I’ll Vote for That: ‘Race’ as ‘Caste’

Review by Bill Doughty––

Although science says there is no such thing as race, that doesn’t mean there is no “racism.”

Under a guise of racism, a dominant class can subjugate, discriminate, and try to control a subordinate class, including by suppressing or subverting their right to vote –– based on superficial differences.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson makes the case for recasting, so to speak, “racism” as “casteism” in her indispensable book for our time: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House, 2020), an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

As for “no such thing as race…”

Scientists call ‘race’ an artificial construct. Wilkerson writes this, citing a great Navy veteran scientist:

“Two decades ago, analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. ‘Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,’ said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. ‘We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.’” (Venter is a former Navy corpsman and Vietnam War veteran; we have featured his work and his autobiography several times here on Navy Reads.)

Now DNA kits ordered by mail show “that race as we have come to know it is not real,” Wilkerson says. “It is a fiction told by modern humans for so long that it has come to be seen as a sacred truth.”

Wilkerson interviews a Nigerian-born playwright, who says, “You know that there are no black people in Africa. Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who embraced the nonviolent teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, saw the issue of racism framed as casteism. Sixty-three years ago, in February 1959, he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled to and within India, where MLK self-identified as “an untouchable.” The Kings visited the grave of Gandhi, laid a wreath, and prayed.

In India, people are born into castes that are supposedly divinely dictated. Discrimination against people considered part of the lower classes was acceptable, lawful, institutional. While civil rights laws in India in the 1940s (and in the United States in the 1960s) have made it illegal to discriminate, "both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not."

Casteism in the U.S. began more than a century before we became a nation.

Actions 

Beginning in 1619, Europeans brought Africans to the English colonies as property and to the very bottom of a social hierarchy. Confronting the morality of the institution led eventually and with great upheaval to the Emancipation Proclamation and American Civil War nearly 250 years later. But like it or not, racism, constructed within a framework of casteism, had been already institutionalized.

“In the decades to follow, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste system that would become the cornerstone of the social, political, and economic system in America. This caste system would trigger the deadliest war on U.S. soil, lead to the ritual killings of thousands of subordinate-caste people in lynchings, and become the source of inequalities that becloud and destabilize the country to this day.”

“After the Civil War, Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war,” Wilkerson writes. There was a backlash to “take our country back.” The Lost Cause. The Big Lie.

South Carolina's Hammond

Wilkerson contends, “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenge is flawed without it.”

She presents dozens of examples of the horrors inflicted by the dominant class in America over previous centuries, including torture, riots, and lynchings.

We learn of the horrid senator of South Carolina James Henry Hammon, who said, “God created slaves for us.” Hammon raped women, including his own daughter, and sexually assaulted four of his nieces. We also read the crushingly sad story of Willie James Howard, a 15-year-old black boy who made the fatal mistake of having a schoolboy crush on a white girl in 1943 in Grand Gulf, Mississippi. And, we hear of ludicrous practices under endogamy, miscegenation, and eugenics laws and theories.

A eugenics book published in 1916 by an American, Madison Grant, titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” became popular with white supremacists.

Adolf Hitler called it his bible.

The Nazis were inspired by how the American upper class treated blacks and especially indigenous peoples. But, fascist Germans of the 30s and 40s escalated and intensified the evil when they exterminated millions of people based on eugenics and claims of Aryan supremacy.

Hitler and Nazi casteism

A caste system set up by Hitler and the Nazis justified the torture and deaths of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, and people with disabilities. To the Nazis, it was “obvious Jews were a separate race.”

When Einstein, a Jew, escaped Germany as an immigrant to the United States, he was shocked to discover he had moved from a country of castes to another country where, this time, people of color were considered a subordinate class.

Once we accept the reality of caste systems, it helps us understand the point of view of others.

That includes many people in the privileged dominant class who feel fear and resentment when they start to lose their privileged position. “A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy,” Wilkerson contends.

Will the dominant class –– through fear, anger, and resentment –– do anything, accept anything, to try to retain the power hierarchy? Think: sedition, treason, secession.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of the Oath Keepers, including the far-right group’s Texas-based founder, on charges of seditious conspiracy related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Oathkeepers stack into the U.S. Capitol, along with other Trump supporters, during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2022.

Reactions

People confronted with scenes of outright violence respond in different ways. Some –– like those who attended lynchings of black people in the American South, or German citizens who swooned when Hitler’s stormtroopers returned from invading Poland –– react with joy. Other people may be outraged at first but later find justification for ignoring or even condoning the violence.

