As a follow up to my “how can I help” post, I’d like to double back on one of the books I mentioned. I have just recently finished reading Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson wrote The Warmth of Other Suns, which I read back when it came out, and gave 5* on Goodreads.
Caste just came out, so recently that there are references to the pandemic crisis at the end of the book. Her research, however, is about the “caste” systems in India, USA and Nazi Germany, and how they compare. She calls what we have in the US a caste system rather than simply racism and explains how people in the higher caste (in the case of the USA, it’s white people, especially white men) treat people in the lower and lowest castes. These are largely determined by race in USA, but not everywhere. India’s caste system is not based on race, but on heredity, religion, tradition. The Nazis of course established that the jews would be in the lowest caste. Interestingly, when the Germans of the 1930s were trying to determine how best to deal with their ‘jewish problem,’ the place they looked to study was the US. How Americans (white Americans) treated the negro back then was instructive and formative for the Germans in establishing their policies and practices. As we now know, it resulted in the deaths of millions of jews. Of course in USA, many black people have been lynched, tortured or otherwise abused in the 400 years of history.
Her book is a remarkable study – well researched and extraordinarily well-written. I enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and was furious and frustrated many times. How can the country that likes to talk about how “all men are created equal” treat people this way, based on the color of their skin.
Wilkerson writes at one point how she gave a lecture in the UK, recounting how so many black Americans had to seek political asylum with the borders of their own country (read Warmth of Other Suns). A person in the audience that day was from Africa, and came up to the author after the lecture. She said “you know there are no black people in Africa. Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yorubo, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just people.” “They don’t become black until they go to America,” she said. “Then they are black.”
Americans grow up with unavoidable unconscious bias about black people. It has always been thus and has only become more legitimized under President Trump. He didn’t create it, he just makes white elitism seem okay, even permissible. Interestingly, since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, no Democrat running for president has ever won a majority of the white vote. Jimmy Carter – a fellow southerner – came the closest with 48%. Whites have fled to the Republican party ever since. Only three Democrats have won the presidency since Johnson: Carter, Obama and Bill Clinton, another southerner, who won with 39% in 1992 and 44% in 1996.
And where are we now? With regards to the strenuous feelings radiating toward Muslims, Mexican and other non-white immigrants and blacks, it all seems to be getting worse, not better. How can people think we are making “America Great Again” during these times. We had a black President, and that seems to have stirred up the dominant caste, who turned to Donald Trump as their savior. We have yet to elect a woman President, and by the time the first woman from a major party nomination ran for President, 60 other countries had already had a woman head of state, including the UK, Germany, India, Australia, and many others.
Finally, I found the vignette about Albert Einstein interesting. Einstein – a jew – left Germany just as Hitler became Chancellor, and moved to the USA where he became quite well known. “The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro,” he wrote in 1946. “The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me,” Einstein wrote. “I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.” He used his fame to do so. He co-chaired a committee to end lynching. He joined the NAACP (I never thought of that – I have now also joined!). He spoke out on behalf of civil rights leaders.
Einstein chose what to do. I guess he can inspire us to consider the same. In the meantime, read this book, it is very good. Thanks Ms Wilkerson.
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