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Wednesday
I’ve been so enthralled with the thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents that Julia and I made sure we saw Origins, the film based on the book, when it appeared in theaters. By viewing America’s treatment of Blacks through the lens of the Dalits (a.k.a. the Untouchables) in India and the Jews in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson clarifies how racism works in the United States. Sadly, if race operates as a caste, then it is much more deeply entrenched in the American psyche than many liberals, including me, have assumed.
To illustrate Wilkerson’s point, in today’s post I feature a poem by Langston Hughes and passages from Huckleberry Finn and Arundhati Roy’s Booker-winning God of Small Things.
Among other things, caste helps explain why impoverished immigrants coming to the United States didn’t feel an automatic kinship with oppressed groups already here. It’s understandable why people would have adopted America’s caste system upon entry: suddenly a big part of your identity is someone else being at the bottom rung of the status ladder.
To focus on one group, the Irish for centuries were treated like dirt by the British, and at first many Irish immigrants found life not a lot better when they immigrated to America. Indeed, many were treated worse than African slaves since, in monetary terms, their lives were worth less. After all, they weren’t prize chattel. But at least they could regain some self-respect by their white skin, a dynamic that is explored in Noel Ignatiev’s study How the Irish Became White.
The poor Whites that I grew up with in segregated Appalachian Tennessee—many of Scotch and Irish descent—were more openly and vocally racist than the rich Whites, more likely to use the n-word and engage in direct violence. (Upper class racism was more subtle, as Harper Lee shows in her sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird.) Hughes pours contempt on these poor Whites in his poem “Ku Klux”:
They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, “Do you believe
In the great white race?”
I said, “Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I’d believe in anything
If you’d just turn me loose.”
The white man said, “Boy,
Can it be
You’re a-standin’ there
A-sassin’ me?”
They hit me in the head
And knocked me down.
And then they kicked me
On the ground.
A klansman said, “Nigger,
Look me in the face —
And tell me you believe in
The great white race.”
I think also of the racist rant from Irish descendant “Pap” Finn in Huckleberry Finn:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ’lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—
Regarded as trash by the Judge Thatchers of the world, Pap salvages some self-dignity thanks to America’s caste system. If you want to understand the irrational hatred that many Whites had for Barack Obama—a hatred that propelled birther-spouting Donald Trump to the White House—look no further. Many of the Pap Finns who voted for him in 2016 were voting for the first time in their lives.
Now, I want to be clear there are plenty of Irish descendants who are not racist, starting with my wife, who broke free of the prejudices of her mother. The problems of caste, furthermore, extend far beyond the Irish. When Julia and I spent a year in rural Minnesota after graduating from Carleton College, I encountered anti-Black racism in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German descendants—which was a shock since I had gone north hoping to escape such prejudice. Even though there were few if any Blacks in the area, my first boss told me a racist joke on my first day and my second boss informed me that Blacks were little better than animals.
This is the point of Wilkerson’s book: the American caste system has always been available to anyone that wanted to make use of it because that’s how caste works. Democrats are currently worried about certain Latinos, especially white Latinos, gravitating to Donald Trump’s white supremacist views. If they are in fact doing so, they are traveling a well-worn path.
I don’t know a lot about India’s caste system, but God of Small Things shows me just how deep caste systems reach. In this tragic novel about an upper-class woman who falls in love with an Untouchable and sees the lives of herself, the man, and her children destroyed in the process, the author at one point reflects on where the tragedy begins. One answer is thousands of years earlier:
It could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
America finally got rid of its own miscegenation laws in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but that hasn’t made the beliefs go away.
In an excruciating scene, Roy shows us the violence that is used to prop up caste. “Touchable Policemen” have tracked down the kindly Velutha, Ammu’s lover, and while Ammu’s horrified twins watch from the shadows, they beat him to death. The author shows the violence comes less from the men than from the caste system:
The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness.
Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.Man’s Needs.
By adding sexism and classism into the mix, Roy shows that caste is not the only dynamic at work. Her novel shows how far the power structure will go to maintain power. As she explains,
What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn’t know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature’s pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God’s Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.
There was nothing accidental about what happened that morning. Nothing incidental. It was no stray mugging or personal settling of scores. This was an era imprinting itself on those who lived in it.
History in live performance.
Further emphasizing how the killing is systemic rather than individual, Roy writes of the policemen,
If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, any connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature—had been severed long ago. They were not arresting a man, they were exorcising fear. They had no instrument to calibrate how much punishment he could take. No means of gauging how much or how permanently they had damaged him.
Roy’s book is brilliant in part because it shows how inexorable the process is. If the central characters worship “the god of small things,” it’s in part because the big gods are not there for them. To borrow the title of Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus play, when there’s an “infernal machine” grinding them down, they find solace in small acts of love, which become everything to them. If it’s useless to worry about tomorrow, one lives day to day.
And if, in the process, one violates love laws—not only caste and miscegenation laws but also (in the case of the twins) incest laws—well, where else is comfort to be found? Unfortunately, the system makes sure the lawbreakers pay a horrendous price, which it does in a cold and efficient manner:
Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot, that morning in the Heart of Darkness the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.
After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.
America’s increasingly multicultural society is seeing far too many of these inoculation attempts. The liberal hope has been that Americans would come to embrace the pluralistic dream once they got to know each other, with Inclusion, Diversity, and Equality programs helping the process along. And in truth, there has been significant progress.
Unfortunately, we may have underestimated the staying power of caste and the extent to which certain fellow citizens are impelled by primal feelings “born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear.”
Further thought: Given the pessimism in today’s post, I should add that millions of immigrant descendants—which includes everyone other than Native Americans and those who were brought here by force—are appalled by caste racism. While caste helps explain why Trump has been as successful as he has been, millions of White Americans will still vote against him in the upcoming election.