For example, despite being an advocate of slavery Secretary of the Navy James K. Paulding reacted strongly after he witnessed what Wilkerson describes as “barefoot men and women locked together with the weight of an ox-chain in the beating sun, forced to walk the distance to damnation in a state father south and riding behind them, ‘a white man on horse back, carrying pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing.’” Paulding said he was outraged to see “such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity … a villain, in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without being charged with a crime but that of being black…” [Paulding, SECNAV from 1838 to 1841, was a contemporary of David Dixon Porter, Isaac Hull, and John Rodgers, serving with them on the Board of Navy Commissioners. Paulding was an ardent defender of slavery and called abolitionists “satanic.” He is also remembered for being opposed to steamships and engineers in the Navy.]

The armed services have come a long way in promoting equality and dignity, especially since the 1960s; nevertheless, military readers will cringe at some of the lack of empathy and outright prejudice and bigotry in the past.

MA1 Laymoun Ferguson lights a candle on National Holocaust Remembrance Day at Commander, Fleet Activities Sasebo. (MC3 Mackenzie P. Adams)

Wilkerson reminds us that during World War I, black soldiers were segregated not only from their fellow white warfighters but also from their European counterparts in uniform.

“American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were ‘inferior beings,’ no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that it was of the utmost importance’ that they be treated as inferior.

“The fact that military command would take the time in the middle of one of the most vicious wars in human history to instruct foreigners on the necessity of demeaning their own countrymen suggests that they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself.”

Black American heroes like Pvt. Burton Holmes and Cpl. Freddie Stowers, both killed in action, were blocked from receiving the Medal of Honor, despite nominations by their white officers who witnessed their bravery and “broke with caste” to nominate them. [Holmes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously in 1919; Stowers’s sisters accepted the MoH on their brother’s behalf in 1991, presented by Navy/WWII veteran President George H.W. Bush.]

Veterans of both world wars came back from the warfront to confront Jim Crow racism and the construction of more monuments to losing leaders of the Civil War.

The 90-foot tall, 17,000-square-foot carving at Stone Mountain, Kennesaw, Georgia, honoring the Confederacy. Carving began in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and a year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The carving was dedicated by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970. It was completed in 1972.

Retractions

Confederates lost the war but won the peace, according to Wilkerson, especially when thousands of monuments, symbols, and namesakes to traitors who fought to defend slavery were set up throughout the United States.

Local governments removed statues of Robert E. Lee, including in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, last summer, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2017 after public hearings. In New Orleans:

“At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. ‘They are ashamed,’ he said. ‘The question is, why aren’t we?’”

Germany looks at its history “without blinking,” highlighting the shame of what the Nazis did –– and what good people failed to do; but, the Germans are neither ashamed nor too proud to confront their history. They reject the hate of the Nazis and honor the victims of the Third Reich.

Wilkerson notes that U.S. Confederacy monuments on pedestals such as those honoring Robert E. Lee –– as well as Georgia’s Stone Mountain, bigger than Mt. Rushmore, featuring Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson –– are up high so everyone has to literally look up at them. But in Germany, where there are numerous monuments to the victims but none to Nazis, people see stolpersteine, stumbling stones embedded in the cobblestones, each denoting a victim of the holocaust or other Nazi horrors. “Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect,” Wilkerson observes.

Stolpersteine commemorate the victims of the Nazis, who receive no monuments in Germany for their lost cause. 

Traction

Sailors raise the flag on MLK Day in Yokosuka, Japan, Jan. 17, 2011.  (PO2 Devin Dow)

MLK’s famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” He marched in Selma for voting rights. He realized that voting rights in a full and open democracy were key to ending casteism.

Some of Wilkerson’s own personal first-hand examples of dealing with casteism, particularly in a restaurant, dealing with a plumber, or while flying first class, seem petty and unnecessary in the context of the moral universe presented in the bulk of her book. However, I can understand if others feel differently.

On the other hand, Wilkerson’s conclusions at the end of this great book are as big as an arc can be, and her optimism is inspiring:

“We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.

“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”

                A view of our galaxy. (NASA)

Wilkerson concludes that the answer is in our hands: “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” Isn’t the answer truly in our hands when we hold a good book –– or a ballot?

Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 President Barack Obama presented Wilkerson with the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."