We will need a bigger boat: caste reflection: the origin of our dissatisfaction

Until that morning, not too long ago, it had been a while since the social pecking orders pushed me back into position. It’s not that you’re not aware of the hierarchy. In fact, as a person of color in the United States, I would argue that it is difficult for everyone to know the invisible lines in their place. But sometimes I forget.

I arrived at a high-class tower in Manhattan to work for the residents. As usual for “help”, I was directed to the entrance to the service of the building. There, we took a cargo elevator to the back door of our apartment. At the entrance to service, the building manager informed me that the cargo elevators were ironically not in service.

Well, there’s nothing else but I’ll come back on another day. At least that’s how good managers saw it. The problem has been resolved. Have a good day.

“But wait,” I asked. “I only have a backpack, so can I use the passenger elevator instead?”

After that, I had an increasingly frustrating call between myself, staff from various buildings, and finally, representatives of my clients. In the end, I ended up going back to where I started. The manager told me again – a little less friendly this time, but getting on a fully functional passenger elevator was out of the question for me.

With an incredible ride that allowed me to return to the office, I was forced to play the problem in my mind. Instead, old, nasty questions resurfaced. Why are we humans obsessed with social hierarchies? What drives these stories and totems of absurdity to be kept at points of absurdity, as if they have separate entrances to “help” or a thin piece of dangling fabric?

Her 2020 book Caste: The origin of our dissatisfactionPulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson jumps deep into the edges to get some answers. Supported by her driving prose and obvious passion for subject matter, the book reads like a ghostly individual’s work. During her time, it seems as if to document the plunder of racism like in previous works. The warmth of other sunsshe got a glimpse of the more insidious evil in the work behind it all.

Early in the book, Wilkerson recounts the incident during Martin Luther King’s visit to India in 1959. At an event for the “Untouchables” family, the lowest in India’s caste system thousands of years ago, Dr. King was introduced as an unruly companion, from the United States of America, initially postponed the statement. But over time, Dr. King realized it was a keen insight. “Every black people in the United States are out of control,” he wrote later.

According to Wilkerson, caste is the ghost of a civilised machine. It is the ancient evil behind American racism and other systems of oppression, and the “infrastructure of our division,” she says.

I’ll chase

As she grabbed the scent of caste, she began to track it down. Using her in-depth research, interviews and her experiences as an American African-American woman, like Ahab of the present day, Wilkerson chases quarries through time and space, chases the flames of round staff I did.

She found evidence of caste at the East Texas Lynch Party in 1921, and later discovered it again at the 1934 Nazi bureaucratic conference at the Nazi bureaucratic conference assessing options for isolating Jews from Aryans. . At a recent meeting in Delhi, caste was there again in a tense conversation between a Dalit (uncontrollable) scholar and an Uppercustodian. She found caste in violent political convulsions following the unprecedented election of blacks as president of the United States. She spots a quarry waiting for her in the basement of her house.

Wilkerson defines castes as “a ranking of human values ​​that set the estimated superiority of one group of groups relative to the estimated inferiority of another group based on ancestors and often invariant properties.” It’s there. Looking at the lens of caste, she finds herself a caste system based on ancient Indian religions, Nuremberg’s methods that became obsessed with the eugenics of Nazi Germany, and, as she calls “forms,” ​​seemingly different human values. It reveals the common thread that connects the ranking system. Shifts in the US, implicit, racially based caste pyramids. ”

She identifies eight characteristics, or “pillars,” of caste shared by these systems, such as dependence on God’s will and the natural order to justify human rankings. Other pillars include the control of marriage and mating (within gamy), the definition of occupational hierarchy, and most importantly, the means of police the boundaries of these departments, allowing everyone to enter where they belong. It involves ensuring you stay. The use of fear and cruelty to keep people in their place is also an incredibly common feature of the caste system.

I know your place

Awareness of your place within the system is a clear indication that you are in the presence of a caste. When I remember fondly that it was the language of caste in the days when people in the past, everyone knows their place. That caste is said when a skilled American presidential candidate is dismissed as a “day rental” simply because she is a woman (or, worse, a non-white woman). It was caste in 2012 that George Zimmerman concluded that Young Trayvon Martin had no business in Zimmerman’s Florida area, based on his dark skin and clothing apparel choice. And after Zimmerman decided to put him in his place, it was the caste that led to the death of the young man.

