We looked in June at how one function of policing in this society is to enforce America’s caste system. It is about protecting defined hierarchies:
No matter how far down they are on society’s social ladder, some people want someone lower than them. They need someone lower than them. Someone they can look down on and say, well, at least I’m not THEM. Black people have filled that role for centuries. Not as long as India’s untouchables maybe, but the principle is the same.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson tells Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” that race is an insufficient frame for understanding what in the United States is essentially a caste system based on skin color.
“Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that’s used to determine one’s place in that,” Wilkerson says. The very concept of race dates from the transatlantic slave trade — 400 to 500 — years whereas caste is thousands of years old, argues the author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Being “white” is an American innovation.
Economic uncertainty, I would add, is as imprecise as racism for explaining the political movement behind Donald Trump. Just as the liberal knock is that white working-class conservatives who support the Republican Party are voting against their best interests.
Caste creates an invisible, false pedestal for those ranked higher by the system, Wilkerson explains, one they are born with and do not recognize [timestamp 11:25]:
“The other thing is that it can create easily activated resentment at anything that does not track with how one perceives oneself. In other words, the perception that someone who has been deemed lower, or that that one perceives to be lower than them, any advancement by someone in that group can be seen as a greater threat than it otherwise would be. There would be a greater investment in maintaining the caste system as it is in maintaining the hierarchy as we have known it to be. And I think that one way that it shows up a lot is that we often say in our era … that white working-class voters will often be acting against their own interests in opposing policies, for example, that may be geared toward working people. Like universal health care, for example. But from the lens of caste it would not be surprising that they might oppose policies that they fear could threaten their own status by assisting those that they perceive as being beneath them.”
They may perceive maintaining that hierarchy as having a higher priority than improving their own status.
Or, as President Lyndon B. Johnson once observed, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
George Lakoff argued in “Moral Politics” that preserving the conservative moral hierarchy is a defining feature of the conservative “strict father” worldview:
Lakoff gives that moral hierarchy more intellectual credit than it is due. It is about pecking order and a function of baser programming. It is about who is the alpha dog in the pack, about who are his lieutenants, and who are the submissives. Caste simply further reduces to this elaborate system to a single element: power.
Wilkerson wrote at length about America’s enduring caste system last month in the New York Times:
Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.
This is a much broader subject than a blog post and crude illustrations, I’m afraid. The fact that there are few pyramidic images floating around that combine to illustrate how race and class interact in America, plus the fact that we are still dealing with Jim Crow and the legacy of the Confederacy over a hundred years after the Civil War is testimony to how effectively America has avoided confronting the issue.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.