How did our country arrive at this moment of rupture and fury? How is it that mass shootings, even of children in their classrooms, and police killings of unarmed citizens of color like Tyre Nichols have become a feature of our days?
How is it that politicians are banning books in a country whose founding First Amendment protects the right to free speech? How is it that the U.S., despite its wealth and technology, leads the world with more than 1 million deaths from COVID-19—more than any other nation on earth? How is it that insurrectionists could storm the citadel of American democracy in a crusade to overturn a presidential election? How is it that we actually saw a Confederate flag inside the U.S. Capitol—that a rioter, in our era, could deliver the Confederate flag farther than Robert E. Lee himself?
In the two years since the global concept of caste entered the national conversation with the initial release of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, recent events have lamentably only affirmed its observations: that the will to maintain the caste system would drive some people to trample democracy itself, as we saw on Jan. 6; that powerful forces would seek to reverse the rights of the marginalized and less powerful, as we have seen in recent Supreme Court rulings; that these turns of events are a natural consequence of our unreconciled history. Because, all told, our country is not terribly unlike a patient with a pre-existing condition like heart disease, and if ever a heart patient, without treatment or intervention, has a heart attack, it should come as no surprise to anyone.
When we open our eyes to it, the ancient lens of caste helps explain most every regression we are now undergoing. It accounts for oppression of all kinds across time and space, allows us to understand the human impulse toward tribalism and domination and the ways in which the restrictions on those least valued in a hierarchy radiate outward to everyone and endanger our planet.
Caste is essentially an artificial, arbitrary graded ranking of human value, the underlying infrastructure of a society’s divisions. Any number of random metrics could be used to divide and rank people in a caste system—ethnicity, lineage, religion, language. In our case, the early colonists took otherwise neutral, physical characteristics that comprise what
