One Drop
In essence, the United States operates under a caste system.
It’s a time honored, societal structure practiced in several cultures, long before our country existed. It dictates one’s class based on birth. In layman’s terms, if your family is wealthy, you’re golden. If your family is poor, you’re screwed. We all are perfectly aware of that dichotomy. It’s a construct of hereditary channels that often dictate one’s future prospects at occupations as well as their social opportunities.
India’s Hindu culture still openly uses this type of social hierarchy as their preferred lifestyle. By the way, India is one of six countries still practicing slavery, with a staggering 18 million people living in forced servitude. The other five countries which still routinely observe open enslavement of peoples are China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, and North Korea.
What upper crust Americans tend not to publicly acknowledge is, we’re doing the caste thing here too, in widespread degrees, albeit in a less advertised fashion in the modern era than previous ones.
Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents brilliantly examines the systemic oppression of Black people. She sees the product of caste pecking orders rather than what she deems a more insufficient term of ‘racism,’ and maintains caste systems are far older than the concept of race, the latter only having been around for 500 years or so when it became more defined due to the transatlantic slave trade.
Here’s a quick refresher for those of you who haven’t studied your colonial history since grade school.
The slave trade developed because of the European demand for sugar, driven mostly by our British ancestors, near the end of the 14th century. A ‘triangle trade’ system was established wherein ships would leave Britain with gunpowder and textiles to trade in Africa for slaves, then the slaves were taken to America and the Caribbean to work on plantations, and then they were exchanged for sugar, spices, rum, and cotton.
Those goods were taken back to Britain and the cycle continued. Before the transatlantic slave trade, Blacks and whites weren’t really delineated as such. Slavery had been around for many thousands of years, but demarcations were defined by geographic considerations or religious standings rather than skin color. I’m Swedish, she’s Italian, he’s Japanese, they’re Slavish, or in Crusades style, we’re Christian, they’re Jewish, those guys are Muslim. White prejudice and persecution have been around since our humble beginnings, busting out the gate with our epoch-spanning proclivity toward antisemitism.
Christianity has shaped much of white supremacy. The possibility Jesus was white, if one presumes his region of origin is in fact the Middle East, is zero point zero. Never mind the probabilities of his actual existence. Don’t get your panties in a wad, I know not either which way, nor would I presume to, because I’m not two thousand years old, so I can’t know for sure, nor can anyone outside of their personal leaps of faith. But take it to the bank: if the Son of God actually existed, that peace lovin’ water walkin’ mad forgivin’ Commie Pinko hippie was a person of color.
Wilkerson goes on to say caste determines standings, presumed competence, and resource allocation, and that race is one of the measurements used to pinpoint an individual’s place within that system. Here in the United States, much like in India, there’s a dominant caste and a subordinate caste, there are sub-castes of tribes, and at the very bottom, not unlike India’s Dalit “untouchables,” there are Blacks and Native Americans.
One of the most shocking revelations Wilkerson reveals in her research was the historical fact chronicled by scholar Charles Mills that “Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins.” U.S. president Andrew Jackson, already a tainted American figure in antiquity via his oversight of the infamous forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands during the Trail of Tears, used bridle reins of Indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding. It’s tough to even type that reference, much less consider its reality. Know your true history.
Equally distressing was Wilkerson’s study of the rise of Nazi Germany, when German researchers were sent to the United States to study Jim Crow laws and how ruling class Americans had subjugated African Americans, eventually compiling findings to include in Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, which directly resulted in the extermination of six million Jews.
Yep. We top o’ the rock Americans had a fair part in the rise of Nazism.
Even more unsettling was, according to Wilkerson, how the Nazis found America’s ‘one drop rule’ excessive. Persons with any amount of Black blood would be considered Black, even if they had but one drop of Black blood.
So...the Aryan architects of the Holocaust found American definitions of race too stringent.
Woof.
*Compiled from August 4, 2020