Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (15 page)

BOOK: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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PILLAR NUMBER EIGHT
Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

The Hollywood still is from a 1930s movie released during the depths of the Jim Crow era. A black woman, ample in frame and plain of face, wears a headscarf and servant’s uniform. Her arms are wrapped around a white woman, slender, cherubic, and childlike, her golden hair and porcelain, air-brushed skin pops against the purposely unadorned darkness of the black woman. When they begin to speak, the dark woman will utter backward syllables of servility and ignorance. The porcelain woman will speak with the mannered refinement of the upper caste. The fragile frame of Mary Pickford is in direct contrast to the heft of Louise Beavers in a set piece of caste played out in a thousand films and images in America, implanting into our minds the inherent superiority in beauty, deservedness, and intellect of one group over another.

As it happens,
the black actress, Louise Beavers, was nothing like the image she was given little option but to play. She grew up in California and had to learn and to master the broken dialect of southern field hands and servants. She was frequently under stress in the narrow box she was confined to, which led her to lose weight on set. The filmmakers made her attach padding to her already full frame, to ensure that she contrasted all the more with the waifish white ingenues who were the stars of whatever film she was in.

Beneath each pillar of caste was the presumption and continual reminder of the inborn superiority of the dominant caste and the inherent inferiority of the subordinate. It was not enough that the designated groups be separated for reasons of “pollution” or that they not intermarry or that the lowest people suffer due to some religious curse, but that it must be understood in every interaction that one group was superior and inherently deserving of the best in a given society and that those who were deemed lowest were deserving of their plight.

For the lowest-caste person, “
his unquestioned inferiority had to be established,” wrote the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley, and that alleged inferiority would become the “basis for his allocation to permanent servile status.”

At every turn, the caste system drilled into the people under its spell the deference due those born to the upper caste and the degradation befitting the subordinate caste. This required signs and symbols and customs to elevate the upper caste and to demean those assigned to the bottom, in small and large ways and in everyday encounters.


He must be held subject, like other domestic animals,” observed the nineteenth-century abolitionist William Goodell, “to the superior race holding dominion over him.”

African-Americans during the century of the Jim Crow regime and Jews during the murderous twelve years of the Third Reich were often prohibited from sidewalks and were forced instead to give way to the dominant caste or to walk in the gutter as a reminder of their degraded station.


If a Negro, man or woman, met a white person on the street in Richmond, Virginia,” for example, wrote the historian Bertram Doyle, they were “required to ‘give the wall,’ and if necessary to get off the sidewalk into the street, on pain of punishment with stripes on the bare back.”

During the height of the caste systems in America, in India, and in the Third Reich, the lowest caste was not permitted to bear the symbols of success and status reserved for the upper caste. They were not to be dressed better than the upper caste, not to drive better cars than the upper caste, not to have homes more extravagant than the upper caste should they manage to secure them.

In India, the caste system dictated the length and folds of a Dalit woman’s saris. Dalits were not to wear the clothing or jewelry of upper-caste people but rather tattered, rougher clothing as the “marks of their inferiority.”

In America, the South Carolina Negro Code of 1735 went so far as to specify the fabrics enslaved black people were permitted to wear, forbidding any that might be seen as above their station. They were banned from wearing “
any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes,” the cheapest, roughest fabrics available to the colony. Two hundred years later, the spirit of that law was still in force as African-American soldiers were set upon and killed for wearing their army uniforms.

In Germany, one of the characteristics that enraged the Nazis was the wealth and success of German Jews and any public display of it. Late in the Second World War,
a young Jewish woman in Berlin had on a fur coat when the Gestapo rounded her and others up and shoved them onto cattle cars to the concentration camps. Upon arrival, the SS were incensed to see a Jewish woman in fur that their wives could likely not afford, and, out of hatred, forced her into the camp’s pigsty and rolled her in her fur coat, over and over, in the icy muck, leaving her to die in the bitter cold. But this was just days before the Allied forces reached them, and this was how she survived, eating the food scraps thrown into the sty. She huddled beside the pigs and stayed warm until liberation.

