ROW Episode 24

In this episode we attempt to raise our consciousness about one of the deepest and most challenging problems facing the United States, namely, anti-Black prejudice. We do this by sharing illuminating highlights from, and offering reflections on, the book entitled “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we attempt to raise our consciousness about one of the deepest and most challenging problems facing the United States, namely anti Black prejudice. We do this by sharing illuminating highlights from, and offering reflections on, the book entitled Cost by Isabel Wilkerson. I'm doing this in recognition of the truth that silence in the face of flagrant injustice affords permission for that injustice to continue with impunity. The time has come for us human beings to all stand in solidarity together and stand together with those who are unjustly oppressed, really from a place where our hearts and our souls are engaged. As we have often talked about during this series, if we're to build a better world and a different future from the one we have to first acknowledge the difficult truths and choices that have led us to where we are today. We need to then accept responsibility for the choices that we've made, create a vision of something different that we want if we don't like where we're at, and then design the steps that will take us from where we are to where we want to be. I've been trying to educate myself on how did we get here in terms of the race challenge in this country and frankly everywhere in the world but particularly in the United States. So I've been reading and trying to educate myself, and I thought that something fun and interesting, definitely fun for me, and educational for me to do, was to read Cast, by Isabel Wilkerson. The first thing that I was struck by when I read this book was understanding, as Ms. Wilkerson puts it, that slavery was an American innovation and not just an unfortunate thing that happened to Black people. This was really quite eye opening for me. Slavery was an American institution that was created by and for the benefit of the elites and the dominant caste, and enforced by the poorer members of the dominant caste, who chose to ally themselves with the dominant caste so that they could better their lot as much as they could. The next thing is understanding that this was a totally arbitrary construction, and one based on the theory of caste, which was really, again, an eye opening concept for me. What that means is caste is an arbitrary construction in which you fix the rankings of human value and usefulness that sets a presumed group of people, who are supposedly more supreme than others and better than others, against a group that is presumably inferior to others. But it's all just really a social construct. It's just something that human beings made up, has no basis in reality. As Isabel Wilkerson points out, cast is therefore the, I love the way she puts it,"the operating system for the economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation, just as," she says, and I'm using a lot of her imagery and language here because it's so powerful, just as she says"the DNA is the code of instructions for cell development." It's really about, Which groups have power and which don't? Which group is worthy of access to resources and which group is not? And it's also about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence. Simply by assigning roles in society to different groups, when we play those roles long enough, as the author points out, we come to believe that they're preordained, because we forget how these roles evolved and how we were the ones who cast people in these roles. Then we come to believe that this is just the natural order of things, and this is the way things should be. The next thing that the author said that really struck me was that America is a house that has flaws in its original foundation that we need to fix. Just as if we had a house, if we discovered that in the original planning and design there were flaws in the foundation, we would want to fix it before the house collapsed. Just as the studs and the joists and the beams in a house and the infrastructure of a building are not visible, but they're actually what frames the building and holds it up, so too, these flaws about our perceptions of other people, how to treat people whose skin color is different from ours, particularly African Americans, these distortions of reality are all invisible and hidden. What I love about this book is that Isabel Wilkerson then sets about to uncover what she calls the eight pillars of caste. The eight pillars that hold up the system that are invisible to us, they've just become part of the operating system of how we think as well. Now, her research is based on studying three systems of caste around the world. The Indian system of caste, the system set up by the Nazis in Germany, and the system set up in the United States using the mechanism of slavery and then beyond that. She argues, very successfully, that these eight pillars comprise hidden false assumptions and beliefs that drive us and that we've come to accept unthinkingly. This is one of the themes that we talk about a lot in Reimagining Our World, that we're driven by these unconscious thoughts and perceptions and ways of interpreting and understanding the world. If we can bring these to the surface, then we're in a position to decide, Do we want to keep these? What's the cost of thinking this way? What's the cost of the behaviors they yield? And maybe we can cast these out and replace them with more ennobling perceptions and beliefs. The key point here that these pillars are based on false assumptions, on distortions that are there just for the convenience of the dominant class. And they have become the means and the justification of cruelty. Let's look at these eight pillars, because I find them fascinating. The first is the concept of divine will and the laws of nature. It's the first organizing principle in any caste system. If you want to justify why it needs to exist, then the best way is to say the Creator or God wants us to be like this. For instance, in the Indian caste system, apparently the story goes back to the story of creation and the establishment of the four varnas, that are the four basically main castes. The Brahmins being the highest caste were apparently created from the mouth of Manu, the all knowing, and they are the