Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Reflections on Caste and the Call For a Radical Kind of Empathy

Reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents has pierced my heart and impacted me deeply. It is hard to describe the tenderness, the bone-deep grief, the heightened empathy and understanding, and the gratitude for the ways that I have been changed by this book. Yes, to some degree there is much I already knew and was aware of. But not like I am now. Not in these depths. And there is so much that I did not know. Now I experience this profound impact and I am truly changed...

And I keep returning to essential questions... 
  • To what degree do we recognize and understand caste and its impact on ourselves and everyone around and beyond us? 
  • As our eyes are increasingly opened, how do we refrain from returning hate with more hate?  
  • How can we channel our anger and grief in ways which do not cause more harm?  
  • How is it that our history continues to repeat itself and live on in the present? 
  • What is it that has long been buried and in great need to be seen, to be understood, healed, and transformed in ourselves, our nation, our world? 
  • How do we grow in enough courage to seek to understand how we've been blind to our indoctrination into caste and learn to how disentangle ourselves?
  • How do we strengthen our hearts? 
  • What does our circle of caring look like; who does it include and exclude?
  • How do we increasingly take steps and learn to see through the eyes and hearts of others who we haven't really understood and who we have felt separate from and judged? 
  • How do we take responsibility for shedding the layers of separation and ignorance that we've absorbed in our families and culture?
  • How is it that we are engaged in doing the hard work of transformation so that we may become increasingly empowered, in an ongoing and evolving way, to be vehicles of awareness and healing and wisdom and love? 
  • What is our process of cultivating and acting out of radical empathy?

Read Caste. So much is illuminated in the depths of this truly remarkable and profound book. Which is why I'm moved to share the quotes below from the courageous and amazing Isabel Wilkerson and others. 

May you too be pierced and your hearts broken more deeply open. May you too be inspired and compelled to grow and strengthen your hearts and the ways that you take up fierce compassionate action on behalf of us all. Especially those who have been marginalized and oppressed and not seen and suffered for so very long. 

We are all connected, all related, all needed. 
— Molly

The following are excerpts from Caste: The Origins 
of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. 
These quotes span from the beginning 
to the end of the book. 
 
The colonists had been unable to enslave the native population on its own turf and believed themselves to have solved the labor problem with the Africans they imported. With little further use for the original inhabitants, the colonists began to exile them from their ancestral lands and from the emerging caste system. This left Africans firmly at the bottom.
 
But in the same way that individual cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country.
 
Slavery in this land was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominate caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. 

What the colonists created was "an extreme form of slavery that had existed nowhere in the world," wrote the legal historian Ariela J. Gross. "For the first time in history, one category of humanity was ruled out of the 'human race' and into a separate subgroup that was to remain enslaved for generations in perpetuity."
 
It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. 

None of us are ourselves.
 
* * *
 
In debating "how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich," wrote the Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman, "they began by asking how the Americans did it." 

Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country's near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United  States had "shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand." He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as "a model for his program of racial purification," historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."

By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States "was not jut a country with racism," Whitman, the Yale legal scholar wrote. "It was the leading racist jurisdiction so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration." The Nazis recognized the parallels even if many Americans did not.
 
* * *

These are the historic origins, the pillars upholding a belief system, the piers beneath the surface of a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root in the firmament, it did not matter so much where the assumptions were true, as most were not. It mattered little that they were misperceptions or distortions of convenience, as long as people accepted them and gained a sense of order and means of justification for the cruelties to which they had grown accustomed, inequalities that they took to be the laws of nature.

These are the pillars of caste, the ancient principles that I researched and compiled as I examined the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies. These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were at one time or another burrowed deep within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a cast system to function.(Italics are the author's.)
 
* * *

Dehumanization is a standard component in the manufacture of an out-group against which to pit an in-group, and it is a monumental task. It is a war against truth against what the eye can see and what the heart could feel if allowed to do so on its own.

In America, political scientists have given this malaise of insecurities a name: dominant group status threat. This phenomenon "is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior," writes Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. "Instead, it is born of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one's own dominate group status."

Working class whites, the preeminent social economist Gunnar Myrdal wrote, "need the demarcations of caste more than upper class whites. They are the people likely to stress aggressively that no Negro can ever attain the status of even the lowest white."

