Beyond Caste: thoughts on Isabel Wilkerson's bestseller

           Isabel Wilkerson’s landmark book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents opens our eyes to the harmful hierarchy of categories of race in the United States, by comparing it to India’s well-studied caste system, and the Holocaust resulting from Nazi Germany’s caste system (which in large part was based on U.S. Jim Crow laws). Caste, as Wilkerson so ably shows us, has roots in biblical old testament beliefs. Post-WWII Germany, Wilkerson holds up as an example of how to dismantle caste. Germany has multiple monuments to those harmed, such as a bronze plaque in the sidewalk outside the door of every home where a lesbian, Jew, or gypsy was kidnapped from and later murdered in a concentration camp. Germany and zero monuments to those who inflicted the harm, unlike that U.S. that lionizes slave owners and has scant public accounting and honoring of individual’s harmed be slavery and the later Jim Crow segregation whose mindset continues to harm Black folks today.

However, I suggest Wilkerson’s book Caste is the tip of the iceberg. There is more to explore about caste, and how to change caste-based behavior. Going beyond caste as a hierarchical ordering of categories, we can explore other ways that our Western, Indo-European, belief in the notion of categories and hierarchy as resulted in other forms of dominance, abuse, and destruction. And we can look at alternatives that are embraced by other cultures, which result in what systems scientist Riane Eisler calls “partnership” structured societies. Instead of believing that everything is divisible into discrete hierarchical categories, separated by what Wilkerson calls “boundaries” or “lines”, we can embrace the world view of many indigenous peoples and even Nichiren Buddhism, which see everyone, everything, and even space and time itself, as an interconnected whole that is imbued with life. In this non-Western worldview the macrocosm is the macrocosm, and vice versa. What appears to be two, such as oneself and one’s environment, is actually one; the indigenous Japanese word “funi” describes this view of reality—two but not two. In short, instead of thinking of us versus them, or humans versus nature, we could think—“we are one.” When everyone and everything is part of yourself, of your family, of your group, no longer do you destroy Mother Nature and all her inhabitants by blowing up the tops of mountains for fossil fuel extraction. Because mountains are sacred. Mountains are members of the family with whom you converse in reciprocal relationship, like is practiced today in many indigenous communities in the Andes mountains of South America. You can imagine many ways our behaviors would change as more and more we embrace “we are one”.

How can we move from racist domination of caste towards partnership? Are education and laws enough? In regards to post WWII Germany’s example of educating all school children about the horrors of the holocaust, and numerous memorials to invoke reflection about the atrocities committed against so many siblings in our human family, Germany also legally enforces laws against hate speech (unlike the U.S. which considers hate speech to be protected as freedom of speech). The book Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment notes that several years after World War II the leaders of many nations met and conferred about how to prevent increasing racism from creating another holocaust. Under the auspices of the United Nations, most countries agreed to outlaw the dissemination of racist ideas. Entered into force on January 4, 1969, the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination reads in part,

Article 4

States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of persons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination and, to this end, with due regard to the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rights expressly set forth in article 5 of this Convention, inter alia:

(a) Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred . . ..

But the United States declines its responsibility to “. . . declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred . . .”. Instead of punishing hate speech, the U.S. protects “dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred” as freedom of speech. But is punishment by law enough?

Fear of jail reduced the amount of hate speech in Germany, but it did not eliminate it. Racist hate speech continues, as recent headlines show:

·         April 14, 2020, “Neo-Nazi Provocations on the Rise in Germany”.

·         September 16, 2020, “Germany far right: (29) Police suspended for sharing neo-Nazi images”.

·         December 1, 2020, “Neo-Nazi Sturmbridage 44: How serious of a threat is it?”; its subtitle reads, “Germany has banned the extreme-right group known as Sturmbrigade 44 or Wolfsbrigade 44. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer accused the organization of aiming to ‘rebuild the former Nazi state’.”

These headlines show us that those who spout hate speech still embrace the notion of hierarchical categories and that their personal category is at the top of that imagined hierarchy. Minds and hearts have not been changed by legislation.

