Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (30 page)

As the most loyal voters of their respective parties, white evangelicals are to Republicans what African-Americans are to Democrats, though each makes up a minority of the total electorate. But the foremost concerns of the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc—affordable housing, clean water, police brutality, the racial wealth gap, and reparations for state-sanctioned discrimination (as has been accorded other groups discriminated against in the United States)—have remained on the back burner, or have even been considered radioactive issues for the party that African-Americans help to sustain. To those who say that this would be impractical, it would be the duty of the party representing and dependent on the subordinate caste to open the eyes of their fellow Americans and make the case for a more egalitarian country.

Meanwhile, the
priorities of white evangelicals—ending abortion, restricting immigration, protecting gun rights, limiting government, and, more recently, the disdain for science and the denial of climate change—have become the menu of belief systems for the Republican Party.

“What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics,” writes Seth Dowland, associate professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University and author of
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
. “Over the course of the 20th century, the evangelical coalition entwined theology, whiteness, and conservative politics….To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes.”

People identifying as white evangelicals, regardless of their personal religiosity, “rallied around Trump to defend a white Protestant nation,” Dowland writes. “They have proven to be loyal foot soldiers in the battle against undocumented immigrants and Muslims. The triumph of gay rights, the persistence of legal abortion, and the election of Barack Obama signaled to them a need to fight for the America they once knew.”

The 2016 election became a remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America, from highest to lowest status, in a given group’s support of the Republican: White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent. Unlike the majority of white voters, every other group of voters supported the Democrat in 2016. The Democratic vote went as follows: White men, 31 percent. White women, 43 percent. Latino men, 63 percent. Latina women, 69 percent. African-American men, 82 percent. African-American women, whose race and gender together put them at the bottom of the country’s artificial hierarchy, supported the white female Democrat by 94 percent. While CNN did not break down the Asian vote by gender, Asians, like other nonwhites, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, at 65 percent versus 27 percent for Trump, tracking the Latino vote overall.

Trump fared well against Clinton with all categories of white voters, at every age and education level, though his percentages were higher for whites who had no college degree (66 percent for Trump, 29 percent for Clinton) than for those who had a college degree (48 percent for Trump, 45 percent for Clinton). Contrary to popular assumptions that economic insecurity was a driver of the 2016 outcome, Trump beat Clinton in most every income level except those who were least economically secure—those making less than $50,000 per year. This could be seen as a reflection of the fact that marginalized voters in general, and black voters in particular—those more likely to support the Democrat—make up a disproportionate share of voters with lower incomes.

With these stark racial patterns, the 2016 election seemed a consolidation of rank among the historic ruling caste. “
Even though white Americans still comprise a clear political majority and continue to possess most of the country’s wealth,” observed the legal scholar Robert L. Tsai, “it is possible to stoke outlandish fears of a coming reckoning where racial and ethnic minorities will seek to subjugate white citizens.”

The sense of perceived injury found a voice in 2016. “
These aggrieved whites are a potentially untapped well,” Jardina wrote, “one whose resentments are primed, ready to be stoked by politicians willing to go down a potentially very dark path.”

For this reason, the ruptures exposed in 2016 transcend a single election or candidate and go well beyond the initial theories of economic insecurity as the driver of the white vote. “
In many ways, a sense of group threat is a much tougher opponent than an economic downturn,” wrote the political scientist Diana Mutz, “because it is a psychological mindset rather than an actual event or misfortune.”

Once in office, the forty-fifth president made no secret of his laser focus on the desires of his base. “
Whether out of personal animus, political calculation, philosophical disagreement or a conviction that the last president damaged the country, Mr. Trump has made clear that if it has Mr. Obama’s name on it, he would just as soon erase it from the national hard drive,” wrote the
New York Times
White House correspondent Peter Baker.

Those susceptible to “
dominant group status threat,” Mutz wrote, will do whatever they can to protect the hierarchy that has benefited them, to “regain a sense of dominance and wellbeing.”

The election outcome alone had his base feeling better. A couple of days after the election, two middle-aged white men with receding hairlines and reading glasses took their seats in first class on a flight from Atlanta to Chicago. They suspected by looking at each other, and knowing the polling results, that they were likely on the same team. It didn’t take them long to confirm that they were.

“Last eight years,” one of them said, “worst thing that ever happened, I’m so glad it’s over.”

