Caste

Black History month is officially over but our learning should never be over. As I said in the beginning of February and say again today, Black History is American History. As I continue to learn and be exposed to the hidden stories of history and the half-stories in our history books, I continue to be frustrated, angry, and unsure what outlet to utilize for these feelings - this blog is one such place.

Last night I continued watching "The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross." Each time I watch an episode, I know about the main events of the episode but I know about them through a white lens, the filtered version that I was taught in school. Why do I know that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin but not know that it's invention spurred the growth of slavery at the same time that the abolitionist movement had also started growing, destroying the movement? That more families were torn apart and bred like farm animals so that more slave could work the far south cotton plantations where the masters with their free labor grew more and more wealthy? This should be told as part of the Eli Whitney story. I learned about him and all the "great inventors" (all white of course) back in school but the implication to what this did to slavery was hardly mentioned if at all.

Some things I am aware of but need to be reminded of especially when white people talk about how slavery ended over 100 years ago and black people have no one to blame but themselves (yes, white people still say that). In the late 1800s, black people in the south were winning elections. Maps weren't gerrymandered and voter suppression laws, including literacy tests, were not yet in place (literacy tests for a group of people who had been forbidden to learn to read!). As the promise of land was retracted and lands were returned to plantation owners, voter suppression laws were put in place, and black Americans were kept out of the practice of democracy even though an amendment had given them that right. The hope and prosperity of Reconstruction, slowly disappeared as Black Code became Jim Crow and was accelerated into the 20th Century. I now watch with horror as Republicans once again try to enact laws to suppress the vote, with very clear tactics to suppress the black vote which is widely regaled as having carried the large Democratic victories in that state. As Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter stated, "These (legislation) notes are dripping in the blood of Jim Crow." History, I fear, has not been our teacher and as whites fear their power and privilege as the highest caste in America is being threatened, they will do whatever it takes to remain on top.

Speaking of caste, I am currently reading "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson. A tough read on a concept I haven't heretofore thought much about. It is a well researched book and I'm learning by the chapter (not even a quarter through). The book focuses on the three main castes in history - the most well known, that of India, but also Nazi Germany and the American caste, based on race. One most shocking revelation for me was the knowledge that Nazis studied our caste system, our racial laws and oppression in designing their own. Even worse, while they praised our laws to maintain racial purity, even the Nazis thought our "one-drop rule" was too harsh.

There's so much about our history where we look down on others who commit genocide, human atrocities, but yet don't fully acknowledge or rectify for our own. As I read Caste, I can't stop thinking about how we've never rectified or made amends for not just slavery which started over 400 years ago, forcing humans into the labor that literally built this country, but of the failures of Reconstruction, the plague of lynchings and the way they were celebrated by whites, Jim Crow, sun-down towns, and the myriad of methods used to keep Black Americans as the lowest caste in our society. I'm not getting into reparations here as I haven't thought through what that might mean or look like, but enslaved Americans were promised things in the post-Civil War era that never happened. Not only that but laws were enacted to prevent them from prosperity for generations. They didn't just start with nothing, they were kept from having anything by Black Code and Jim Crow and voter suppression. Did you know that Alabama finally overturned their law against interracial marriage in 2000 and that 40% of Alabamians supported keeping the law!

Slavery ended. Black Code ended. Jim Crow ended. Legally they ended but the infrastructure and disparities they created live on through generational wealth, education, social, and power gaps especially as maps are gerrymandered and black votes are suppressed. It lives on through the caste system alive and well in America.