What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.
p. 70

If you don't find metaphors useful, perhaps this will help.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Through the Fog of Delhi to the Parallels in India and America

The United States and India are profoundly different from each other—in culture, technology, economics, ethnic makeup. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, both protected by oceans and ruled for a time by the British, fertile and coveted. Both adopted social hierarchies and abide great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Both were conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on earth. The older country, India, the largest.

Their respective hierarchies are profoundly different. And yet, as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols. Both countries kept their dominant caste separate, apart and above those deemed lower. Both exiled their indigenous peoples—the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States—to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted a fretwork of laws to chain the lowliest group—Dalits in India and African-Americans in the United States—to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.

LanDroid wrote: [*] What is so special about India, Nazi Germany, and America that we are the only societies blessed with a caste system?
[*] Are we indeed the only three?[/list]

I suspect every society has some sort of regimentation that under a microscope would look like caste. Perhaps the castes in India, Nazi Germany and America are only extreme forms of a kind of class structure that exists almost everywhere. Although i've heard that pirate society was strictly egalitarian.

I suspect many would not see the systemic racism in America as a form of caste. It probably boils down to semantics.

LanDroid wrote:

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.
p. 70

If you don't find metaphors useful, perhaps this will help.

Just to be clear, I do find metaphors useful, and yours is a fine one. I shouldn't try to over think a metaphor, adjusting it to the more complicated reality it tries to explain. Metaphors are suggestive and I think often appropriate in letting us see essential similarities through use of novel terms. A more poetic understanding, I suppose.

Ezra Klein had a long podcast last week on Trumpism and the internet. Mostly it went over familiar ground, and I am not particularly recommending it. The title is something like "An Appalled Conservative Considers the Future of the Republican Party." The guest, the appalled conservative, is Yuval Levin and he does a good job of representing the positive values associated with the conservative point of view, for those who are interested.

I am bringing it up because at one moment a phrase jumped up and grabbed me, and I think it's relevant to this discussion. They were talking about what is the basis for Trump's appeal, and Levin said, "in addition to the question of who will be in charge." He didn't mean just one thing with that, but when Klein came back and repeated it, "the question of who will be in charge" a lot of pieces fell into place for me. What was astonishing to me was how little they wanted to discuss the point even though they both agreed it was an important part, maybe the main part, of Trump's appeal.

I spent more time thinking about it, in the context of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Caste" and another book I am reading which takes up such matters from a very different angle, "Where the Crawdads Sing." And the more I thought about it the more I settled in on the notion that the famous prediction of a "majority minority" nation by 2045 had triggered deep feelings of wrongness, of injustice, by those who believe in caste. The dominance of Whites is, in their mind, just. "We" built this country. "They" can't be trusted. (And of course, as Wilkerson pointed out, Trump would repeal "Obamacare" for "them" but not for "us".)

I realize that "they" is a bigger category these days. The ones who can't be trusted may be "radical socialists" who are allied with "them". In the South radical socialist is still code language for those who side with Black people and other racial minorities, but in much of the Midwest and Northeast it means what it says it means, the issue is property and economic freedom, and the racial angle is less important. But in the whole country there is a substantial part of the White population, (not all of them Trumpists but for the most part, yes,) who still feel that racial minorities are interlopers, allowed to be here on sufferance by "us" the White majority.

All the stuff captured by "who is going to be in charge?" is too big and amorphous to pin down, and it certainly includes things like attitudes toward religion and willingness to tolerate atheists and Jews and Hindus (and maybe Muslims) as long as they stay in their place. But I have to keep digesting the question of what it means that "Freedom" means freedom for people who look like me and think like me. It is not abstract philosophical freedom, it is "our freedom".

Many people here will say, "Well, duh!" to that, and I accept the criticism. I am committed to listening to all sides, and so that generally means taking people's word for what they mean when I should probably see through it. Here's naive me, listening to a couple of highly educated Jews discussing "who is going to be in charge" and never recognizing the shadow of the gas chambers lurking in what they refer to but don't want to discuss.

This chapter about the caste system in India is very short. I wish it was longer as that system appears ridiculously complicated. I expect there will be more information on that later.

“Perhaps only the Jews have as long a history of suffering from discrimination as the Dalits,” wrote the Dalit journalist V. T. Rajshekar. “However, when we consider the nature of the suffering endured by the Dalits, it is only the African American parallel of enslavement, apartheid and forced assimilation that comes to mind.”