“It was bigger than an election,” the other one said. “It was one of the most amazing events I think we’ll ever witness. I stayed up all night to watch it.”

“Yeah, well, I went to bed that night thinking I’d be crying the next morning. Woke up. Best news I ever heard.”

“There is justice in this world. They made a bad, bad choice with her,” one said.

“The current president was a bad choice,” the other said.

“He was in over his head. It’s a beautiful day!”

“Yep, finally got it right. Yessiree.”

The Confederate general who led the war against the United States over the right to hold human beings hostage for all their natural-born days, Robert E. Lee, or, more precisely, a bronze
sculpture of Robert E. Lee, rose two stories high on its granite pedestal in the center of a village green in Charlottesville, Virginia. On this day in the late summer of 2017, the statue in honor of a hero of the former slaveholding states was now covered with a thin black tarp that had taken two men positioned in cranes something like an hour to stretch across the length and width of it, over the general’s head and the American Saddlebred horse he sat astride.

The statue was under a shroud while city leaders tried to figure out what to do with it. The monument had drawn the attention of the world after a rally of white supremacists turned deadly just weeks before. The rally brought together disaffected members of the dominant caste in protest of the city’s plan to remove the statue. It was as if the passions of the Civil War had been resurrected and had merged with a resurgent Nazism, which the forefathers of the young Americans at the rally had fought to vanquish back in the middle of the previous century. The heirs to the Confederates and the heirs to the Nazis could see how much they and their histories had in common even if ordinary Americans did not.

On that day in August 2017, Confederate flags and swastikas interfused above the ralliers, men mostly, some with haircuts as severe as their faces. Together, the night before, they had marched through the campus of the University of Virginia, extending Nazi salutes, chanting, “Sieg Heil,” and “White lives matter,” and “Jews will not replace us.” They held tiki torches in the night air, reenacting the torchbearers’ rivers of light at the old processions for Hitler. The following day, at the rally itself, the neo-Confederates and the neo-Nazis arrived well armed, which in turn drew counterprotesters bearing signs of peace. Then a white supremacist rammed a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one of them, a paralegal named Heather Heyer, and wounding dozens of others.

Now the city was trying to keep the statue from public view, but every time the city covered it, someone would come and remove the tarp, releasing Lee’s likeness in protest. The city would again send in the cranes to put the tarp back over it. The day I happened to visit Charlottesville, shortly after the rally, the city was prevailing.

From the center of the green, in the very middle of town, rose a jagged black trapezoid tied at the base like a giant chifforobe wrapped for protection until the movers arrive. It looked for all the world like a giant trash bag from which you could make out the crown of the general’s head and the nose and tail of the horse at opposite ends. The whole effect of the giant trapezoid in the middle of a stately park brought more attention to the general, and to the monuments to the Confederacy, not less, though the tarp had been a short-term compromise to keep it from public view. Tourists came in search of it.

“Guess that’s him right there,” a man said, crossing the street to take a closer look. The tourists waited their turn to take their picture in front of the cloaked general. Then they made the pilgrimage to the street across from the statue, the street where Heather Heyer had been killed. It had become a block-long memorial to her, piles of dying roses and sunflowers, heartbroken messages scrawled in the pavement and on the sides of brick walls, a plea for humanity.

Across the United States, there are
more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “
Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

The Confederacy would lose the war in April 1865, but in the succeeding decades would win the all-important peace. The Confederates would manage to take hold of the public imagination with gauzy portrayals of the Lost Cause. Two of the most influential and popular films of the early twentieth century—
Birth of a Nation
and
Gone with the Wind
—fed the country and the world the Confederate version of the war and portrayed the people of the degraded lowest caste as capable only of brute villainy or childlike buffoonery.

Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them.

The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness.

It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.

Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.

By the time of the rally in Charlottesville, there were some 230 memorials to Robert E. Lee in the United States, including the Robert E. Lee Hotel in Lexington, Virginia, Robert E. Lee Park in Miami, Florida, and Robert E. Lee Creek in Boise National Forest in Idaho, two thousand miles from the old Confederacy. There are scores of plaques, busts, schools, and roadways throughout the country—a Robert E. Lee
Street
in Mobile, Alabama, a Robert E. Lee
Drive
in Tupelo, Mississippi, a Robert E. Lee
Boulevard
in Charleston, South Carolina, a General Robert E. Lee
Road
in Brunswick, Georgia, and a Robert E. Lee
Lane
in Gila Bend, Arizona.

