CHANGING OUR PERSPECTIVE ON RACISM
Rev. Kit Ketcham
January 17, 2021
The past couple of years have been tumultuous, not just because of the pandemic and its lockdowns, social distancing, and the politicization of national health, but because we as a global society are having to come to terms with a previously unseen and evil force: the white supremacy which lies like a deadening blanket over our relationships with our fellow human beings of color.
Like many of you, no doubt, I have been doing a lot of reading about white fragility, white supremacy, institutional racism, and looking at myself and my own history of growing up in a world of racial privilege that I didn’t even notice, most of the time.
One of the books I read was Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE: the origins of our discontents. Wilkerson’s personal experiences, her scholarship, and her knack of telling stories and making connections with our painful American history gave me a picture of an embedded poison in our heritage that has come to a head with political and social events of recent decades.
Her book starts with an analogy, one you may not have heard before.
In the summer of 2016, in the Siberian tundra, an abnormal heat wave caused the tundra to warm up to the point where something unusual began to happen. A strange pathogen sickened and killed hundreds of human beings and animals. It was discovered to be the anthrax pathogen which had killed herds of reindeer decades earlier, carcasses buried in the permafrost since WWII and now surfacing unexpectedly to cause havoc as the pathogen awakened in the heat. It seeped into the grazing lands and infected reindeer and herders who raised and relied upon those animals for sustenance.
Wilkerson writes: “The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.”
That same year, 2016, in the USA, two candidates vied for the office of POTUS, one a no-nonsense woman with decades of experience and highly qualified, the other an impetuous billionaire, reality TV star, prone to insulting anyone unlike himself, who had never held public office.
During the campaign, these polar opposites displayed opposite campaign tactics as well. The billionaire boasted about his sexual assaults, mocked the disabled, encouraged violence, declared FAKE NEWS to be endemic in the media, and had his supporters shouting “Lock her up” at every rally.
On the other side of the aisle, the woman candidate could hardly get a word in edgewise when, at debates, the billionaire loomed over her as she spoke, as if threatening her from behind her podium. And despite her obvious qualifications, she was a woman and therefore the billionaire’s target.
After the election, won by probably the least qualified candidate in US history, anger and fear for our democracy arose in large pockets of resistance across the land: the Women’s March movement, Black Lives Matter, and several others, and we as a nation began to see how deeply divided our citizenry is.
During the past four years, my concern and disgust toward the situation which was developing as the president of the US wreaked havoc drove me to read what I could about both the person in the White House and the motives which seemed to be driving him.
We have known for a long time that systematic, institutional racism infects our culture deeply. But what does it look like in other parts of the world? Isabel Wilkerson’s book CASTE addressed that topic and as I read it, I could see that it was bigger than US history. It did not start with slavery in our country but was a logical progression in a worldview which regarded certain classes of people to be less than human.
Wilkerson discusses three major caste systems throughout the book: India, Nazi Germany, and America. There are differences, of course, but there are many similarities. Did you know, for example, that the Nazis actually studied America’s segregation practices and Jim Crow laws in their run-up to Jewish persecution and execution?
She describes 8 pillars of the Caste system, ancient principles upon which a caste system is constructed, beliefs that were at one time or another deep within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant. That’s how caste develops and functions. These foundational concepts have arisen from Wilkerson’s study of the ancient principles underlying the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies.
As I describe them, I hope you’ll think about where you have seen or experienced these pillars at work in our American life, as well as in other societies you may be familiar with.
The first of these principles is “Divine Will and the Laws of Nature”
Religious legends have been told for centuries about how the gods or god created a hierarchy of human beings---in Hinduism, for example, the Brahmin is the head, the mouth, the philosopher, priest, the one nearest the gods; and then downwards, level by bodily level, according each part of the human body to a certain social role.
The Brahmin is the head, and the feet are the servants which bear the burden, and they are at the bottom. Yet not quite at the bottom, for there are the Untouchables, now called Dalits, who pollute with their very shadow, the Outcastes.
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine yourself born into a caste level that is unchangeable, controls who you may marry, causes you to fear the possibility of pollution from a lower caste person or, if you are a lower caste person, the fear of being accused and punished for offenses of pollution.
Imagine that you are limited to certain kinds of work and education, that you are vulnerable to oppression in health care, that terror and cruelty, both psychological and physical, are used to control you. Imagine that you are always to be part of the inherently superior caste and always to assume that members of a lower caste are stereotypically dangerous criminals or dishonest in their financial dealings.
I’m sure that most of us can see how these levels of caste appear in human life, not just in Hinduism and Nazi Germany, but in American life.
Even though here in the US, we don’t openly label the levels of hierarchy, they still shape our expectations and behavior, in some of us more than others.
The second pillar of caste is Heritability: the mechanism by which a member of a caste can never escape that caste level. Born a Brahmin, always a Brahmin. Born a Rockefeller, always a Rockefeller or a Kennedy or a Roosevelt. Born a Black, always a Black no matter how educated or talented. Even with a Harvard education, Barack Obama was still Black and, by many, considered to be lower caste.
The third pillar of caste is Control of Marriage and Mating: that a member of the upper level must marry or mate with another member of the upper level. Certain people are not allowed to marry or mate, no matter what their level status, even if they’re white----as in same sex relationships. Blacks and whites must not marry or mate. I remember the reaction I got from family members when I revealed that my first serious love was a Black man whom I had met in our religious tradition, American Baptist.
