The film Origin summarized ideas presented in the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Our discussion group, held on February 18, 2024, generated ways that the Eight Pillars of Caste Structures are maintained in the United States today.
Notes from Caste: The origins of our discontents. Isabel Wilkerson, 2020
by Suzanne Zilber from Class Aware: Class and Classism in Congregational Life 2023
The ideas generated by the 9 discussion participants on 2/18 are under each pillar description. We wanted to share these ideas with the congregation.
India and the US have used similar “methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols. Both countries kept their dominant caste separate, apart, and above those deemed lower. Both exiled their indigenous peoples – the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States- to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group – Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States, – to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.” 74
“African-Americans” and the Dalits bore the daily brunt of the taint ascribed to their very beings. The Dalits were not permitted to drink from the same cups as the dominant castes in India, live in the villages of the upper-caste people, walk through the front doors of upper-caste homes, and neither were African-Americans in much of the United States for most of its history. African-Americans in the South were required through the side or back door of any white establishment they approached. Throughout the United States, sundown laws forbade them from being seen in white towns and neighborhoods after sunset, or risk assault or lynching. In bars and restaurants in the North, though they might be permitted to sit and eat, it was common for the bartender to make a show of smashing the glass that a black patron had just sipped from.” More restrictions extended to religious institutions. 128 “Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs, and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation”. 129
“Every act, every gesture, was calculated for the purpose of reminding the subordinate caste, in these otherwise unrelated caste systems, of the dominant caste’s total reign over their very being. The upper caste, wrote the nineteenth century author William Goodell, made ‘the claim of absolute proprietorship in the human soul itself.’” 140
She notes 8 pillars that societies use to keep caste structures in place.
- Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
In 1858, South Carolina Sen James Henry Hammond stated that in the enslaved Africans, the South had ‘found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand…Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves.’” 131
- Religion was used to both support and oppose slavery
- The idea of God creating humans a certain way is used against transgender people.
- The chant: Jews will not replace us
- Images of Jesus as a white person – which was driven by the tendency of Mediterranean countries to value whiteness.
- Lower class British Isles paganism was attacked
- Heritability – differs on whether it is by mother or father by culture
- This is just still true
- Endogamy – restricting marriage to people within the same caste. “By closing off legal family connection, endogamy blocks the chance for empathy or a sense of shared destiny between the castes.” 109
- A discussion participant who entered a mixed race marriage 30 years ago said that she feels this has gotten worse, not better over the years. And others noted how there are less cross class marriages and across religion marriages.
- Purity versus Pollution – the sanctity of water, pool closures. The hierarchy of trace amounts of genetic inheritance.
- People homeschooling their children
- Segregated school systems caused by redlining communities (Redlining was the practice of not selling homes to Blacks in certain parts of a city)
- The trend in Ohio toward funding private schools with money intended originally for public schools
- Occupational Hierarchy – state laws prohibited performing any labor other than farm or domestic work, prohibited selling or trading goods of any kind, below non-English speaking immigrants. “The historic association between menial labor and blackness served to further entrap black people in a circle of subservience in the American mind. They were punished for being in the condition that they were forced to endure. And the image of servitude shadowed them into freedom.” 135 Blacks were allowed to be entertainers, because “merriment, even if extracted from a whip, was seen as essential to confirm that the caste structure was sound, that all was well, that everyone accepted, even embraced their station in the hierarchy.” 137
- During the FDR New Deal period, southern states lobbied for farm workers to not receive employment protections including Social Security and Unemployment.
- Care workers, who are predominantly Black women, receive poor pay
- Black athletes are exploited and measure like they were when slaves.
- Wage theft
- The history behind tipped workers started with Blacks after Emancipation only being offered tips and no wages. There is a two tiered system for tipped and nontipped workers that disproportionately impacts Black women. (See the movie Waging Change on Prime Video and donate to One Fair Wage and sign the petition for Ohio ballot initiative)
- General overinvestment in college rather than skilled labor trainings.
- Dehumanization and stigma – it is hard to dehumanize an individual so those who seek power and division attach “a stigma, a taint of pollution to an entire group.” 141 “Individuality is a luxury afforded to the dominant caste. Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.” 142 If some humanness or achievement shone through, it had to be punished. “In America, a culture of cruelty crept into the minds, made violence and mockery seem mundane and amusing…” 149
- Racism everywhere
- Unbalanced coverage of who gets arrested, difference in photos of white and Black defendants
- Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control “the only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to pre-empt resistance before it can be imagined.” 151 Lynchings, use of ritualized torture for minor infractions. “ “But from the time of enslavement, southerners minimized the horros they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed. ‘No one was willing, ‘ historian Edward Baptist wrote, ‘to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture. ‘ ” 47
- Police in the US started out as hunting groups for fugitive slaves.
- People continue to feel hunted by the police
- Sundown towns still exist in the south (where Blacks cannot be safe there after dark)
- Black kids have to learn how to speak to police officers.
- The physical pain associated with poverty: having to hold several jobs, jobs hard on the body, not being able to take time to get medical care.
- Little Italy in Cleveland may still be unsafe for Black people as evidenced by actions taken during Black Lives Matter period.
- Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority – “signs, symbols, and customs [were designed] to elevate the upper caste and to demean those assigned to the bottom, in small and large ways and in every day encounters. “ 160 Examples were requirements to show deference, how to board a bus, what they could wear, “The laws and protocols kept them both apart and low. The greater the chasm, the easier to distance and degrade, the easier to justify any injustice or depravity.” 164
- Segregation
- This provides the framework for Dehumanization and stigma
- Requirements to not wear natural Black hair
The following is not from the book: There are 14 characteristics of Fascism identified by political scientist Lawrence Britt in 2003. The fascist regimes studied were Hitler’s (Germany), Franco’s (Spain), Suharto’s (Indonesia), and Pinochet’s (Chile). Some features overlap with Wilkerson’s 8 pillars of caste.
Tolerance for torture as a means to ensure system security.
Identification of scapegoats as a unifying cause
Controlled mass media – Statements like the Press is the enemy of the people
Fox News Algorithms on social media
Religion and government are intertwined
Labor power is suppressed – as related to occupational hierarchy
Fraudulent elections (or the striving to create them!)
- The Senate system does not create proper representation and was put in place for Slave holding states
- The Electoral College also gets in the way or representation and has resulted in presidents who did not win the popular vote.