‘Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement”, the Pulitzer winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson says in her well-researched book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”.

We tend to think that America has a racial divide, which is substantially different from our own caste system. But Ms Wilkerson, who has herself suffered and continues to suffer from discrimination in her own country because of the colour of her skin, despite being one of the most brilliant journalists of her times, asserts it is one and the same, going by the common characteristics that define any caste system. Going further, she says that even the annihilation of the Jews attempted by Nazi Germany belonged to the same genre. It is not easy to dispel the arguments that she proffers. She has spent time in India as well as Germany, interacted with Dalit and German scholars, and drawn extensive inferences from the daily humiliations and discriminations the black people are subjected to in the USA each day in their lives, even more than one-and-a-half century after the 13th Amendment had abolished slavery in the USA in 1865.

Advertisement

As she says, “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power ~ which groups have it and which do not.” This reality is extremely disturbing which is why most of us pretend to ignore it, knowing fully well that ignoring it will never make the problem go away. Caste is not a term we associate with the USA or Europe; the world knows caste as a typical Indian invention, a human construct of social stratification based on one’s birth. But the word ‘Caste’ is not Indian in origin; it came from the Portuguese word “Casta” for breed or race, after they had seen its form in India.

Advertisement

The USA is supposed to have race prejudices based purportedly on a biological........

© The Statesman