The fourth pillar of caste is Purity versus Pollution: the need to be pure of blood, not polluted by blood from a lower caste person. Even a drop of Black blood meant a person was black. Earlier in the 20th century, Jews and Blacks were forbidden to use certain pools and beaches and whites would not enter water that had touched black skin. And segregation, of course, meant exclusion of the polluting caste. Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.
The fifth pillar of caste is Occupational Hierarchy: a division of labor depending on one’s place in the caste hierarchy. The drudge work went to those who were considered to be of low intelligence and skill---the slave in early American history, as an example.
A Southern politician declared this central doctrine from the floor of the US Senate in March 1858: “In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” said Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. “That is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity, such a class you must have---it constitutes the very mudsill of society.”
The sixth pillar of caste is Dehumanization and Stigma: Black people and Jewish people in history have been used for medical and social experimentation, treated cruelly deliberately because they were not considered human and couldn’t feel pain the way real people felt pain. This treatment was documented in Nazi concentration camps and in literature that came out of the slavery days in America. Brown children in cages at the Mexican border, torn from their parents, is another more recent example.
To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one’s own species.
The seventh pillar of caste is Terror as Enforcement and Cruelty for Control: violence and terror, both physical and psychological, have been used to control and prevent resistance.
A quote from p. 151 of Wilkerson’s book: “Jews in Nazi controlled Europe, African-Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who had been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them, and had incentive to try to prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against (their) fellow humans.”
Black and Brown and Jewish people live with a constant concern that they may become targets for those who have terror and cruelty to the Other embedded in themselves by this assumption.
The eighth pillar of caste is Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority: people are forced into roles that are stereotypical of their caste level. There is an assumption embedded in this pillar that Blacks are dangerous criminals and violent, that Jews are sly and money-grubbing, that Brown people are lazy or stupid.
One teaching technique for elementary students has been the division in the classroom by eye color, designating the blue-eyed children, for example, as less deserving and the brown eyed children as more deserving. Privileges and treats were doled out according to eye color and after lunch, the designation was changed---blue eyed children were the deserving group and brown-eyed kids were less deserving.
It was a dramatic way of showing the ways physical appearance can be stigmatizing and it was maybe too effective, as children reported the abuse and name-calling they experienced when they were the less-deserving kids and the more deserving children were observed relishing their opportunity to abuse and harass the others. This technique, of course, varies in its success, depending on the skill and empathy of the teacher!
Imagine the training that Black and Brown and Jewish parents must give their kids, the warnings about staying in line, not disobeying the limitations of their caste, and at the same time, encouraging them to get education, to strive for excellence, without fear and always knowing that fear for their children is part of the equation.
What training did our parents give us? My well-meaning parents gave me the standard lessons for girls: don’t date certain boys, keep your knees together, keep the doors locked on the car, that sort of thing---pretty mild compared to what Black parents, for example, have to teach their children.
The world has changed, yes, and perhaps things are a bit better than they were in the 50’s and 60’s in America, but when the attempted coup by angry Trump supporters occurred 10 days ago, it became clear that we are still fighting the battle to establish in this country a multi-racial, multi-cultural democracy.
We are further realizing that this has never been successfully achieved in our history. It is a shining goal, an ambition we may not have considered possible in the past but now see as essential, if democracy is to survive and prosper in our nation.
I read a blog weekly by an organization led by Darren Walker, its president. On January 7, he wrote this, which I will read in closing:
I have long believed that inequality is the greatest threat to justice—and, the corollary, that white supremacy is the greatest threat to democracy. But what has become clear during recent weeks—and all the more apparent yesterday—is that the converse is also true: Democracy is the greatest threat to white supremacy.
As the inimitable, incisive Isabel Wilkerson Tweeted in real time, “we have seen caste in action.”
I, too, cannot see yesterday’s insurrection as anything other than the latest chapter in a long, dispiriting, exhausting history. And yet, from this very same history, I also—perhaps, paradoxically—draw hope.
I’m hopeful because, from our founding contradiction, we have emerged a freer, fairer nation. All too slowly, all too unevenly, all too imperfectly—and at far too high a cost—we, the people, have struggled to root out the strand of white supremacy in our country’s DNA.
Our founding aspirations were just that: aspirations. It’s been the work of generations—from Frederick Douglass and Fannie Lou Hamer to Harriet Tubman and Bayard Rustin—to realize these aspirations. And while much remains to be done, and undone, I believe we can emerge—and are emerging—a more unified, more equal, more just, more American America.
Yes, the ideal of democracy is the greatest threat to the ideology of white supremacy; neither can long endure in the presence of the other. That is why today—and every day—we must renew our commitment to protect our democratic values and institutions from all enemies, foreign and domestic, especially those falsely disguised as patriots.
Let’s pause for a time of silent reflection and prayer, followed by our closing song.
BENEDICTION: Our worship service, our time of shaping worth together, is ended, but our service to the world begins again as we leave this place. Let us go in peace, remembering what we have heard today and looking for the evil traces of caste in the situations we observe and read about. May we be vigilant in eliminating those caste expectations from our lives and may we continue to do all we can to make the world a safer place for our blossoming multicultural, multiracial democracy. Amen, Shalom, Salaam, and Blessed Be.
