Class - the Elephant in the Womb

 “Caste – the Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020

This book is a small step forward from the simple-minded analyses of ‘race’ carried out by U.S. liberals and conservatives, the media and educational institutions to this day.  Wilkerson realizes that ‘race’ is a reactionary social construct, not a biologic fact, citing scientists like Ashley Montagu in the 1950s.  Among humans, it does not exist, as we are 99.9% the same.  Yet everyone blathers on about race in the plural, inspired by government categories derived from Jim Crow. 

Wilkerson knows there is no such thing as ‘white’ or ‘black’ people, just various shades of melanin – of brown, beige and pink skin.  She knows that skin color and certain small physical markers are products of geography and nothing else.  She makes fun of the odd qualification of ‘Caucasian.’  What does exist is the politicization of these terms.  Wilkerson understands that there is a difference between active institutional racism and personal bigotry or prejudice.  She calls the former caste.

INDIA and the U.S.

Wilkerson’s touchstone on the subject of caste is the religious caste system in India, which MLK once visited to better understand Gandhi.  At one point, MLK was introduced in India as an American ‘untouchable,’ which surprised him but then made sense.  Wilkerson herself upholds Dalit ‘untouchable’ B.R. Ambedkar as the MLK of India.  Wilkerson does not note that Gandhi, a Hindu, was a supporter of the Indian caste system in his battles with Ambedkar.  Gandhi’s father was from the Modh Baniya caste – a merchant caste – and Gandhi became a lawyer.  Indian castes themselves are buried in hundreds of years of Hindu varna hierarchies, originating out of slave and medieval economies, not capitalism.   

Wilkerson considers India, the brief existence of fascist Nazi Germany and the U.S. to be the only sources of a caste understanding.  All three examples actually come from different economic sources.  She ignores apartheid South Africa, the treatment of indigenous Americans or Palestinians and the existence of mistreated color, ethnic or religious strata all over the world.  Wilkerson is casual in her approach, relying on anecdotes and psychology, not statistics or social science.  The style is stories and journalism, not sociology. She mentions earlier works written in the 1930s:  “Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class” and “Caste and Class in a Southern Town.”  But notice their titles as opposed to hers - class is included.  One of the authors of the first treatise, Allison Davis, was probably a Marxist who criticized the black bourgeoisie in a famous 1929 essay, “The Negro Deserts His People.” A favorite of liberals and Wilkerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, is still ignored in his opposition to capitalism as the source of caste oppression.

For Marxists I do not think the concept of a color caste in the U.S. raises problems if you rename ‘race’ to ‘caste.’  It exists between the obvious flaws of simple-minded identity politics and class.  Caste has attributes of class if the concept is applied properly.  The Indian caste system denotes roles in a religious and social hierarchy and sometimes geographic origins.  It is also supposed to determine your economic job.  Given there are many castes and sub-castes and many jobs in India, the concept divides the working classes and farmers by Hindu religious boundaries. Even Indian Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and Christians are affected by it.  This archaic caste system objectively props up the virulent Indian class system, now dominated by enriched Hindutva mega-capitalists. 

Wilkerson’s concept of U.S. caste on the other hand is simple, deceptive and somewhat artificial, stretched across various ethnic identities.  She assigns Latinos and Asians to a ‘middle’ caste, while exiling indigenous native Americans from the caste system altogether.  Her conception is a mostly ‘black’ centric concept, bi-polar to ‘whites.’  This reflects a theoretical weakness in the book, a blinkered tunnel vision that continues throughout.  It is one of several crucial weaknesses in her theory.

Someone Got There First

CASTE is ECONOMIC

Wilkerson accepts caste as an economic category, as job-related.  Her examples include assumptions that all 'black' people must be waiters or clerks, or cannot be NYT reporters, as she once was. Slavery and Jim Crow legally prohibited darker skinned persons from having businesses or more skilled jobs.  Agricultural, servant and physical or ‘menial’ labor was almost all that was allowed or possible, even as people moved north to escape Jim Crow.  Wilkerson’s examples of job restrictions become fewer and fewer as she approaches the present, as most are from Jim Crow.  Dark-skinned people who succeed in a job ‘outside of their caste’ like herself she cleverly calls "miscast."  Those numbers of ‘miscasts’ are not infinitesimal or accidental anymore.

U.S. color castes are not impermeable categories, as we can easily find exceptions, including Ms. Wilkerson herself, a professor. Or the unemployed Scots-Irish miner in Appalachia suffering from black lung high on opioids.  I stereotype because it reveals the weakness of caste as an all-encompassing view.  Class is a bedrock economic reality that encompasses concepts of caste and ‘race.’  Class is sometimes permeable but it still cuts across every caste, every ethnicity, every nation, every identity, every single society.  Class is present in all capitalist societies, even when there are no castes present.  In the U.S. the permeability of class has become less and less, even in comparison to Europe.  

A visit to a typical U.S. restaurant will let you see a color caste and class system in action.  Light skinned women up front as waitresses and hostesses, Latino cooks in the kitchen, dark-skinned or Latino dishwashers and bussers in back … and an alabaster owner counting profits in the office.  The first groups are all exploited by the last, though the waitresses might get the best tips.  This is how caste and class intertwine but ultimately capital dominates.  Profit is the actual motivation, not history, meanness, stupidity or theology.

