Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  It was only the third such impeachment trial: The two previous U.S. presidents who were impeached in office were Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, under pressure from fellow Republicans, in August 1974 as the House of Representatives prepared to impeach him.

  More than three hundred days had passed: Chris Cillizza, “The Last ‘Daily’ White House Press Briefing Was 170 Days Ago,” CNN, August 28, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/​2019/​08/​28/​politics/​trump-white-house-daily-press-briefing/​index.html. By the time the presidential impeachment trial ended on February 5, 2020, it had been 329 days since the last press briefing at the White House, held on March 11, 2019.

  Then the worst pandemic: Dan Diamond, “Trump’s Mismanagement Helped Fuel Coronavirus Crisis,” Politico, March 7, 2020, https://www.politico.com/​amp/​news/​2020/​03/​07/​trump-coronavirus-management-style-123465; Michael D. Shear et al., “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19,” New York Times, March 28, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/​2020/​03/​28/​us/​testing-coronavirus-pandemic.html; David Frum, “This Is Trump’s Fault: The President Is Failing, and Americans Are Paying for His Failures,” Atlantic, April 7, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/​ideas/​archive/​2020/​04/​americans-are-paying-the-price-for-trumps-failures/​609532/.

  one who had never served: “In the office’s storied 227-year existence—from George Washington to Barack Obama—there has never been a president who has entirely lacked both political and military service. Donald Trump has broken this barrier.” Zachary Crockett, “Donald Trump Is the Only US President Ever with No Political or Military Experience,” Vox, January 23, 2017, https://www.vox.com/​policy-and-politics/​2016/​11/​11/​13587532/​donald-trump-no-experience.

  “unholy mess”: Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017), p. 13. The two Washington journalists use the phrase “unholy mess” to sum up the views of campaign insiders Lissa Muscatine, Clinton’s longtime speechwriter, and Jon Favreau, former wunderkind speech writer for President Barack Obama. See also Joshua Zeitz, “Why Do They Hate Her?,” Politico, June 3, 2017, https://www.politico.com/​magazine/​story/​2017/​06/​03/​why-do-they-hate-her-215220.

  “An apparent mistake”: NBC News reported that Vladimir Bogdanov, a biology professor with the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in an interview for RBC news that “Yamal authorities stopped vaccinating reindeer 10 years ago because there had been no outbreaks for more than half-a-century—an apparent mistake.” Alexey Eremenko, “Heat Wave Sparks Anthrax Outbreak in Russia’s Yamalo-Nenets Area,” NBC News, July 27, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/​news/​world/​heat-wave-sparks-anthrax-outbreak-russia-s-yamalo-nenets-area-n617716.

  The military had to weigh: Marc Bennetts, “Russian Troops Destroy Hundreds of Reindeer Killed by Anthrax,” Times (London), August 9, 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/​article/​russian-troops-destroy-hundreds-of-reindeer-killed-by-anthrax-k5n3gf0cp.

  They would have to incinerate them: “Tundra Ablaze as Reindeer Carcasses Infected with Deadly Anthrax Are Incinerated,” Siberian Times, August 5, 2016, http://siberiantimes.com/​other/​others/​news/​n0699-tundra-ablaze-as-reindeer-carcasses-infected-with-deadly-anthrax-are-incinerated/.

  Chapter Two: An Old House and an Infrared Light

  “As a social and human division”: Hacker, Two Nations, p. 4.

  Chapter Three: An American Untouchable

  “To other countries, I may go”: Martin Luther King, Jr., “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi” (1959), https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/​king-papers/​documents/​my-trip-land-gandhi.

  “The separation of children”: C. Edwards Lester, Life and Public Services of Charles Sumner (New York, 1874), pp. 74, 81.

  “to maintain the color line has”: Myrdal, American Dilemma, p. 2:677.

  “When we speak of the race”: Montagu, Most Dangerous Myth, p. 180.

  “A record of the desperate efforts”: Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), p. 64.

  “The mill worker with nobody else”: Pope, Millhands, p. 94.

  “Let the lowest white man count”: This creed, known as “Race Hierarchy in the South,” was first published in Neale’s Monthly Magazine in November 1913 and was included in Bailey, Race Orthodoxy in the South, p. 112.

  “that my countrymen may take”: Jotiba (also known as Jotirao) Phule was an anti-caste reformer in nineteenth-century India who dedicated his 1873 book, Gulumgiri (Slavery), to the people of the United States who had ended slavery as a result of the Civil War. Cited by Kalpana Kannabirin in Non-Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), p. 151.

  “There is so much similarity”: B. R. Ambedkar to W.E.B. Du Bois, ca. July 1946, in W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

  “every sympathy with”: W.E.B. Du Bois to B. R. Ambedkar, July 31, 1946, ibid.

  “Why did God make me”: Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 3.

  “caste system, which divided”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 330–31.

  “The prejudice of race appears”: Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 141.

  An Invisible Program

  The great quest in the film series: Wachowski, Lilly and Lana, writers and directors (originally as The Wachowski Brothers). The Matrix Reloaded. Warner Brothers Studio, 2003.

