividing a person’s lot in life at a given time as infant, child, adolescent, adult, elder?

All creatures start out in life with a good intention: Survival. Animals are perhaps more beholden to natural instincts whereas humans have an evolved intellect that allows them to be even more intentional and thus experimental. Not only must they survive as individuals, but the family must also survive and so roles have resulted. From families, the idea is perhaps expanded to tribes, or communities. And within the communities, warrior groups for protection, worker groups for productivity and so on with each group having roles and somewhat of a caste system akin to Wilkerson’s loose comparison. For example a military structure seems to be most effective with its ranks of leadership and command. A company or corporation has an “org” chart to make clear who reports to who and whose decisions and opinions have more weight. How well they are organized seems to have a clear bearing on their success and productivity. Doesn’t sound so bad now, does it? In fact it seems rather widespread in the world.

Now it could be argued that Wilkerson also sees a difference in that the caste system is bad because people are stuck in their roles for life and the way I am using it allows people to advance out of their roles, ideally upward. That’s a fair argument. A true caste system has that problem. But our guest professors have provided us with an astute case against comparing Nazi Germany and American slavery as a caste system. Further, I would argue that the practice of creating roles has had its roots in good intention and in fact if we just look about, we can see it has worked more often than it has failed. Power can be abused in any system. Freely elected rulers can become corrupted and mislead their electorate. Bosses can be unfair to the workers. Even parents can abuse their children. Regardless, no one has found a better route than roles and rules. Things can and do go awry--sometimes, like Nazism and slavery, going really off the track. But even those worst examples failed. Overall, civilization has prevailed.

Closer to Home

The Little Free Library I put in the front of my house has been an enjoyable experiment. But it hasn’t been without some frustrations. An ongoing aggravation is that the visitors often “borrow” the nicer books (and never return them) and the contributions are often old, uninteresting books that wouldn’t bring a nickel at a yard sale and so languish in the box. And a good number of those are self-help books that attracted attention (or “trended” as we say today) in their heyday but now whose pages yellow in boxes and attics. So health and diet fads, inspirational psychology or spirituality, apocalyptic threats to society, “get rich” quick schemes, and so on that had their day in the sun are now put in my little library. Perhaps the contributor thinks someone else might find them useful.

With the Black Lives Matter movement finding a center stage in current events, a subsequent spate of books on what is known as Critical Race Theory or some similar theme is crowding into the best seller lists. These are perhaps self-help books for White people uneasy and remorseful about their apparent privileged status in today’s world.

I live on an affluent side of my town (by birth, not by wealth I jokingly qualify--my parents bought the house in 1962, when the neighborhood could be called “transitional,” for about $16,000). And in this town, like most anywhere in the U.S., “affluent” also means predominately White. But recently it is not hard to find juxtaposed yard signs on our properties: BLM signs on one side of the front walk and a construction company’s sign on the other side. The irony is not lost on me--the owners hedging their bets by proclaiming solidarity with marginalized folks while they invest in remodeling projects to further gentrify their property. Or as Stokely Carmichael said, “What a [White] liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.”

I don’t believe the Bible is infallible, but I do tend to buy into its notion that I don’t have to carry the guilt from the wrongs of my forebears. “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20). To the extent that Critical Race Theory posits that racism is “systemic”--that it has happened to a group collectively--may have valid points. But if it chooses to ignore our biases are individualized. It (CRT) does not seem to tolerate the freedom for self-assessment, I should expect to find many of these current best-sellers in my Little Free Library not long in the future.

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