“I have a slave who I believe”: “Narrative and Testimony of Sarah M. Grimké” (1830), in Weld, American Slavery, p. 24.
An SS squad leader, who: “Compulsory Labour in the ‘Brickworks’ Death Camp,” Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Sachsenhausen, Germany. Wall text describing SS squad leader Richard Bugdalle making prisoners dance like bears around a shovel. When one man refused, Bugdalle “took a shovel handle, and hit and killed him.”
“the claim of absolute proprietorship”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 77.
Pillar Number Six: Dehumanization and Stigma
“undergarment and an”: Doyle, Etiquette of Race Relations, p. 61.
“punishable by cutting off”: Rajshekar, Dalit, p. 64.
work in the bakery: “The Brickworks,” Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Sachsenhausen, Germany. Wall text describing conditions inflicted on forced laborers at the concentration camp.
“When spoken to, they must’’: Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, p. 74.
“He is accounted criminal for”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 287.
seventy-one offenses that carried: Ibid., p. 291; H. Bruce Franklin, “Billy Budd and Capital Punishment: A Tale of Three Centuries,” in Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling and Activism, ed. Katy Ryan (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), p. 117.
“be flogged for teaching”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 290.
“Richmond required that Negroes”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 209.
the village of Oranienburg: “Bricks for ‘Germania’—Shells for the ‘Final Victory,’ the ‘Brickworks,’ an External Camp of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Sachsenhausen, Germany. Wall text describing the daily march of prison laborers to the clay pits, and the carts they pushed at day’s end with the bodies of those who had died on site.
One plantation doctor: Washington, Medical Apartheid, pp. 62–70. The medical ethicist Harriet Washington’s groundbreaking work on experimentation is, in my view, the leading and definitive analysis of the long history of medical abuse of African-Americans in the United States. In the case of the black baby whose scalp was opened, the physician James Marion Sims was experimenting on a condition called tetany, which was characterized by convulsions and seizures. For extensive analysis of the medical abuse of enslaved women, see Deborah Kuhn McGregor, From Medicine to Midwives: The Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
“could be induced”: Smith, Less Than Human, p. 128.
In a similar experiment: Albert Bandura, Bill Underwood, and Michael E. Fromson. “Disinhibition of Aggression Through Diffusion of Responsibility and Dehumanization of Victims,” Journal of Research in Personality 9, 1975, p. 266.
“Dehumanization is a joint creation”: Smith, Less Than Human, pp. 4, 6.
There was an attraction: Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), pp. 76, 77.
And enthusiasts lined up: Smith, Less Than Human, p. 118. See also David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 92, 93; Michael W. Robbins and Wendy Palitz, Brooklyn: A State of Mind (New York: Workman Publishing Company, 2001), p. 52.
A certain kind of violence: DuRocher, Raising Racists, p. 94.
Pillar Number Seven: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control
“the whip was the most common”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 174.
“to whip every hand”: Ibid., p. 188.
A teenager endured: Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, pp. 118, 120, 140.
“Native Americans were occasionally”: Mills, Racial Contract, p. 99.
“with a hot iron on”: Taylor, Slavery in Louisiana, p. 236, quoted in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 188; Edwin Adam Davis, Plantation Life in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana, 1836–1846, as Reflected in the Diary of Bennet H. Barrow (New York: AMS Press, 1967), pp. 173–74. In Georgia prior to 1770, and in North Carolina prior to 1775, taking a slave’s life was not a felony. Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 218.
“any person may KILL”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 178.
“at least twelve slaves”: Ibid., p. 183.
Fourteen-pound chains and: Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, p. 57.
“not speaking up and looking”: Ibid., p. 72.
“He was left to die or”: Ibid., pp. 28–30.
“Make them stand”: Kenneth M. Stampp, “To Make Them Stand in Fear,” in A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American Studies, ed. Floyd W. Hayes III (Oxford: Collegiate Press, 2000), p. 295.
“a sound as of murder”: Weld, American Slavery, p. 90.
“the Negroes seem to be”: Dollard, Caste and Class, p. 360.
Pillar Number Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority
the black actress, Louise Beavers: Regester, African-American Actresses, pp. 71–106; Bogle, Toms, Coons, pp. 54–57.
“his unquestioned inferiority”: Smedley and Smedley, Race in North America, p. 99.
“He must be held subject”: Goodell, American Slave Code, p. 285.
“If a Negro, man or woman”: Doyle, Etiquette of Race Relations, p. 55.
“any sort of garment or”: Eulanda A. Sanders, “The Politics of Textiles Used in African American Slave Clothing,” in Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (Washington, D.C., 2012), p. 740, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/740.
a young Jewish woman in Berlin: Nigel Dunkley, interview by author, Berlin and Sachsenhausen, May 24, 2019.
“They were owned by a woman”: The Farmers’ Register of 1834, quoted in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 142.