Another indication of the caste is the absurd length of people going to carry it out. For example, take some water. Wilkerson devotes an entire section of the book to how different caste systems police the use of water to maintain hierarchy. In India, for example, Dalits were not allowed to drink from the same cups as people from higher castes. In Nazi Germany, Jews were not allowed to step into the beaches of their summer homes. And of course, Jim Crow America has all the water rules: separate water fountains, isolated pools, etc. One of the most moving stories in the book is about a young black boy who is “generously” permitted to do so in 1951, in which he stays in an inflatable raft, and under any circumstances Unless it touches water so it can be contaminated and used by white patrons.

I used to think that those who supported Jim Crow’s laws were simply ignorant. However, once I passed through the evidence of Wilkerson’s gathering, another possibility emerged. Perhaps these people knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the absurdity of a separate pool. Still, they committed to the bits and put international ridiculous laughs at risk because of the higher principles of caste and the narrative of superiority it represents. From this perspective, caste is more than selfish or ignorant impulses. Caste is a belief system, or religion, that gives meaning to life. And like any religion, it is something that supporters spend a considerable amount of time supporting them. There is no act of too ridiculous or fatal in caste services.

This religious enthusiasm for keeping people in their own place is something that the caste system has allowed them to endure. From the Bronze Age to the Information Age, caste was the fixture of human civilization. Wilkerson likens it to a virus that exists in the human mind. Like a virus, caste enthusiasm alternates between periods of activity and hibernation. It also mutates to adapt to the environment. Wilkerson’s narration proves that the US racially-based caste system is particularly strong in this respect, and Africans who preceded the establishment of the country via Jim Crow’s era. It has been proven to have been mutated from permanent enslavement of the various “reclaiming our nation.” The movement is currently trending.

Bigger boat

So how do you fight enemies such as caste? Wilkerson’s evidence points to a larger, more unruly opponent than expected. Caste says, “Because it is deeply embedded in the human subconscious, even if a law is passed and a declaration made to protect it, the law may not be comparable to its durability. .”

In light of such a difficult task, when the book unexpectedly moves towards spirituality on the final page, the sudden change of tone feels like a desperate h pass on Wilkerson’s part. jawshe will need a bigger boat for work.

To defeat the caste, Wilkerson calls on all of us to exercise “radical empathy.” Radical empathy, as she defines it, connects with others “from a deep place that reveals your mind, as your mind perceives you in the pain of others.” is. After that, after a less-than-possessed dare, her plea for radical empathy, becomes a perfect prayer that we “transcend the origins of our dissatisfaction.”

However, given the book’s persuasive case of the established nature of caste in human experience, I found this sudden angel to be a rather frustrating way to finish the book. . The need to create a social hierarchy of human values ​​is a feature of the species, and when it is not a bug, but an impulse that comes naturally to us, like the need to eat or reproduce. Suddenly, you choose radical empathy. It also contrasts with the plain realism shown in the rest of the book. She might ask people to stop breathing.

But perhaps I was essentially expecting too much from the secular work of social commentary. The book’s last-minute turn to religion acknowledges the limitations of a materialistic approach to such issues. Secularism has always been difficult to navigate the inner realms of the human mind, especially with regard to the evils that humans do. But if there is hope to defeat the caste, it is where we have to go. Aptly, the book’s final chapter is titled “The Heart Is The Last Frontier.”

And to travel towards the turbulent seas of hearts, you will actually need a larger boat that can handle the irrational currents that are furious inside. As Albert Einstein of Avowed Agnostics once said, Become it. “The book’s closing religious language suggests that these questions about what to do with regard to caste are better suited to explorers of all cultures that are not limited to purely material understandings of reality: Ancient prophets, mystics, gurus, and messiahs.

In my religion, for example, the issue of caste and heart changes is central. When Jesus of Nazareth began his public ministry, he declared that he was leading a new kingdom “the last will be the first.” And to be part of this kingdom he famously said that a person must be “reborn” and in itself be a supernatural heart change.

Religion was the source of many suffering in the world. For example, in one of the greatest ironies of history, the religion “least of these” is often conscripted in caste services. Still, as long as the inner realm of the heart in which the caste lives remains out of reach for secular exploration, we are able to chart ambitious courses past the origin of dissatisfaction. It appears that they may need the help of religion.

As for caste, we are all Lovecraft protagonists standing at the edge of reason, staring at the vast landscape of Eldrich Mysteries. I’m grateful to Wilkerson for taking me this far. But if I push first, I need a guide who is well versed in the inner workings of the human mind. If caste hideouts are beyond reason, then perhaps so is the key to undoing.