Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (32 page)

On a gray November afternoon, couples with strollers, tailored women with their shopping totes, commuters in wool and tweed, all make their way to the Wittenbergplatz subway station off Kurfürstendamm, the buzzy, neon-lit Fifth Avenue of Berlin, on the west side of the city.

They converge at the front doors to the station, and there to the right of them is the sign, nearly a story high, for every commuter, every shopper, every store clerk, every couple on a date, every backpacked student and tourist to see. Translated from German, it reads:
Places of Horror That We Should Never Forget.
Then it lists the places never to be forgotten: Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and half a dozen other concentration camps.

It was through these station doors that thousands of Jews took their last look at their beloved Berlin before being forced onto trains that would carry them to their deaths. This fact, this history, is built into the consciousness of Berliners as they go about their everyday lives. It is not something that anyone, Jew or Gentile, resident or visitor, is expected to put behind them or to just get over. They do not run from it. It has become a part of who they are because it is a part of what they have been. They incorporate it into their identity because it is, in fact, them.

It is a mandatory part of every school curriculum, even for grade school students, and it is never far from view for any citizen. This is not to say that everyone is in agreement as to the lengths to which the country goes to reinforce this history. What seems not in contention is the necessity of remembering. A former member of the German parliament was once talking with Nigel Dunkley and thought out loud about his discomfort with the massive stone installation to the European Jews near the Brandenburg Gate, which some have compared to a cemetery in the middle of downtown. “Why can’t we have a nice park with grass and trees and a proper monument?” the former parliamentarian said. “Every time I drive past, I feel I am being punished by this higgly-piggly mess.”

“If that is what you really think,” Dunkley said to him, “that you’re being punished, then you are being punished.”

When Dunkley takes German students on tours of the history of the Third Reich, he asks them their reaction to what they have seen.

“Do you as Germans feel any guilt for what the Germans did?” he will ask them.

They will go off into groups and have heated discussions among themselves, and then come back to him with their thoughts.

“Yes, we are Germans, and Germans perpetrated this,” some students once told him, echoing what others have said. “And, though it wasn’t just Germans, it is the older Germans who were here who should feel guilt. We were not here. We ourselves did not do this. But we do feel that, as the younger generation, we should acknowledge and accept the responsibility. And for the generations that come after us, we should be the guardians of the truth.”

It was nearing the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War, and the turmoil in America had doubled over on itself through the summer of 2014 and into 2015, a metronome of unfiltered videos, one after another, of police attacking unarmed citizens from Staten Island to Los Angeles. Then came the mass demonstrations, protesters converging by the thousands to shut down FDR Drive in Manhattan and Lake Shore Drive in Chicago at rush hour, protesters dropping to the ground as had the victims in those shootings. And we could see on Twitter or cable news the office workers and undergraduates splayed together on the tile floor at the cosmetics counters at Macy’s or at Grand Central Terminal or the University of Michigan Medical School, the die-ins as they were called, under the tragically obvious rallying cry of Black Lives Matter.

By June of 2015, the first black president was delivering a eulogy at the funeral of the pastor killed in the Charleston church massacre. The president, looking grim-faced and stricken, sought to bring the country to a hoped-for redemption by leading the sanctuary through the refrain of “Amazing Grace,” the song itself a quest for absolution by the captain of a slaving ship.

It was shortly thereafter that the Confederate flag finally came down from the state capitol in Columbia after it had flown for fifty-four years. At the same time, Harper Lee’s second novel,
Go Set a Watchman,
was released, and the country discovered that the most beloved hero in American fiction, Atticus Finch, had actually been an unreconstructed bigot.

The country was being unmasked, it seemed. It moved me enough to write an op-ed about what appeared to be a moment of truth. I decided to reach out to a friend, Taylor Branch, the esteemed historian of the civil rights movement, to hear his thoughts. He was translating this through the lens of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s thirteen-year campaign for social justice. He believed then that the country had been hurled back to the 1950s, which he said he found hopeful, actually, because it could be the beginning of a breakthrough.

“It is building up to a crisis for those who want to will this away,” he told me, and I included him in my opinion piece in
The New York Times
that July.

