The critics of "Critical Race Theory" are out in full force. Today (I started this Friday) I heard Ted Cruz attacked CRT with lots of venom and no facts. I read a piece by gay conservative Andrew Sullivan give a more nuanced description of 'liberal' defenses of CRT. And I read about how the Southern Baptist Convention, while managing to elect a new president who promises a thorough investigation of sexual abuse complaints among Southern Baptists, also
"approved a consensus measure regarding critical race theory that did not mention it by name but rejected any view that sees racism as rooted in 'anything other than sin.'"
[I read the AP article in the Anchorage Daily News, but getting a link now directly from AP, I see the handling of CRT by the Baptists was more complex than just this quote suggests.]
I wrote a letter to the editor almost two weeks ago, because I think it's important for people to understand that this is a cynical ploy by conservatives to do two things:
- make people associate any talk of race with anti-white, anti-American, anti-capitalism
- supercharge an issue to rile up whites to vote in 2022
In any case I've been wanting to add more information from a book that documents systemic racism and thus would be caught up in the very big net being cast by the anti-CRT campaign) to show how much this CRT and discussions of race are NOT what the conservatives claim. CRT is based on well researched, factual evidence that the attacks make no effort to disprove. Rather they have created a bogey man they call CRT without actually defining what it is. They just list their supposed dangers.
I'm almost finished with Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. As I mentioned in an earlier post, she argues in this book that caste is a bigger factor than race in the subjugation of Blacks in the United States. Though, of course, skin color is the critical marker of caste.
She compares the caste system of India - the most clearly articulated caste system - to the systems in the United States and Nazi Germany. In the US she says the two castes are White and Black with a gray zone in between. In Nazi Germany she looks at how Jews were systematically dehumanized and treated as a subordinate caste to Aryans. She compares the lowest class, Untouchable class - the Dalits - to African-Americans.
To make the comparison she identifies The eight pillars of Caste. I'll describe the a little further here (Wilkerson takes 60 pages so my quick summary will be just that, a quick summary. But first I'll just offer the list and let you speculate what each might entail.
- Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
- Pillar Number Two: Heritability
- Pillar Number Three: Endogeny and the Control of Marriage and Mating
- Pillar Number Four: Purity vs. Pollution
- Pillar Number Five: Occupational Hierarchy
- Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma
- Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control
- Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
That all makes sense, right? I'm assuming mostly US readers here, though folks from India drop by as well regularly. This list probably is easier for the lowest classes - Dalits and Blacks - to relate to than members of other castes, particularly the highest classes.
1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature - The key point here, if I understood this right, is that opposing the caste system is to oppose the will of God, to attack the laws of Nature, because, according to caste upholders, Caste system are not created by humans, but by God(s) or nature.
She tells us about Manu, "the all-knowing" explaining the origins of the world
"and then, to fill the land, he created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishya from his thighs, and from his feet, the Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas...
"Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even the feet of the Shudra. They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen. Their very shadow was a pollutant. They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes. [How many of you had ever considered 'outcastes' so literally before?] These were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate caste of India."
Christians, Wilkerson tells us, also justified their treatment of Blacks with their holy book. Going to the story of Noah. Noah got drunk of the wine from his vineyard.
"The wine overtook him, and he lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, who would become the father of a son Canaan, happened into the tent and saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside."
Shem and Japheth went into the tent backwards and covered Noah without seeing his nakedness.
"When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham's son, Canaan, and the generations to follow, saying, "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers."
"As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them. From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah's curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God's emissary, Noah himself."
How does she know this? She's quoting Thomas R.R. Cobb who wrote a history of slavery in the mid-1800s. In the endnote she writes:
"This interpretation of Genesis was debated, oddly enough by some who were even more hateful of blacks than most enslavers. They argued that this interpretation could not be true, because Africans were not human, they were beasts and therefore could not have descended from a son of Noah, cursed or not"
Okay. Clearly I can't go into so much detail for each of the eight pillars. But knowing about the Indian caste origins is probably not something most US readers know. I also wanted here, at least, to show that these points are documented. The other seven pillars are treated the same way.
I'd note that I haven't heard any CRT critics dispute facts like these. They merely dismiss CRT as un-American and as attacks on whites, while I see it as offering us a factual counter-narrative to the history written by the victors - the people who enslaved Blacks and forcibly removed the Indigenous people from their land.
Each of the pillars has the same kind of examples and documentation. I won't go into as much detail because I think they're relatively easy for people to understand. And those who can't, can borrow a copy of the book from the library or even buy one.
2. Heretibility-
"You were born o a certain caste and remained in that caste, subject the high status or low stigma it conferred, for the rest of your days and into the lives of your descendants."
Which requires the next pillar.
3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating - Engodogamy is the restricting of marriage to people within the same caste. Wilkerson documents the many laws in many states that prohibited marriage between Blacks and whites.
Which is also required because of the next pillar.
4. Purity versus Pollution - This one is particularly obnoxious. She talks about the extremes required to keep Dalits from (in some cases, even being seen by) the higher castes.
"A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to 'drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints' and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his 'foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin.'"
