Caste summary

For some of us, it may seem crazy that we’re still fighting tooth and nail to push the message of Black Lives Matter. It’s been over fifty years since the civil rights movement in the US, but there are still so many signs that America is far from achieving equality. What’s going on? Why is lasting change so hard to come by?

While there’s been a lot of talk about systemic racism, what if we could look at American history in a way that not only explained how the system was created, but also why it’s been so hard to get rid of? This is exactly what happens when we look at things through the lens of casteism. Racism is one thing, but getting people to let go of generations of social hierarchy is something else.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

• the eight pillars of the caste system;
• the similarities between Jim Crow laws and Nazi laws; and
• how the US could learn from modern-day Germany.

The concepts of caste and class are often mixed together. But class is something a person can transcend through marriage, money, employment, or other avenues. Generally speaking, though, there is little hope of escaping the caste into which you’re born.

Casteism is also different from racism, though there are some important commonalities. It may come as a surprise, but the whole idea of “race” is a relatively new development, whereas caste has been around for millennia. However, in the US, the caste system has been built around ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.

The key message here is: Looking at caste alongside race and slavery can help explain the depth of America’s discontent.

The concept of race emerged in the early days of the transatlantic slave trade as a way to categorize and differentiate people. European colonists and explorers began using the word “race” in the context of encountering new people. And, as the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley put it, race became a tool for creating an “exclusionist form of race ideology” – especially for the English and North Americans, who used it to create very rigid caste lines.

But race is an entirely arbitrary and unscientific concept. For a perfect example of just how arbitrary it is, consider “Caucasian.” This race was invented in 1795 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine. Blumenbach loved to collect and analyze skulls. His favorite skull, the one that he considered to have the best shape, came from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia. So he decided that Europeans like himself should be given the name Caucasian.

It made little sense at the time, and makes even less now, in the age of DNA analysis. When the human genome was completely mapped in 2000, it was clearer than ever that all human beings can be traced back to a handful of tribes that originated in Africa and spread out to colonize the entire planet.

Race could have been used to categorize people using any number of arbitrary features, such as height, hair color, or eye color. But in America, it was skin color that eventually came to determine caste lines. Europeans became “white,” Africans became “black,” other people were lumped into categories of “red,” “brown,” and “yellow.” This is how people were identified. And based purely on skin color and race, this was how a person’s caste was determined.

Consider this: There is surviving documentation from 1619 that accounts for one of the first ships to deliver slaves to a British colony in America. And given the fact that the Civil War ended in 1865, that means African-Americans were considered property for 246 years, and have been considered free people for less than 160 years.

So, for those 246 years, a caste system was in place that positioned African-Americans as the most subordinate caste. During this time, other people migrated to America. Some, like Italian and Irish people, were also discriminated against and placed in subordinate castes.

However, in the years that followed the Civil War, things would change for some – but not for others.

The key message here is: The American caste system has proven to be resistant to change.

In the later nineteenth century, a broad category of “white” people took shape that included people ranging from Ireland to Eastern Europe. In America, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs became “white” for the first time in their lives. But for African-Americans, change was harder to come by.

Under pressure from Southern leaders, the federal government pulled back from Reconstruction efforts meant to give freed slaves a path toward equality. Instead, Jim Crow laws were established that created a new kind of slavery. This was a deliberate, government-sanctioned effort to keep the American caste system in place.

Through segregation, sharecropping, and the constant threat of violence and lynching, African-Americans were essentially kept at the bottom of the caste system. Those who tried to move up, either by starting their own Black-owned/Black-supported businesses or by moving north, often found their efforts thwarted by those in higher castes.

In 1951, when a Black veteran attempted to move his family to Cicero, Illinois, four thousand Italian and Polish residents protested with a violent rampage. But often, Black people were quietly kept out of higher-caste neighborhoods through a common practice known as redlining. This was a nationwide policy of denying financing and creating zoning restrictions that essentially kept African-Americans from buying homes in white neighborhoods.

The caste system works through such measures, but also through social conventions, such as white people refusing to use the term “mister” when addressing a Black man. Shaking hands with African-Americans was also deemed a forbidden practice in the South. As historian Jason Sokol explains, making such gestures would be “harrowing” and was considered a “cardinal sin.”

Children are extremely adept at picking up on social cues. If they see that their parents treat someone differently, they can carry that information with them for the rest of their lives. This is how caste systems continue to thrive from one generation to the next. These rules aren’t necessarily spoken aloud, but they get passed down nonetheless.

To really understand how a caste system operates, let’s look at the pillars that keep it propped up.

The key message here is: A caste system requires a set of foundational pillars.

There are eight pillars to every caste system. The first is Divine Will and the Laws of Nature. In India, the caste system has a religious basis that makes it hard to dislodge. There are ancient Hindu texts that speak of Manu, an all-knowing being who explained the social order. He placed the Brahmin at the top, followed by the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, and the Shudra. More castes were placed below these four, including the Untouchables. It was deemed that the lowest castes were paying a karmic debt, which meant they deserved their low status and must live it out.