“They must obey at all times”: Ibid., p. 144.
“any number of acts”: Ibid., pp. 207–8.
“In the tone of an answer”: Douglass, My Bondage, p. 92.
“trivial offenses”: Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, p. 394.
“because he asked for a receipt”: James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 213.
“The Negro occupies a position”: Doyle, Etiquette of Race Relations, pp. 149–50.
“The human meaning of caste”: Berreman, Caste and Other Inequities, p. 159, cited in Smaje, Natural Hierarchies, p. 21.
“Is it possible that any”: Jordan, White over Black, p. 182.
“What to do with Hitler”: Louis Adamic, A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper, 1945), p. 201.
Part Four: THE TENTACLES OF CASTE
Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes
Jane Elliott decided: “A Class Divided,” Frontline, PBS (March 26, 1985), https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided/. This video, about the teacher’s lesson in discrimination, is one of Frontline’s most requested programs.
“If you do that with a whole”: Jane Elliott, interview by NBC, September 29, 2017, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eFQkLp5u-No.
Chapter Eleven: Dominant Group Status Threat and the Precarity of the Highest Rung
death rates of middle-aged white Americans: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (December 8, 2015): 15078–83, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518393112.
who died during World War II: The number of Americans who died in World War II was 405,000.
“These are deaths that do not”: Anne Case and Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear and Despair: Consequences of Inequity,” in Knowledge to Action: Accelerating Progress in Health
, Well-Being and Equity, ed. Alonzo L. Plough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 11–15.
rates in other Western countries: Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/mortality-and-morbidity-in-the-21st-Century/; Case and Deaton, “Rising Morbidity.” In 2019 a similar trend surfaced in the United Kingdom: “Deaths of Despair, Once an American Phenomenon, Now Haunt Britain,” Economist, May 14, 2019, https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/05/14/deaths-of-despair-once-an-american-phenomenon-now-haunt-britain.
“is not the usual form of prejudice”: Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (May 8, 2018): 4330–39, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115.
“dear treasure of his superiority”: Cash, Mind of the South, p. 66.
“has not only been neglected”: Smith, Killers of the Dream, p. 171.
“need the demarcations of caste”: Myrdal, American Dilemma, p. 2:597.
“in which downward social mobility”: Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, p. 60.
“public and psychological wage”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 700.
“little but their complexion”: Letter from an eastern Virginia slaveholder in the Richmond Enquirer, May 4, 1832, quoted in Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London: Verso, 1997), p. 2:255.
“Nobody could take away from”: Smith, Killers of the Dream, pp. 164–65.
“the basic restrictions upon marriage”: W. Lloyd Warner and Allison Davis, “A Comparative Study of American Caste,” in Thompson, Race Relations, p. 236.
“In the span of a few cruel years”: Russell Baker, “The Problem of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” New York Times, November 9, 1963.
“Always [the Negro] was something”: Smith, Killers of the Dream, pp. 179, 222.
“It’s a great lie on which”: Sushrut Jadhav, interview by author, May 2018.
“His whole life is one anxious”: Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, p. 250.
“hangs there to this day”: Ambedkar, Castes in India, p. 45.
“if you or your parents were”: Ben Mathis-Lilley, “An Ingenious and Powerful Case for Reparations in the Atlantic,” Slate, May 22, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/05/22/reparations.html. The writer distilled this conclusion in his analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s seminal “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic (2014).
“the trillions of dollars of wealth”: Lipsitz, Possessive Investment, pp. 5–7, 107.
more racism than African-Americans: Michael I. Norton and Samuel Sommers, “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011), pp. 215–18.
as much as 80 percent: David R. Williams, interview by author, Providence, R.I., May 29, 2013.
white felons applying for a job: Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 5 (March 2003): 937–75.
often disregard the reports of pain: Kelly M. Hoffman et al., “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs About Biological Differences Between Blacks and Whites,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (April 19, 2016): 4296–301, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516047113. “Research has shown that black patients are undertreated for pain not only relative to white patients, but relative to World Health Organization guidelines….New research from the University of Virginia suggests that disparities in pain management may be attributable in part to bias. In a study of medical students and residents, researchers find that a substantial number of white medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences between black and white people (e.g., black people’s skin is thicker; black people’s blood coagulates more quickly) that could affect how they assess and treat the pain experienced by black patients.” University of Virginia, “Study Links Disparities in Pain Management to Racial Bias,” ScienceDaily, April 4, 2016, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160404153044.htm.
“No way I want my tax”: Metzl, Dying of Whiteness, pp. 3–7, 174–75.
Chapter Twelve: A Scapegoat to Bear the Sins of the World
The other, the scapegoat: Leviticus 16:5–10, 20–22.
“This serves to relieve others”: Perera, Scapegoat Complex, p. 8.
“The scapegoater feels a relief”: Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
“before binding them to the stakes”: Weld, American Slavery, p. 59.