It's like Lundy Bancroft’s work with domestic abusers. In his book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, Bancroft notes that the convicted domestic abusers he attempted to reform, through court orders, were mostly white men whose jobs put them in positions of power over others (such as a policeman, or CEO). Most of these abusive white men would profess to have seen the error of their ways, and only wanted to be free and reunited with their wives (who they had been convicted of abusing), promising they would never do it again. But the evidence showed time and again that those men were lying through their teeth, saying what they knew the person in authority over them wanted to hear. Once these men were freed and reunited with their wives, the men resumed abusing them. The only times (which were very rare) that Bancroft saw a convicted domestic abuser truly change his ways was when every single person in his social circle shunned him because of his violent behavior. To not be completely shut out of his social circle of family, friends and work colleagues, he becomes motivated to do the hard work to find respectful ways of relating to his wife, instead of abusing her. However, if the convicted abuser has even one person in his social circle who approves of his abusive words and actions, according to Bancroft’s research, the abuser has zero motivation to change.

The same is true with caste and racism. If a racist has no one to sympathize with, he will necessarily behave in ways his social circle finds acceptable. But if he can find even one racist buddy to fuel each other’s hatred against anyone they perceive as different than themselves, he is unlikely to change. You can make those racist buddies’ hate speech illegal and throw them in jail (where they’ll likely meet even more racist people like themselves), like is done in Germany, but they will not have a change of heart.

One unrepentant example that comes to mind is Charles Manson. The category of people he hated (and had brutally murdered) were folks he considered to be in the “in crowd” in Hollywood—a crowd he had tried, and failed, to enter. Manson’s behavior perhaps points to the reasons of other mass murderers, which for a time were referred to in the press with the moniker of “going postal”, which referred to a disgruntled former postal worker who machine gunned down his former co-workers. Wilkerson might argue that Manson and the more recent mass murderers “going postal” were almost all white men, and that the notion of white male supremacy influenced their extreme aggression against other people, whether the other people were white or not. I agree that belief in categories and hierarchy are the root causes of racism and all forms of domination.

On another note, Wilkerson raises the issue of changing demographics in the U.S. fueling fear in many people born with (or passing with) white skin. One forecast is that in 2042 whites will no longer be the majority of the U.S. population. Right wing fundamentalist white Christian groups seem to be fanning the flames of fear and hatred of increasing numbers of people of color in the U.S. population. I’m guessing those churches don’t teach the Sunday School song I learned as a child in a white Methodist church, which goes like this:

Jesus loves the little children

All the children of the world

Red or yellow, black and white

They are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Does all of this mean there is no hope of changing society to become more just, based on the vision that all are created equal? No. There is hope. Problems created by people can be solved by people. Adrienne Lafrance, in her recent article in The Atlantic about the danger of Facebook as a breeding ground of hate based on hierarchical categories that has devastating real world consequences, states, “We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives.” 

Lafrance’s envisioned alternatives appear to be technological in nature. Others such as Gandhi and Buddhist thinker Daisaku Ikeda promote education in critical thinking and ethics, and individual spiritual development and awakening (human revolution) as necessary for building peaceful and nurturing alternatives to Western society’s blind belief in categories and hierarchies. 

Here's an example of what an alternative to racism and all types of domination looks like. Were you one of the millions participating in the Women’s Marches around the world on January 21, 2017? If so, you experienced a powerful alternative—a sea of women and feminist men whose loving power was a sea of refuge, an embracing sea of oneness. No pushing or shoving. Only mutual respect and a clear desire for justice, in all its many aspects. When a pair of counter protestors stood on a curb in Washington, D.C. with their banner against women's reproductive freedom, they cowered in silence as the feminine masses like a mighty river flowed around them; for hours 1.2 million unified women pumped their fists in the air and in unison chanted, “My body, my choice!” as they passed by those two silent and blank-faced men who limply held their banner like deer frozen in the beam of headlights.

In other words, when hate speech is isolated and surrounded by people living truth with compassionate hearts, it withers. As more and more people open and develop their wise hearts of compassion and wisdom, with courage, to embrace the reality that we are one, we can turn the tide. And as anyone walking at the base of cliffs along a rocky seashore at low tide knows, when the tide turns, there is no stopping the tide. All are swept along in the tide’s cleansing flow.