——

From the beginning, the power of caste and the superior status of the dominant group was perhaps never clearer than when the person deemed superior was unquestionably not. Given that intelligence is distributed in relatively similar proportions among individuals in any subset, it was a special form of human abuse that everyone in a particular group, regardless of intellect, morality, ethics, or humaneness, was automatically accorded control over everyone in another group, regardless of their gifts.

The historian Kenneth Stampp described the arbitrary nature of life for enslaved people in the caste system, the terrifying forced submission to individuals who were unfit for absolute power over the life and death of another. “
They were owned by a woman ‘unable to read or write,’ ” Stampp wrote, “ ‘scarcely able to count to ten,’ legally incompetent to contract marriage,” and yet had to submit to her sovereignty, depend upon her for their next breath. They were owned by “drunkards, such as Lilburne Lewis, of Livingston County, Kentucky, who once chopped a slave to bits with an ax,” Stampp wrote; “and by sadists, such as Madame Lalaurie, of New Orleans, who tortured her slaves for her own amusement.”

In order to survive, “they were to give way to the most wretched white man,” observed
The Farmers’ Register
of 1834.

For much of the time that African-Americans have been in this land, they have had to find ways to stay alive in a structure that required total submission, a close reading of their betters and the performance of that submission in order to avoid savage punishment. “
They must obey at all times, and under all circumstances, cheerfully and with alacrity,” said a Virginia slaveholder. They had to adjust themselves to the shifting and arbitrary demands of whatever dominant person they happened to be encountering in that moment.

This created a nerve-jangling existence, given that “
any number of acts,” according to a North Carolina judge during the time of slavery, could be read as “insolence,” whether it was “a look, the pointing of a finger, a refusal or neglect to step out of the way when a white person is seen to approach.”

To these, the nineteenth-century orator Frederick Douglass added the following gestures that could incite white rage and violence. “
In the tone of an answer,” Douglass wrote, “in answering at all; in not answering; in the expression of countenance; in the motion of the head; in the gait, manner and bearing.” Any one of these, “if tolerated, would destroy that subordination, upon which our social system rests,” the North Carolina judge said.

This code extended for generations. Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic, African-Americans were 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.”

The most trivial interaction had to be managed with ranking in mind. Well into the 1960s in the American South, the mere boarding of a public bus was a tightly choreographed affair devised for maximum humiliation and stigma to the lowest caste. Unlike dominant-caste passengers who climbed aboard, paid their bus fare, and took a seat, black passengers had to climb up, pay their fare, then get off the bus so as not to pollute or disturb the white section by walking through it. Having been forced to disembark after paying, they then had to run to the back door of the bus to board in the colored section. It was not uncommon for the bus to drive off before they could make it to the back door. The passengers who had the least room for error, the least resources to lose the benefit of the ticket they had paid for, the least cushion to weather a setback, would now be humiliated as the bus pulled off without them, now likely to arrive late for work, thus putting already tenuous jobs at further risk.


The Negro occupies a position of inferiority and servility, of which he is constantly reminded when traveling, by restriction and by the attitudes of his white neighbors,” wrote the historian Bertram Doyle.

The laws and protocols kept them both apart and low. The greater the chasm, the easier to distance and degrade, the easier to justify any injustice or depravity.


The human meaning of caste for those who live it is power and vulnerability, privilege and oppression, honor and denigration, plenty and want, reward and deprivation, security and anxiety,” wrote the preeminent American scholar of caste, Gerald Berreman. “A description of caste which fails to convey this is a travesty.”

In the slaveholding South, some in the dominant caste grew so accustomed to the embedded superiority built into their days, and the brutality that it took to maintain it, that they wondered how they might manage in the afterlife. “
Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to Heaven,” a dominant-caste woman in South Carolina asked her minister, “and I must see them there?”