The notion here is that the lowest castes can pollute the higher ones by their mere presence. And if the Hindu example above seems extreme, Wilkerson talks about the sanctity of water and the near universality of US Blacks not being allowed to pollute the water that whites drink or swim in. Separate drinking fountains and bathrooms in the South. But bans of Blacks using white swimming pools and even beaches throughout the US.
"In the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed under pressure to allow black swimmers into some of its public pools, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out. In the 1960s, a black civil rights activist tried to integrate a public pool by swimming a lap and the emerging to towel off. 'The response was to drain the pool entirely,' wrote the legal historian Mark S. Weiner, 'and refill it with fresh water.'"
Then she talks about blood quantum.
"Arkansas first defined Negro as 'one in whom there is a visible and distinct admixture of African blood.' Then in 1911, the state changed it to anyone 'who has. . .any negro blood whatever,' as it made interracial sex a felony. The state of Alabama defined a black person as anyone with 'a drop of negro blood,' in its intermarriage ban. Oregon defined as nonwhite any person with 'with 1/4 Negro, Chinese or any person having 1/4 Negro, Chinese or Kanaka blood or more than 1/2 Indian blood.'"
5. Occupational Hierarchy: The Jatis and Mudsill - Wilkerson explains
"When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam hammered into place to anchor the foundation. That piece is called the mudsill. . . In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon."
That explanation is needed by most of us today to understand the point of this US Senate speech from 1858:
"'In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,' Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina 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."
In India the castes themselves define the kinds of work caste members are allowed to do, but in the US it's less explicit. Nevertheless,
"In 1890, '85 percent of black men and 96 percent of black women were employed in just two occupational categories,' wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, 'agricultural and domestic or personal service.' Forty years later as the Deression set in and as African-Americans moved to northern cities, the percentages of black people at the bottom of the labor hierarchy remained the same, though, by then, nearly half of black men were doing manual labor that called merely for a strong back."
I hope you are getting the idea. She's offering us the characteristics of caste and then example after example of how each characteristic plays out. It's not some fictional narrative as critics of CRT argue. It's not a screed against white people. It's simply a factual recitation of the many ways that our law, regulations, and customs separated (and in many cases still do) whites from blacks.
I haven't seen critics of CRT dispute facts like these. Rather they make broad accusations of CRT being an anti-white attack on US democracy.
Michael Harriot, mocking the claims of CRT detractors, started a Twitter trend today posting:
"CRT took my guns away and gave them to the transgenders. How did CRT ruin your life?"
We only have three more pillars of caste.
6. Dehumanization and Stigma - I think this is obvious enough. Wilkerson gives examples of how the Nazis treated Jews as they arrived at concentration camps and the conditions they were forced to live in. She writes about African slaves in the US South. After a list of dehumanizing actions, she writes:
"Beyond all of this, the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target's own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting. Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste. During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry 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. . . Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant cast rep telling itself. They were punished for being the humans that the could not help but be."
You might pause and say, well this is interpretation, not facts. Yes, in this case I left out the facts - you can find a copy of the book and read them yourself. This is, indeed, interpretation of the intent of those facts. One can dispute the interpretation, though I find the context and the facts make this interpretation seem quite reasonable. Especially given the many similar interpretations by contemporaneous observers. What are some other interpretations?
I think about meeting a nicely dressed, very gracious, middle aged white man in Vicksburg, Mississippi who told me that they hadn't needed the 'Northern, communist, hippy agitators' who came to Mississippi in the 1960s to march for civil rights. "Our Negroes were happy with how things were down here." That was in the year 2000.
7. Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a means of Control -
"The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society. They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment. But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body. This twelve generations of African-Americans faced the ever-present danger of assault and battery or worse, every day of their lives during the quarter millennium of enslavement."
The book gets much more graphic.
8. Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority - Wilkerson writes about Hollywood's portrayal of whites in superior positions and Blacks as servants (not simply in portrayals of the South), and then about how rigidly that was actually enforced in the South.
"Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americanswere still being brutalized for the least appearance of stepping out of their place. Planters routinely whipped their sharecroppers for 'trivial offenses,' wrote Allison Davis and Burleigh and Mary Gardner in 1941. A planter in Mississippi said that, if his tenant 'didn't stop acting so big, the next time it would be the bullet or a rope. That is the way to manage them when they get too big.' In 1948, a black tenant farmer in Louise, Mississippi was severely beaten by two whites, wrote the historian James C. Cobb, 'because he asked for a receipt after paying his water bill.'"
This is not "an interesting side topic."
This issue is already a major thrust of the Republican effort to retain the House and the Senate, as well as winning local elections. It's part of the current effort to disenfranchise lower caste voters and to pass laws that give Republicans the power to decide whether elections are fair and who the winners are.
Trump is teaching them that refusal to abide by the law and facts is a winning strategy. It didn't quite work this time, but it was a good trial run. Next time, they'll fix the parts that didn't work for them.
This is about the ability of democracy to survive in the United States. Republicans are hoping that fear of losing their superior place in the US caste system will mobilize enough votes for Republicans to hang on. For those of us who can see that strategy clearly, it's time to educate ourselves and everyone we know. And then to find those folks who, for various reasons, don't vote and help them understand what their not voting can lead to.