Three years later, we were catching up over coffee, with a different president and the concentric circles of hate seeming to radiate outward to Muslims, Mexican immigrants, nonwhite immigrants overall, and now to Jews. It was November 2018. The month before, eleven Jewish worshippers had been gunned down as they prayed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

“With everything going on, where do you think we are now?” I asked him. “Are you still thinking 1950s? I’m thinking 1880s.”

“Well, that’s awfully bleak,” he said. “There was a total exclusion of the black vote, total exclusion from political life. People were being lynched openly. That is not happening now. The 1880s was the start of a long period of suppression.”

I could see his point, and I told him I fervently hoped to be wrong. That era, the decades roughly between the end of Reconstruction and the start of World War II, was called the Nadir by the black historian Rayford Logan. Many black historians see the current era, starting roughly with the shooting of Trayvon Martin and other unarmed black people, combined with the rollbacks in voting rights protections, as the Second Nadir.

“We’re seeing the twenty-first-century version of the backlash,” I said. “The tools will be different than before.”

We both well knew that grandfather clauses had faded with the previous century, but now states were
purging tens of thousands of voters for missing a single election, shutting down polling stations at the last minute in Democratic-leaning precincts. They were now requiring state ID just to vote, but were
rejecting IDs that didn’t match the voter list to the letter or that were missing a single apostrophe. Since 2010, twenty-four states had passed one or all of these restrictions.

Then there were the shootings of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of authorities that, despite viral videos, often went without prosecution.

“The purpose of the lynchings was to keep black people in their place,” I said. “In both eras, people were killed with impunity. And now, the mass shootings.”

“Based on what you’re saying,” Taylor said, “that sounds like we’re at the end of the Weimar Republic!”

“It grieves me to think that,” I said.

“Donald Trump brought to the surface what had been there all along, and now that it is out, there is no denying it. So it should be easier to defeat.”

“I think what we’re looking at is South Africa.”

“They are more out front with their racism than here,” he said.

“By that, I mean the demographics and the dynamics of their demographics.”

“Yes,” he said of the predictions for 2042. “People were angry when the projections came out. People said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country.”

“Now there are troops at the border,” I said, “and shootings of black and brown and Jewish people.”

Taylor nodded. He contemplated the meaning of that. “So the real question would be,” he said finally, “if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one.

Leon Lederman was an American physicist who won a Nobel Prize in 1988 for his groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the particles of nature. Decades afterward, when he was in his early nineties, he began to suffer memory loss and to require additional care. In 2015, he took the extraordinary step of auctioning off his Nobel Prize medal for $765,000 to cover medical bills that were mounting. In 2018, he died in a nursing home, his Nobel Prize in the hands of someone else.

Compared to our counterparts in the developed world, America can be a harsh landscape, a less benevolent society than other wealthy nations. It is the price we pay for our caste system. In places with a different history and hierarchy, it is not necessarily seen as taking away from one’s own prosperity if the system looks out for the needs of everyone.

People show a greater sense of joint responsibility to one another when they see their fellow citizens as like themselves, as in the nations of western Europe or in Australia, a diverse country with a looser hierarchy. Societies can be more magnanimous when people perceive themselves as having an equal stake in the lives of their fellow citizens.

There are thriving, prosperous nations where people do not have to sell their Nobel Prizes to get medical care, where families don’t go broke taking care of elderly loved ones, where children exceed the educational achievements of American children, where drug addicts are in treatment rather than prison, where perhaps the greatest measure of human success—happiness and a long life—exists in greater measure because they value their shared commonality.

In a video that went viral at the end of 2019, British citizens are shown being asked to guess what they think routine medical procedures, covered by their own healthcare system, would cost in the United States. Time and again, the interviewees woefully underestimate the cost to Americans, some bellowing, gobsmacked, at the actual prices, some refusing to believe that anyone would have to pay that much for basic, necessary care.

“
Ten grand?” one woman asks when told the average cost of childbirth. “For a baby? Mad!”

One man is asked how much he thinks it costs for an ambulance to take you to the hospital. “There’s a price for that?” he asks. “Why?“

“I’m genuinely speechless,” one woman says.