A similar divine will has been used to maintain the American caste system. There’s an Old Testament story about Noah and his three sons, one of whom was Ham. One day, Ham walked into a tent and saw Noah naked, which caused Noah to curse Ham’s son, Canaan. The quote goes: “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” Some biblical interpreters suggest that Ham had black skin. And they’ve also read into a passage from Leviticus to suggest that slavery of heathens is fully endorsed. That passage reads, “Both thy bondmen and they bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are around you . . . ” 

Pillar number two is Heritability. This essentially dictates that one is born into the caste of his or her parents. For this to work in America, the colonists introduced a strange innovation into their patriarchal world. They made the mother’s status the factor that dictated the child’s caste. This way, children fathered by slavemasters wouldn’t be capable of rising above their designated caste. 

Pillar number three is Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating. Endogamy is marriage within one’s caste; this is something that has been brutally enforced in India, and throughout much of America’s history. Even the mere suggestion that a Black man has touched a white woman has often been cause for gruesome torture that ends in lynching.

Let’s move on to the fourth pillar of a caste system: Purity versus Pollution.

White supremacists have often talked about the need to keep bloodlines pure. Under the Nazi regime, Jewish people were forbidden to set foot on a beach, let alone go in water that might touch a pure Aryan German.

Likewise, African-Americans were long banned from public swimming pools. If a Black person was known to have been in a pool, it would have to be drained and cleaned before it was deemed ready for a white person.

The key message here is: The pillars of caste include an obsession with pollution and a process of dehumanization.

In 1951, in Youngstown, Ohio, a little league team had just won the championship game. So they all went to a local outdoor swimming pool for a celebratory picnic. All the boys got to swim except for Al Bright, the one Black boy on the team. Since some of the coaches and parents felt bad that Al had to sit outside the gate of the pool, the lifeguard found a compromise. Al could get on to an inflatable raft and he could be pushed for one lap around the pool. But under no circumstances could Al touch the water. It was an agonizing experience that Al would never forget. 

The fifth pillar is Occupational Hierarchy. You may have heard the argument that someone has to do all the menial jobs for a society to function. On the US senate floor in 1858, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina made this argument, stating that the Black “race” had the kind of “vigor, docility, [and] fidelity” required to perform “the drudgery of life.” 

The sixth pillar is Dehumanization and Stigma. This is a foundational part of the caste system, but it is an enormous undertaking, as it goes against what we should know in our hearts to be true: that we are all human beings – each no better or worse than the next.

If someone were to try to dehumanize a person who was standing in front of you, it probably wouldn’t work. The better tactic is to dehumanize an entire group. This is what the Nazis did to the Jewish community, and it’s what the US has done to African-Americans. In both countries, the people in the lowest castes were subjected to medical experiments and tortured for the amusement of the dominant castes. For example, at amusement parks in the US, there were “Son of Ham” shows, where people could pay money to throw baseballs at a Black man’s head. In this way and others, generations were desensitized to racial violence.

Stigmatization often goes hand-in-hand with dehumanization. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were heavily stigmatized. They were blamed for Germany’s loss in World War I as well as for the economic turmoil that followed. In the US, African-Americans have often been blamed for many of the country’s ills, from economic troubles to the crime rate.

In these cases, the humans within these groups lose their individual identities. Instead, they are lumped together, with everyone sharing the same traits. Only those in the dominant castes have the benefit of individuality.

The key message here is: The final pillars include terror and inherent inferiority.

The seventh pillar is Terror as Enforcement and Cruelty as Means of Control. This may sound like it speaks for itself, but it’s important to understand how much these final two pillars rely upon the complicity of those in the higher castes.

Whippings, hangings, and burnings were tools of enforcement and control that were used by both the Nazis and American slavers. But whereas Nazis would supposedly limit their whippings to 25 lashes, Americans delivered as many as four hundred. In both Nazi concentration camps and Southern plantations, these whippings took place in full view of everyone else in the low caste. It was both punishment and warning.

In America, hangings and burnings continued well into the twentieth century. Their victims were generally Black people who were deemed to have stepped out of line or acted in a way that defied their place in the caste system. Therefore, these monstrous acts of violence continued to be performed where everyone in the community could see the result. 

Finally, there is the pillar of Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority. This refers to the often-unspoken code that informs every interaction between the dominant and lower castes.

In India, the Dalit people who were in the lowest caste were expected to wear shabby clothing that reflected their inferiority. Likewise, lower-caste people are often expected to “give the wall” or otherwise move out of the way if they are in a public place and dominant-caste people are coming from the other direction. 

There is a long list of these kinds of expectations – behaviors and dress codes that are intended to reflect the lower caste’s inferiority. And it is often this pillar that can burrow into society’s subconscious and cause lasting damage.

In 1941, sharecroppers in the South were still being whipped whenever those in the higher castes deemed it necessary. In 1948, a tenant farmer in Mississippi was brutally beaten because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill. This is the kind of act that those in the highest castes saw as a step too far.

