Caste is a social marker in India as the inalienable category into which every Hindu is born. This accident of birth into a particular caste then moulds the choices that person has at his disposal later in life. This is the academic aspect of caste. There have been concerted efforts since independence to equalize opportunities available to people as a whole, without reference to the caste into which they were born. Reservation of seats in government bureaucracy and legislature to people of the depressed castes is the world’s most successful affirmative action barring violent revolution and resultant turmoil. With this in mind, I opened the book and was shocked to find that a similar, if not more discriminative, caste system is prevailing in the US even though it is not called as such. Caste system is a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the inferiority of other groups. In this sense, caste is at the centre of American society and maintains the 400-year old social order. This book explains the segregation and discrimination the blacks had to endure for nearly 250 years till the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century and the invisible yet subtle ways in which the old prejudices spring forth even at present at the slightest trigger on presumed racial attitudes. Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American author of the bestselling book The Warmth of Other Suns and has won the Pulitzer Prize. She has taught at Princeton, Emery and Boston universities and has lectured at more than 200 venues across the world.
The word ‘caste’ originated from the Portuguese term ‘casta’ meaning race or breed. The Portuguese were the earliest European traders in South Asia and applied the term to the people of India upon observing the divisions in Hindu society. The sense of ‘breed’ is especially fitting as each caste is endogamic in nature. The Indian caste system is several millennia old, but it is not racial in nature. There is a wide chasm between the highest and lowest castes, but genetic studies reveal that all of them belong to the same race. Well, scientific studies do not pronounce judgment on race, but tell instead that there are very few genetic variations among them, which is essentially the same thing. However, caste system solidified in the US along racial lines with the arrival of African slaves in the American south in 1619, which became the birthplace of the caste system where it was most brutally enforced. It spread to other places from here, but nowhere as harsh as in the South. Wilkerson proposes that three caste systems can be discerned in human history – that in India, the US and in Nazi Germany where the Jews were evicted from all positions of honour and dumped at the bottom ladder virtually overnight. This classification is preposterous as the German case revolved around the social ideology of a political party which could be easily disposed of once that party was ousted from power. It sought to wipe off the Jews who were deemed lower caste. This doesn’t compare with the Indian and American instances which are more rugged. Anyhow, the book is structured around this artificial divide. The author also claims that even with her minimal exposure to Indians, she is able to tell upper and lower castes apart in mixed social gatherings. She comments that the upper castes display certitude in bearing, demeanour, behavior and a visible expectation of centrality (p.31).
Wilkerson dwells on the development of slavery, and by corollary the caste system too, in some detail. The inhuman condition the slaves were forced to live on is a painful reminder of an incredibly cruel era in American history. The white masters exerted absolute ownership on the body and mind of the slaves. They could kill them with impunity, have sexual relations with any slave woman they chose, break up a family by selling off one or more members to different buyers and demanded unconditional loyalty in return. It is hard to imagine the numerous ways in which men lorded over other men upon the flimsy pretext of skin colour. The colonists were unable to enslave the native population and they solved the resultant labour problem by importing Africans in large numbers. With little further use of the original inhabitants, the colonists exiled them. Some measly laws were enacted in the interim period to lighten the burden on slaves. In 1740, the work hours of slaves were limited by law to fifteen. This was no great concession to them because prisoners on hard labour were required to work only ten hours at that time. Even after Abolition and Civil War, the physical plight of slaves did not markedly improve as the occupying unionist forces returned power back to the confederates after a few years of ‘Reconstruction’. The period from this moment to the Second World War is known as Nadir. The blacks had acquired education by this time and were unified enough to feel collective outrage at the naked discrimination. With the enactment of civil rights reforms in the 1960s, equality was achieved in law even though some amount of casteist exclusionism is still prevalent.
This book portrays the brutal conditions that existed in American society to keep the blacks firmly under the yoke. American laws on immigration and marriage restrictions in the 1920s were models for the Nazis. It provided segregated facilities for coloreds and whites in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses, steam boats and even in prisons. Race was indicated in birth certificates, licenses and death certificates. In many jurisdictions, interracial marriage was a crime punishable by up to ten years’ imprisonment. Ban on intermarriages stayed in the law books for long. Alabama was the last state to repeal it – can you believe it? – in the year 2000.There was a referendum to settle the issue and 40 per cent still voted to keep the rule in the statutes. Most whites refused to associate with a black. Shaking hands with a black man caught on camera made a candidate lose the mayoral polls in Birmingham, Alabama as late as 1961 (p.54). Blacks and whites were permitted to go to the same schools only in the 1970s. The caste system elicited extraordinary effort from the lower castes just to stay afloat in society. A black man who managed to become an architect in the nineteenth century trained himself to read the blueprints upside down because white clients would feel uncomfortable by having him on the same side of the desk as themselves. Wilkerson recounts many instances of racial abuse in the book.
The author analyses the common factors of all caste systems and presents eight of them in some detail. The foremost among them is divine sanction and permissive sacred texts. In the case of India, the Shudras – the lowest among the four Varnas – emanated from the Creator’s feet while Brahmins originated from his face. The colonists likewise found appropriate verses from the Bible to justify slavery. Noah is said to have cursed his grandson Canaan to slavery while piqued by the boy’s father, Noah’s own son, chancing to see his nakedness while sleeping. Leviticus specifically permits the believers to take slaves from religious heathens.
A peculiar characteristic of the racial segregation in the US was the graded differentiation it extended among whites also. Southern and Eastern Europeans were left out of the top tier as also all Asians. In a Japanese man’s case, the US Supreme Court decreed that ‘white’ meant not skin colour, but the race ‘Caucasian’ which present more inconsistencies. People residing at that time in the Caucasus regions were actually deemed lower in the hierarchy.
The author brings out strident arguments to exhibit the amount of injustice still prevailing in American society. However, she seems to cross the line of objectivity at times and provide a biased review of things. Even with the brutal system of slavery in place, it cannot be denied that the impetus to discard the system was kick started and sustained by whites. When the South refused to accede to laws abolishing slavery, it was again the whites who embarked on a civil war to bring the South in line with a loss of 7,50,000 lives in that war. This means that the way forward is one of reconciliation and assimilation and not by seeking reparations from the whites now living in the US for crimes committed by their ancestors. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black to become President by riding on the back of large scale support from whites. But the author claims that Obama won ‘despite the bulk of the white electorate’ (p.314). This is simply mean. Whites constitute 76 per cent of the population and they traditionally vote for Republicans, but Obama obtained 43 per cent of the white votes. This is more than the support garnered by Bill Clinton, another Democrat candidate, when he managed only 39 per cent of the white votes. Does the author demand that every white should vote for a candidate without considering partisan loyalties, if the candidate happens to be black? In another chapter, she puts up another disgraceful remark that Obama was elected because he was the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white woman and hence was not a descendant of the slaves. Some of the examples of the present day discrimination tends more towards the fictional as in the case of an Indian PhD holder wearing an oversized shoe because he was afraid to ask the upper caste salesman to search for and find a fitting size.
The book is recommended.
Rating: 3 Star
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