  Part Two: THE ARBITRARY CONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN DIVISIONS

  Chapter Four: A Long-Running Play and the Emergence of Caste in America

  “held at the outset’’: Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, p. 129.

  “a civilized and relatively docile”: Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, p. 112.

  “The colonists soon realized”: Ibid., p. 113.

  “The Gaelic insurrections”: Ibid., p. 112.

  “the beautiful avenue in front”: Weld, American Slavery, p. 76.

  “When they [the slaveholders] permit”: Ibid., pp. 76, 77.

  “submission is required of”: George McDowell Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1856), p. 154; Weld, American Slavery, p. 283.

  “an otherwise perfect cloth”: Steinberg, Ethnic Myth, p. 300.

  “an extreme form of slavery”: Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, pp. 22, 23.

  “The slave is doomed to toil”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 64.

  “The slave is entirely subject”: Ibid., pp. 72, 63, 12.

  in 1740, South Carolina, like other: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 218.

  “They were scarcely permitted”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 125.

  “Your slaves, I believe, work”: Ibid., p. 116.

  “Whipping was a gateway form”: Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, pp. 120, 139–141, 185.

  “This fact is of great significance”: Guy B. Johnson, “Patterns of Race Conflict,” in Thompson, Race Relations, p. 130.

  “In the gentlest houses drifted”: Cash, Mind of the South, pp. 82–83.

  “For the horrors of”: Baldwin, Fire Next Time, p. 69.

  the year 2022 marks the first year: Enslavement lasted from 1619 to 1865 or for 246 years. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. The year 2022 is 246 years from 1776. The Thirteenth Amendment freed African-Americans from enslavement in 1865. The year 2111 is 246 years from the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that freed African-Americans from enslavement.

  the deaths of three-quarters: Guy Gugliotta,“New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” New York Times, April 3, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/​2012/​04/​03/​science/​civil-war-toll-up
-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html.

  “In Ireland or Italy”: López, White by Law, p. 84.

  “No one was white before”: James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ and Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984, p. 90.

  “The European immigrants’ experience”: Jacobson, Whiteness, p. 8.

  the Draft Riots of 1863: Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 32–33.

  “It was not just that’’: Jacobson, Whiteness, p. 9.

  “Caste in the South”: W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “A Comparative Study of American Caste,” in Thompson, Race Relations, p. 245.

  Chapter Five: “The Container We Have Built for You”

  “two men and two women”: Doyle, Etiquette of Race Relations, p. 145.

  “cardinal sin”: Sokol, There Goes My Everything, pp. 108–9.

  “charging horses, their hoofs”: George B. Leonard,“Journey of Conscience: Midnight Plane to Alabama,” Nation, March 10, 1965, pp. 502–5.

  Chapter Six: The Measure of Humanity

  overwhelmingly an inherited trait: Chao-Qiang Lai, “How Much of Human Height Is Genetic and How Much Is Due to Nutrition?” Scientific American, December 11, 2006, https://www.scientificamerican.com/​article/​how-much-of-human-height/.

  “ ’caste or quality of authentic’ ”: Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, pp. 37, 14, 19.

  anthropologist Paul Broca: López, White by Law, p. 59.

  The word was not passed down: Painter, The History of White People, pp. 72–84.

  More than a century later: López, White by Law, p. 54.

  “Race is a social concept”: Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 68.

  “an arbitrary and superficial selection”: Montagu, Most Dangerous Myth, pp. 116, 72–73.

  “Americans cling to race”: Painter, History of White People, p. xii.

  “Racism is a modern conception”: Dante Puzzo, “Racism and the Western Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 4 (October–December 1964): 579.

  as happened to Barack Obama: Garance Frank-Ruta, “The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party,” Atlantic, July 19, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/​politics/​archive/​2013/​07/​the-time-obama-was-mistaken-for-a-waiter-at-a-tina-brown-book-party/​277967/.

  Chapter Seven: Through the Fog of Delhi to the Parallels in India and America

  I saw the wayside altars: Borayin Larios and Raphaël Voi, “Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/​samaj/​4546.

  “Perhaps only the Jews”: Rajshekar, Dalit, p. 11.

  “The colonial powers officially”: Shah et al., Ground Down, p. 3.

  “Both occupy the lowest positions”: Verba, Ahmed, and Bhatt, Caste, Race and Politics, p. 15.

  the Dalit hosts joined in: Kevin D. Brown, “African-American Perspective on Common Struggles: Benefits for African Americans Comparing Their Struggle with Dalit Efforts,” in Yengde and Teltumbde, Radical Ambedkar, p. 56.

  Chapter Eight: The Nazis and the Acceleration of Caste

  “how to institutionalize racism”: Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, p. 113. Whitman’s unsettling book is a chilling investigation into how the American legal system influenced and inspired several Nazi race policies. Based on a wealth of research and his close reading of Nazi records and Reich-era literature, Whitman reconstructs a full picture of the Nazi connection to American race law. The book describes in detail the June 5, 1934, planning meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform.

