Episode 26: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents"- Isabel Wilkerson Part 2.

Welcome back to the Fake Ass Book Club. Your host continue to talk about New York Times Bestseller and Oprah's Book Club pick, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Kat starts by very sloppily explaining Noah's Ark and the curse of Ham. This book also leads to conversations around why the Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy myths can be harmful, why Mother Teresa was awful in real life, eugenics, Steven Universe, and In Living Color's Classic sketch "Men on Film". Wow, what a diverse podcast this is. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Cheers! Trigger Warning: Use of Racial Epitaphs, Explict Language Caste Part 2: 8 pilars of caste continued 5-8 FIVE: Occupational Hierarchy In the reasoning of Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, in 1858, society needs to have menial workers, and since this means people of little intellect and skill, society was lucky to have “‘found a race adapted to that purpose.’” (p. 131) Hence after the Civil Was, South Carolina prohibited black from performing any labor except farming or domestic work. In North Carolina people in the lowest caste were forbidden to do trading. Thus they could not earn extra money in order to better their situation. Even the Great Migration did not help blacks to escape their caste. In the North they were given a position lower than the recent European immigrants. “‘Every avenue for improvement was closed against him,’ wrote William A. Sinclair. (p. 134). SIX: Dehumanization and Stigma Dehumanizing another human being is a long process, programming one group to deny the evidence of their senses. In both Nazi Germany and the U.S., attempts have been made to strip target groups of their individuality: Jews’ heads were shamed, clothing was replaced with striped uniforms, numbers replaced names. In the American South, Africans were given mocking new names, were forced to do the heaviest work for a bare minimum of food, were compelled to wear clothing not much different than potato bags, were punished for showing any human response to their conditions. Abolitionist William Goodell wrote that the American slave was “‘punished with a severity from which all others are exempted. He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.’” (p. 146) The inhumanity of the labor itself (draining swamps, chopping trees, hauling logs) further dehumanized both American and Nazi slaves. Both Jews and African-Americans were used as victims of medical experiments. The “total control over black bodies game them unfettered access to the anatomy of live subjects.” (p. 148) In our country we accepted a culture of cruelty toward this lowest caste: “made violence and mockery seem mundane and amusing . . . built up the immune system against empathy.” (p.149) SEVEN: Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control Whipping and flogging (one extreme was “bucking” p. 155) were the most common measures for controlling slaves. Other methods included burning or branding slaves, vigilante shootings, and public lynchings. In both the U.S. and in Nazi Germany, those in control sowed “dissension among the subordinate caste by creating a hierarchy among the captives, rewarding those who identified more with the oppressor rather than the oppressed and who would report back to them any plots of escape or uprising.” (p. 156) In the 20th century in the U.S., slavey was over but the consequences for acting above one’s caste were the same. EIGHT: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority The image of African-Americans was controlled for a hundred years and more after the Emancipation Proclamation. Movie roles were for heavy women with the dialect of field hands, filling the roles of servants. Jim Crow laws forced African Americans to relinquish their place on the pavement to a white person; black soldiers were “set upon and killed for wearing eerie army uniforms,” just as the SS would kill Jewish women wearing furs. The garments were above their caste. (p. 161) African Americans could incite write rage “‘In the tone of an answer,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in answering at all; in not answering; in the expression of countenance; in the motion of the heard; in the gait, manner and bearing. . . . ‘ This code extended for generations. Years after the Nazis were defeated across the Atlantic.” (p. 163 *eu·gen·ics /yo͞oˈjeniks/ noun the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, eugenics was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups. *Mother Teresa stuff- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV4YzOwMu6I https://thehoya.com/noted-scholar-attacks-mother-teresa-legacy/ *Men on Film- In Living Color -Correction Kenon Ivory Waynes was the one who showed his butt on the Zoom call not Damon Waynes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OKwRsnWO84 thefabpodcast@gmail.com thefabpodcast on IG