Isabel Wilkerson’s book CASTE (CASTE: The Orgins of Our Discontents) is reverberating in my heart and mind like crazy. I think everyone should read it.  Or at least go see the movie based on it, called ORIGIN. It’s in theaters now.

Eye-opening. Troubling. Heartbeaking. 

 

Given the new lens, I totally see how caste (as opposed to what we here in the U.S. refer to as “class” — upper class, middle/working class, underclass) has shaped the vast majority of families’ fortunes, earning potential, and the near impossibility of raising ourselves from the class we’re born into to positions in which our mere financial survival is no longer the paramount pressing concern.

 

The system was rigged from the get-go by the upper caste

 

The system is so rigged by the upper caste that the lower castes frequently end up behaving like crabs in a crab trap: the ones in the middle pulling down every climber caught in the same trap who tries to escape it, in a mad scramble to avoid becoming among the worst-off among the survivors.

 

And since America was founded using indentured labor from white European immigrants (who could earn their freedom after serving a master for a number of years) plus kidnapped and enslaved tens of thousands from Africa (who could never earn freedom for themselves or their progeny, no matter how long they served their masters), the caste system has been hard-baked into our national character and legal system.And far too few people have thought about it long and hard enough to say, “Hey, wait a minute! This isn’t right! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, dammit!!!”

 

The GI Bill didn’t extend to Black veterans who fought during WW II 

The freedom and liberation they won, as soldiers, for people in other nations did not exist for them in their own.  They couldn’t buy a home anywhere they wanted, enroll their children in schools with adequate funds to give them a superior education, or create a financial legacy large enough to pass to their children.

 

All of the others in their deeply sunk crab trap (including poor white families, whose fortunes were meager but who were still considered a caste above Black folks simply because of their alabaster European heritage) kept pulling them back down, even as the privileged male white caste passed laws deeming Black folks’ actions criminal simply because of their color: loitering, not stepping off the sidewalk when a white person was on it, looking into a white person’s eyes, drinking from a white person’s water fountain, using a white restroom, stealing a loaf of bread to feed hungry children, trying to go to the nearest emergency room in a hospital, etc.

 

I have always tried to walk in other people’s shoes as best I can

 

I have often wondered if I could have accepted (as millions of Black Americans have had to) being viewed as sub-human and less worthy of decent treatment than the upper caste.  As a semi-privileged white person assigned female (erroneously) at birth, I have experienced some of the discounting and disconcerting assumed privilege that occurs when I’m in the presence of privileged white men (wolf whistles, ham-handed invitations to screw, unwelcome, unwanted touching, too close proximity, and the eyes that hyper-focused on my breasts when I had them, etc.).

 

Those experiences alone (including a near rape by a farm hand who grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go until I miraculously thought up an escape maneuver that threw him for a loop long enough for me to get away) have been quite enough to inform me about what it’s like to be considered another  person’s perceived “toy” or object of desire/attention/misuse/abuse.

 

But I have never experienced what it’s like to be deemed “an untouchable” or as someone deemed less than entirely human and unworthy of respect, deference, or even common courtesy.  I fear I would have been among the lynched, because I’m not sure I could have taken that kind of treatment (an absolute lack of agency) without losing my shit and calling someone out on it, which would have sealed my fate. And alas! Most of the people who were lynched didn’t even get the satisfaction of pushing back before they were hanged. They were lynched for drummed up charges more often than not! Coming across as uppity as I am would have gotten me killed!  I’m absolutely sure of it.

 

But perhaps a steady diet of implied and actual terrorism — which most Blacks face — would have “educated” me out of in-your-face resistance while I was still a child.  That’s what Black parents face every time they give birth to and try to raise a child.  “At what point –how soon –should we start telling this precious child about the way the white world sees and treats people with skin our color? They have to know, so they know how to protect themselves from micro and macroaggressions.”

 

And when they educate them –as surely they must, to increase the likelihood that they will survive — the children will then begin to perceive the white folks around them as potential saboteurs, threats, users and abusers… and the cycle repeats and repeats and repeats!

 

NOT THAT LONG AGO…

 

ALL this stuff was happening (still is happening in too many households and communities) when I was a teenager 55 years ago. I remember being in the Deep South and becoming friends with a young white woman who had gone to college in the North. Her friends and family considered her “uppity” (they told me this directly) for wanting to improve her chances in life by getting a college degree!

 

So, how much worse was it for young Black people who merely wanted to be considered worthy of a fair shot in life?  It wasn’t happening for them down there, and in the North even those who went to college and excelled had a harder time landing upper caste positions than white high school dropouts and even white felons.  Why? Because of caste.  It was the rare “miracle” who became victorious, usually as entertainers or sports figures: Sidney Poitier, Nichelle Nichols, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali. And even when they succeeded, they couldn’t stay in the same hotels in which they spoke or entertained. Those were off-limits white establishments, you see!

 

It makes me furious just thinking back on it, AND I’M WHITE!!!

 

Anyway, if the above is news to you, or even if it isn’t, I highly recommend CASTE: The Origin of Our Discontents OR that you go see ORIGIN. (In fact, I recommend seeing the movie before you read the book. It has scenes in it that will inform you in ways you will never be able to un-see. It’s devastating!)