“It seemed that human sorrow was always based on regret and pain in the past, and that neither time nor location nor history made much difference.” — Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart (2017).
By Rey Moreno
We distinguish. We discriminate. We love ranks, hierarchies and categories. It’s them versus us. Love your own kind. Belonging and identity define us; they set boundaries and motivate us to take actions. Distinctions, whether class, racial, religious or otherwise, give us honours and status. They make us special. We desire to be in high places, especially if you are born right with wealth and privileges; have better opportunities to succeed in life. Unfortunately, our investment for the higher self than others has created the “great chain of being” called the caste system. Here are the eight pillars of the caste system as laid out by Isabel Wilkerson in her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).
- Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
Religion has created this pillar. The author refers to the Hindu text of India when Manu, the all-knowing, was approached by men of stature who asked him about the laws of social classes. Manu answered that Brahma sat on top of everybody because “he is beyond the range of senses” and the “grandfather of all the worlds.” On earth, the four varnas, or divisions of mankind, would be as follows: The highest cast was the Brahmin, the 2nd in line was the Kshatriya, the third was the Vaishya, and the last was the Shudra. But lo and behold, Shudra was not the last. Outside of the caste system were the Untouchables to be known later as the Dalits.
In the Old Testament, one of Noah’s sons, Ham, was cursed to be the slave of his brothers for discovering Noah’s nakedness when he got drunk of wine from his vineyard. Later in the Middle Ages, Ham was described as having black skin condemning his descendants and other people with dark skin to slavery.
- Pillar Number Two: Heritability
The caste system is fixed and immutable, determined at birth. There is no movement vertically in the social hierarchy. In India, the rank of the father would pass to his children; while in colonial Virginia, both by law and custom, children would inherit the caste of their mother. The term class, on the other hand, allows escape out of your original position in the social hierarchy through education, hard work, higher income, and better jobs. Yet in America, the blacks still suffer discrimination, humiliation and police brutality. Here’s what LeBron James said: “No matter how great you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you, or what you do, if you are an African-American man or African-American woman, you will always be that.”
- Pillar Number Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating
Referring to Wikipedia, endogamy is defined as “the practice of marrying within a specific social group, religious denomination, caste, or ethnic group, rejecting those from others as unsuitable for marriage or other close personal relationships.” It established an ironclad boundary where the dominant caste could not be stained by those beneath them. It was forcefully and legally enforced in ancient India, the early American colonies and the Nazi regime in Germany. Nowadays, it has become acceptable to have inter-marriages. Children have more say who they want to marry. But there are still remnants of our society which still strictly follow this practice in defiance of the law.
- Pillar Number Four: Purity versus Pollution
The dominant caste had created so many ways to ensure its purity wouldn’t be blemished. In India, for example, the lowest-caste people had to wear bells to warn those above them of their presence and to keep their distance (between twelve and ninety-six steps) when walking in public. In Germany, the Jews were forbidden to go to the beaches and public pools because they might pollute them with their “Jewish body”. In United States, laws were enacted to segregate “the white and colored races” in any public settings, be it in trains, buses, or schools as a few examples. In South Africa, the apartheid laws were enforced to ensure that the majority Africans could not mingle with the minority Afrikaners.
- Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill
The term jati refers to how one is born. But in India, the Jatis were those who had to do the most dreaded and thankless jobs such as cleaning the latrines, tanning the hides of animals, or handling the dead bodies. Mudsill, on the other hand, is the first layer of wood installed on top of the foundation wall. But in the United States, it was a derogative description of the black people made famous by Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina when he told his fellow senators: “That is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have…It constitutes the very mud-sill of society.” From thereon, the black people were relegated to doing farm or domestic work without being paid as well.
- Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma
Dehumanization and stigma do not randomly occur. They work as a program or a process of denigrating those who are not part of the group. They target specific people rather than an individual. For Nazi Germany, it went after the Jews resulting in co-ordinated murder of at least 6 million Jews. In the United States, the blacks were the out-group, being treated as properties without rights, privileges and freedom and constantly subjected to brutal punishments and deaths. They were even forbidden to show emotions “as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live.” And in India, the Dalits suffered a lot of mistreatments for their lowly status. If they were caught stealing food for their sustenance, they would be meted with death after.
- Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control
Fear is a strong emotion that makes one to act in a way that is detrimental to one’s well- being. Threat of physical harm can induce fear but the most effective tools for total subjugation of a whole bunch of people are terror and cruelty. So the Nazis built concentration camps where the Jews were constantly terrorized by rendering punishments, such as lynching them for minor offenses. Same in the American South where the blacks were flogged known as “bucking, in which the person was stripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogging with a cowhide, as other enslaved people were forced to watch. The person was then washed down with salt and red pepper.” And another form of power exercised by the dominant caste was to force the low caste to perform acts of violence against its own fellow caste member. The superior caste didn’t want to muddy its hands with the kind of brutality it wanted to impose.
- Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
Deference is afforded to those determined by the ruling power as people of high-breed status, featuring their wealth, education, intellect, proper manners, sparkling beauty, and God-given superiority in the natural order of being. They were born right and ordained to be the best. Nobody has done a greater service in perpetuating this perception than Hollywood. As an example, Wilkerson alluded to the contrast between Mary Pickford and Louise Beavers in the movie Coquette (1929) “implanting into our minds the inherent superiority in beauty, deservedness, and intellect of one group over another.”
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After years of recorded history exposing the evilness of the caste system, these eight pillars remain present and alive in our modern world. We have learned the lessons but they can be easily forgotten by the new generations without constantly reminding them of their detrimental effects. There is no God’s blessing why some are given a good quality of life at the start. But that should not be a justification to disadvantage those who are already disadvantaged from the very beginning. Now that we know what is not right and just, that is, we have been enlightened with our experiences, we must be responsible for our inaction if we see it in our midst. We must strive for a world without caste. We should all invest in the well-being of others and not only on ourselves.
In addressing the National Urban League, Albert Einstein said: “We must make every effort (to ensure) that the past injustice, violence and economic discrimination will be made known to the people. 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 a slap in the face of the Constitution of the nation.”
21 March 2024