“The Negro becomes both”: Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, p. 49.
“at the hands of persons unknown”: For more on the ritual of lynching, see Dray, Persons Unknown; Raper, Tragedy of Lynching; and Litwack, Trouble in Mind.
“Whites were unified in seeing”: Myrdal, American Dilemma, vol. 2, p. 598.
it is white women, and thus white families: Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Framing Affirmative Action,” 105 Michigan Law Review First Impressions 123 (2007), https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr_fi/vol105/iss1/4/; Victoria M. Massie, “White Women Benefit Most from Affirmative Action—and Are Among Its Fiercest Opponents,” Vox, May 25, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action.
“for structural economic problems”: Ashley Crossman, “Definition of Scapegoat, Scapegoating, and Scapegoat Theory,” ThoughtCo., August 2, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/scapegoat-definition-3026572.
“He never tried to comfort”: Margaret Carlson, “Presumed Innocent,” Time, June 24, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,153650,00.html.
Anthony Stephan House: “In another line of inquiry with potential racial undertones, police sought to determine whether House’s death was cartel-related. Mark McCrimmon, a defense attorney, said a client who had been arrested in a drug raid in the neighborhood weeks before was interviewed by police during their investigation into the bombing.” Eli Rosenberg, “Exploding Packages Tap into Simmering Tensions over Austin’s Racial Segregation,” Washington Post, March 15, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exploding-packages-tap-into-simmering-tensions-over-austins-racial-segregation/2018/03/15/595a7b24-28a4-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html.
“We can’t rule out that Mr.”: Ibid.; “Police: Exploding Package Caused Death of NE Austin Man, Tips Sought,” CBS Austin, March 5, 2018, https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/austin-police-identify-man-killed-in-explosion.
“Based on what we know”: Tom Dart, “Austin Bombings: How They Unfolded, and What They Revealed,” Guardian, March 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/24/austin-bombings-mark-conditt-texas.
Chapter Thirteen: The Insecure Alpha and the Purpose of an Underdog
“The main characteristic of an alpha”: Safina, Beyond Words, p. 155.
“a kind of social glue”: Wolf Howl Organization, “Wolf Behavior,” part 1, Running with the Wolves, n.d., http://www.runningwiththewolves.org/behavior1. Running with the Wolves, an organization founded by Teresa DeMaio on Long Island, is devoted to wolf and wildlife conservation.
Chapter Fourteen: The Intrusion of Caste in Everyday Life
“One of them”: Bancroft, Slave Trading, p. 81.
“countermanding an order”: Richard Frucht, Black Society in the New World (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 32.
“shelter or security from the”: Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 343.
“You’re in a Yale building”: Brandon Griggs, “A Black Yale Graduate Student Took a Nap in Her Dorm’s Common Room. So a White Student Called Police,” CNN, May 12, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/
09/us/yale-student-napping-black-trnd/index.html.
In Milwaukee, a woman: Nicole Rojas, “Black Man Records White Woman Calling 911 After Accusing Him of Breaking into His Own Car,” Newsweek, August 17, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/woman-calls-police-video-black-man-breaking-own-car-milwaukee-reporachel-1078717.
As the white man briefed: Patrick May, “Video of a San Francisco Dad’s ‘Trespassing’ 911 Call to Report a Black Software Engineer Goes Viral,” Mercury News, July 9, 2019, https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/09/video-of-a-san-francisco-dad-trespassing-9-1-1-call-to-report-black-software-engineer-goes-viral/.
In the video that the man took: Melissa Gomez, “White Woman Who Blocked Black Neighbor from Building Is Fired,” New York Times, October 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/us/hilary-brooke-apartment-patty-st-louis.html.
“This lady is following me”: Melissa Gomez, “Babysitting While Black: Georgia Man Was Stalked by Woman as He Cared for 2 White Children,” New York Times, October 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/us/black-man-babysitting.html. Corey Lewis’s video is at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TyATgNSAkj8. See also Yamiche Alcindor, “Living While Black: How Does Racial Bias Lead to Unnecessary Calls to Police?” PBS NewsHour, July 2, 2018, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o3r3mOo4LmY.
Chapter Fifteen: The Urgent Necessity of a Bottom Rung
“The masters feared their former”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, p. 633.
“This indulgence and this”: Col. J.L.A. Linard of American Expeditionary Force headquarters advised the French command on how African-American soldiers were to be handled. His memo, quoted here and in the next paragraphs, was published as “A French Directive,” Crisis, no. 18 (May 1919): 16–18, available at https://glc.yale.edu/french-directive. See also Rebecca Onion, “A WWI–Era Memo Asking French Officers to Practice Jim Crow with Black American Troops,” Slate, April 27, 2016, https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/04/secret-information-concerning-black-troops-a-warning-memo-sent-to-the-french-military-during-world-war-i.html.
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