The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as black, with immigrants from outside of Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure.

The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, and the excluded fifth, known as Untouchables or Dalits.

Thousands??? Looking for news on this, I searched "Dalit" on the site IndiaToday.in. Here are a few articles.

On Scheduled Caste Welfare: Battle Half Won
The Scheduled Castes (SCs), who number around 1,300 communities and account for nearly 200 million people or 16 per cent of India's population (2011 census), are among the most marginalised in terms of socio-economic indicators.

'Untouchability' has been abolished, but the mainstreaming of SCs through socio-economic improvement-alongside attitudinal changes in society-is a work in progress for the Republic after seven decades. The efforts to improve their lot have been through reservation in education and political and government offices and, more recently, through economic upliftment and greater participation in entrepreneurship.
2/1/2021
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/nati ... 2021-01-30

How on earth do they keep track of all these Scheduled Castes? There are also Scheduled Tribes, don't know what those are. An amazing amount of energy must be expended in conforming to and enforcing those systems. There must be an elaborate legal system dedicated mainly to enforcing innumerable disputes at those boundaries.

Although "Untouchability" has supposedly been abolished, there are quite a few stories like the following.

Odisha: Dalit boy suffering from skin disease forced to undergo 'purification' by villagers
A minor Dalit boy suffering from a congenital skin disorder in Odisha was forced to undergo a 'purification' ritual in order to be socially accepted by villagers. The seven-year-old boy, who suffers from congenital nevomelanocytic nevus (CNN) -- a skin disorder that leads to unusual growth of dark hairy patches in the body -- and his family had been socially ostracised by the villagers.

The incident, which happened two weeks back, took place at Baghua village, under Jagannath Prasad block, in Odisha. The father of the boy even had to shell out Rs 10,000 to be accepted back into the village, the report said. (10,000 Indian Rupees = $137. USD) As part of the condition to be accepted, the villagers insisted on the boy's 'purification' by being tonsured followed by a community feast.
1/30/2021
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/o ... 2021-01-29

4 booked for thrashing, urinating on Dalit youth in Pudukkottai of Tamil Nadu
Four people were booked for alleged harassment and assault on a Dalit youth in the Pudukkotai district of Tamil Nadu. The 18-year-old Dalit youth has claimed that the men thrashed and urinated on him for objecting to a derogatory word.

...The Dalit youth said Pradeep used a derogatory word for his caste to which he protested. He said Pradeep and three others dragged him into a car and took him to a secluded place. There, they thrashed the Dalit youth, and urinated on him. A case was filed under sections 365, 342, 506, 294 (b), and 323 of IPC and also sections under Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocity) Amendment Act based on his complaint.
1/30/2021
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/3 ... 2021-01-30

If they have public opinion polling in India, I wonder what the attitudes are toward the caste system. It's possible many will still say such an ordering is a good set-up, promoting harmony. Or maybe there is scant support for it, yet the advantages are baked in by this time, so the uppers can enjoy them, with lip service to more equality.

It's clear the system has come under scrutiny due to the expectations of modern government. So you could say that things are better now. The problem is that improvements to a bad system leaves you still with a bad system, so it's understandable that many people still held back don't appreciate hearing that progress has been made. It can sound too much like gratitude is expected for privileges that never should have been denied. It must be frustrating for writers like Wilkerson to constantly bump up against the charge that they're not giving enough credit for things being not as bad as 50 years ago.

It seems that once it was more possible to justify social stratification in the interest of a well-functioning society. The individual's rights and opportunities were less important. That view has shifted as time has gone on and economic opportunity has become what all expect.

DWill wrote:If they have public opinion polling in India, I wonder what the attitudes are toward the caste system. It's possible many will still say such an ordering is a good set-up, promoting harmony. Or maybe there is scant support for it, yet the advantages are baked in by this time, so the uppers can enjoy them, with lip service to more equality.

The Constitution of India, going back to 1948, outlaws discrimination against someone based on caste. Fortunately or unfortunately, the Congress Party introduced positive or compensatory discrimination to provide extra opportunities for the lowest (or "scheduled") castes. Over time this became a vote-getting strategy and the line was shifted to include more groups from less-oppressed castes.