Students take classes at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Tyler, Texas, among others, and at Lee Junior High School in Monroe, Louisiana. Eight states in the Union have a county named after Robert E. Lee: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. The third Monday in January is Robert E. Lee Day in both Mississippi and Alabama.

Robert E. Lee was a well-born graduate of West Point Academy, a pragmatic and cunning military strategist, a political moderate, for his times and his region, and a Virginia slaveholder who saw slavery as a necessary evil that burdened the owners more than the people they enslaved. “
The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically,” he once wrote. “The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise merciful Providence.”

Like other slaveholders, he made full use of the “painful discipline” of which he spoke. In 1859, three of the people he enslaved on his Virginia plantation—a man named Wesley Norris and his sister and cousin—fled north and were captured near the Pennsylvania border. They were forced back to Lee’s plantation. Upon their arrival, Lee told them that “
he would teach us a lesson we would never forget,” Wesley Norris later recounted. Lee ordered his overseer to strip them to the waist, tie them to posts, and whip the men fifty lashes and the woman twenty, on their bare backs. When the overseer resisted, Lee got the county constable and told him to “lay it on well,” which the constable did. “Not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh,” Norris recalled, “Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

This was common practice and standard procedure during much of the 246 years of slavery. Had these and even more gruesome atrocities occurred in another country, at another time, to another set of people other than the lowest caste, they would have been considered crimes against humanity in violation of international conventions. But the slaveholders, overseers, and others in the dominant caste who inflicted atrocities upon millions of African-Americans over the centuries were not only not punished but were celebrated as pillars of society.

Lee was never called to account for what he did to the Norrises nor to the many families he broke apart as an enslaver, the children he separated from parents, the husbands from wives. Even after leading the war of southern secession that ended with more casualties than any other on this soil, Lee faced few penalties associated with treason. President Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Democrat and onetime slaveowner who succeeded Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln’s assassination, granted amnesty to most of the Confederates in a bid to move on from sectional tensions and to put the matter to rest. Lee did no jail time and suffered little censure, though he was no longer permitted to vote, and he was forced to relinquish his plantation, which the government coveted and converted into
Arlington National Cemetery.

It turned out that, after the war, many white northerners felt a greater kinship with the former Confederates who had betrayed the Union than with the people whose free labor built the country’s wealth and over whose freedom the Civil War had been fought. The North’s conciliatory embrace of the former Confederates compelled Frederick Douglass to remind Americans that “
there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget,” adding that “it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.”

Robert E. Lee went on to become president of a college that would later add his name to its own, Washington and Lee University in Virginia. This granted him social standing and a worshipful legacy, and allowed him a platform to weigh in on issues of the day with authority if he chose.

His reputation only grew after his death in 1870. As the country embraced segregation, north and south, with redlining and restrictive covenants keeping black people out of white neighborhoods and the races separate, he became not just a southern hero, but a national one. He is interred at a chapel named after him on the campus of Washington and Lee, Confederate flags flanking, up until recently, a mold of the general in repose. Among the memorials in his honor well beyond the South, there came to be plaques and busts of him in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, elementary schools named after him in Long Beach and San Diego, and five different Robert E. Lee stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service. Usually, it is the victors of war who erect monuments and commemorations to themselves. Here, an outsider might not be able to tell which side had prevailed over the other.

At two o’clock in the morning on April 24, 2017, a SWAT team positioned its sharpshooters at strategic locations at a dangerous intersection in downtown New Orleans. K-9 units patrolled the grounds and perimeter. At the center of the targeted area, men in face masks and bulletproof vests went about their perilous duty in the darkness. Others had refused to risk their lives for this, declined even to attempt the operation, after the death threats and firebombing that preceded this moment. These men in face masks were the only ones willing to take up the mission. They were removing the first of four Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans.

Tensions had been building since 2015 when Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a fifth-generation Louisianan whose ancestors had been in the state since before the Civil War, decided it was time for the Confederate statues to go. That June, a gunman inspired by the Lost Cause of the Confederacy massacred nine black parishioners as they prayed at the end of Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Under international pressure, the South Carolina state legislature and Gov. Nikki Haley agreed to
remove the Confederate flag from the state capitol and put it in the Confederate Relic Room in the State Museum. South Carolina had been the first state to secede from the Union in the run-up to the Civil War, and this gesture opened the way for other states to follow if they could gather the will.