The majority of America’s peer nations have some form of free or low-cost healthcare coverage. The writer Jonathan Chait noted America’s singular indifference, unique among developed nations, toward helping all of its citizens. He connected this hard-heartedness to the hierarchy that arose from slavery. He found that even conservatives in other wealthy nations are more compassionate than many Americans.

“
Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States,” he observed in
New York
magazine in 2014. “In none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.”

A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world.

There are more public mass shootings in America than in any other country, and the United States has one of the highest rates of gun deaths in the developed world, according to the World Health Organization. Americans own more guns per capita than any other nation. Americans own nearly half of the guns in the world owned by civilians.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than that of Russia and China, with a rate of 655 per 100,000. The United States imprisons more people, 2.2 million, than any other nation. The incarceration rate in America is so high that the line representing the United States extends well off the page in graphics of the prison rates in the developed world. If the U.S. prison population were a city, it would be the fifth largest in America.

American women are more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women in other wealthy nations. With fourteen deaths per 100,000 live births,
the maternal mortality rate in America is nearly three times the rate in Sweden, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Part of this reflects the woeful maternal death rates for black and indigenous women in the United States.

Life expectancy in the United States is the lowest among the eleven highest-income countries (United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Denmark).
The life expectancy in America is 78.6 years, as against a combined average of 82.3 years and against 84.2 for Japan, the country with the longest life expectancy, based on a 2019 analysis.

Infant mortality in the United States is highest among the richest nations, 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, as against a combined average of 3.6 per 1,000 live births for the richest countries, as against about 2 per 1,000 in Japan and Finland.

American students score near the bottom in industrialized nations in mathematics and reading. Fifteen-year-olds in the United States scored well below students in peer nations on math literacy, below Latvia and the Slovak Republic, among the dozens of countries that exceed U.S. test scores. By the time that the first woman major-party candidate ran for president in 2016, some sixty other countries had already had a woman head of state, including India, Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and smaller countries such as Iceland, Norway, Burundi, and Slovenia. And, in perhaps the most important measure of all for citizens anywhere, the United States ranked
eighteenth in happiness in the world, just above the Czech Republic, according to the consortium of organizations, including Gallup, that publishes the results each year. The United States has fallen seven spots since 2012, a testimony to our continuing discontents.

In the winter of 2020, the one year in human history that would hold the promise of perfect insight, an invisible life-form awakened in the Eastern Hemisphere and began to spread across the oceans.

The earth’s most powerful nation watched as faraway workers in hazmat gear tested for what no one could see, and deluded itself into believing that American exceptionalism would somehow grant it immunity from the sorrows of other countries.

Yet the virus arrived on these shores, and it planted itself in the gaps of disparity, the torn kinships and fraying infrastructure in the country’s caste system, just as it exploited the weakened immune system in the human body.

Soon, America had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world. Governors pleaded for basic supplies and test kits, were reduced to bidding against one another for ventilators. “
As Usual,” read a headline in
The Atlantic,
“Americans Must Go It Alone.”

The virus exposed both the vulnerability of all humans and the layers of hierarchy. While anyone could contract the virus, it was Asian-Americans who were scapegoated for it merely because they looked like the people from the part of the world that the virus first struck.

And as the crisis wore on, it was African-Americans and Latino-Americans who began dying at higher rates. Preexisting conditions, often tied to the stresses on marginalized people, contributed to the divergence. But it was the caste-like occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy—grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact—that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.

As the number of deaths climbed to the highest in the world, America—and those looking to it for leadership—had to come to terms with the untested fragilities of its social ecosystem.

“
To a watching world,” wrote
The Guardian,
“the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.”

The pandemic, and the country’s fitful, often self-centered lack of readiness, exposed “a failure of character unparalleled in US history,” in the words of Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University. The pandemic forced the nation to open its eyes to what it might not have wanted to see but needed to see, while forcing humanity to contemplate its impotence against the laws of nature.

“
This is a civilization searching for its humanity,” Gary Michael Tartakov, an American scholar of caste, said of this country. “It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own.”