philosophers, the sages, the priests. Then from the arms of the Creator came the Kishatriya, and forgive me for butchering the pronunciations here. They are the warriors, the protectors, and the rulers. Then from the thighs come the Baishya, the merchants, the traders, and so on. And then you have the feet, the Shudra. Who are the servants and the bearers of burden. And then you've got that group that is beneath, really the unmentionables in some sense also known as the untouchables or the Dalits, who are beneath even the feet of the Shudra. They're not to be touched and not to be seen. Now, we move to another framework, a religious framework, if you like, for justifying the caste system in the United States. You have the story in the Old Testament of the Great Flood and the story of Noah. Apparently Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Noah ends up cursing one of his sons, Ham, because Ham enters the tent when his dad is asleep and happens to be naked, and he sees him naked, goes out, and tells his brother,"Oh our dad's naked." And anyway Noah, the father, gets very upset and then curses this son and his brother and his son, Canaan, and all the generations to follow. And these three sons then spread around the world and have descendants. And the descendants of Ham moved to the South and are supposedly the dark skinned folks. The justification for treating African Americans as slaves and the Africans that they forcibly kidnapped and brought to the United States to work here as slaves, the justification was that they are the progeny of Ham, and therefore it is part of divine will that they should be treated this way and be at the bottom of this rung of hierarchy. The second pillar of caste is what Ms. Wilkerson refers to as heritability, which means that it's a limiting belief that says once you're born into a particular caste, You are stuck there for life, and there's nothing you can do to get out of it. Unlike class, where you can move from one class to another through your own efforts, by getting an education, by working hard, and so on, you can't move out of your caste, no matter how wealthy you become, no matter how much money you earn, no matter whom you marry and no matter how famous you become. Even celebrities who are Black weren't able, and still aren't very often able to break out of this mindset. Once you're born into this system, you have your place in society and you better stay in your place. Then the third pillar is endogamy, which means controlling marriage and mating with the goal of keeping the caste separate and protecting the bloodlines of those who belong to the upper caste, supposedly. That means you restrict marriage to those within the same caste. You have this system in India, you had the system in the American colonies, and you had it in Nazi Germany. It also ensures that you keep resources within a caste, right? And also affinity, a feeling of having a personal stake in the happiness and fulfillment of another human being. You make sure that it doesn't go beyond your caste, because then the whole system would collapse. Indeed, 41 out of 50 states in this country ended up passing laws that made intermarriage between black and white a crime punishable by fines of up to 5, 000 dollars and up to 10 years in prison. When you combine this system with the ban on immigrants from places that were not European for much of American history, you see that the goal of all these laws is to control breeding and to curate the population of America. On to the next pillar, the pillar of purity versus pollution. When you look at India, you see that people of the lower castes are often required to stay a certain number of steps between 12 and 90, depending on the castes involved, from someone of a dominant caste. Sometimes people had to wear bells to alert the higher castes to their presence so they wouldn't pollute the environment. In some instances, some had to drag a thorny branch to wipe out their footprints or to prostrate on the ground as a Brahmin passed by. In Nazi Germany, Jews were banned from stepping onto the beaches at their own summer homes for fear of polluting those waters. They were also prohibited from using public pools. In the U. S., our caste system African Americans were prohibited from using white fountains and had to use horse troughs. Bedsheets for black prisoners were kept separate from bedsheets for white prisoners. Even when folks died, their bodies were kept in a corner of the dead house, away from the corpses of white folks. It's just a crazy system. It makes you shudder when you think about it. They weren't allowed to enter stores and they weren't allowed to try garments on or to touch the clothing for fear of polluting it. Another thing I learned from this book that actually stunned me, was that Nazi Germany actually looked to America for inspiration in creating a legal prototype of creating a caste system, because legally speaking, you have to be able to categorize people before you can separate them. And when they looked at the U. S., they saw that the U. S. alone, of all the other caste systems, created a system based on racial absolutism. In other words, the idea that a single drop of African blood or varying percentages of Asian or Native American blood could taint the purity of someone who might otherwise be presumed European. But this one drop rule was too much, even for the Nazis. And that was something I learned that just, that was horrifying. All right, the next pillar is the idea of that you divide labor based on one's place in the hierarchy. The entire caste system is based on the idea that there's a class that has to do all the menial duties, the scut work, the dirtiest work, the most demeaning and the least desirable of jobs. This whole system confirms the economic purpose of a hierarchy to begin with, a caste system hierarchy. So there were artificial parameters set for the roles of each caste. Blacks were allowed to do menial work and to do a certain amount of husbandry and agriculture. They were also at some point allowed to enter the field of entertainment, but even that was cynical, because they were forced to have good cheer, as a weapon of submission to assuage the guilt of the dominant class and to also humiliate the enslaved. The system was set up to ensure African Americans did not step out of their place, by prohibiting by law that they couldn't go into the arts or trades or business as an artisan or