“White people embrace narratives about forgiveness,” wrotethe essayist and author Roxane Gay after the massacre, “so they
can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.”
It is the fixed nature of caste that distinguishes it from class,a term to which it is often compared. Class is an altogether sepa-rate measure of one’s standing in a society, marked by level ofeducation, income, and occupation, as well as the attendant char-acteristics, such as accent, taste, and manners, that flow from so-cioeconomic status. These can be acquired through hard work andingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity. If you can actyour way out of it, then it is class, not caste. Through the years,wealth and class may have insulated some people born to the sub-ordinate caste in America but not protected them from humiliat-ing attempts to put them in their place or to remind them of theircaste position.
Tied conveniently as it was to what one looked like, member-ship in either the upper or the lowest caste was deemed immuta-ble, primordial, fixed from birth to death, and thus regarded asinescapable. “He may neither earn nor wed his way out,” wrotethe scholars Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in DeepSouth, their seminal 1941 study of caste in America.
Bhimrao Ambedkar came to theUnited States to study economics as a graduate student at Colum-bia, focused on the differences between race, caste, and class.
Look into Ambedkar's writings on race, caste, and class.
These tenets, as interpreted by those who put themselves onhigh, would become the divine and spiritual foundation for thebelief in a human pyramid willed by God, a Great Chain of Being,that the founders would further sculpt in the centuries to follow,as circumstances required. And so we have what could be calledthe first pillar of caste, Divine Will and the Laws of Nature, thefirst of the organizing principles inherent in any caste system.Wilk_9780593230251_all_3p_r1.indd 104 20/6/5 8:28 AM
Given Wilkerson's introductory chapters on knowing and understanding history, I'm heavily disappointed this is the singular reference in the book to "The Great Chain of Being". It's not even indexed in the end.
The underlying idea of the scala naturae across a huge swath of western history is really the thing that gives rise to the problems of American history which she is attempting to bring to life here. Missing this part of the bigger picture is a serious flaw.
Does she skirt it rhetorically so as not to give fuel to the idea that "this is how things have always been?" arguments?
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 1st ed. 2020. Reprint, New York: Random House, 2023. https://amzn.to/40KnGyB.
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Las castas. Casta painting showing 16 racial groupings. Anonymous, 18th century, oil on canvas, 148×104 cm, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico
The surplus of life’s labor is not sufficient to con-tinue bearing the burden of a caste system devoted tocontrolling the many so a few can indulge in egotisti-cal displays of privilege on a dying Earth. The more ofhumanity’s labor we devote to maintaining the system ofdomination, the less that is available to secure life’s wellbe-ing and the more rapid the living system’s collapse.
for: caste system, caste, inequality, carbon inequality,
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parantheses
new adjacency
This exclusionary argument has serious connotations for our times, where Indian cultural identity has been projected as Hindu from ancient times despite overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary, and hence cannot pass without criticism.
She offers no alternative to "Indian cultural identity" being "projected as Hindu from ancient times".
majorly married within their gotra
This makes little sense, because in most parts of India, people seek to avoid marrying within their gotra (seeing that as marrying within their own family).
I
COVID-19 response shows the caste system within healthcare system as low wage workers disproportionately have less protection and less communication channels to understand what's occuring.