There is still heavy prejudice against the lower castes, including blockages of marriages across boundaries, especially in the countryside. Much of the resurgence of Hinduism as a political force was a response to the affirmative action for Dalits and to the perception that lower-caste people were likely to convert to Christianity or Islam to escape their status. I am not sure what people would say if polled, but there are plenty of actions to support the notion that caste is still considered right and appropriate.

DWill wrote:It must be frustrating for writers like Wilkerson to constantly bump up against the charge that they're not giving enough credit for things being not as bad as 50 years ago.

Yes, surely. I know that when I make those kinds of observations, it is meant to be an assertion that "things take time", but it has to be frustrating to be told to wait for fair treatment. On one hand, I am for fair treatment, now. On the other, I have a pragmatic, goal-oriented side that says you take what is pragmatically available and don't beat your head against the wall over the things that are not.

DWill wrote:It seems that once it was more possible to justify social stratification in the interest of a well-functioning society. The individual's rights and opportunities were less important. That view has shifted as time has gone on and economic opportunity has become what all expect.

Structured, de jure, stratification is not really a source of a well-functioning society, but it can seem that way to those with privilege. The idea that there will be differences in power was something the Communists were not able to get rid of (and often did not even try) but did try to put on a meritocratic basis.

The real issue with caste and other structures oppressing individuals in the name of order is the de facto stratification that lingers on. The suspicion over giving someone a job, the worry over what class of people your children go to school with, the general sense of distance and difference, all these are mechanisms that transmit injustice without formal structures.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste

The author starts to examine the third caste system. It is quite unnerving to see the strong influence of American law in the institutional restrictions enacted under the Nazi regime.

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.”
p. 78

The Nazis had been especially taken with the militant race theories of two widely known American eugenicists, Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. Both were men of privilege, born and raised in the North and educated in the Ivy League. Both built their now discredited reputations on hate ideology that devised a crude ranking of European “stock,” declared eastern and southern Europeans inferior to “Nordics” and advocated for the exclusion and elimination of “races” they deemed threats to Nordic racial purity, foremost among them Jews and “Negroes.” A racial slur that the Nazis adopted in their campaign to dehumanize Jews and other non-Aryans—the word Untermensch, meaning “subhuman”—came to them from the New England–born eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard.

By the time that Hitler rose to power, the United States “was not just 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.

Why do so few Americans recognize the parallels now as the Nazis did then?

What the Nazis could not understand, however, was why, in America, “the Jews, who are also of interest to us, are not reckoned among the coloreds,” when it was so obvious to the Nazis that Jews were a separate “race” and when America had already shown some aversion by imposing quotas on Jewish immigration.

Remember the thought experiment in the previous chapter where in an alternate universe short people are the dominant group and how that would be accepted as a natural order.

While the Nazis praised “the American commitment to legislating racial purity,” they could not abide “the unforgiving hardness” under which “ ‘an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks,” Whitman wrote. “The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”
p. 87

Here again we see the underlying pattern of caste: A dominant group, a subordinate group that serves and is deprived of resources, and a system of separation to prevent "infection." But erected on that foundation the details are quite different, focusing obviously much more on Jews than race and eventually on extermination rather than separation. Another binary system, Aryan Vs. Jew, unlike the complicated system in India.

I expect many Americans still look back on that era and shake heads wondering how such horrors could have happened in a sophisticated culture. Did they really not know what was happening in the concentration camps? Some may be vaguely aware of American support and influence. The was a rally of 20,000 Nazis at Madison Square Gardens in 1939. Check this skin-crawling 6 minute video of that event. Or take Henry Ford, who headed an anti-Semitic newspaper, wrote the infamous four volume book The International Jew, and received the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest honor Nazi Germany could give to any foreigner.

And yet it is shocking to learn aspects of the American legal system underpinned the Nazi framework.
Why is this shocking? Why is this information not better known?
Yeegadz, the one drop rule was too much for Nazis?

The subtitle of this chapter is "The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste." It seems the American caste system took a while to develop after 1619. And although there was over a thousand years of background anti-Semitism in Europe, the German caste system was erected almost instantly. How much of that is because they could pick and choose elements from the well established American system to build their own? The subtitle indicates quite a bit. Another aspect is strong dictators are extremely efficient at implementing drastic change.