Some things have changed since the forties. Segregation, in terms of Jim Crow laws in the South, has ended. Civil rights legislation has been passed. But caste, in many ways, still exists.

The key message here is: In the second half of the twentieth century, people in the castes above African-Americans began to feel threatened by a changing society.

Once Jim Crow laws ended and legislators made efforts to correct hundreds of years of imbalance with acts aimed at housing, employment and education, the dominant castes began to feel threatened. Every step that the lowest caste took upward was taken as a sign that hundreds of years of social order were no longer secure.

Part of the reason for this fear is the fact that caste systems create group narcissism. The social theorist and psychologist Erich Fromm studied group narcissism and how people can come to define their self-worth through their membership in a larger group. When people overestimate their own position and hate everyone who differs from it, this is narcissism in action.

This hatred is one of the dire consequences of caste systems. And it damages not only those in the lower castes; the fear and hate eat away at everyone in the system. Nevertheless, when a person can transfer his personal narcissism to an entire nation, he can achieve what Fromm called “a euphoric, on-top-of-the-world feeling.”

These feelings are part of human nature, and they’re something the Nazis took full advantage of. History shows us that group narcissism, and especially racial narcissism, can quickly lead to fascism.

In America, racial narcissism has begun to take a toll on the higher castes. Following the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, some in the subordinate castes began to achieve elevated status in society. As a result, those in the dominant castes, especially some of their poorer members, began to experience higher rates of elevated blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. The fear of losing one’s place in society can be deadly.

It’s easy to look at an old photograph of the massive crowds of Germans who cheered Adolf Hitler and feel certain that you wouldn’t have been one of those people. But the truth is, all human beings can be made to feel insecure and rendered susceptible to propaganda. Falling into place within the social hierarchy comes quite naturally to all of us. It takes great courage to stand apart from the majority.

What often goes overlooked is that, when it came time for Nazi leaders to write new laws, they turned to America. From racial segregation and punishment, to rules about what certain people are allowed to wear, Nazi leaders borrowed from existing US laws. 

Nowadays, however, America could learn something from modern, democratic Germany.

The key message here is: Monuments and memorials can help support or dismantle the caste.

Just a few years ago, there were around 230 memorials to Robert E. Lee in the US. He was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He’s honored in southern states like Florida and Virginia, but also in northern states such as Idaho.

Such statues have long been tolerated and even celebrated. But then, in 2015, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu set in motion an effort to take down a statue of General Lee, as well as a statue of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

Public hearings were held. At least one angry Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police. But Richard Westmoreland, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Marines, made a strong statement when he pointed out that Erwin Rommel was, militarily speaking, a remarkable general, but Germans did not put up statues of him. “They’re ashamed,” Westmoreland said. “Why aren’t we?”

Instead, Germany has multiple memorials to the different victims of the Nazis. Throughout the country, thousands of markers carrying individual names are embedded in the sidewalks outside the homes from which victims were taken. Everyday, people in cities like Berlin are reminded of the names of people lost and where and when they died. They are humanized. They cease to be abstractions.

Meanwhile, in America, death threats were sent to contractors who were offered the job of removing the statue of Robert E. Lee.

What happens when the structural problems of the old house go ignored, generation after generation? You end up with the kind of heightened tensions that are fueling the protests and extremist politics we see in America today.

Things like the COVID-19 pandemic have shown how the effects of the millennia-old caste system are still wreaking havoc. People in the dominant castes have benefitted from health-care coverage offered through their jobs, while those in the subordinate castes have been forced to toil in “essential” jobs that often don’t provide health-care plans at all. The statistics from the pandemic have shown that the pandemic is disproportionately deadlier to marginalized communities. 

So how do we move forward?

The key message here is: We can support those who break the barriers, and we can chip away at the pillars.

There is no simple solution to dismantling a caste system that is hundreds of years old. Clearly, part of the solution is to make more people aware of the system in the first place.

But there are other things we can do in our day-to-day lives to make the system weaker. Foremost among them is to support people who find ways of breaking free from the subordinate castes. We can also make sure that people see us as individuals with things in common, rather than just parts of some group. More than one pillar of the caste system depends on dehumanization and on people of different backgrounds thinking they have nothing in common with one another.

One day, the author, who has African-American heritage, had to have a plumber come over to fix a flooding problem in her basement. The man who showed up was wearing a hat that hinted he had certain political views. The first thing he asked was, “Is the lady of the house at home?”

It wasn’t the first time she’d been asked this at her own house. And when the plumber was shown the basement, he seemed ready to do the least amount of work possible. But then the author mentioned that her mother had recently died, and she asked the plumber about his parents. 

Soon, the atmosphere in the room changed. He mentioned how mean his own father had been and asked how old the author’s mother had been when she passed away. Instead of doing nothing, suddenly, the man began to fix the problem at hand.

By simply opening up to one another, caste lines dissolved, and they were able to see each other as individuals.