mechanic or shopkeepers, and in the rare areas where they were allowed to enter, they had to get a license and pay a sum of money, which was a barrier to entry. So there were lots of roadblocks put around them to ensure that they were never able to break out of this cycle of of denigration. The next pillar is that of dehumanization of a group and stigma. It's harder, as Ms. Wilker Wilkerson points out, to dehuman ize a group than it is a person who's standing in front of you who has human emotions. So you start by attributing pollution, blame, or taint to an entire group. Then it's much easier to strip away individuality. For instance in Nazi Germany, the Jews were blamed for Germany's losses during World War I, and for the shame and the economic straits of the country after defeat. Therefore stigma was attached to the group as a whole. Then when they arrived at the concentration camps, they also stripped them of all individuality, their clothes, their hair was shorn off, anything that kind of made them stand out and distinguished was taken away, and even their names were taken away, and they were replaced with numbers. In America, at the auction blocks and labor camps in the South, blacks were stripped of their names and given other names that they had to respond to. And they have historically been blamed for many of the social ills in this country. Both Jews and African Americans have been subjected historically to gruesome medical experimentation. For instance, in this country, doctors practice performing surgeries on African American, particularly gynecological surgeries on Black women without anesthesia, so that they could better advance their skills. The next, seventh pillar is terror and using terror and cruelty as a means of psychological and physical control. The goal here is to preempt resistance before you even start thinking about it. The use of ritualized torture for arbitrary infractions in the Nazi era. And both, the Confederate era and post reconstruction era in this country, they use the same techniques. The use of the whip was really prevalent in the United States. When you read the story of the Trail of Tears, which was the forced removal of the indigenous peoples of this country from their ancestral homelands you read that Andrew Jackson, who was the president of the United States, who oversaw this forced removal used bridal reins made of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding. That level of cruelty and terror. The last pillar is the idea of inherent superiority of the dominant class versus the presumed inherent inferiority of the lower class. To have a caste system, you've got to have this belief in these alleged inferiority and superiorities. And on the basis of this belief, you then allocate people to permanent servile status. The goal is to always prevent the lower caste from stepping out of their place. Again, in the United States and in the Third Reich, both African Americans and Jews were prohibited from the sidewalks and were forced to walk in the gutter and give way if somebody from the dominant class came. In all three systems the lower classes could not be dressed better than the upper caste or drive better cars or have nicer homes. The Dalits in India, there was a law even dictating the length and the folds of the woman's saris. And in some U. S. states, there were laws specifying which fabrics people from the enslaved classes could wear. Answering with the wrong tone or insolence or an expression of the face or walking a certain way, all of these had to be fixed and punished in order to keep people in their place. Now, some of the consequences of these erroneous perceptions and false assumptions and really destructive mindsets is the following. These pillars in the caste system represent a distortion of the human spirit. They dehumanize both the oppressed and the oppressor, and they create unnecessary and degrading competition and jealousy from lower classes of whites with respect to blacks, because anytime the lowest class succeeds, it's a slap in the face to those who are somewhere in the middle who feel like,"Oh my gosh, my turf is now being taken over." It's just crazy. So competition sets in. And the other thing is that people, this is just human psychology, people become what you tell them they're capable of becoming. They will rise or fall to meet the level of societal expectations. So we end up stunting the growth of a group of people, assuming and telling them that they can only attain minimum achievements. We therefore draw, deprive them and ourselves as a society at large from the unique gifts and talents that the oppressed group is born with and can bring to us. In short, the cost is way too high. So what can we do to change our perceptions and don new ennobling and life affirming perceptions. We've identified how we got here, what the problem is, how the caste system was created, that it was created, what are the hidden assumptions that hold it up. So now what can we do? We need to first of all change our perceptions. So I want to offer some thoughts here. How about if we recognized that the human soul has no race or gender. It just is. It is the sign of the creator within us. What if we came to believe and understand that all human beings are created noble, and that what characterizes and distinguishes one human from another is not the color of their skin, which is immutable and a fixed characteristic in which they had no choice, just like their height and their weight and, the color of their eyes. What distinguishes them is actually their qualities of heart and qualities of character, which we all have a choice in crafting. What if It's the deeds, those deeds that are more worthy and are more in service to other human beings and are expressions of the highest part of each individual? What if it's those deeds that actually matter and on the basis of which we should distinguish human beings as opposed to skin color? What if we believe that we're all created equal in the sight of God, and that in fact we should aim to treat others not only as well as we would want to be treated, but better than we would want to be treated? That all must be accorded equal rights, privileges, and opportunities? What if the purpose of our lives is to develop certain virtues and qualities that are indispensable for our well being and our advancement as spiritual beings? Just like the job of the fetus in the womb of the mother is to grow organs