  “For us Germans, it is”: Comments made in a review of Heinrich Krieger’s 1936 book, The Race Law in the United States, quoted in Kühl, Nazi Connection, p. 99.

  “the dedication with which”: Ibid., pp. 14, 15.

  They made Stoddard’s book: Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, p. 112.

  “weeding out the worst strains”: Kühl, Nazi Connection, pp. 61, 62.

  “inferior stocks”: Spiro, Defending the Master Race, pp. xi, 357. As a measure of Stoddard and Grant’s place in popular American culture at the time, F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to them in a thinly veiled conflation of the two men in a section of dialogue in The Great Gatsby. Tom and Daisy talk about “a fine book” Tom is reading, about the challenges facing “the dominant race” by “this man Goddard.”

  Hitler had studied America: Fischer, Hitler and America, pp. 2, 9.

  “shot down the millions”: Waitman Wade Beorn, The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 61.

  “a model for his program”: Spiro, Defending the Master Race, p. 357.

  “knack for maintaining an air”: Eugene DeFriest Bétit, Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid: African Americans’ 400 Years in North America, 1619–2019 (Xlibris, 2019), p. 282. Hitler had taken a personal look into American race policies. “I have studied with interest the laws of several American states,” he said around the time of these deliberations, “concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or injurious to the racial stock.” Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, p. 112.

  “was not just a country”: Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, p. 138.

  “the American Supreme Court”: Ibid., p. 77.

  “there were no other models”: Ibid., p. 138. South Africa would not enact a ban on interracial marriage until 1949, with the passage of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. In 1957, South Africa passed section 16 of the Immorality Act, which prohibited blacks and whites from living together and having sex. Nathaniel Sheppard, “S. Africa Plans to Repeal Racial Sex Ban,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1985, https://www.chicagotribune.com/​news/​ct-xpm-1985-04-16-8501220310-story.html; Michael Parks, “S. Africa to End Racial Ban on Sex: Will Repeal Laws Forbidding Blacks to Marry Whites,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1985, https://www.latimes.com/​archives/​la-xpm-1985-04-16-mn-23232-story.html.

  the country’s last free and fair election: In the last free and fair elections of the Nazi era, held in 1932, the Nazis won nearly 38 percent of the German vote. Brustein, Logic of Evil, p. 9; Hett, Death of Democracy, p. 201.

  “to exploit the methods of democracy”: Fischer, Hitler and America, p. 4.

  more than a third of Germans: Barry Eichengreen and Tim Hatton, Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective, IRLE Working Paper no. 12–88 (April 1988), https://www.irle.berkeley.edu/​files/​1998/​Interwar-Unemployment-In-International-Perspective.pdf.

  “public opinion accepted them”: Koonz, Nazi Conscience, p. 176.

  “white children and colored children”: Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, pp. 122, 121.

  “who thought American law”: Ibid., pp. 122–23.

  “any further penetration of Jewish”: Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 45.

  “There is a growing tendency”: Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, p. 120.

  “Gürtner simply refused to concede”: Ibid., p. 102.

  “political construction of race”: Ibid., pp. 107–8.

  “this jurisprudence would suit”: Ibid., p. 109.

  “because he did not wish”: Koonz, Nazi Conscience, p. 171.

  “We have been talking past”: Ibid., p. 177.

  “Germany became a full-fledged”: Fredrickson, White Supremacy, pp. 123–24.

  “The scholars who see parallels”: Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, p. 128.

  “the American commitment to legislating”: Ibid.

  Chapter Nine: The Evil of Silence

  Mothers pulled their children inside: Nigel Du
nkley, interview by author, Berlin and Sachsenhausen, May 24, 2019.

  the local lynching tree: Schrieke, Alien Americans, p. 133.

  The townspeople of the East Texas village: Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), p. 155.

  The little girls appear to be: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and James Weldon Johnson, N.A.A.C.P. Rubin Stacy Anti-Lynching Flier, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/​vufind/​Record/​3833735; Emma Sipperly, “The Rubin Stacy Lynching: Reconstructing Justice,” Northeastern University Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic working document, Fall 2016, https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/​downloads/​neu:m04285648?datastream_id=content; John Dolen, “His Name Was Rubin Stacy,” Fort Lauderale Magazine, August 1, 2018, https://fortlauderdalemagazine.com/​his-name-was-rubin-stacy/.

  Photographers were tipped off in advance: The Crisis 10, no. 2, June 1915, p. 71.

  They made postcards: Allen, Without Sanctuary, pp. 29, 174–77, 183, https://withoutsanctuary.org/​pics_22_picback_text.html.

  “Even the Nazis did not”: Richard Lacayo,“Blood at the Root,” Time, April 2, 2000, http://content.time.com/​time/​magazine/​article/​0,9171,42301,00.html.

  The leaders of the mob pulled Brown: “A Horrible Lynching,” Nebraska Studies, n.d., http://www.nebraskastudies.org/​1900-1924/​racial-tensions/​a-horrible-lynching/.