In a psychic way, the people dying of despair could be said to be dying of the end of an illusion, an awakening to the holes in an article of faith that an inherited, unspoken superiority a natural deservedness over subordinated castes, would assure their place in the hierarchy. They had relied on this illusion perhaps beyond the realm of consciousness and perhaps needed it more than any other group in a forbiddingly competitive society "in which downward social mobility was a constant fear," the historian David Roediger wrote. "One might lose everything, but not whiteness."
 
* * *

Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe, to African-Americans during the lynching terrors of Jim Crow, to Native Americans as their land was plundered and their numbers decimated, to the Dalits considered so low that their very shadow polluted those deemed above them happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded and had been open to being persuaded, centuries ago or in the recent past, that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving of their fate. Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identify to believe in, to feel chosen and important.

Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise. If we could just wait until the bigots die away... It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations. Because it means the enemy, the threat is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself. (Italics are the author's.)
 
* * *

The social theorist Takamichi Sakurai wrote bluntly: "Group narcissism leads people to fascism. An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism."

The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own. "The greater the leader," Fromm wrote, "the greater the follower... The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him."

One cannot live in a caste system, breathe its air, without absorbing the message of caste supremacy. The subordinated castes are trained to admire, worship, fear, love, covet, and want to be like those at the center of society, at the top of the hierarchy.

Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy.
 
* * *

The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not collective will to maintain them.

A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist — in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people's physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be.
 
Once awakened, then we have a choice. We can be born to the dominant caste but choose not to dominate. We can be born to a subordinated caste but resist the box others force upon us. And all of us can sharpen our powers of discernment to see past the external and to value the character of a person rather than demean those who are already marginalized or worship those born to false pedestals. We need not bristle when those deemed subordinate break free, but rejoice that here may be one more human being who can add their true strengths to humanity. 
 
Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the country's DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened.  
 
Thus, regardless of who prevails in any given election, the country still labors under the divisions that a caste system creates, and the fears and resentments of a dominant caste that is too often in opposition to the yearnings of those deemed beneath them. It is a danger to the species and to the planet to have this depth of unexamined grievance and discontent in the most powerful nation in the world. A single election will not solve the problems that we face if we haven't dealt with the structure that created the imbalance to begin with. 
 
* * * 
 
To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system the twelve-year reign of the Nazis can been created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." 
 
No one escapes its tentacles. No one escapes exposure to the message that one set of people is presumed to be inherently smarter, more capable, and more deserving than other groups deemed lower. This program has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And, high or low, without intervention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed. 
 
And yet, somehow, there are the rare people, like Einstein, who seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe, who manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to. From the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery to the white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, these all-too-rare people are a testament to the human spirit, that humans can break free of the hierarchy's hold on them. 
 
These are the people of personal courage and conviction, secure within themselves, willing to break convention, not reliant on the approval of others for their sense of self, people of deep and abiding empathy and compassion. They are what many of us might wish to be but not nearly enough of us are. Perhaps, once awakened, more of us will be. 
 
Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching though it may be. The persistence of caste and race hostility and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste. You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved. 
 
"We must make every effort [to ensure] that the past injustice, violence and economic discrimination will be made known to the people," Einstein said in an address to the National Urban League. "The taboo, the 'let's-not-talk-about-it' must be broken. It must be pointed out time and again that the exclusion of a large part of the colored population from active civil rights by the common practices is slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation." 
 
***
 
When an accident of birth aligns with what is most valued in a given caste system, where being able-bodied, male, white, or other traits in which we had no say, it gives that lottery winner a moral duty to develop empathy for those who must endure the indignities they themselves have been spared. It calls for a radical kind of empathy.
 
Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is looking across at someone and feeling sorrow, often in times of loss. Empathy is not pity. Pity is looking down from above and feeling a distant sadness for another in their misfortune. Empathy is commonly viewed as putting yourself in someone else's shoes and imagining how you would feel. That could be see as a start, but that is little more than role-playing, and it is not enough in the ruptured world we live in. 
 
Radical empathy, o the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it. 
 
Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean. 
 
With our current ruptures, it is not enough to not be racist or sexist. Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-humanity in all its manifestations. In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them. 
 
None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward. 

We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share.

We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.
 
* * *

In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish gift determined to save the planet, the physics-defying aerobatics of an "African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute all of these feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

A world without caste would set everyone free.
 
 

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