and limbs, that it needs to function well once it's born into this life. And what if free will is a gift that's given to all human beings, regardless of the color of their skin, and that all should be able to exercise in order to live lives of nobility and dignity in which we can all actualize our God given potential. What if we were to imagine that we're all born with certain threads? We can't choose our life circumstances and we can't choose our parents and our families, but, recognizing that we're not responsible for things that are out of our control, but what we will be judged on is that It's the patterns that we weave, whether the threads are made of silk or coarse wool, or whether they're beautifully colored or not. We've lived with the false assumptions that certain groups are superior and others inferior for so long that we've accepted it as though it were a truth, which it is not. What if we were to replace it with a truth that is a social truth, and that is the law of the oneness of humanity, which, like the law of gravity and physics, operates on us whether we want to acknowledge it or not. We wouldn't dream of building an airplane, I think I've mentioned this once before, without taking into account the law of gravity. It would be a foolish thing to do. And yet we blindly go about creating social, political, economic, environmental institutions that fail to take into account the law of oneness. Ultimately, we have to accept that racism is a profound deviation from the standard of true morality. Having changed our mindsets and thought about developing these new mindsets, what can we actually do in our day to day lives to break these artificial barriers between the members of the caste, this whole system. It just needs to be knocked down, right? So what can we do to bring it down and replace it? I have two thoughts that I want to offer and both of them come from an amazing role model that I think we can all learn from. I believe in looking at successful role models and looking to see what they've done and then learning from them as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel. The role model I want to look for, some of you may be familiar with this individual and others may not, is someone I consider to be one of the greatest peacemakers of the 20th century. His name was Abdu'l Baha. He was a prisoner in the Ottoman Empire for many years, and then eventually after the Young Turks Revolution, was freed and chose to come to the United States in order to promote the message of peace. One of the topics that was closest to his heart, and one of the greatest challenges that he saw American society facing, was this challenge of racial prejudice. He set about to do his best to try to bring amity between the races. He did a couple of things that I want to share with you because it shows how a human being can do something that helps shatter these false constructs. One of the things he did when he came to visit in 1912 when these miscegenation laws were very strong, laws that prohibited intermarriage between black and whites in 41 states, he encouraged the black and white to intermarry. There is a particular example of this amazing couple, Louis Gregory, and his wife. Louis Gregory was an African American gentleman whose grandmother had been a slave. He married a British woman, a white woman by the name of Louisa Matthews. They had a beautiful marriage, because their goal in getting married was to demonstrate that black and white could come together and live in unity and on the basis of equality and to demonstrate that love. They saw the beauty of the creator in each other. Beyond that, Mr. Gregory ended up traveling around the country sharing a message of peace and love. Both of them took enormous risks. In breaking the social mores of their time by exercising courage and getting married and then traveling around the country to talk to others about how they could break the social mores. The second example that I wanted to draw on of something Abdu'l Baha did was. There's a story of him being invited to host a luncheon, a social luncheon at the home of Agnes Parsons, who herself was a woman of high society here in Washington, D. C. She did not have any African Americans on her guest list, because in those days socializing was segregated in D. C. and blacks and whites didn't socialize together. So Abdu'l Baha invites Louis Gregory, the same individual, to come meet with him at her home before the luncheon. And when the luncheon is called, Abdu'l Baha goes to the table and says,"Where is my friend, Mr. Gregory?" Mr. Gregory was going to leave, but he's called in and Abdu'l Baha says,"He must join us for lunch." So that's rule number one. The fact that the dominant class doesn't socialize with African Americans. Rule number one broken. With just one word, one sentence. The second thing that Abdu'l Baha did, which was amazing, is that he quickly reshuffled the places, and he gave Louis Gregory the seat of honor to his right side at the table, without making a fuss. He just made sure that there was a place for him, invited him to sit. Now, you'll know that there are protocols involved, and who sits where, and all of this craziness those social protocols were broken as well. Abdu'l Baha didn't make a fuss about it and just went on and gave his talk, which happened to be about the oneness of humanity. When I read stories like this, I think to myself, Sovaida, what can you do in your life to be mindful in all situations. Are there opportunities when I can mindfully make sure that we have a diverse group, that my African American sisters and brothers are also represented in whatever kind of gathering, whether it's my kitchen table, or at my dinners, or going out for a walk, or whatever it is, going to the pool, having a conversation, inviting them to speak, making sure they're represented on all the panels and talks and in the workplace, make sure that we are hiring people of diverse backgrounds so that we don't miss out on the amazing contributions and talents that people from all backgrounds bring to bear. Those were the thoughts that I wanted to share with you today I hope that you have found this useful and interesting. I highly commend this book Cast by Isabel Wilkerson to you, if you haven't read it. There's also a wonderful biography of Lewis Gregory, for those of you who might be interested, written by Gail Morrison. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.