Isabel Wilkerson(0/0)
Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro
It was in 1913 that a prominent southern educator, Thomas Pearce Bailey, took it upon himself to assemble what he called the racial creed of the South. It amounted to the central tenets of the caste system. One of the tenets was “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.”
The creation of a caste system
The creation of a caste system was a process of testing the bounds of human categories and not the result of a single edict. It was a decades-long sharpening of lines whenever the colonists had a decision to make. When Africans began converting to Christianity, they posed a challenge to a religion-based hierarchy. Their efforts to claim full participation in the colonies was in direct opposition to the European hunger for the cheapest, most pliant labor to extract the most wealth from the New World.…
Their whiteness opened the golden door
Somewhere in the journey [immigration], Europeans became something they had never been or needed to be before… “No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said. Their geographic origin was their passport to the dominant caste. “The European immigrant’s experience was decisively shaped by their entering an arena where Europeanness–that is to say, whiteness–was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to,” wrote the Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson.…
Turn a person into cash
Slavery made the enslavers among the richest people in the world, granting them “the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice.” But from the time of enslavement, southerners minimized the horrors they inflicted and to which they had grown accustomed, “No one was willing,” Baptist wrote, “to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.”
Caste is the bones, race the skin
Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. The can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.…
Caste makes distinctions where God has made none
Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions where God has made none.…
Slavery provided the fabric from which America was made
Slavery in [the United States] was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. It made lords of everyone in the dominant caste, as law and custom stated that “submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons.…