——

A century after the slaveholder spoke those words, the caste system had survived and mutated, its pillars intact. America was fighting in World War II, and the public school district in Columbus, Ohio, decided to hold an essay contest, challenging students to consider the question “
What to do with Hitler after the War?”

It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.”

Part Four
 
T
HE
T
ENTACLES OF
C
ASTE
Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes

The third-graders fidgeted in their seats and rested their chins on their folded forearms as their teacher, Mrs. Elliott, told them the rules of a class experiment she wanted to try with them. This was in the farm town of Riceville, Iowa, in the late 1960s, and all of the children, the descendants of immigrants from Germany and Scotland and Ireland and Scandinavia, had roughly the same skin color as their teacher and, from afar, little by which to distinguish one from another. But after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the turmoil that followed beyond the cornfields that surrounded them,
Jane Elliott decided she needed to do something out of the ordinary to teach her dominant-caste students how it felt to be judged on the basis of an arbitrary physical trait—the color of their eyes.

She announced to the children that they would do things differently that day. She laid out arbitrary stereotypes for a neutral trait that, for now, in her classroom, would put a student with that trait in essentially the lowest caste. She told the children that brown-eyed people are not as good as blue-eyed people, that they are slower than blue-eyed people, not as smart as blue-eyed people, that, until she said otherwise, the brown-eyed students would not be allowed to drink from the water fountain, that they had to use paper cups instead. She told the children that the brown-eyed people could not play with the blue-eyed people on the playground and would have to come in early, but that the blue-eyed students would get to stay out longer for recess.

The students looked confused at first. Then, in a matter of minutes, a caste hierarchy formed. It started as soon as the teacher told the children to open their books to a certain page to begin their lesson.

“Everyone ready?” Mrs. Elliott asked the class. One little girl was still turning the pages in her book to get to the right one. The teacher looked at the girl, her eyes judging and impatient. “Everyone but Laurie,” Mrs. Elliott said with exasperation. “Ready, Laurie?”

A blue-eyed boy interjected. “She’s a brown-eyed,” he said, having caught on instantly to the significance of what had never mattered for as long as he had known the girl.

When lunchtime approached, the teacher told the blue-eyed children they would get to eat first and would be permitted a second helping, but the brown-eyed children weren’t allowed to.

“They might take too much,” the teacher told them.

The brown-eyed children looked downcast and defeated. One boy got into a fight at recess because one of the blue-eyed boys had called him a name.

“What did he call you?” the teacher asked him.

“Brown eyes,” the boy said, tears at the surface of those eyes.

An otherwise neutral trait had been converted into a disability. The teacher later switched roles, and the blue-eyed children became the scapegoat caste, with the same caste behavior that had arisen the day before between these artificially constructed upper and lower castes.

“Seems when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us,” one girl said. “The way you’re treated you felt like you didn’t want to try to do anything,” said another.

Classroom performance fell for both groups of students during the few hours that they were relegated to the subordinate caste. The brown-eyed students took twice as long to finish a phonics exercise the day that they were made to feel inferior.

“I watched my students become what I told them they were,” she told NBC News decades later.

When the brown-eyed children were put on a pedestal and made dominant, Elliott told the network, she saw “little wonderful brown-eyed white people become vicious, ugly, nasty, discriminating, domineering people in the space of fifteen minutes.”

With the blue-eyed children scapegoated and subordinated, “I watched brilliant, blue-eyed, white Christian children become timid and frightened and angry and unable to learn in the space of fifteen minutes,” she said.


If you do that with a whole group of people for a lifetime,” she said, “you change them psychologically. You convince those who are analogous to the brown-eyed people that they are superior, that they are perfect, that they have the right to rule, and you convince those who take the place of the blue-eyed students that they are less than. If you do that for a lifetime, what do you suppose that does to them?”

BOOK: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
10.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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