American Caste System...

[5fish]

We have a caste system as our Gini coefficient goes up... Martin Luther Jr. went to India... Learned we had one too and we still have it... its a good read...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...caste-system-us-race-martin-luther-king-india

He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read about and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.

And he(Martin) said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.

 

[5fish]

Herr another look....

Does America have a caste system?

An Indian scholar makes the case that caste explains inequality in America better than race and class.

theconversation.com

In the United States, inequality tends to be framed as an issue of either class, race or both. Consider, for example, criticism that Republicans’ new tax plan is a weapon of “class warfare,” or accusations that the recent U.S. government shutdown was racist.

As an India-born novelist and scholar who teaches in the United States, I have come to see America’s stratified society through a different lens: caste.

Many Americans would be appalled to think that anything like caste could exist in a country allegedly founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. After all, India’s atrocious caste system determines social status by birth, compels marriage within a community and restricts job opportunity.

But is the U.S. really so different?

A thought...

Add to these ideological currents the evidence on the race gap in higher education, stagnant upward mobility and rising inequality, and the truth is damning. Five decades after the civil rights movement, American society remains hierarchical, exclusionary and stubbornly resistant to change.

Caste gives Americans a way to articulate their sense of persistent marginalization. And by virtue of being apparently foreign – it comes from India, after all – it usefully complicates the dominant American Dream narrative.

The U.S. has a class problem. It has a race problem. And it may just have a caste problem, too.

 

[5fish]

Here a good article....

Is America Trapped in a Caste System?

Isabel Wilkerson compares American racism to structures of oppression in India and Nazi Germany.

newrepublic.com

Three-quarters of the way into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson describes the humiliation suffered by Black passengers on a steamship in the American South before the Civil War. All women, and all free during slavery’s reign, they confounded the captain, who had to decide how to integrate them into the dining protocols aboard. The ship, a floating microcosm of antebellum society, followed social codes determined by the era’s prevailing hierarchies of class as well as race. The white passengers ate first, followed by the white crew, followed by the Black crew, whether enslaved or free. The Black passengers ate after everyone else, in the kitchen pantry rather than the dining room, standing up at the butler’s table rather than seated. Punished for not conforming to expectations that they be subordinate, they were treated worse than the Black laborers aboard, in bondage or not, who were of lower status.

 

[5fish]

Here is a thought that racism divides and conquers the workers...

Du Bois and the “Wages of Whiteness”: What He Meant, What He Didn’t, and, Besides, It Shouldn’t Matter for Our Politics Anyway – Nonsite.org

Since the emergence of what has been known as “whiteness studies” in the early 1990s, proponents of the view that the white working class in the United States rejects a class-based politics in favor of commitment to white supremacy have cited W.E.B. Du Bois’s reference in Black Reconstruction...

nonsite.org

Since the emergence of what has been known as “whiteness studies” in the early 1990s, proponents of the view that the white working class in the United States rejects a class-based politics in favor of commitment to white supremacy have cited W.E.B. Du Bois’s reference in Black Reconstruction In America to a “psychological wage” that whiteness offers as supporting that view and, by extension, the necessity that combating racism and white supremacy takes priority over struggle against capitalist inequality.

Whiteness studies - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Whiteness studies is the study of the structures that produce white privilege,[1] the examination of what whiteness is when analyzed as a race, a culture, and a source of systemic racism,[2] and the exploration of other social phenomena generated by the societal compositions, perceptions and group behaviors of white people.[3] It is an interdisciplinary arena of inquiry that has developed beginning in the United States from white trash studies and critical race studies, particularly since the late 20th century.[4] It is focused on what proponents[who?] describe as the cultural, historical and sociological aspects of people identified as white, and the social construction of "whiteness" as an ideology tied to social status.