Episode 25: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents- Isabel Wilkerson Part 1

Welcome back to the Fake Ass Book Club!!! Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" was so heavy, Moni and Kat had to break it in half. Forgiveness please for our hosts as they struggle to pronouce words in English, Hindi and forget Einstein quotes, smh!. They also discuss if the N-word should be deleted from the lexicon. This episode is extra racey, so strap in, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Cheers! *Trigger Warning: Explicit language Also suicide is a serious matter if you or someone you love needs help please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. *Bacon Rebellion- https://www.worldhistory.org/Bacon's_Rebellion/ *Boondocks' Uncle Ruckus- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOFvO2XHZNc *Quote: Albert Einstein * “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” There are 8 Pilars of Caste according to Isalbel Wilkerson: We listed the first 4 below, we will list the other 4 in part 2 ONE: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature In the Hindu creation myth, The One created the highest caste from his mouth; the warrior caste from his arms; the merchants and traders from his thighs; the servants from his feet. The untouchables are below the feet of the servants. In the Biblical story of Noah, we have the story of the children of Ham, cursed to be slaves because his son Ham (who had black skin) had seen Noah naked. These tenets in both cultures led to a belief in a Great Chain of Being, a permit willed by God. TWO: Heritability (Moni mispronounced this one on this episode...apologies) In India, children inherited their castes from their fathers. In Virgina, children inherited the caste of their mother. This was enacted into law in 1662 by the Virginia General Assembly. This broke from the order known in the English legal precedent in order to keep blacks in the lowest caste. White men could increase their wealth by impregnating slaves without the danger of mother or child making claims against the upper caste man. Members of the lowest caste “may neither ear nor wed his way out,” concluded a scholarly study of caste (titled Deep South) in 1941. THREE: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating Endogamy is the means by which people may only marry inside their own caste, an “Iron-clad" foundation of any caste system, from ancient India, to the early American colonies, to the Nazi regime in Germany.” (p. 103) Endogamy produces a world in which the castes are entirely separate, unlikely to know or empathize with each other. “‘Caste,; write Bhimrao Abedkar,the father of the anti-caste movement in India, ‘means an artificial chopping off the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy.’” (p. 110) Virginia outlawed interracial marriage in 1691. The Supreme Court overturned these laws in 1967, though alabama kept its law on the books until 2000. The sentiment that ‘God ntended the races to be separate continued into (and beyond) the middle of the 20th Century. FOUR: Purity versus Pollution The observation of rules of purity can be seen in social customs in India as well as the U.S. An upper class person in India had to cleanse himself if he drew too close to an Untouchable. Books from segregated schools in Florida could not be stored in the same locations. From water fountains to railway platforms to morgues in hospitals, there were rules to keep the white upper classes separate from the blacks. Particularly egregious was the sharing of water sources (beaches, pools, lakes).How much lowest caste blood made a person polluted? Only in the U.S. was that amount a single drop: “a system based on racial absolutism.” (p. 121) In our Northwestern states, the prohibition had a more complicated formula: “Oregon defined as nonwhite any person ;with 1/4 Negro, Chinese or Kanaka blood or more than 1/2 Indian blood.’” (p. 124) In 1922 the Supreme Court ruled that ‘white’ referred to light skin but to Caucasian blood. This allowed people from Asia to be excluded from the upper castes as well as people of African origin. But for African-Americans escape from the Bottom Rung was impossible. “Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusions. Their degraded station justifyied their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absurd the message of their degradation.” (p. 129) Caste Study Notes found online at www.fgcquaker.org taken from the book Caste. thefabpodcast@gmail.com IG: thefabpodcast (fakeassbookclub)