Wilkerson is aware of elites in the dominant caste and economic exploitation of those lower down through slavery and afterwards.  Yet she doesn’t consider present versions of slavery as relevant to her theory.  Right now debt slavery and non-chattel labor imprisonment are at record levels.  Imprisoned Thai shrimp fisherman locked on their boats and Mexican tomato workers in walled farms; young Indian boys staining leather for their father’s debts; body parts taken from poverty-stricken proletarians; caged children picking chocolate beans in Ivory Coast; captured miners in the Congo; imprisoned Indonesian housemaids in Saudi Arabia; Romanian girls sold to London brothels.  

It is all part of an international system of profit off of labor and bodies, an imperial ‘side gig’ that is illegal, but like the drug trade, gun smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion and crime itself, are part of the overall capitalist economy.  It is not chattel slavery - it is the modern equivalent.  Profit makes the law.  

FAMILIARITY

Much of this book is very familiar.  She locates the origins of caste in colonialism.  She outlines slavery, descriptions of lynching and miscegenation laws.  She writes about the Jim Crow ‘one drop’ and 1/64th rules and Nazi adoption of Jim Crow law applied to German Jews.  She has a chapter on the false science of eugenics, which dominated social sciences in the early 1900s.  Obama as a ‘black’ president; Charlottesville and the Confederate flag issue; personal slights; a few mentions of cop violence but not many; the Trump victory.

Where she gets into quicksand is her description of so-called "middle castes."  She notes historical attempts by Asians, Indians, native Americans or Latinos to be considered ‘white’ in the legal sense, just as Italians or Irish became ‘white.’  However that ignores the fact that Mexicans and native Americans, many Arabs, Africans and Asians are specifically oppressed.  They are not middle castes. They don’t have the long oppressive history of slavery behind them, but they do have "that skin thing."  Some middle-class Asians might be the best candidates for middle-caste, but it is because of their class standing as professionals or business people.  The poverty-stricken and proletarian Hmong in St. Paul, Minnesota or Somalis in Minneapolis are in no way middle caste.  The term reflects Wilkerson echo of the liberal fantasy term middle class for everyone who is between Bill Gates and those on welfare.

Professor Wilkerson

BLACK BOURGEOISIE

Wilkerson never uses the term capitalism and avoids the term class except in one paragraph in which she addresses it, admitting that some low-caste members can "make it" but are still subject to a caste problems.  She gives examples of wealthy or prominent African-Americans who were treated like low-level nobodies by cops or business owners, or talked down to at meetings by clueless 'whites'.   What she does not do is talk about the existing "black bourgeoisie" and explain how their existence disrupts her caste paradigm.  Nor does she deal with the vast ‘white’ proletariat, which also disrupts her view. She admits the upper caste has elites and so does the lower - but goes no further.  Here be monsters!

According to Forbes there were only 7 African-American billionaires in the U.S. in 2020, “from finance to technology to entertainment.”  In 2021, Nubia notes the top 10 ‘black’ wealthy were: Vista Equity Partners owner Robert Smith; a businessman, David Steward; Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Jay-Z, P-Diddy; another business owner, Sheila Johnson; Dr. Dre, Rihanna, and Tyler Perry.  This small number of super-wealthy concentrated in entertainment reflects a growing wealth gap between the castes, but it does not eliminate class in the ‘black’ community.  The ‘black’ upper class is estimated to be 1% of the overall population.  Making over $200K a year qualifies a person to be in the upper middle class (UMC) according to some estimates.  In 2016 Brookings reported that 7% of the UMC was African American, 9% Hispanic-American, 11% Asian-American, the rest European-American.  Asians had the smallest proportion of the overall population so Brookings notes that Asians have more members in the UMC than ‘whites.’  This further undermines Wilkerson’s version of caste.

Like many middle-class liberals, Wilkerson assumes in her text that all ‘white working class’ people are bigots or racists, relishing their higher caste standing and all endorsing Trump.   This is factual nonsense, unsupported by statistics.  Blue-collar proletarians have more in common across any caste than those who are in the upper middle class of their own caste.  Integrated workplaces, political organizations and unions show this best. 

DISAPPEARING CLASS

Ultimately the effect of Wilkerson’s book is to disappear class as part of a broad propaganda effort by the bourgeois academy, corporate media and the political system.  She has no plan to overcome caste and ignores any perspective of emancipation from class, caste or institutional racism.  Her solution is:  “an intervention of humanitarian impulses.”(!) She herself has been a top NYT reporter, a prominent journalism professor and a celebrated non-fiction writer for an earlier book on the Great Migration.  Caste itself got a pat on the back from Oprah and the NYT.  She’s a ‘somebody’ writing for nobodies.  Is she an Ambedkar?  Not even.  A hard answer to Wilkerson’s version of this theory are the efforts of Marxists, now and in the past.  Here is Black Agenda Report’s look at her book:   BAR on Caste

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar); “Slavery by Another Name,” “The New Jim Crow” (Alexander); “One Night in Miami,” “Arundhati Roy,” “White Tiger,” “Toward Race Reductionism,” “Mistaken Identity,” “Blood and Earth,” “Modern De Facto Slavery,” “Slave States,” “Prison Strike” “White Trash” “Chavs” or words like ‘racism,’ ‘caste’ or slavery.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

February 15, 2021